“The Immigration Dodge” by Mark Krikorian
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-limit-immigration-1490366475
Today’s bitter divides focus too narrowly on enforcement. All sides need to be clearer about what immigration policy is meant to achieve
The immigration debate in the U.S. has been contentious for decades, but Donald Trump’s candidacy and election have taken it to a new level of polarized animosity. Politicians and the public have focused, understandably, on Mr. Trump’s promise to build a “big, beautiful” wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and on what should be done with the millions of illegal immigrants currently in the country.
These are certainly important issues. But they are enforcement issues. They are less fundamental than a question that too often goes unaddressed in our debates: Why limit immigration at all? Almost everyone at least pays lip service to the need for limits of some kind, but we don’t often enough challenge each other to explain what limits we support and why.
If we are ever to have a rational debate about immigration—rather than a screaming match among combatants mostly intent on signaling their own moral virtue or ideological purity—the starting point has to be a candid acknowledgment of our goals and preferences. Politicians and ordinary voters shouldn’t be allowed to get away with saying “Of course there should be limits on immigration, but…” without explaining what they mean.
Almost all of the arguments for limiting immigration share a common theme: protection. Even those advocating much more liberal immigration policies acknowledge the need to protect Americans from terrorists, foreign criminals and people who pose a threat to public health. Supporters of stricter limits, such as me, seek wider protections: protection for less-skilled workers, protection for the social safety net, and protection for the civic and cultural foundations of American society.
In prior centuries, the vast distances that people had to cross to get to the U.S.—to say nothing of the difficulty of communication and of gathering information about prospects here—proved quite effective at limiting immigration. But now that we can talk to anyone in the world at any time and reach anywhere on the planet in a matter of hours, the oceans no longer pose such a formidable barrier.
Census data show that more than 43 million foreign-born people are now living in the U.S., close to half of them naturalized citizens. Each year, about 1.5 million new immigrants arrive, most of them legally. But the actual demand for immigration to the U.S. is far higher than these levels.
Even with our current rules, which give out about a million green cards each year (plus hundreds of thousands of work visas), more than four million people are on immigration waiting lists, according to the State Department. And the universe of potential immigrants to the U.S. is much larger still. A 2009 Gallup poll found that 700 million people would permanently leave their countries if they could, with the U.S. as the top choice for some 165 million of them.
Many of these people wouldn’t actually follow through, of course, but there is every reason to think that the flow of immigrants to the U.S. would expand enormously if current limits, which are already badly enforced, were to be relaxed or abolished. Under much more liberal rules, immigration to the U.S. could easily reach 10 million people a year.
And what would be wrong with that? What interests of American citizens would warrant protection from much higher levels of immigration? CONTINUE AT SITE
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