Re-thinking immigration

Are problems with enforcement a window into something more fundamentally wrong?

In my post here, I took a look at the enforcement problems ICE and the Border Patrol have encountered in Minneapolis and concluded that changes are needed — not so much, I said, in Trump’s stated goal of deporting the millions who came here illegally (most prominently and most recently under Biden’s effectively open border policy), as in how enforcement has been carried out.

Having received feedback from some smart conservatives I know and trust, I now think that my earlier take was, to a degree, shortsighted. The gist of my thinking was this:

It’s important to [deport people illegally in the country] not because illegals put a strain on the system (there’s evidence that they do, but there is some counter-evidence as well), and not because immigrants in the present day don’t assimilate and have little interest in assimilating (the big majority assimilate well and want to be in America for the same reasons my father’s parents did). The main reason is simply to uphold the rule of law — or, as liberals are very fond of saying in other contexts (discussing Donald Trump for example), no one is above the law. If you came here in violation of the rules, go back home and do it right next time. You don’t get the benefits of living in this country by cheating and pushing ahead of other prospective immigrants who followed the rules and waited in line.

I’m now persuaded that my instincts for insisting that the law be obeyed were too rigid. There’s more involved than my instincts, which, while wholesome (I’m willing to presume), ignore too much practical reality. The urge to push back on Biden’s flagrant lawlessness needs more of a filter than I gave it.

One of my errors was in thinking that it’s easier for deported illegal migrants to re-enter lawfully than it actually is. An expert in immigration law tells me that it’s quite hard. (I’m trying to persuade the expert to write more fully on this subject; when and if this happens, I’ll post it here). The difficulty of re-entry has to factor in to the advisability of mass deportation. Thinking about who specifically you’re deporting and how they’ve lived while in the United States are part of any rational, not to mention humane, enforcement goal. As commenter Richard Vigilante reminded me in response to my earlier post, there is inescapable, not to mention advisable, discretion in enforcement priorities, and that to exercise that discretion is not to abridge the rule of law.

Another of my errors was failing to exam rubrics that some on the Right commonly use about immigration, and in particular about immigration and crime. One of the difficulties in slanted journalism is that it’s getting to be practiced by conservatives in the same way it is by liberals (although conservatives have a long, long way to go). If you watch Fox News enough, you’ll start to think that all immigrants, or at least a very hefty number, were in on murdering Laken Riley. That error is egged on by the Left’s insistence on whistling past her killing and making like MS-13 is just a conservative-conjured fantasy.

In fact, people illegally in the country do commit violent crime, and the Left’s dismissing it is disturbing and dishonest. But the Right’s hyping it also paints a distorted picture. As this blog notes, albeit in its own over-hyped terms:

Documented and undocumented immigrants commit less violent crime than native-born Americans. This isn’t controversial. It’s been shown repeatedly across decades, states, and methodologies. Cities with higher immigrant populations consistently experience lower rates of violent crime, not higher. If immigrants were the crime wave MAGA fantasizes about, Texas, California, Florida, and New York would be smoldering ruins. They are not.

Actually, New York and California are on the way to ruination, but not, for the present, because of violent crime, which is decreasing across the country.

Then there’s the matter of economics:

Immigrants also start businesses at higher rates than native-born Americans. A disproportionate share of new small businesses, tech startups, restaurants, construction firms, and service companies are founded by immigrants. Entire industries, food service, agriculture, logistics, health care, elder care, are kept alive by immigrant labor. MAGA’s imaginary “job theft” collapses…when confronted with reality: immigrants are disproportionately job creators, not job stealers.

If this is true, and personal experience suggests it is, Trump’s undifferentiated hostility toward immigration is to say the least, ill-advised.

And wages? Immigration does not meaningfully depress wages for native-born workers. The overwhelming evidence shows neutral to mildly positive effects overall, with localized, short-term adjustments at the very low-skill end, effects dwarfed by automation, corporate consolidation, and union destruction.

Just as an aside, the decline of labor unions is something they’ve earned with their thuggery, and was underway long before Donald Trump.

[T]he modern economy does not reward nostalgia. It rewards adaptability. Immigrants arrive knowing this. They move where the work is. They retrain. They take jobs others refuse. They accept instability as the price of opportunity. MAGA, by contrast, demands that the economy rearrange itself around their frozen expectations.

“Frozen expectations” is putting it harshly, but, as a younger friend of mine (still in law school) reminds me, the return of America as a nation of factories isn’t going to happen, not when under any conceivable scenario wages in India and China and much of the world are massively below wages American workers will accept.

Factories didn’t disappear because of immigrants. They disappeared because machines got cheaper than people, because CEOs chased quarterly returns, [and] because global supply chains outpaced local labor…Immigration is not the cause of economic disruption; it is one of the few forces still injecting dynamism into a stagnant system.

Forgive me for a personal story that strikes me as relevant here, namely, my parents’ improbable marriage. My mother was from an old, upper crust Southern family, reared in Richmond society. The Shirley Highway south of Washington, DC, is named for her father. My father was from a working class family in Philadelphia, the son of German immigrants. Ordinarily, back in the 1930’s my mother would have never even had met, much less married, my father, their worlds were so different. I think a big part of the reason she chose him was his dynamism. At some pretty deep if unspoken level, my mother knew that she had been brought up in a dying world, the world of the Old South, still nursing the wounds of, and still furious about losing, the Civil War, still thinking that a more genteel, agrarian way of life was going magically to get restored. My mother understood that this wasn’t going to happen, and that the future was going to arrive wanted or not. My father, the first in his family to go to college — Penn on an athletic scholarship — was the path to getting there: He started his own successful business in the heart of the Depression. So as it happened, instead of having the big, fancy society wedding that someone of her place in life would be expected to have, the two of them got married one morning in the city clerk’s office in Richmond and basically eloped.

Looking back on it, I don’t think it was a coincidence that he was the son of immigrants. He knew how to adapt. He knew that he’d have to start from scratch. But he had his parents’ faith that America would reward his work, which it did.

In the present day, we hear a good deal about how the immigrant Somali community in Minneapolis is cheating and stealing on a breathtaking scale. So far as I can see, quite a few of them belong in jail and will be headed there. But on the whole, the Somali story is about one criminal subculture. It’s not the story of immigration as a whole. At one point or another, we’re all the posterity of immigrants.

It now seems to me that Trump’s aggressive deportation policy, the outcroppings of which have made so much news lately in Minneapolis and elsewhere, are a needlessly generalized and insufficiently thought-through reaction to Biden’s lawless open borders. Correcting Biden’s depredations was and is needed, and Trump was elected in large measure to do it. But the incidents in Minneapolis are telling us something — something more than just that particular enforcement tactics need fixing. They’re telling us that the whole idea of deporting everyone who’s entered illegally, regardless of their history and the (sometimes many) years they’ve lived and worked in the country, and regardless of the costs and sometimes the cruelty of doing so, is less a needed application of the rule of law and more an emotive (not that Trump would ever be emotive) response. In reality, we can’t and we’re not going to deport all illegals, and the sooner Trump starts to think and act more sensibly about the priorities he needs to adopt, the fewer Minneapolis-type horror stories we will hear, and the better off all of us will be.