In her Washington Post column Megan McArdle points out what should be obvious but apparently is not—that we don’t have the time for a protracted national dialogue on immigration. Not months or years but days:
Trump is of course wrong to cast fact-free aspersions on desperate people seeking a better life. But the left is wrong if they think that making that observation ends the argument, because even a caravan of nothing but decent, hard-working people would raise big questions. There are billions of decent, hard-working people living in the world. Do all of them have a right to migrate to the United States merely because doing so would make them better off?
Immigration restrictionists and advocates both struggle with that question to some degree, depending on the scale they use when considering it. On the macro scale, restrictionists find it easy to say, no, of course we can’t let in every single person who wants to come, because doing so would transform the country into one that few Americans of any political persuasion would want to live in.
If we decide to admit the people in the “caravan”, on what basis would we reject the next and the next and the next? The number of people involved is truly vast—estimated to be in the tens or hundreds of millions all told. The level of tax and transfer required to clothe, house, feed, transport, educate them (and their children!), and provide for their bodily needs is truly unimaginable. It just has too many zeros.
If we decide not to admit them, we need to figure out how to do it. Merely dispersing them will only delay the inevitable.
We don’t have a lot of time to decide.
The dilemma reminds me of the quote from the movie Dr Zhivago; “One man desperate for a bit of fuel is pathetic. Five million people desperate for fuel will destroy a cityâ€. This was a policeman’s reaction to seeing Dr Zhivago chop a tree for firewood in the midst of the Russian civil war.
Yep. That’s a good example.
That’s good, curious.
I need to see that movie again, it’s been too long.
Even more than the lack of dialog is a lack of basic policy positions when it comes to immigration. Republicans and Democrats continue to lack a specific platform on immigration and instead speak using platitudes, ie. “we are a nation of immigrants” and “secure the border.”
San Francisco is a good example of letting in an unmanageable population living on their streets. Something like 46% of people living in SF, when polled, wanted to relocate to somewhere else. A cousin and his wife are examples of such an exodus, being turned off by stepping over vagrants every morning as they leave for work. They are selling and moving southward.
The city is not only losing it’s allure for residents, but also lost dollars from conventions canceling and probably a down-swing in tourism. But, when a place like CA becomes a sanctuary state it invites open enrollment for non-residents and non-citizens alike which usually leads to the decay of both it’s social and physical environment.
Jan
Three years ago the family took a last pre-college trip to Hawaii, stopping off for three days in SF. I hadn’t been there in probably 8 years. But I recall being struck by the changes. It seemed more a city on the down than the glowing City by the Bay.
http://www.kalw.org/post/why-homelessness-san-francisco-appears-be-growing-when-fact-it-isn-t#stream/0
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Bay-Area-economy-growing-nearly-twice-as-fast-as-13061373.php
“Something like 46% of people living in SF, when polled, wanted to relocate to somewhere else. ”
Nice. Real estate prices must be falling dramatically. Might be time to buy there.
Steve
Letting the caravan in, maybe giving them each a debit card loaded with $2,000. ala Katrina, possibly a pamphlet on American colonial guilt, printed in Spanish, a prepaid cellphone, loaded with minutes, a bus ride to their favorite sanctuary city, might actually be the best thing we could do at this point to focus American voter’s attention on our immigration policy. After all , they are only 7,000, which is < infinity.
Why should I, Hispanic and childfree, pay such high taxes to support the health care and education of tens of millions of Amerikan children and ignore the pleas of all others? Nowhere does the Constitution support ignoring the needs of children merely because they were not born Amerikan.
Well, Jim, don’t pay taxes if you feel they are unfairly distributed. AS to the constitution, you might want to read it again.
Pay close attention to the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment as: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.