Immigration

Two Issues to Care About for 2024

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It seems to me that there are two issues that Democrats have got to get serious about before the election.

First of all we should recognize that the issue of Biden’s age is not going to disappear.  People are not crazy–Biden is old enough to make the VP an issue, and Kamala Harris is not currently a strong figure. So there is something to worry about.

There is no viable alternative to Biden as President.  But we can certainly do a better job of promoting Harris and giving her opportunities to shine.  Or alternatively it is not impossible to change VP (with compensation) for someone else, e.g. Karen Bass.  I’m not choosing options here.  But age is a real issue, and the only way we can respond is by strengthening the VP.

The second real issue we are avoiding is immigration.  Part of the problem is that there is genuine disagreement among different wings of the party, but the real issue is that we’re deluding ourselves about what the policy actually is.  Despite what we tell ourselves, the current policy is becoming close to open borders—and there is no support for that in the general population. 

The problem is asylum.  It’s an out-of-control loophole that is being used by an increasing percentage of all the desperate people who want in.  It takes time and effort to adjudicate cases, there is a huge and increasing backlog, and the people are inside (and frequently lost) while it’s all going on.  Since the people asking for asylum are clearly in desperate straits there is no pleasant way to impose up-front controls, so we are essentially in denial about what is going on.  But the issue is right up after Biden’s age, and the statistics support it.

The population supports DACA people, so it’s not that they hate all immigrants.  They just recognize that there are so many desperate people at the moment that we can’t just take them all, and it’s getting worse.  I’m not proposing a specific solution, but we had better figure out something even if it’s going to be unpleasant.  The alternative is not a matter of living with immigrants; it’s living with a majority-supported nationalist regime.

The Zakaria article referenced earlier recommends a total freeze on new asylum applications. That sounds draconian, but a Republican future is worse.  Trump, De Santis, and others have been quite gleeful about it: shoot to kill at the border.

Exported and Armed Prohibition

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“Prohibition Repealed: New York Times, 5 December 1933” by cizauskas is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

As a nation we seem to be baffled by the problems of drug-based criminality south of the border.  Why can’t those people live like us?  What makes us so superior?

For those questions it’s worth emphasizing that we used to have problems like that too.  Our problems were self-inflicted, but the phenomenon was similar.  Let’s talk about Prohibition.

Prohibition was a reactionary revolt much like what we’ve got with the Christian right today.   The heartland was able to stick it to the godless, immigrant-infested cities.  No more alcohol to corrupt our body fluids.

That repressive crusade was just too overarching to succeed.  It resulted in an immense network of criminality to meet demand.  Criminality pervaded every corner of the country, and the kingpins captured the news daily.  It could and did happen here.

Let’s compare with the situation in Latin American.  North of the border there is vast money to be made with illegal drugs, and the resources available to stop it are ludicrous by comparison.  Big surprise they’ve got a problem.  We have drug problems too, but we also have resources of the US.

What kind of help do they get?  They can’t even get us to slow down the sale of military-grade weapons underpinning the drug wars.

It’s like the wall.  Let’s just keep problems out.  We’ve exported and armed Prohibition.

Let’s Just Do Immigration

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Now that Trump has decided that the target for the total number of immigrants is unchanged, why don’t we just fix immigration:

  • Family unification is a good thing, but it has taken too much of the total, now 70%.
  • It’s sensible that some fraction of immigrants should get in based on special capabilities or other demonstrable merit.  (It’s worth noting that the current system is actually not so bad in that respect.)
  • It’s also sensible to have some fraction of immigration that is not so constrained.  You never know who’s going to be a hero, and diversity has value.  Moreover past immigrants mostly came from places where they were denied opportunities for such merit.  So a lottery system has value too.

As a default, divide it up 1/3 for each and call it even.  Otherwise negotiate the limits for a while and then call it done.  (As an interesting variant, Canada handles family unification with relationship points in the merit index.)

Additionally:

  • We need to settle DACA once and for all, because there is no value to anyone in not doing it.  Since we’re talking about merit, these are upstanding, fully-adapted, English-speaking contributors.  And their number, compared to Trump’s new annual totals, is on the order of 1%.
  • For the rest of currently undocumented immigrants, we had a bipartisan bill passed by the Senate in 2013.  That can still be a basis for work.  These people are almost all working and paying taxes.

This isn’t so hard.   It only takes the will to do it.

There remains the question of enforcement.  For that, the problem is that we’ve been postulating solutions without any serious analysis.   Politicians shouldn’t be arguing about this.  (Border control was never wild about the wall until they were told they”d better be.)  There needs to be an independent assessment of how money should be spent to enforce the law.

However one thing that is definite is that there is no excuse for mistreatment of desperate people looking to escape overwhelming problems for themselves or their families.  We can’t satisfy them all–immigration law is there to say who gets help–but that’s no excuse for treating them all as criminals or worse.