There’s a good post on the politics of immigration policy at The Week by Damon Linker. Here’s a snippet:
Many liberals argue that refugees are among the most vulnerable people on Earth and so must be welcomed with open arms. That forcing undocumented immigrants to leave the country is gratuitously cruel, violates their rights, and so justifies municipalities flouting federal law by turning themselves into “sanctuary cities.” That banning entry to refugees or immigrants not yet within the United States can violate their due process rights under the U.S. Constitution. And that the desire to restrict immigration is invariably an expression of xenophobia, racism, and other forms of irrational animus and so morally (and perhaps constitutionally) indefensible.
All of these claims are, at bottom, expressions of a fundamentally anti-political humanitarian ideology that is unlikely to fare well in the next presidential election. Democrats desperately need to confront the vulnerabilities of this position and stake out a more defensible and pragmatic one if they hope to push back against Trump’s populist-nationalist message in upcoming years.
Many Americans believe that their constitution presumes or appeals to certain timeless, universal moral truths that apply to all human beings. But the U.S. Constitution itself — like the constitutions, fundamental laws, and commonly affirmed norms and rules of all political communities — is nonetheless instantiated in a particular place, rooted in a particular tradition. It also pertains and applies only to people who are members of the political community known as the United States of America.
Those who are members of this community are known as American citizens. They get a say in what laws get passed and how they get enforced. Those who are not members of this community — who are not citizens — don’t get such a say. The community is perfectly within its rights to decide which and how many of these outsiders will be allowed to visit the country, how long they will be allowed to stay, when they will need to go, and how many, if any, will be permitted to join the community permanently by becoming citizens.
When you stake out your position based on transcendent moral truths rather than on cost-benefit analysis, there’s no room for compromise. What is the resolution of a difference of opinion where there’s no room for compromise? The only peaceful resolution I can see is divorce.
This is just a silly argument. It’s not anti-political or some vast act of impossible idealism to assign dignity and human rights to people who have snuck across the border and are now being paid for picking strawberries at a rate too low for legal citizens. It’s just an acceptance of the reality we live in.
It’s like saying there’s something transcendentally moral in not freaking about a woman wearing a burqa.
These are just defenses of xenophobic hostility and a futile economic populism. Linker is a moron, but the logical progression of any of these views is that it’s anti-American to have any empathy for non-Americans. It’s a philosophy of the last resort. When you have nothing but hostility and ignorance, this is what you get.
There is a limit to how much and how rapidly any society will accept newcomers, refugees or otherwise.
Each of you have a limit, million?40 million?400 million?
When border enforcement is stepped up, even slightly, word spreads, rapidly nowadays, reaching millions of ears in the third world.
The ears inform the minds of the millions, who begin to re-calculate their plans to venture North, and instead bend their efforts toward improving their lot at home.
Remember, no one is talking about stopping LEGAL immigration.
Only cleaning up the legal mess that 50 years of sporatic enforcment has spawned.
Many? I guess. In reality, I think most liberals are not arguing for unlimited refugees, that instead we have a moral obligation to accept some. Then we can argue about what that number should be.
Next, I don’t really know or read anyone on the left who thinks we should support illegal immigration into the country, though it is a big world and I am sure some exist. I think we mostly just want realistic policies on what to do about he ones already here, and realistic ways to decrease further entries. Most of us, I think, would prefer we make it harder to employ them especially at sub-par wages. The GOP generally opposes that. If an illegal gets here, they want their business people to be able to hire them and make money.
Finally, we have stepped up border enforcement in the past and it did little to slow down illegal crossings. Then, we had a recession and the flow of illegals actually reversed.
Steve
Moral hazard, Steve. One of the shibboleths for immigration reform activists is a “path to citizenship”. Any path to citizenship that doesn’t involve penalties for breaking the law is an incentive for future breaking of the law, i.e. it will encourage more illegal immigration. That was the experience after the amnesty of the 1980s.
If you can’t draw limits on how much illegal immigration is acceptable or how much you’re willing to enforce it, you de facto support an open border. Many open borders absolutists, both Republicans and Democrats, explicitly support open borders.
Yeah, the frustrating thing for me about the so-called immigration debate is that it’s not about immigration – it’s mostly about what to do about illegal immigrants followed by border enforcement. Both party platforms say nothing about what they actually want in terms of immigration policy beyond the usual claptrap of boosting security and the economy.
The whole “path to citizenship” thing assumes that immigrants want to be citizens. A lot of them don’t – they are here to make money and then, at some point, go back home.
We already know the answer to the question—we learned that after the 1985 reform when only a minority of the eligible actually sought citizenship but the amnesty meant that the U. S. didn’t plan to enforce its own laws. The reality that what we need is a guest worker program for Mexican citizens is just too awful for activists to consider. A guest worker program would accomplish every goal except their political ambitions.
“Any path to citizenship that doesn’t involve penalties for breaking the law is an incentive for future breaking of the law, i.e. it will encourage more illegal immigration. ”
There should be 2 penalties. First, the person here illegally should be sent back. Second, there should be severe financial penalties for those who hire people here illegally.
Steve
One local talk show wag once said “Work that you can’t pay your own work force enough to get them to do the work is work that doesn’t need to be done.”
That takes in both cost benefit analysis and spiritual truths, just not the fake truth of the multicultural liberal totalitarians.