It’s frankly bizarre that voters in places like Iowa and New Hampshire name immigration as among their top concerns. Have Quebecois terrorists been sneaking into the Granite State? Are undocumented Minnesotans booting Hawkeye farmers off their John Deere’s and plowing rogue furrows?
Clearly immigration is serving as a proxy for all sorts of other concerns. Jobs that were once done in America by people with Northern European surnames are now being done in Asia or Latin America or by people who originated in such places. But very little of that is the fault of illegal immigrants, rather of global competitors who have underpriced American labor and American corporations who have imported foreign-born software engineers or exported jobs overseas to compete.
Fear of Islamic terror also fuels concern about our porous borders, though the number of dangerous immigrants committed to acts of terror who are infiltrating the country seems miniscule. Indeed, most recent terror seems to have been homegrown. We are actually exporting wannabe jihadis to the Islamic State.
Looming over all the immigrant frenzy is the very real sense that in a global economy, America is not winning the competition the way it used to. A changing demand for skills leaves many workers high and dry, and the high cost of education makes it expensive for old dogs to afford to learn new tricks.
Jobs, industries and whole professions seem to vanish in the blink of an eye. This is not the result of immigration so much as of huge changes in technology and geopolitics. These have created hundreds of millions of new consumers and competitors. They have also allowed companies to produce more with fewer workers. In this case, anti-immigration rhetoric is often code for isolationism.
If we could just pull up the drawbridge, we’d all be safe and prosperous again. Or would we just be isolated, under siege and not fighting back? Instead of whining about “the other” stealing our jobs, we had better educate our children better and learn to adapt. That’s the traditional American way.
Many of the talk radio versions of immigration hysteria are clearly wacko. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is convinced every person crossing the border from Mexico is either a drug mule or Osama bin Laden. Donald Trump has made this kind of heavy breathing the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. And he has a plan. Change the Constitution, deport eleven million people and get Mexico to foot the bill for a wall to keep them in their place.
Dream on. And even if his dream came true, these measure would only treat a symptom, not the disease. Yet Democrats shouldn’t be too quick to disparage the notion of controlling our borders just because some of the messengers are more unAmerican and anti-democratic than the immigrants they demonize. Most only want to come here to embrace the American dream of a better life. And why not?
We live in a world filled with hunger, disease, soaring population, declining opportunity, political instability, environmental and economic dangers where billions yearn to breath free. That demands that we take our sovereignty and security seriously.
When I was born there were 144 million Americans. Now there are 320 million. We can’t accept hundreds of millions of additional immigrants, and we also can’t default to making new citizens on the basis of who’s best at crashing the party, even though that’s kind of the story of our history.
Most of my ancestors got on a boat on one side of the Atlantic and got off on the other, no questions asked. I even have a paternal great-grandfather who was one of those Quebecois who left the farm one day for the mills of nearby New England seeking better pay and working conditions. He probably immigrated by train. And the mills were glad to have him.
Not today. We have fewer jobs to offer and those are not for the unskilled. Securing our borders now has become essential. Deciding rationally who to admit and who to reject must also be a priority. Those loudest for wall building are also loudest against increasing funding to assure the borders are less porous.
That said, the pressure on all prosperous countries will not cease so long as they are the “haves” and their neighbors are the “have-nots,” sunk in poverty and torn by strife. It is in our interest to aggressively help others to help themselves, to devise ways to feed their hungry, but also to aggressively help the globe limit its population growth.
One solution to the problem is to become a place no one wants to immigrate to, to regress to the mean, but that would force us to share the pain of less competitive and less happily endowed places. Not really a solution. It might even require us to give up our main selling points. Relative freedom, opportunity, civil rights protections, and all the rest.
Far better to help make the wretched places of the earth into places a smaller, more prosperous, better educated population would not want to leave in the first place.
Most immigrants to America, past and present, wouldn’t have left home if it hadn’t been an intolerable place to live.
The trouble with a rational prescription — like getting our fiscal, educational and competitive act together, reforming our immigration law and practice, really protecting our border, limiting global population growth, actively promoting reforms that would empower poor countries — is that these are really hard to do, will take a long-term commitment and will be expensive.
Jingoism, xenophobia, demonizing the other, fear mongering, scapegoating and demagoguery are cheap. They make the candidate and the audience feel better. They just don’t solve anything.