The loudest immigration voices are usually not looking at the whole problem
... and it doesn't matter what side they're on.
I was asked if I wanted to attend the midtown memorial service for the hundreds of my immolated fellow Englishmen. I can’t say that it was exactly at this moment that my thoughts crystallized, but it was at about that time. No, I don’t want to go to anybody’s gender-specific or national or ethnic-identity ceremony. I have found the patch of soil on which I will take my own stand, and the people with whom I’ll stand, and it’s the only place in history where patriotism can be divorced from its evil twins of chauvinism and xenophobia.
Christopher Hitchens in December 2001, explaining why his reaction to 9/11 made him decide to become an American
A lot of people are born Americans, but it takes some longer to get here than others.
A year ago I began a report on American immigration policy NGOs with these sentences:
American border and immigration policy is a deeply awful mess.
That may be the only universally accepted statement on the matter. Otherwise, Americans and the advocacy groups working on these issues craft fighting words from what should otherwise be objectively simple phrases, such as “immigration reform” and “border security.” Gushers of money flow through the nonprofit sector to policy groups that cannot even agree on the words to define problems, let alone on solutions.
A year later, the analysis has held up a little too well.
Consider this part:
Figuring out what to do with those 10.5 million people already here illegally goes a long way toward resolving what to do with those lining up to follow them.
They represent a population that is larger than that of Michigan and 40 other states. There aren’t many happy historical examples of governments moving 10 million people to where they don’t wish to be. [emphasis added]
The fail-state of Venezuela continues to be a big piece of the problem, but it’s not an unprecedented problem:
The humanitarian disaster in Venezuela is affecting a culturally Roman Catholic and Spanish speaking population, people who have historically become prosperous and patriotic American immigrants.
This is also true of those who have fled communist disaster states, such as the Cubans of South Florida. There is a strong moral and economic argument for allowing many more Venezuelans and people like them to become Americans.
But there is a counter argument for border security. Even the successful integration of Cubans who fled the Castro regime over many decades carries the scars of a local crime wave that ensued after the 1980 Marial Boatlift. Ten thousand success stories will quietly create a community, but the news headlines will always be driven by the one bad apple among them.
The report profiles right-leaning immigration policy groups, such as Numbers USA:
With rhetoric indistinguishable from many lefty climate groups, Numbers USA’s “Sustainability Initiative” promotes the message that producing too many Americans will threaten the “carrying capacity” of the nation, cut off our access to nature, wipe out species, and worse. “We need to end our unsustainable resource consumption and persistent urban sprawl, and start preserving the quality-of-life for future generations,” warns a letter drafted by Numbers USA for its advocates to send to Congress.
I also looked at the left-leaning immigration expansionist groups:
On the other side, it’s not clear the Institute for Policy Studies has any respect for border security or borders at all. An October 2021 IPS webinar was titled “Dismantling Borders: A conversation with Harsha Walia” and was promoted as “a visionary conversation about dismantling borders and pursuing a world that honors the right to migrate, the right to remain home, and the right to return after displacement.”
A July 2023 policy commentary from IPS reframed border enforcement as “militarizing immigration” and called for steep cuts to some or even all of it: “Billions of taxpayer dollars fund border patrol, and every dollar used for militarizing immigration is a dollar that doesn’t go toward public health, education, housing, or other real needs.”
The report covers the big money spent by the illegal immigration expansionist camp, the comparatively small amount spent by the immigration restrictionists, and who is sending money to both.
As is clear from the angry debates we have today, both sides are extremists who admit to no grey area between them.
That’s not to say there isn’t a middle ground. And I said it this way:
But unlike left-wing expansionists that draw most of the attention on this issue, libertarians are not generally hostile to policing the border. They argue that a policy of admitting law-abiding migrants will make it easier to screen out the tiny few bad actors seeking illegal entry. The most prominent examples of this position are the Wall Street Journal’s otherwise conventionally conservative editorial page, an American business community that seeks a larger labor pool to draw from, and explicitly libertarian think thanks such as the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, and the Reason Foundation.
The “third way” libertarian perspective looks like this:
To the extent that criminal concerns on the border exist, the libertarians believe they are the result of an overly restrictive immigration policy that forces good people into the “illegal” line with bad people. The libertarians believe the presumption that every border crosser is a criminal makes it difficult to discern who has actual criminal intent.
According to this theory, if we screen out those with discernible criminal backgrounds at legitimate border crossings, but eagerly accept and swiftly admit anyone with the potential to fill a full-time job, then our front door will have a long but peaceful line filled with the people who have always become great Americans.
The back door—crossing illegally—would then be the scene of much less activity, easier to police, and rather than innocent women and children it would be almost exclusively a population of bad men with worse intentions.
Please read the full report, which appears on pages 5-13 of the July 2024 issue of Capital Research Center magazine:
THE ADVOCACY GROUPS AND DONORS WHO FIGHT OVER IMMIGRATION AND BORDER SECURITY