Tag Archives: United States

How Undocumented Organizers Can Lead the Way to Open Borders

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My perspective on open borders has been profoundly shaped by my work with undocumented organizers in the U.S. In this post, I make the argument that the people most directly affected by closed borders are best able to create the political conditions necessary for open borders because:

1. They have the most to lose and therefore work the hardest for change,

2. They can better analyze the issues and frame the arguments in support of open borders because they directly experience the consequences of closed borders, and

3. Because of 1 and 2, affected individuals are more persuasive messengers to the voting public than intermediaries.

Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that meaningful social change comes through the creation of tension in an untenable system. In a recent OB post, Paul Crider cited King:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. . . . I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. . . . The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

King’s key insight found expression in the movement for Indian independence, the U.S. civil rights movement, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the Arab Spring.

Undocumented youth in the U.S. have created tension by engaging in direct action to force the fact of their oppression into the public consciousness. The two most significant political events relating to immigration in the U.S. in the past few years were the DREAM Act vote in December 2010 and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals initiative announced by President Obama in June 2012. Both resulted in large part from direct action by undocumented activists.

Undocumented Youth Push the DREAM Act to a Vote

Before 2010, immigrant rights barely registered with progressives, liberals, and libertarians who weren’t directly affected by the issue. In the 2009-2010 legislative session, with solid majorities in both houses of Congress and in possession of the White House, the Democrats didn’t even introduce a bona fide comprehensive immigration reform bill in either house of Congress until after it was clear it wouldn’t be voted on. Most Democrats preferred not to talk about immigration, much less push bills through Congress.

In early 2010, the debate around Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, started to change the conversation on the left. The vote on the DREAM Act in December 2010 further engaged mainstream progressives, who began to learn about immigration and started to pick a side. Even though the bill failed, undocumented youth emerged from the vote as the most visible and empowered segment of the immigrant rights movement.

It wasn’t preordained that the DREAM Act would be voted on at all. In early 2010, the national immigrant rights advocacy groups, then almost exclusively citizen-led, opposed bringing the DREAM Act up for a vote as a standalone bill. Their reasoning was that, having garnered solid bipartisan majorities in the past, the DREAM Act had to be bundled with comprehensive legislation as a sweetener so the larger bill could pass. They also believed that a failure on DREAM would doom any other immigration legislation for the foreseeable future. The advocacy groups told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to hold the DREAM Act in committee, and the CHC communicated the message to Democratic leadership in Congress. The White House was almost entirely disengaged from immigration reform efforts at this time.

By early 2010, some undocumented youth activists were fed up with the hesitance and dissimulation coming from those purporting to speak for them. Through a series of direct actions, including a sit-in in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office, Reid changed course and agreed to bring the DREAM Act up as a standalone bill. This account of Reid’s conversion from restrictionist to immigrant advocate appeared in the New York Times recently.

But this is what really happened during the run-up to the 2010 mid-term elections.

Even though Reid had been mobilized through electoral politics, most Democrats in Congress were still stuck in a reactive mode. Reid couldn’t bring the Democratic caucus into line on the DREAM Act vote, losing five Democratic votes, which killed the bill given overwhelming Republican opposition.

Rubio Challenges Obama on Immigration and Fails

June 2012 marked another turning point. The GOP presidential primaries were in full swing, with each candidate trying to outdo the next in declaiming immigrants. Obama had little to fear from the Republican candidates themselves. Latinos were not likely to vote for the GOP given the party’s hard turn against immigrants over the previous decade. The question was whether Latino voters would turn out for Obama in sufficient numbers to push him over the top in swing states like Nevada, Colorado, and Florida. Obama’s mass deportation campaign, then in its fourth year, was hurting him with Latino voters.

In the spring of 2012, Senator Marco Rubio floated a proposal for a Republican DREAM Act. Observers speculated that Romney might try to undo the damage he’d caused with Latino voters in the primary by selecting Rubio as his running mate, and Rubio seemed to be working towards that outcome with his DREAM Act proposal. Rubio consulted directly with undocumented youth activists about the bill, acknowledging that their support would be crucial to his effort.

The National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA), an undocumented youth group formed by the activists who led the first undocumented civil disobedience actions in 2010, came out early in favor of the Rubio proposal. United We Dream, the other, larger national undocumented youth organization, followed suit. Rubio had presented a way for the GOP to get out of the corner it had painted itself in with the Latino electorate. Obama was feeling pressure.

Then in early June, undocumented youth began staging sit-ins at Organizing for America offices in Oakland and Denver. Days later, President Obama announced the most significant immigration policy reform in over a decade: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The policy tracked the requirements of the DREAM Act, and offered formal protection from deportation to certain undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. With DACA, Obama neutralized whatever momentum for the GOP the Rubio proposal had sparked. The predictable backlash against DACA from Republicans, along with the ongoing public theater around Arizona SB 1070 and other anti-immigrant state bills, sealed a lopsided majority of the Latino vote for Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

Without the last several years of youth activism, there would have been no comprehensive immigration bill, as flawed as it is, passing last month in the Senate with a unified Democratic caucus and 17 Republican votes. There would be no generally-acknowledged connection between the future of the Republican Party and its position on immigration policy. Democrats would still be running from the issue or trying to out-enforce the Republicans. Obama likely wouldn’t have beaten Romney in the Latino and Asian-American vote by the margins that he did. Even had Obama won, the election results wouldn’t have been connected to a major immigration policy closely identified with the President–DACA–because the policy wouldn’t have existed without the organizing efforts that forced the President’s hand.

Documented and Afraid

Driving much of the change over the past few years has been a strategy developed by undocumented youth of publicly identifying themselves as undocumented and encouraging others to do so. The concept of “coming out” as undocumented and unafraid was adapted from the LGBT rights movement by LGBT undocumented activists. “Coming out” is an enormously effective strategy, but early adopters risk harsh penalties for challenging the dominant paradigm. As undocumented activists came out, they presented a different immigration narrative than the public had seen. Citizens came to realize that undocumented youth were not much different than their children or peers. Other undocumented youth saw those who had come out and were empowered to come out themselves. This had a ripple effect that rapidly changed the narrative about undocumented youth. The feared repercussions–deportation of those who exposed themselves as undocumented–never materialized.

Initially, most citizen advocates discouraged activists from being public about their undocumented status. “Know your rights” training sessions held by community organizations teach undocumented people never to disclose their immigration status to the police. Lawyers, advocates, and legislators have gone to great lengths to discourage undocumented activists from participating in civil disobedience actions, usually out of a misguided desire to protect the activists from themselves. Undocumented journalist Jose Antonio Vargas has talked about how most of the people he consulted before writing his seminal “coming out” piece in the New York Times in 2011 discouraged him from publishing it.

Not only did documented advocates fail to formulate effective organizing strategies, many actively tried to prevent undocumented activists from carrying out their own plans. While often based in good intentions, these efforts to suppress the political expression of oppressed people are patronizing and disempowering. This problem is caused by diverging incentives. Citizen advocates are not themselves at risk of harm, though some have loved ones who are at risk. Immigration lawyers like me–including those at legal services nonprofits–get paid whether we are fighting deportations or helping people apply for status; that is, whether immigration reform passes or not. Advocacy organizations can get funding for immigration work, whether to promote immigration reform or to implement it.

Undocumented activists were driven to riskier tactics out of desperation. Not long ago, ICE was routinely deporting all undocumented youth regardless of the balance of equities in individual cases. The risks the activists took in exposing themselves were real and extended to their families.

Citizen advocates are not only not the best immigrant rights analysts or strategists, but also not the best messengers. Over the past several years, I have appeared in my role as lawyer on panels or at interviews along with undocumented activists. Invariably, the interviewer’s or audience’s interest is drawn to the person who is herself affected, who herself risks imprisonment just by being there. For years, organizations and legislators have told the stories of clients or constituents to generate public support for immigration reform. On this, there is a fine line between empowerment and tokenism. Too often, advocates fail this test.

Leading the Way

Moving forward, affected people must continue to create the political conditions that will make better legislation possible. Momentum is on the side of the reformers. U.S. immigration laws are selectively and arbitrarily enforced. Counterintuitively, those who defy the immigration regime most publicly are the safest from deportation. This tells us that the legal system has become disconnected from the moral and political spheres. Citizen advocates and allies can play an important supporting role in reform efforts, but should not take the lead. If they do, they risk forestalling change yet again.

If Congress approves anything like the comprehensive bill passed by the Senate last month, opportunities for citizen civil disobedience will proliferate. For instance, citizens could unlawfully help deported immigrants re-enter the country or knowingly and publicly employ unauthorized workers. The more that citizen allies risk, the more moral authority they will wield. But few will have the incentive or resolve to risk long-term imprisonment–I know I don’t.

Most Americans are taught early on that U.S. democracy is principled, ordered, and fair. Opposing views on a topic are aired and consensus develops. Policymakers respond to and are held accountable by voters. While there were some hiccups in the past (slavery, Native American genocide) we’ve moved beyond those now.

The reality is that millions of noncitizens in the U.S. are exploited, targeted, and reviled with the sanction of the government and approval of the voting public. The U.S. political system not only produced and produces this result but is incapable of rectifying it. These problems are not unique to this time and place. Institutional systems of oppression are rarely overturned through sanctioned channels. Instead, oppressed people must themselves, through nonviolent direct action, create the political conditions necessary to reform the system.

The undocumented population in the U.S. and around the world is a small fraction of the total number of people profoundly harmed by closed borders. But undocumented organizers may present the best hope for reforming the global immigration and citizenship regime.

Undocumented youth in the U.S. are uniquely positioned to mobilize for legislative change because they are able to navigate U.S. culture while credibly speaking for the larger undocumented community. More than the citizens of most other countries, Americans claim to be willing to accept immigrants who make efforts to assimilate. This gives undocumented youth, who often pass as citizens, moral leverage they would not possess in most other countries.

As children, undocumented youth were promised the opportunities afforded to their citizen peers, finding those promises to be hollow only upon reaching adulthood. Straddling the line between global haves and have nots, undocumented youth in the U.S. personify the contradictions between the stated values of the political-economic order and the actual inequality and injustice that the order perpetuates. They blur that line and hint at the possibility of erasing it. If they are able to connect with victims of closed borders in other countries to organize transnationally, undocumented youth in the U.S. could point the way to achieving open borders on a much larger scale.

Is citizenism a commonly held belief system?

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Here at Open Borders: The Case, we have devoted a large number of blog posts to critiquing citizenism. Some others on the open borders side have been critical of this resource allocation decision. One criticism is that by devoting so much attention to citizenism, we’re giving it more serious consideration than it deserves. This sentiment was echoed in a comment by Andy Hallman for instance.

Citizenism would deserve consideration if it were either plausible or popular. As Bryan Caplan writes:

As a rule, I do not respond to positions that are neither plausible nor popular.

So, is citizenism either plausible or popular? If we look at the explicit origins of citizenism, we might be tempted to think otherwise. The term “citizenism” has been coined by Steve Sailer, who, while doubtless considerably more widely read than Open Borders, is quite controversial himself, and hardly mainstream. The use of the term hasn’t caught on much outside a few select circles: Sailer’s ideological fellow travelers on the one hand, and a few other blogs such as Open Borders and EconLog on the other.

Even among Sailer’s ideological fellow travelers, consent to the term is far from unanimous. For instance, the very first commenter on one of Sailer’s posts on citizenism begins with “Citizenism deserves all the scorn it gets, no doubt about that.”

I believe that even though few people explicitly subscribe to the tenets of citizenism as formulated by Sailer, most restrictionist arguments, particularly those that refer to the harms to immigrant-receiving countries, implicitly make their normative claims using citizenist reasoning — they weigh the interests of natives/citizens much higher than that of non-citizens, and view this as a legitimate basis for immigration restrictions. Citizenism is an important undercurrent in the majority of restrictionist thinking and perhaps even in some mainstream pro-immigration circles.

A more general framing it is that a lot of people subscribe to the moral relevance of countries. But, the mere assertion that countries have considerable moral relevance could be interpreted and made more concrete through a number of different normative ethical perspective such as:

  • Citizenism, the idea that national governments and citizens should give primacy to the interests of current citizens (and their descendants). Citizenism may be justified by neocameralism or some variant thereof.
  • Territorialism, the idea that national governments should give primacy to the interests of people within the geographic area of the nation-state, regardless of their citizenship status.
  • Local inequality aversion, the idea that local inequality within national boundaries is an evil in and of itself, independent of global inequality.
  • Nation as family, a variant of citizenism which asserts that the family is a useful metaphor for the nation, and that the head of family is the nation-state’s government.
  • “Maximize the average” type views, where the goal is to maximize the average indicators of the nation as it is constituted in the future, through appropriate migration, deportation, and extermination policies.
  • Love for the physical land or specific cultural capital of the nation-state as a motivator for national government policy, independent of whether people are willing to pay to preserve these.
  • “Proposition nation” theories: Here, the goal is to preserve specific values or institutions associated with the nation, such as slavery, ethnic strife, democracy, free markets, or a large welfare state.

All of these are important and they interact in interesting ways, but I contend that citizenism is one of the more important formalizations of the moral relevance of countries. Later in the post, I will return to the question of why it isn’t more explicitly embraced or discussed in mainstream circles, and why it took a relatively heterodox figure like Steve Sailer to articulate it clearly.

Sophisticated citizenism among policy wonks and social scientists

A passage from a recent op-ed by Tyler Cowen (which has been praised by David Henderson on EconLog and many of my Facebook friends) notes and critiques the citizenistic underpinnings of many policy analyses relating to immigration:

“Imagine that it is your professional duty to report a cost-benefit analysis of liberalizing immigration policy. You wouldn’t dream of producing a study that counted “men only” or “whites only,” at least not without specific, clearly stated reasons for dividing the data. So why report cost-benefit results only for United States citizens or residents, as is sometimes done in analyses of both international trade and migration?”

For some other examples of citizenistic arguments from an unexpected quarter — leftists in the UK — see here and here (HT: co-blogger John Lee for both links). Here’s a relevant quote from the latter (emphasis added, not in original):

I would guess that it remains the common sense assumption of 90 per cent of British citizens that public policy should give preference to the interests of citizens before non-citizens should the two conflict: that does not mean you cannot be an internationalist, or believe that it is a valuable part of our tradition to offer a haven to refugees, or believe that all humans are of equal moral worth and if they are in British space are entitled to certain basic rights. But it does mean that the first call on our resources and sense of obligation begins with our fellow citizens.

And this should be a central principle underlying immigration policy that the authors do not spell out robustly enough: immigration policy must be designed to serve the interests of existing British citizens, especially poorer ones. [see also our master race page] It is true that it is not always easy to work out what those interests are. It is also true that Matt and Sarah do accept discrimination on grounds of nationality (and reject post-national arguments in favour of global social mobility) and understand that immigrants do not necessarily have the same entitlements as the settled population, but this is all rather tentative and overshadowed by a far more robust and often repeated commitment to a human rights ideology that too often overtly seeks to dissolve the precious distinction between citizen and non-citizen.

In a Facebook post, I posited three possible explanations for the implicit citizenism in policy analyses and policy wonk discussions. Continue reading Is citizenism a commonly held belief system? →

Immigration Does Not Decrease Economic Freedom

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This post was originally posted on the blog Cato at Liberty and is reproduced here with the author’s permission.

A common criticism of immigration reform (here, here, and here) is that it will decrease economic freedom in the United States, by increasing the voting pool for the Democratic Party.  Leaving aside the issue of which party supports economic liberty, if any, it’s important to see what the actual impacts of immigration are on economic freedom in the United States and the world.  The political effects of immigrants after they arrive are less certain than the economic benefits.  Do immigrants decrease economic freedom in their new countries?  The bottom line: fears of immigrants decreasing economic freedom seem unfounded.

Since 1980, wealthy countries have seen rises in immigrant populations.  Immigrants are drawn to economic prosperity, higher wages, and better standards of living so it’s not surprising that wealthier countries have higher percentages of immigrants.  I excluded numerous small countries and petro-states like the UAE and Kuwait from the analysis.

I looked at the 25 wealthiest nations in the world in 1980 (by per capita GDP PPP) and considered their economic freedom rating and the percent foreign born.  I then tracked those same countries every 5 years until 2010.  Here are the averages for all 25 nations:

World

Year

Economic Freedom Rating

GDP Per Capita (PPP)

Immigrant (%)

1980

6.27

$20,875

10.11

1985

6.44

$21,475

10.72

1990

7.05

$23,912

11.61

1995

7.39

$24,671

11.95

2000

7.65

$28,788

11.82

2005

7.68

$30,454

13.96

2010

7.15

$30,481

14.37

Sources: Economic Freedom of the World: 2012 Annual Report, World Bank Development Indicators

From 1980 to 2010, the average economic freedom rating for those 25 nations increased by .88 points and their foreign born populations increased by 4.27 percentage points, while per capita GDP increased by $9,606.  The Great Recession makes those numbers appear less remarkable because of the decrease in economic freedom between 2005 and 2010 that accompanied the slowdown in growth.

And when we zoom in on the United States:

United States

Year

Economic Freedom Rating

GDP Per Capita (PPP)

Immigrant (%)

1980

7.92

$25,510

7.20

1985

8.11

$28,562

8.19

1990

8.53

$31,899

9.31

1995

8.50

$33,874

10.71

2000

8.65

$39,545

12.34

2005

8.21

$42,516

13.29

2010

7.70

$42,079

13.84

Sources: Economic Freedom of the World: 2012 Annual Report, World Bank Development Indicators

From 1980-2010, the United States’ economic freedom rating fell by .22 and the foreign-born population increased by 6.64 percentage points.  The entire loss in economic freedom occurred post 2005 while the foreign-born population rose by .55 of a percentage point, the smallest increase in any 5-year period.  It seems highly unlikely that a .55 percentage point increase crossed a threshold that caused the economic freedom rating to decrease so much.

Remember that the claim made by many opponents of immigration reform is that more immigrants will cause a decrease in economic freedom.  A linear regression (OLS) of the economic freedom rating and the percent of immigrants in the United States produced a coefficient of -0.0013908 with a t-value of -.02.  The R-squared for that regression is 0.0001.  That means that factors other than immigration explain 99.99 percent of the decrease in America’s economic freedom rating.  On its face, the hypothesis that an increasing percentage of immigrants in the United States will decrease economic freedom does not hold much water.

Sources: Economic Freedom of the World: 2012 Annual Report, World Bank Development Indicators

Excluding small countries, here are the wealthiest nations in the world in 1980:

1980

Richest Excluding Small Countries

GDP per capita, PPP

 Income % Immigrant EF Rating

1

 Saudi Arabia

33,903

19.60%

–

2

 Switzerland

29,363

16.90%

7.99

3

 Norway

26,205

3.00%

5.79

4

 Bahamas

26,045

11.40%

6.26

5

 United States

25,510

7.20%

7.92

6

 Canada

23,070

15.50%

7.68

7

 Netherlands

22,271

3.50%

7.23

8

 Iceland

21,847

2.50%

5.25

9

 Bahrain

21,139

28.90%

7.42

10

 Belgium

20,793

9.10%

7.06

11

 Denmark

20,790

3.20%

6.39

12

 Austria

20,714

9.50%

6.33

13

 Sweden

20,362

7.50%

5.68

14

 France

20,264

10.70%

6.09

15

 Australia

19,784

19.70%

6.86

16

 Italy

18,814

2.00%

5.37

17

 United Kingdom

18,154

6.00%

6.57

18

 Finland

17,858

0.80%

6.65

19

 Japan

17,835

0.70%

6.88

20

 New Zealand

17,391

15.10%

6.35

21

 Greece

17,043

1.80%

5.76

22

 Gabon

17,007

13.90%

4.50

23

 Spain

15,368

1.60%

6.10

24

 Trinidad and Tobago

15,310

5.70%

4.83

25

 Israel

15,028

36.90%

3.48
Average

20,875

10.11%

6.27

Sources: World Bank, Cato Economic Freedom of the World Index.

In 1980, 9.4 percent of people living in all countries (including small ones like Monaco and the United Arab Emirates) were immigrants, compared to 10.1 percent in the richest countries.  The average economic freedom rating in the world was 5.4 compared to 6.27 for the richest.  In 1980, the 25 richest countries in the world had more immigrants and more economic freedom than the average nation.

2010

Richest Excluding Small Countries

GDP per capita, PPP

 Income % Immigrant EF Rating

1

 Norway

46,906

10.00%

7.53

2

 United States

42,079

13.50%

7.70

3

 Switzerland

39,072

23.20%

8.07

4

 Netherlands

36,925

10.50%

7.58

5

 Ireland

35,993

19.60%

7.92

6

 Austria

35,313

15.60%

7.55

7

 Canada

35,223

21.30%

8.09

8

 Australia

34,602

21.90%

8.14

9

 Sweden

34,125

14.10%

7.62

10

 Germany

33,565

13.10%

7.53

11

 Belgium

32,882

9.10%

7.47

12

 United Kingdom

32,814

10.40%

7.87

13

 Iceland

32,779

11.30%

7.02

14

 Denmark

32,379

8.80%

7.76

15

 Finland

31,310

4.20%

7.89

16

 Japan

30,965

1.70%

7.61

17

 Equatorial Guinea

30,493

1.10%

–

18

 France

29,484

10.70%

7.39

19

 Italy

27,083

7.40%

6.73

20

 Spain

26,901

14.10%

7.40

21

 Korea

26,774

1.10%

7.20

22

 Israel

25,995

40.40%

7.25

23

 Slovenia

25,053

8.10%

6.62

24

 Oman

24,559

28.40%

8.00

25

 New Zealand

24,400

22.00%

8.38
Average

32,307

13.32%

7.60

Sources: World Bank Development Indicators, Economic Freedom of the World: 2012 Annual Report.

In 2010, 11 percent of people living in all countries were immigrants.  The average economic freedom rating in the world was 6.84, 1.44 points higher than in 1980.  The 25 richest countries in 2010 had a greater percentage of immigrants and a higher economic freedom rating than the rest.

These results are not surprising.  To the extent that economic freedom produces greater economic prosperity, immigration will likely increase.  Given the results from the regression analysis, there is practically zero evidence that immigrants have caused a decline in economic freedom.  Other factors, such as an increase in the regulated state, likely explain changes in economic freedom more than the intensity of immigration.

Opposing immigration reform for the reason that new immigrants will decrease economic freedom is a popular excuse in some circles – but there is surprisingly little evidence to support this myth.  Moreover, merely pointing out that immigrants are more likely to vote for the Democratic Party is insufficient because actual policy shifts count more than partisan political outcomes.  Those who claim immigrants will decrease economic freedom have yet to prove it.

Eternal Vigilance: A Response to Professor Bryan Caplan

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Open Borders note: With the exception of the link to Caplan’s post being responded to, all other links have been added by Open Borders staff to ease research, and not at the behest of the author.

Author’s Note: While my original agreement with the staff at Open Borders was to write a single blog post, a recent post from Professor Bryan Caplan at the Library of Economics and Liberty caught my eye as being directly relevant to our discussion. I still intend to honor my one-week agreement, but the Open Borders staff has generously allowed me to post a short response to Professor Caplan here.

—

In response to your post, Professor Caplan: There is a reason that immigration restriction is fundamentally different than the other faux “policies” you list in your post. That fundamental difference is that the freedom to teach and learn how you wish, reproduce as you wish, speak and vote how you wish are all liberties of a particular group, and restricting who enters that group is the only way to preserve those liberties in the long term.

I am not swayed by the concepts of “natural rights.” They are a fine moral construct for philosophical debates, but when it comes to the world in which we live, great individuals had to sacrifice tremendously to secure those liberties from those who would trample them, whether or not they’re your natural rights. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I am not so alarmist as to think that open borders today would lead to disaster tomorrow, or even ten years from now. But if I want my grandchildren to grow up in a nation where they have the freedom to speak, vote, reproduce, teach, learn, and live their lives as they wish, then the nation must be preserved.

If everyone in the world wanted freedom and liberty as badly as the early Americans did, then the whole world would now have governments very similar to America’s. That is not the case. People want prosperity, but the vast majority of people cannot identify the link between freedom and prosperity. They think America is wealthy because of the things they see: land, technology, etc. They don’t recognize that it is our freedom that makes us wealthy. And so they think they can come to America and enjoy all the prosperity, but also use all that wealth to create vaster and vaster government involvement until we are wealthy no more. I don’t think this will happen in ten or maybe even twenty years. But unless it is abated, I think it could happen in one hundred, or even fifty.

The most moral policy of any government is one that creates the most net freedom for its people. If a small freedom must be revoked so that a vastly greater freedom is preserved, then that policy is moral. The Founding Fathers understood this – they did not gain independence from Great Britain and then abolish all government in favor of anarchy. They created a limited government that must (as all governments must), by its very nature, infringe on liberty to some small degree. Their goal was to keep that degree as small as possible while still preserving the greater liberty. Minor restrictions on immigration are no different. I do not advocate closing the borders; I don’t even suggest a set quota. Rather, I suggest strict criteria, such that liberty is preserved.

Discrimination and the semi-open border

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A couple weeks ago the American Civil Liberties Union updated its position on the Senate’s immigration bill. Overall, the ACLU seemed to favor the bill for its path to citizenship and for due process improvements in detention and deportation processes. One of their concerns was that “LGBT couples do not have the same rights as straight couples in immigration proceedings.” The ACLU blog post was written before the US Supreme Court ruled the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, a ruling that for the most part renders moot discrimination against gay couples in the Senate immigration bill, at least at the federal level. Nevertheless, it’s interesting that at a time of cascading victories for gay rights, when even opponents feel the inevitability of gay equality, one instance where discrimination can gain support is that of gay couples bestriding the border.

Of course, I’m probably overstating this effect. Those pushing to discriminate against gays in immigration proceedings are the same as those pushing to discriminate against all-American gays. Yet discrimination is a common theme in immigration restrictions. Though I view it as strategically unwise–not to mention unfair and not altogether honest–to denounce immigration restrictions as inherently racist, it’s also unwise to ignore the blatantly racist history of American immigration policies. Chris Hendrix has blogged about the first major restrictionist legislation, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, but even before this, naturalization (as opposed to immigration) was restricted on explicitly racist grounds. The Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted naturalization to “free white persons” of “good moral character”. This may not be surprising for a nation that allowed legal slavery of Africans and those of African descent for nearly a century, but this racial requirement was the law of the land until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Immigration isn’t the same as citizenship, yet this unpalatable history is clearly relevant to today’s discussions of immigrant assimilation (citizen or otherwise).

Perhaps partially as a result of this legal requirement, much of the history of assimilation has been entwined with the idea of “whiteness”. The story of the Irish in America, for example, has been one of transforming from a “racial” group into an “ethnic” group. In a reflection on St Patrick’s Day a few years ago on racismreview.com, blogger Jessie writes:

Over the course of the 19th and early 20th century, Irish Americans managed to a great extent to enter and become part of the dominant white culture. In an attempt to secure the prosperity and social position that their white skin had not guaranteed them in Europe, Irish immigrants lobbied for white racial status in America. Although Irish people’s pale skin color and European roots suggested evidence of their white racial pedigree, the discrimination that immigrants experienced on the job (although the extent of the “No Irish Need Apply” discrimination is disputed), the simian caricatures they saw of themselves in the newspapers, meant that “whiteness” was a status that would be achieved, not ascribed.

For some time now, Irish-Americans have been thoroughly regarded as “white.” Evidence of this assimilation into whiteness is presented by Mary C. Waters (Harvard) in a recent AJPH article, in which she writes that “the once-rigid lines that divided European-origin groups from one another have increasingly blurred.” Waters goes on to predict that the changes that European immigrants have experienced are “becoming more likely for groups we now define as ‘racial.’” While I certainly agree that the boundaries of whiteness are malleable – it is a racial category that expands and contracts based on historical, cultural and social conditions – I don’t know if it is malleable enough to include all the groups we now define as ‘racial’ Others.

Emphases in original. The intimate relationship between whiteness and American assimilation is possibly best described in the language of historical court decisions. In a paper titled Immigration and the Meaning of United States Citizenship: Whiteness and Assimilation (ungated here), SMU law professor George Martinez quotes some real legal gems:

[Assimilation] as a proxy for whiteness is confirmed by the United States Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Thind. In rejecting an immigrant from India’s claim to whiteness and the right to naturalize, the Court explained that Indians were unable to assimilate:

The children of English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage, quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the children born in this country of Hindu parents would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry. It is far from our thought to suggest the slightest question of racial superiority or inferiority. What we suggest is merely racial difference, and it is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation.

Lower court cases further confirm a connection between assimilation and whiteness. In United States v. Cartozian, the court considered whether Armenians were white. Connecting assimilation with whiteness, the court held that “it may be confidently affirmed that the Armenians are white persons, and moreover that they readily amalgamate with the European and white races.” Similarly, in In re Ahmed Hassan, the court held that Arabs were not white persons, observing that

it is well known that they are part of the Mohammedan world and that a wide gulf separates their culture from that of the predominantly Christian peoples of Europe. It cannot be expected that as a class they would readily intermarry with our population and be assimilated into our civilization.

Martinez goes on to quote the Supreme Court’s logic upholding the legality of the Chinese Exclusion Act: “[If Congress] considers the presence of foreigners of a different race in this country, who will not assimilate with us, to be dangerous to its peace and security … [Congress’s] determination is conclusive upon the judiciary.”

Explicit racism in immigration restrictions persisted after the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 formally severed the concepts “American” and “white”. In a curious collusion of Mexican emigration restrictionists and American immigration restrictionists, “Operation Wetback” was launched in 1954 to deport illegal Mexican immigrants and limit further Mexican immigration. The dangers, of course, are that a long history of racist justifications for immigration restrictions doesn’t just disappear down the memory hole when the law is officially changed and that explicit racism in American immigration policy has merely been replaced by implicit racism. One place to start looking for such implicit discrimination would be in the federal Secure Communities program, which has been criticized for encouraging racial profiling.

But I don’t want this post to be entirely about the historical connection between immigration restrictions and racism. Another, more subtle kind of discrimination is at play in the modern immigration debate, even in more enlightened quarters: discrimination against lower classes. A recent incarnation of this is the moralized evocation and denunciation of a “moocher class” composed of the lazy poor who take handouts from the government and give nothing back to society in return. The reality is somewhat different, with many upper class individuals failing to realize when they have benefited from government programs. As with racial discrimination, discrimination by socioeconomic class makes generalizations about large groups of individuals and judges them to be somehow worth just a little less than the dominant group.

This class discrimination arises in the distinction between “skilled” and “low-skilled” immigrants. Many people skeptical of allowing more low-skilled migrants across the border can even be quite enthusiastic supporters of more immigration of skilled workers. Reihan Salam of the National Review has summed it up this way:

The goal of means-tested benefits and publicly-funded human capital investment is to better the lives of all members of the American polity, but particularly the most vulnerable, by giving them a foundation for participation in our shared economic and civic life. We might disagree about how much we ought to spend and how these programs are structured, with people like me favoring a limited scope for social programs, choice and competition, and an emphasis on work supports, etc., but support for the idea of a safety net and a place for the public sector in education is pretty firmly entrenched. When we expand the American polity, it makes intuitive sense that we would want to do so by welcoming individuals who are already well-prepared to fully participate in economic and civic life, as we’ve learned through long experience that people who are ill-prepared will face tremendous difficulties, as will their children. For a variety of reasons, individuals with 8th grade education and limited English proficiency are less likely to flourish in the U.S. than individuals with a college education and a high degree of English proficiency. If it is also true that less-skilled and less-affluent U.S. residents with limited English proficiency benefit more from an influx of skilled immigrants (potential customers or complements) than from an influx of less-skilled immigrants with limited English proficiency (potential competitors), the case for a more selective, skills-based immigration policy becomes even stronger.

While this technocratic approach sounds sensible enough from some national central planner’s perspective, it sounds paternalistic from a view closer to the ground, as if those who are deciding when and how to “expand the American polity” are protecting low-skilled migrants from the “tremendous difficulties” of living in a developed country. People have been migrating to strange new places with novel difficulties to navigate ever since we spread beyond Africa. As autonomous agents directing the course of their own lives, presumably migrants have assessed the risks and difficulties of migrating to a new country and have judged their chances of flourishing to be greater with moving than with staying. This is true even for migrants “low-skilled” but nonetheless savvy enough to pursue higher wages when and where they can be found. If “low-skilled” workers will fail to flourish in a high-income host country, then they will almost certainly fail to flourish to a greater degree in their poorer countries of origin. And of course flourishing may be relative, with modest living in a rich country amounting to serious comfort to those who have only experienced modest living in a poor country.

The paternalistic, for-their-own-good argument seems to be a thin veil concealing the desire to make the “American polity” look a certain way.  The low-skilled migration restrictionists do not seem to be concerned with removing poverty so much as with removing poverty from view. I suspect the distinction between low- and high-skilled immigrants is really a euphemism for discriminating against poor and lower class immigrants. High-skilled immigrants, regardless of absolute wealth levels, are usually richer than low-skilled immigrants and they are certainly more educated. High-skilled immigrants have grown up in families that would be considered culturally elite or at least middle class in their countries of origin (this is how they attained the human capital to qualify as “skilled”). As such, high-skilled workers will more easily fit into “nice” parts of the rich world, like suburbs and medical schools. And they will do the host country the benefit of adding diversity to these institutions, making them appear more inclusive while still keeping out the riff-raff. They will not need to live in dense slums many-to-a-room in living conditions middle class natives find distasteful.

Low-skilled immigrants, by contrast, are more likely to come from lower social classes in their countries of origin and this will translate immediately, if not permanently, into a similar socioeconomic status in a rich host country. With that status come all of the disadvantages the native poor face, with the additional disadvantage living under constant threat of unceremonious deportation.

I don’t doubt the desire of folks like Reihan Salam to improve the lots of low-skilled natives, and even better, their desire for an institutional framework in which low-skilled natives improve their lots themselves. The problem is that their motivation to do so is to create a more superficially attractive nation, rather than to construct an actual engine of human flourishing.