RUTHFULLY YOURS

On October 8, the White House released a list of “Immigration Principles and Policies” that President Trump says “must be included” in any legislation legitimizing President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order (DACA). Trump is cutting a deal: Congress gets DACA if Trump gets immigration reform.

The million-dollar question: is it a good deal? No, unfortunately.

Before getting into the details, it is worth briefly reviewing DACA and highlighting Trump’s key demands.

Summing up DACA: President Obama signed an executive order in June 2012 that let all illegal aliens who arrived in America before they were age 16 apply for legal work permits, Social Security numbers, and driver’s licenses and made them eligible for earned income tax credits. The order gives recipients most of the privileges associated with citizenship. Enrollment must be renewed every two years. Since 2012, nearly 800,000 illegal aliens have taken advantage of the program – most of them adults. Basically, DACA is renewable amnesty.

Depending upon how broadly Congress legislates on DACA, somewhere between 800,000 and 3.5 million people could be granted de facto amnesty and given a pathway to citizenship. Remember: not everyone who can enroll in DACA is enrolled. This is an enormous number of people, comparable in scale to the Reagan-era amnesty.

On the other side of the equation are President Trump’s demands. In exchange for DACA, Trump wants funding for the wall (the House Homeland Security Committee has already allocated $10 billion toward the wall); an extra 10,000 ICE officers, 1,000 immigration lawyers, and 370 judges to help clear the deportation backlog; legislative penalties for “sanctuary cities”; an E-Verify system to bar illegals from the job market; passage of the RAISE Act; and a number of other minor concessions.

Of these reforms, the RAISE Act is the most significant. Very briefly, the RAISE Act is an immigration reform bill sponsored by Senators Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.). The act would not only cut legal immigration into the U.S. by roughly 50 percent, but break the cycle of chain migration by giving priority to economically valuable immigrants rather than those with family connections. If passed, the RAISE Act would be the most significant piece of immigration legislation since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ushered in the era of mass migration.

It is difficult to overstate the economic benefits of the RAISE Act, which are twofold. First, the legislation would reduce overall immigration levels significantly. Second, it would better calibrate the type of immigrants arriving in the U.S.

Reducing the overall level of immigration is important because America’s economy does not need additional labor. The labor market is over-saturated as is. Real unemployment remains high, and there is no sense exacerbating the problem. Furthermore, fewer immigrants would help improve working conditions and wages for U.S. citizens. This has already begun in a few locations – the logic is sound and empirically valid. And fewer low-skilled immigrants means fewer people on welfare.

The act also ensures that America gets high-quality, skilled immigrants by prioritizing people with valuable skills. This is the type of immigrants most likely to help expand the economy in the long run – immigrants whom U.S. policy should have been targeting for decades.

The issue of immigration has become the occasion for deciding the most practical and perennial of issues: who rules? Americans know that Europe’s un-sustainable socio-economic model—bureaucratized economies, social welfare, and demographic decline—is a warning to us.

Increasingly, we have imitated that model, assuming that the decline would be slow and graceful. But Europe’s crisis, and ours, has always been far less socio-economic than civilizational. That is why mass migration into Euro-American civilization—especially people from the Muslim world who neither share in nor sympathize with that civilization—is accelerating the crisis. Confidence in the future is being replaced by the sense that living as before will be impossible.

More and more, people have reacted by voting against the elites responsible for socio-economic management and for migration. But elites on both sides of the Atlantic have not changed course. They justify their resistance to popular sentiment by applying invidious labels to the voters who reject them. Each side’s denial of the other’s legitimacy is collapsing the socio-political legitimacy of modern democracy. This ensures that whatever changes in Euro-American civilization may take hold will include revolutionary political events.

A Snapshot
What follows is a snapshot of Europe’s problems taken from a small city in northern Italy with which I have been intimately familiar all my 74 years. Far from identical, the place is not wholly dissimilar from the rest of Old Europe.

Traditionally a center of agriculture, smokestack industry, and railroading, by the 1950s the city had bounced back from the bombing of World War II. Crowds filled streets lined with cafes. By the 1990s, the few big factories had been replaced by countless small and mid-sized businesses doing high-quality manufacturing in the suburbs. The city had also become something of a bedroom community for metropolitan Milan. Year after year, the supermarkets approached and then surpassed the opulence of those in such places as Palo Alto, California and Weston, Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, economic hope was draining away. As the ratio of working-age people to retirees was falling and the government was running out of room to finance its deficits by borrowing, it resorted to raising taxes in myriad ways, and to making sure that every last Euro was paid. This crimped businesses. Many closed.

By the late ’90s, the hiring of young people had slowed to a crawl. Individuals, their lives further complicated, used up family resources to finance their lifestyles. The middle class suffered about a 50 percent loss of accumulated wealth. Fewer new families formed, fewer children were born. Fewer people are in the streets and cafes. For those well established, life is comfortable, but ever more somber.

People had never expected political leaders to raise life’s moral tone. But since the 1960s, political leaders have depressed it—first by their corruption and then by the repudiation of Christianity as European civilization’s core, as well as through the promotion of a vision of the good life that consists largely of obedience to squalid bureaucracy.

The Trump administration’s recent announcement of its comprehensive immigration policy objectives was met with the predictable championing by its advocates and denunciation by its opponents. Lost in the news cycle and punditry analysis, however, is this undeniable fact: the Trump proposals, if enacted, would represent a sea change from immigration policy direction over the last several decades. That change would result in clear benefits for our country and its lawful citizens.

Border security

The proposals were broken down into three general categories: border security, interior enforcement and a merit-based immigration system. Despite emotional pleas from open borders advocates that a border wall is mean-spirited and against the principles of America, there is an abundance of evidence from around the world that border walls are highly effective. America would greatly benefit from a significant reduction in illegal aliens, drugs and guns that routinely pass through our southern border.
Another popular talking point by wall opponents is that its price tag would be excessive. Estimates on the actual cost of the wall vary. While the Trump administration has suggested that the cost would be in the $12-15 billion range, higher-end estimates are above $20 billion. To the average American living on a budget, that sounds like an astronomical amount of money, especially considering the many problems in our society in need of remedy. Even considering the higher estimate, and assuming the cost will go up once construction begins — as large, federally-funded projects inevitably do — that amount needs to be put into perspective. The newest aircraft carrier in the Navy fleet, the USS Gerald R. Ford, cost $12.8 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that The Affordable Care Act will cost $1.34 trillion over the next decade, and in 2016 cost $110 billion. That’s one year.

Now consider the cost of illegal immigration, which is generally calculated at $116 billion annually. When put into that context, the price tag for a wall doesn’t seem that excessive after all, especially considering the long-term benefits that a permanent barrier would provide.

Interior enforcement

While porous borders is a big part of the problem, so too are lax, conflicting and ineffective policies with regard to interior enforcement. Chief among these are local and state sanctuary policies. In defiance of the supremacy clause of the Constitution’s Article VI, these jurisdictions are harboring illegal aliens and the results in some cases have been tragic. While the story of Kate Steinle was widely reported, there have been too many other innocent lives lost because illegal aliens took advantage of sanctuary cities despite multiple deportations. This needs to end.

While illegal immigration is regarded by many as a matter of national sovereignty and the rule of law, it also is detrimental to those who are unemployed and seeking work. Companies that hire illegal aliens usually pay them below minimum wage or a wage that is exploitative for the work being done. This serves to drive down wages for people who have been struggling for years without raises while seeing their cost of living rise. It also decreases job opportunities for millions of people who have been unemployed or underemployed. Contrary to popular talking points, Americans are certainly willing to do a wide range for work if it is available and at a reasonable wage. Policies that promote illegal immigration deny opportunities to Americans and lower their paychecks. The administration supports the use of E-Verify to protect American workers as well as other measures to stop employment discrimination against legal workers.

Merit-based immigration

For too long, the American immigration system has prioritized the needs of immigrants over what is best for the country. The administration proposals seek to reverse that order. Entry into the United States — and all the freedom and opportunities that come with it — is a privilege, not a right. America should exercise its right to select immigrants based on the value they bring to the country, not just family connections. In that pursuit, the proposals call for limiting family-based green cards to include spouses and minor children.

For President Trump’s so-called travel ban, October 10 was a big day after all. That did not seem a likely outcome when the Supreme Court removed the case from its docket, scrapping the oral arguments originally scheduled for Tuesday morning. That evening, though, the Court issued a brief order that gave the president an important victory — one that is clearer than the Court’s June 26 ruling, which the White House dubiously celebrated as a big win.

The Court not only dismissed as moot the challenge to the administration’s restrictions on travel to the United States by aliens from six countries. Critically, the Court also vacated lower-court rulings that had upheld injunctions against the travel restrictions.

These abusive lower-court decisions were exercises in sheer judicial fiat. They ignored Supreme Court precedents that recognize the executive’s authority over foreign affairs and homeland security, as well as the political branches’ plenary power to set the conditions under which aliens may enter and remain in the country. Moreover, these rulings relied on the breathtaking conclusion that the president’s expressed national-security considerations were a pretext, concealing the anti-Islamic bias that was said to be his true motivation — notwithstanding that the “travel ban” (which was not actually a ban, but sets of temporary restrictions) had no effect on the vast majority of Muslims worldwide and that the cited countries were selected not because they are Muslim-majority but because they had been cited in legislation signed by President Obama.

The mootness finding was no surprise. We foreshadowed it when the justices took up the matter only preliminarily at the end of last term. We noted the confirmation of our suspicions when the case was removed from the docket on the eve of the term just begun.

The Court’s June 26 ruling lifted the lower-court injunctions. The administration regarded this as a win because it allowed the travel restrictions to go into effect. The justices, however, left intact some important aspects of the lower courts’ reasoning (including that a potentially broad array of American citizens and institutions would have standing to sue, claiming vicarious harm from restrictions on the aliens).

Trump’s orders set forth two categories of restrictions, both temporary: 90 days for aliens from the cited countries (originally Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — with Iraq subsequently dropped); 120 days for refugees globally. By allowing the administration to proceed with the restrictions, the Court set the table to avoid further grappling with the case: By the time the new term began in October, the 90-day restrictions would have lapsed and the 120-day restrictions would be on the verge of lapsing. Trump, furthermore, would probably have issued new guidance. The original restrictions would be moot.

That is what happened. On September 24, after an exacting review by the Departments of Homeland Security and State, the president issued a new proclamation overhauling the multi-country visa restrictions, which are no longer temporary. Meanwhile, the refugee restrictions will lapse in less than two weeks, by which time the administration will have issued new guidance, rendering the former restrictions moot. The Justice Department said as much in the letter-brief it filed last week, at the Court’s direction. (See letter-brief, p. 6: “The United States anticipates that . . . the government will complete its review and undertake any new actions regarding refugees by October 24.”)

This is why, for the moment, the Court’s dismissal on mootness grounds is limited to one of the two “travel ban” cases: Trump v. International Refugee Assistance Project. The case the Court has not yet dismissed, Trump v. Hawaii, includes challenges to the refugee restrictions. Expect the justices to dismiss it, too, in the next few days, once those restrictions are superseded by new guidance or lapse by their own terms.

A win on the mootness point alone would have been a hollow victory. The administration badly needed to prevail on the matter of vacating the lower-court decisions. These rulings rested on damaging legal and factual conclusions that the Justice Department wanted to challenge but that the Supreme Court, due to the mootness doctrine, would have been unable to review. This is not an unusual situation. Under Supreme Court precedent (particularly, the 1950 case of United States v. Munsingwear), the “established practice” in the mootness situation is to remand the case to the lower court with instructions that it be dismissed.

This means lower-court rulings that a higher court has not had the opportunity to review should be vacated, which “clears the path for future relitigation of the issues between the parties.” The Supreme Court is not required to follow this prudential practice, however, so opponents of the travel restrictions were beseeching the justices to leave the lower-court rulings intact — the better to exploit them in litigation against Trump’s new guidance.

For example, in ruling against the president, the Ninth Circuit had controversially held that a provision of immigration law (section 1152(a)(1)(A)) prohibits the president from singling out countries for visa restrictions, despite a separate provision (section 1182(f)) that clearly permits his doing so. (We anticipated this controversy here and here.) The Ninth Circuit further ruled, against precedent and in contravention of the statute it was purporting to construe (section 1157), that the president may not direct that fewer refugees be admitted to the U.S. than the maximum number established in consultation with Congress each fiscal year.

One of the sillier arguments against securing the border is cost. Vastly inflated estimates are presented. But they leave out what failing to secure the border is costing us. As Dr. Steven Camarota at the Center for Immigration Studies points out, even if the wall only stops a fraction of illegal immigration, it will pay for itself.

A new report by the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that if a wall at America’s southern border stopped between 160,000 and 200,000 illegal crossers — 9 to 12 percent of those expected to successfully cross in the next decade — the fiscal saving would equal the estimated $12 to $15 billion cost of the wall. The analysis takes the likely education level of illegal border crossers and applies fiscal impact estimates, developed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, for immigrants by educational attainment. Based on the Academies estimates, each illegal border crosser creates a net fiscal burden (taxes minus expenditures) of approximately $74,722 during their lifetime, excluding costs for their U.S.-born children.

Of course the left denies that there’s any cost at all to illegal migration, just benefits, but the reality is very different.