America, please be reasonable on immigration

In order to preserve our nation of immigrants, we need to compromise.

Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

Back in 2017-2019, I was planning to write a book about U.S. immigration. The basic idea was that immigration is crucial for America, not just for our economy, but for the dynamism of our society and for our self-concept as a nation of immigrants. There was going to be one chapter praising high-skilled immigration, and another explaining the value of mass (i.e. “low-skilled”) immigration. There was going to be a chapter about the history of U.S. attitudes and policies, arguing that the U.S. has usually been very pro-immigrant, despite the occasional spasm of restrictionism. Another chapter or two would be about how successfully the U.S. assimilates — or, if you prefer, “integrates” — new Americans’ cultures into our own. In preparation for this undertaking, I read around 40 books about immigration and cultural assimilation, many of which I reviewed on Twitter (and which I might review on this blog, if people are interested).

At the end of the book, I was going to recommend a return to the Senate’s proposed immigration compromise of 2013, which balanced strong border enforcement with a robust expansion of legal immigration. It would have expanded skilled immigration, increased border security, created an e-verify system to prevent the hiring of illegal immigrants, and given amnesty to people who were in the country illegally before December 2011.

I still might write this book, someday. But in 2020 I changed my mind and decided to hold off, for one simple reason: I didn’t think Americans were in the mood to listen to reasonable arguments on the topic of immigration. The issue seemed to have become a culture war wedge-issue, where actually improving the system had become less important than using the system’s problems as a club with which to bludgeon the opposing political tribe. Extreme positions had become valued as purity tests, while calls for compromise drew as much fire from one’s own side as from the opponents’. In that sort of climate, the book I wanted to write would be either denounced or ignored by many progressives for supporting border security and trumpeting assimilation, while drawing wild condemnations from the right wing for supporting “population replacement”.

Right now, the nation is once again up in arms over immigration. Texas is embroiled in a standoff with the Border Patrol over installing razor wire along the border. Even the Supreme Court got involved, narrowly ruling in favor of the Border Patrol. On social media, the usual right-wing voices are screaming about an “invasion” and threatening civil war between red states and blue states.

On one hand, I agree with my friend Wally Nowinski that there is more than a little opportunism at work here:

“Stancil” refers to Will Stancil, a prominent Twitter user who has argued that negative perceptions of the economy were out of touch with reality

The general realization that the U.S. economy is firing on all cylinders has naturally sent the GOP in search of something else to attack Biden about. And immigration was the natural thing to pivot to, especially because the idea that foreigners are flooding our country and replacing our population and bringing terrorism and drugs and crime etc. etc. has pretty much been Trump’s most consistent campaign theme since 2015.

But to be fair to the Republicans here, immigration, unlike the economy, actually is a big problem right now. Since 2021, there has been an absolute flood of people crossing the southwestern border illegally. It swamps anything we saw in the 1990s and early 2000s:

Source: Border Patrol

This is a massive problem. It’s a short-term logistical problem in terms of how to house and feed the millions pouring into the country — a task that is now straining the resources of many heavily Democratic cities. It’s a long-term fiscal problem, because these people will require heavy government support for their health care, housing, and education; this will end up coming from city and state governments, since they’re barred from federal welfare programs. And it also presents a psychological problem for Americans, because it violates their sense of sovereignty; there’s a general sense that these millions are forcing their way in, instead of being invited by the democratic will of the American people.

And the American people are very upset. During the Trump era, attitudes shifted strongly in a pro-immigration direction. Now polls have bounced back in a restrictionist direction, to where they were before Trump. Pretty much all Americans agree that the situation at the border is bad, with most calling it either a “crisis” or “very serious”:

Source: CBS

And an increasingly large majority want policy to get tougher:

Source: CBS

And support for mass deportations, though still a minority, appears to be rising:

Source: Civiqs

Support for a border wall is rising as well. Biden’s approval rating on the immigration issue, meanwhile, has fallen to an all-time low. If any issue threatens Biden’s reelection chances, it’s this one.

Biden has apparently (belatedly) realized this vulnerability. He had been inching toward tougher border policies for a while, but now he’s agreeing to a bipartisan Senate deal that would get very tough on migrants who cross the border illegally seeking asylum. But Republicans in the House, who are more closely allied with Trump than their colleagues in the Senate, are blocking the deal. Since Trump himself has been crusading against the deal, many suspect that the House Republicans’ goal is to force the border crisis to continue, in the hopes of getting Trump elected in November.

Whether or not that political gambit will succeed, it means that, like in 2013, nothing is getting solved. And the longer the border festers, the more danger there is that America will go into one of its occasional anti-immigrant spasms.

What Americans really need on the immigration issue is to be reasonable. Our country needs lots of immigrants for our economy, and because taking in immigrants is a core part of how we define ourselves as a nation. But a chaotic border that encourages mass illegal entry does not help advance that goal. Compromise positions on immigration, like the one we failed to embrace in 2013, are easy to imagine; what we need is to care more about solving the problems than about pinning them on our opponents.

The two things we need to compromise on are 1) how people get into the country, and 2) who gets to come in.

Compromise 1: Immigration is not an invasion, but national sovereignty requires border control

Many Republicans and conservatives call the mass influx of migrants an “invasion”. This is ridiculous. Yes, migrants are flouting U.S. laws by crossing the border illegally, but that doesn’t make something an invasion. Let’s check the dictionary definition of “invasion”:

• “an instance of invading a country or region with an armed force” (Google/Oxford Languages)

• “incursion of an army for conquest or plunder” (Merriam Webster)

• “an occasion when an army or country uses force to enter and take control of another country” (Cambridge)

…and so on. All of these definitions require invaders to be armed, and most of them require the invaders to seek control of the country they’re invading. For the overwhelming majority of the migrants coming into the U.S., neither of these is the case.

First of all, if you present yourself to the Border Patrol to ask for asylum — which is what these migrants are doing — you aren’t going to do it while holding an AK-47. They’re not armed. And while a few migrants are involved in drug gangs and the like, there are no migrant paramilitary forces with the inclination or ability to defeat U.S. authorities in battle.

And second of all, none of these migrants thinks they or their friends are going to conquer the United Sates. They aren’t even allowed to vote! I know some right-wingers have this notion that immigrants want to “replace” the American population by turning White people into a minority and then outvoting them. But that sort of plan would require multigenerational planning and foresight, of a type that impoverished migrants are highly unlikely to possess. And it would require that this same “replacement” plot be secretly and simultaneously inspiring people in dozens of different countries, all at the same time.

Even if we’re willing to stretch the dictionary definition, at the very minimum an invasion seems like it should require hostility to the country that’s being invaded. But pretty much everyone who interacts with migrants agrees that their motivations for coming to the U.S. are 1) to improve their economic circumstances, and 2) to escape instability and violence. In other words, they’re coming to America because they think it’s a better place than wherever they lived before. Nor is there any plan to violently dispossess Americans of any of their property; even illegal immigrants, who were willing to break the law to get here, commit less crime than the native-born.

In other words, the notion that the wave of migrants constitutes anything resembling an “invasion” is fantasy.

Similarly absurd is the notion, advanced by a few Republicans, that Biden has committed “treason” by refusing to enforce immigration law. Note that the people making this accusation never specify which immigration laws Biden has failed to enforce.

In fact, by granting asylum hearings to people who cross the border illegally, Biden is enforcing U.S. law. As far as I can tell, U.S. asylum law follows the requirements of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, to which the U.S. is a party. Article 31 of that convention states:

The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of article 1, enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence. (emphasis mine)

This basically constitutes a loophole in immigration law. If you sneak over the border and turn yourself in to the Border Patrol, you now can’t be penalized for your illegal entry; you’re now legally entitled to an asylum hearing. The vast majority of the people who request asylum won’t get it, but they’re legally entitled to a hearing. To enforce the law, Biden has to give them a hearing.

Now, in my opinion, this is not a good convention, and not a good law. Countries should be allowed to refuse asylum categorically to anyone who enters illegally; otherwise, the incentive will obviously encourage mass illegal entry. The U.S. can and should change its asylum law to close this loophole; this might mean we’re in violation of the Convention, but in practice the negative consequences of that would probably be minimal. But until the loophole is closed, Biden is enforcing the law — as did Trump — by letting people exploit it.

So while Republicans are perfectly within their rights to be angry about Biden’s failure to discourage asylum-seekers from flooding illegally over the border, the cries of “invasion” and “treason” are ridiculous overwrought hysteria.

Democrats, meanwhile, need to accept that control over who can and can’t get into the country is a key feature of national sovereignty. As much as some progressive activists (and a few libertarian intellectuals) may rage against the idea, nations are exclusive clubs that get to decide who does and doesn’t get in the club. Americans like immigrants, but they strongly dislike the idea of giving up popular democratic control over immigration.

If millions of foreigners are getting to stay in America by illegally crossing the border, did Americans really choose to let them in? Yes, Americans did vote for leaders who adopted the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1967. And yes, Americans did vote for leaders who crafted asylum law to follow that convention. And yes, Americans, if they chose, could vote for leaders who would reform asylum law in order to close the loophole that millions of migrants are now exploiting. In fact, if they understood asylum, and the law, and the loophole, I am pretty sure they would vote for leaders who would change it.

I think you’ll find, however, that very few Americans understand any of this. To the average American, the difference between illegally crossing the border to request asylum and illegally crossing the border to hide out in America and live and work illegally is not apparent. So even though Americans technically could exercise their popular will to change the law and stop the illegal migrant flood, they don’t understand enough to do this.

Instead, Americans think their popular will has already forbidden the thing that the migrants are doing. So they see the incoming migrants as forcing their way in, in defiance of the law, rather than simply exploiting a loophole. This feeds into the right-wing fantasies of invasion and treason, of course. But more importantly, it makes Americans feel a lack of control over their country.

And that feels undemocratic. Democracy is all about feeling a sense of ownership and control over your country; that’s one of the basic reasons it’s a good system of government. The idea that migrants are forcing their way into the country en masse produces a feeling of helplessness that runs exactly counter to the good feeling that democracy gives people.

This, I believe, is the biggest reason Americans are so mad about the border.

Nor, I think, will Biden’s “parole” program solve this problem at all. In order to reduce illegal border crossings, Biden massively expanded an old program for people from Central American countries to come and work in America temporarily. The idea was to reduce demand for illegal entry by giving people a legal option to be guest workers — a bit like streaming services reduce the demand for illegal downloads.

It seems unlikely that this would reduce demand for entry into America by enough to make a dent in the flood of people crossing the border. But some people swear it’s working:

Whether or not this is true, it seems unlikely to assuage Americans’ feeling of a lack of control. First of all, it’s being done by executive order. But even more fundamentally, it probably feels to many people like a capitulation by the U.S. If the only choices are letting people in via illegal border crossing and letting people in through “parole”, there is no choice to simply not let people in. And I think Americans want the option to not let people in.

Anyway, I should also mention that over the last decade, some progressives have begun to display decidedly unhelpful attitudes toward immigration.

For example, one of the books about immigration that I read, back in 2019, was This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, by Suketu Mehta. This book was strongly recommended to me by MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes. But the book’s main argument was that America owes immigrants entry, as reparations for colonialism, climate change, and other Western sins. In addition to being a bit self-contradictory — if immigration is good for Americans, then how is it a form of reparations to allow it? — this argument is incredibly unhelpful to the cause of expanded immigration. It depicts immigration as something Americans should be shamed into allowing out of a sense of historical guilt, rather than something they should embrace freely for their own good. It’s hard to imagine a less effective sales job.

Some progressives also assert that America used to have open borders, and that border control is thus not an important element of national sovereignty. Even some of the books I read, such as Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects, made this claim. But it’s absolutely false. As Hidetaka Hirota’s Expelling the Poor details, U.S. states tried very vigorously to bar and then to expel poor Irish immigrants in the early and mid 19th century. The only reason they failed was that state-level expulsions weren’t very effective; most migrants would simply go to a different state. The reason America didn’t have strong national borders in the old days wasn’t that Americans didn’t care about enforcing borders; it was that the federal government was weak, and state governments were strong.

(See? Having read dozens of books on a subject does occasionally come in handy!)

And progressives also have an unfortunate tendency to tolerate leftist activists who share right-wing fantasies of “replacement”! At a recent pro-Palestine protest at Stanford University, some protesters screamed “Our next generation, they will take all your places, and ensure Israel falls, and America too!” Progressives need to denounce this sort of leftist rhetoric, because it feeds directly into right-wing fever dreams. In general, leftist anti-Americanism contributes to the idea that the nation is under attack, and immigrants are inevitably going to disproportionately bear the brunt of that fear.

So anyway, both conservatives and progressives need to be more reasonable here. Conservatives need to stop screaming their heads off about invasion and treason, while progressives need to accede to Americans’ desire to subject immigration to the democratic popular will. This represents a compromise. In some sense it’s just the same compromise that the nation-state itself represents, with its borders, laws, police, punishments, and so on. But it’s a compromise that has worked well in the past, and it’s vastly superior to the all of the chaotic and violent alternatives.

High-skilled immigration bias is a compromise we should embrace

Once we accept that Americans get to decide who gets into America, we need to ask the next question: Who should get in? This, too, requires a compromise.

Republicans are going to need to accept that in order for America to maintain its economic vitality, we need lots of immigrants. I made the case in this post last year:

The U.S. cannot afford to turn against immigration

In the 90s and 00s, U.S. fertility hovered right at the replacement rate; since the Great Recession, it has tumbled.

In fact, without immigration, the U.S. labor force would have barely grown at all over the last decade and a half:

Without immigration, our labor force will eventually shrink. A smaller and smaller number of working-age people will be required to support a larger and larger number of retirees — either through eldercare or through taxes. The young generation of America will bear a crushing burden.

In addition, a shrinking America would have a smaller market size, making it a less attractive destination for investment relative to the huge and growing markets of Asia. A deficit of high-skilled immigrants would be particularly harmful, since these workers are a big draw for high-value industries like software, biotech, and advanced manufacturing. Without skilled immigrants, we will have a hard time competing with China’s much larger talent pool.

In addition, Republicans need to accept that most of the immigrants we get from now on won’t be from Europe. There just aren’t that many Europeans anymore, and most of them tend not to leave. A number of restrictionists, such as University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, have argued against nonwhite immigration:

Maybe it’s just that Democrats love open borders, and Asians want more Asians here. Perhaps they are just mesmerized by the feel-good cult of diversity…but as long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.

She also said of Indian immigrants:

Here’s the problem. [Indian immigrants] taught that they are better than everybody else because they are Brahmin elites and yet, on some level, their country is a shithole…They’ve realised that [the West has] outgunned and outclassed them in every way… They feel anger. They feel envy. They feel shame. It creates ingratitude of the most monstrous kind.

This kind of comment is disgusting to me personally, but it can’t be dismissed as the rantings of one weird racist lady. It exactly echoes the arguments that MIT president Francis Walker made against Eastern and South European immigrants back in 1896:

Only a short time ago, the immigrants from southern Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia together made up hardly more than one per cent of our immigration. To-day the proportion has risen to something like forty per cent, and threatens soon to become fifty or sixty per cent, or even more. The entrance into our political, social, and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions, is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm. These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement…They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government, such as belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains. (emphasis mine)

Walker’s fears proved unfounded, of course, as will Wax’s. Not only did the East and South Europeans prove to be just as capable as German, Irish, and British immigrants of centuries past, they also eventually began to split their vote between Republicans and Democrats.

So conservatives need to put these fears aside, for the good of the republic.

But Democrats and progressives need to understand that mass low-skilled immigration has substantial costs. No, immigration doesn’t reduce wages for the native-born, or take their jobs — at least, not as far as we can tell. But that doesn’t mean there are no costs at all.

Right now, poor migrants are straining the resources of cities like New York City. Just as in the 19th century, they have arrived without the ability to support themselves, meaning that state and local governments are responsible for their housing, health care, and education. This is causing even the bluest of blue cities to become enraged at the Biden administration for not having done anything to halt the border crisis.

This problem is far more acute for immigrants with lower levels of education. A 2017 report by the National Academy of Sciences found that, under the most reasonable assumptions, immigrants without a high school degree are a net drain on total U.S. government finances, even if you count their children’s contributions and project out for 75 years into the future:

Source: National Academy of Sciences via Noah Smith

In other words, the more of the “huddled masses” we take, the more it’s going to cost taxpayers. That will eventually put pressure on state and local governments to deny health, education, and housing services to migrants, just as the federal government denied immigrants many welfare benefits after 1996. But that will just mean a large number of unhealthy, uneducated, and homeless people hanging around American cities.

It is perfectly acceptable for Americans not to want this. Yes, keeping out the tired, hungry, and poor is an act of selfishness — but the option to be selfish is part of national sovereignty. A nation is an exclusive club, and its people have the right to be as exclusive as they want.

It seems to me that the best compromise is to take in some low-skilled immigrants, but far less than 2 million per year. Instead, we should expand legal pathways for high-skilled immigration. Skilled immigrants are a huge fiscal positive, as the chart above shows. They are also absolutely essential for maintaining our high-tech industries in the face of Chinese competition.

This was at the core of the 2013 Senate compromise — more skilled immigrants, and more border security.

It’s important to remember that it was conservative House Republicans who killed that bill, just as it’s conservative House Republicans who are blocking Biden’s border crackdown right now. And Donald Trump was no friend of skilled immigration — he enacted various measures to make life more difficult for them. Let no one think that I’m arguing that both sides are equally responsible for the breakdown of our immigration system. But that doesn’t mean that Democrats and progressives are already where they need to be on this issue — the activist dream of rescuing as many asylum-seekers as possible needs to be set aside.

I do not think that high-skilled immigrants are intrinsically more valuable as human beings than those without an education. But economically speaking, high-skilled immigration is a necessity, while accepting and nurturing the lowest-skilled migrants is an altruistic luxury for our nation. On some level, Americans realize this, which is why support for more skilled immigration is higher than support for expanded immigration overall.

Again, as with asylum law and border enforcement, what I’m proposing is a reasonable compromise. I know that many Americans are inclined to fight to the end on this issue, but that conflict is just going to leave our immigration system more chaotic and broken, and our politics more rancorous and ineffective. When people call for a civil war (or “national divorce”) as the alternative to the status quo, you know they’re out of good ideas.

So let us be reasonable. Let us compromise. America is a nation of immigrants, and it must remain thus. Functional borders, and an immigration mix that boosts the economy and government coffers, are simply ways of making sure that we retain the national strengths that have brought us this far.

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