RUTHFULLY YOURS

Something very odd and potentially self-defeating is happening to liberalism in the Trump era.

Confronted by the rise of a harder right, the center-left has responded by declaring the intellectual and political equivalent of a public health emergency. Policy positions adopted by their opponents, which liberals of the past would have considered wrong but perfectly legitimate, are now deemed morally unacceptable threats to our form of government — a hazard to the soul of American democracy akin to the danger that an outbreak of a deadly plague would pose to individual American bodies.

Nowhere has this change been clearer or more dramatic than on immigration, and never more so than in reactions to the proposal floated by the White House late last week. In return for providing a permanent path to citizenship for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, the Trump administration hopes to gain approval for significant cuts to legal immigration.

There are three ways to respond to such a proposal. The first is to make a pragmatic case that cutting legal immigration will harm the economy. The second is to make a moral case that cutting legal immigration will betray America’s highest ideals. Both responses implicitly presume that there will be legitimate arguments made on the other side and that those arguments may well prevail in the back and forth of public debate.

But a surprisingly large number of liberals are taking a third, and very different, approach — not claiming that cuts to legal immigration shouldn’t be made, but that the very act of proposing and defending them in the first place is morally illegitimate. These liberals appear to believe that immigration restrictionists should be excluded on principle from participating in public debate and discussion about immigration policy in the United States.

This is absurd.

President Donald Trump reportedly asked why the U.S. is “having all these people from shithole countries come here.” I think he could have used better language, but it’s a question that should be asked and answered. I have a few questions for my fellow Americans to consider. How many Norwegians have illegally entered our nation, committed crimes and burdened our prison and welfare systems? I might ask the same question about Finnish, Swedish, Welsh, Icelanders, Greenlanders and New Zealanders. The bulk of our immigration problem is with people who enter our country criminally from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East. It’s illegal immigrants from those countries who have committed crimes and burdened our criminal justice and welfare systems. A large number of immigrants who are here illegally — perhaps the majority are law-abiding in other respects — have fled oppressive, brutal and corrupt regimes to seek a better life in America.

In the debate about illegal immigration, there are questions that are not explicitly asked but can be answered with a straight “yes” or “no”: Does everyone in the world have a right to live in the U.S.? Do Americans have a right to decide who and under what conditions a person may enter our country? Should we permit foreigners landing at our airports to ignore U.S. border control laws just as some ignore our laws at our southern border? The reason those questions are not asked is that one would be deemed an idiot for saying that everyone in the world has a right to live in our country, that Americans don’t have a right to decide who lives in our country and that foreigners landing at our airports have a right to just ignore U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

Senate Democrats led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) shut down the government last weekend, ostensibly in defense of “Dreamers”—illegal aliens who arrived in the United States as minors. The Democrats, in effect, placed the progressive political project “above our national security, military families, vulnerable children, and our country’s ability to serve all Americans,” as a White House press release put it.

This new and virtuous Schumer of 2018 stands in stark contrast with the Schumer of 2013, who vehemently denounced those who would “risk default for the nation” by shutting down the government over immigration. He called such obstinance the “politics of idiocy, of confrontation, of paralysis.” But that was before Trump and #TheResistance.

Just who are these “Dreamers” the Democrats are using as political props? The name comes from the proposed 2001 Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which has failed to pass repeatedly over the years. By most estimates, some 3.6 million illegal immigrants came to this country as children. Of that number, around 800,000 registered under the Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Americans have been fed a line that Dreamers are among our “best and brightest,” but the reality is much different. While DACA and Dreamer are used interchangeably, the distinction makes a difference. DACA recipients are a subset of the Dreamers, and the soldiers and scholars among the DACA class are an even smaller subset. More importantly, even though the shutdown fight was reportedly about DACA, the Democrats aren’t simply seeking amnesty for those 800,000 program participants. They want all 3.6 million Dreamers included in the deal. A look at the bigger picture of what this might mean is sobering.

In Arizona, DACA recipient Francisco Rios-Covarrubias, 30, was arrested after offering a 3-year-old girl for sex to a man who notified authorities, the child was discovered bound with duct tape and showed signs of repeated sexual abuse.

Because Democrats regard the millions of people who have entered, are entering, and (they hope) will continue to enter the United States illegally as a prospective bloc of captive voters, they demand we give illegal aliens “a path to citizenship.” And President Trump now seems inclined to give in to that demand.

Citizenship is what the 1965 immigration law has conferred to more than 40 million people from what we used to call the Third World, a majority of whom have in fact become the Democratic Party’s reliable supporters. So as we decide what the status of various categories of illegals should be and whether to continue or to reform our current system of legal immigration, there should be no doubt that the balance of political power in America is at stake—never mind its cultural character.

Who shall be admitted to citizenship is the question. Next to that, who we let in to do what looms small. Citizenship determines who shall rule, to what ends, and what life among us will be. Such decisions are quintessential to popular sovereignty.

We obfuscate reality if we pretend that today’s influx is a mere continuation of the hallowed heritage of American immigration; if we ignore that people who want to come to America differ in their motivation, character, and above all in relevance to our constitutional republic. What follows distinguishes the categories of people involved and asks what status we should grant to whom and for what reason.

Is It All Just Racism?
The 1924 immigration law had established small quotas for immigration from foreign countries, proportionate to the percentage of U.S citizens from those counties. Today, calling that law “racist” is commonplace. By what criterion is it “racist” for a country to decide to remain the way it is?

By the 1924 law, Americans decided to admit people like themselves, including habits of the heart and mind regarding honesty, work, women, and America itself. And if taking origin into account is racist, why was the 1965 law not racist for prioritizing and turbocharging with unlimited “family reunification immigration” by Third World people with characteristics very much different from those of Americans? What had been wrong with America that it had to be righted by injecting people as different as these have been? What change, precisely, was this injection supposed to produce?

In short, the contrast between the pre- and post-1965 approaches to immigration has to do with the different political and cultural agendas of Americans.

Maybe an immigration compromise isn’t hopeless in 2018 after all. That’s at least a possibility after the White House floated a proposal on Capitol Hill late Thursday that would offer legalization and a path to citizenship for some 800,000 so-called Dreamers in return for funding for President Trump’s wall at the Mexico-U.S. border and other changes to U.S. immigration law.

The details weren’t fully known by our deadline Thursday, but the outline has something for both sides. Democrats would get legal protection for the Dreamers, the young adults brought here illegally as children. They could also become U.S. citizens over time, which makes sense given that this is the only country they have known for nearly all of their lives. Democrats claim to care for the well-being of these people, and this is a big concession by the President given opposition from some on the right.

Those restrictionists would get funding for the wall, which Mr. Trump campaigned on. The White House proposal also includes limits on the ability of citizens to bring adult siblings or parents into the U.S., as well as an end to the lottery program that awards 50,000 visas a year to countries that typically don’t have many immigrants.

These concessions would substantially limit the number of legal immigrants, and thus a source of talent, but we recognize that compromise is needed to break the veto that both sides have held over immigration policy for so many years. Credit Mr. Trump with recharging the chances for a deal after much recent acrimony.

Who’s the racist who once said this: “All Americans . . . are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers”?

Who’s the racist who once said this: “When I see Mexican flags waving at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration”?

If you guessed the last two Democratic presidents — Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, respectively — then you’re correct. If you believe their own party would excoriate them for the same words if they uttered them today, then you’re also correct. It’s time to acknowledge that the Democratic position on immigration has moved rapidly and decisively to the left, so rapidly and decisively that internal progressive debates that were common even a few years ago are settled. Over. To some activists, good-faith dissent from the new position simply isn’t possible. It’s proof positive that you’re racist.

Indeed, this change is so rapid and so dramatic that thoughtful liberals are taking note. Last summer Peter Beinart wrote a long piece in The Atlantic chronicling the transformation. The party platform substantially changed. Politicians like Bernie Sanders were browbeaten into backing an ever-more open-borders position. Beinart talked to Jason Furman, the former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic advisers. “A decade ago or two ago,” Furman said, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.”