Yes, America is unique in its immigration policy. It’s one of the core concepts of the American experiment; a nation built not around a common ethnic culture, but on an ideology, where all are welcome.
We humans are naturally xenophobic, as a useful trait when life and death meant the strength of a tribe. All other countries’ immigration policies reflect this natural xenophobia. America’s own xenophobic policies might be the least xenophobic of the bunch, but that’s the point. Welcoming immigrants of all stripes with open arms is not radical in 2017; it was radical when our founding fathers did it, but at this point it should be something we’re proud of, something that makes America unique and successful.
Our immigration policies have become more restrictive as time has marched on, but why? Why not embrace something that has made America unique? Successful? Why do we feel compelled to haze every new group of immigrants? the Irish, eastern Europeans, Chinese, Hispanics, and now Muslims? We all know that 20, 30, 50 years down the road we’re going to look back on the period of hazing and feel shame. Why not just accept that open immigration is part of America? It’s something that made American great! Let’s keep doing it!
Free migration is working terribly for the EU, especially for the more ethnocentric countries in eastern Europe. For two reasons: 1) a huge proportion of their educated people and younger cohorts have emigrated to western Europe, leading to big labour shortages in the east, and 2) eastern countries are now very worried about the influx of non-European immigrants, because once someone has migrated from Pakistan or Nigeria to Sweden, there’s nothing in principle to stop them moving to Poland, even though Polish people might not want them there. (Eastern Europe is generally much more ethnocentric / tribal place than western Europe or north America, or for that matter most other parts of the world). This is part of why Euroskeptic sentiment has been rapidly rising over the last few years.
If you want to see the effects of free migration within subdivisions of a country, have a look at what happened to eastern Germany after the reunification of the country in the early 1990s. In spite of huge amounts of money being poured into the east since reunification, the eastern states of Germany have more or less stayed ‘stuck’ at 67-70% of western GDP/capita since about 1996. That’s because the influx of money from west to east was cancelled out by a mass migration of skilled people from east to west, which was the whole reason emigration restrictions had been passed to begin with.
You can draw a connexion between nationalism and “racism” if you want, and that’s fine, but then the obvious question is, <I>is racism always and everywhere bad</I>. And if choosing who you want to allow to be part of your country (based on factors that might include, yes, race) is going to be defined as racism, then I think most people are going to conclude, no, racism is not always a bad thing.
I don’t particularly disagree with you as a normative matter, but it’s far from clear to me that history has any kind of ‘progress’ or inevitable ‘direction’ at all, much less that it points in the direction of increasing cultural openness and migration. Lots of countries are substantially more ethnocentric today than they were a few decades ago, and in many cases it’s precisely because mass migration has made people worried about the demographic future of their own societies.
Well, “we all know” is a bit much, I’ll admit. But there’s been a clear pattern of how we treat immigrants in this country. The city just south of mine (really more of a neighborhood that decided it wanted to be its own city) was founded 100+ years ago with the explicit purpose of drawing a line down a street to separate them from a bunch of Italian immigrants where buying up houses. The Italians were then specifically forbidden from moving in. It seems so ludicrous today that that would even have been a thing. Italians.
Because it’s a status offense. It’s not a crime against persons or property or of selling addictive drugs, which is what we normally think of when we think of crime.
If they have committed such crimes, well sure, give 'em the heave-ho. But if the only law they’ve broken is the one that they’re breaking just by standing in the U.S. with their hands in their pockets, I for one don’t feel the least bit threatened by their presence, the way I would by garden-variety criminals.
And one category of ‘illegal immigrants’ - persons who were brought here as children by their parents who entered illegally - are (a) blameless, and (b) don’t really have a country to go back to, in any meaningful sense. They’ve grown up here, speak English, and (depending on age at arrival) may have no idea how to survive in the ‘old country,’ and may speak its language poorly if at all. Deporting them an act of depraved cruelty.
That NPR article is kind of misleading, because it includes 1) Gulf State countries whose “immigrants” are really temporary guest workers, not immigrants in the sense Americans tend to think of (i.e. people who might one day become citizens), 2) tiny micro-states like Andorra (?) which aren’t much of a model for anything, and 3) countries like Australia and Russia in which a large proportion of the immigrant population consists of people from the majority ethnic group (i.e. immigrants from Britain and New Zealand to Australia, and ethnic Russians from the former Soviet Union migrating to Russia).
The US isn’t uniquee in terms of our openness to welcoming people from a variety of ethnic groups to become citizens of our country, but we’re certainly relatively unusual.
Like people just forgot history. Our country has grown over 100 times in population since its founding. Population growth is not a bad thing. In fact, people are an economic resource, so purely from a selfish financial standpoint we should be welcoming them all with open arms. That’s not even getting into the morality of it.
No, actually, quite a lot of them are anti-immigrant, period, especially anti-brown-immigrants, or generally anybody who isn’t western European white Christian. That’s why you see a lot of rhetoric about the American way-of-life being overwhelmed by those “others.”
But we pass them out in ways that don’t give everybody an equal shot. The majority, for example, go to family members of people already here.
People from other countries want to come to the U.S. because working on an egg farm or in a slaughterhouse is STILL better than living where they came from. Telling somebody that they must stay in Bumfuckistan because we don’t want “their kind” here serves what purpose, exactly?
I think most American liberals would much rather support increased LEGAL immigration–it’s not that we like illegal immigration, but given a choice between supporting the rights of illegal immigrants here and kicking them all back to the country that they risked their lives to leave, it’s not really a difficult decision for me.
I don’t think most liberals would dispute that at all. This reality, however, requires that we don’t start with a blank slate; any policy we develop has to acknowledge all of the people who already did walk across the Arizona desert, or sneak across the Rio Grande, or enter for a day’s shopping in El Paso and never leave.
So your approach would be to force skilled and ambitious young Germans to stay in the east? What happened to individual freedom here, and how is your approach any different than what the old GDR did with the Berlin Wall and all the guards and machine guns?
I don’t support illegal immigration but I do support making it easier for people to legally immigrate. Here’s my take on the situation.
Republicans* talk about control of the border, having those here illegally leave, and then decide what do. The problem is that the suspicion on the other side of the aisle is that what Republicans really mean is once we have the wall built that’s the end of the story. In the words of Trump himself, we’re going to put Americans first. Democrats* want(ed) to increase legal immigration, but were unable to pass laws for this due to fears from Republicans about those already here illegally.
My belief is that the type of illegal immigration we commonly see is actually beneficial to the country as a whole. I think the Republican plutocracy is riling up the base against immigrants to distract them from the real problems and solutions, which would likely involve some kind of wealth redistribution. For example, how is an undocumented Mexican immigrant who washes dishes at a taqueria in El Paso or works building houses in Laredo harming a white person from Youngstown, Saginaw, Scranton, or any other rust belt city with shuttered factories? I think stories of illegal immigrants clogging up the ER or collecting welfare and not doing anything in return are hugely exaggerated. Given that, what I support is increasing by a large amount the quota for legal immigration with the limitation that we accept the type of people making up the majority of current migrants, i.e. young people who will work and support themselves and be a net positive to society.
I think the arguments about terminology for liberals and conservatives vs. Democrats and Republicans are silly. In the past they may have meant something but in the current United States I don’t think their is any meaningful distinction, at least at the national level. With only a very few exceptions such as Joe Manchin, liberal = Democrat and conservative = Republican.
I won’t argue that based on your points, although my main point was tempering the claim that we are “the nation which lets in the most legal immigrants, by far” and I think my point still holds up even under your analysis.
liberals think that the presently predominant illegal immigrants, Hispanics, can be hoaxed into voting Democrat, thus making the policies liberals want more likely. Notice how liberals didn’t like open borders for refugees of communism(Cubans)?
I think this is more or less right, although I don’t place the same normative value on it that most liberals do. Very few people actually care about legality one way or the other (in general). Some people favour large scale immigration and a more diverse society, others don’t, the whole debate about legal vs. illegal immigrants is mostly a red herring.
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So your approach would be to force skilled and ambitious young Germans to stay in the east? What happened to individual freedom here, and how is your approach any different than what the old GDR did with the Berlin Wall and all the guards and machine guns?
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I mean, that die has been cast, and both Germanies are one country now. Had I been in the GDR government in 1961 though, I’m not sure I would have done anything differently than they did. Entire towns, for example, had no doctors by 1960 because all of the doctors had moved to the west. (This pattern is being repeated in some developing countries today, where educated professionals want to emigrate to the west). I’m not sure why the freedom of the doctor to emigrate is more important than the right of people in that town to, you know, be able to see a doctor.
I mean, that die has been cast, and both Germanies are one country now. Had I been in the GDR government in 1961 though, I’m not sure I would have done anything differently than they did. Entire towns, for example, had no doctors by 1960 because all of the doctors had moved to the west. (This pattern is being repeated in some developing countries today, where educated professionals want to emigrate to the west). I’m not sure why the freedom of the doctor to emigrate is more important than the right of people in that town to, you know, be able to see a doctor.
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If the people place that high a value on having a doctor in town, they will support politicians and policies that would encourage doctors to stay. Unfortunately sometimes the local population decides they would rather support a local strongman rather than educated professionals. If the circumstances are such that your neighbors prefer not to have you, why wouldn’t you leave?
Google “Jackson Vanik” amendment and the party ID of Jackson and Vanik. Then for kicks and giggles look up the voting patterns of the type of migrants who the Jackson Vanik amendment favorited.
I think the ideal of a “freedom to migrate” is fairly silly, but I think it’s fairly clear that liberals who hold it, hold it sincerely, and not just because it might favour democrats.
I am not “for” illegal immigration in the way I am not “for” going 10 mph over the speed limit, it just does not bother me or raise my ire as much as it does conservatives.
The “crime” is what I consider one of the less offensive ones, a crime I am sympathetic with the rationale of. You want a better life economically? That is made more likely by crossing a border and working hard?
You’ll have to forgive me if I do not have the same attitude towards such people like conservatives who view them as little different from some low thieves and criminals of a similar order that would steal the wallet off a stranger on the street.
I actually find that view of illegal immigrants to be incredibly vulgar and off putting. That is a separate issue from how WE should handle illegal immigration and deportations. This is not a call for open borders, more about an attitudinal difference. Conservatives are just genuinely hateful people. And to the conservatives on this board who think I am being unkind, listen to what they actually say:
Read the comments. These are awful, resentful, hateful, bitter human beings. Their moral judgments about this “crime” are warped beyond all reason.
I don’t care what some random asshole says. I am not conservative or liberal but my views match up most closely with Massachusetts style Republicans like Mitt Romney and current governor Charlie Baker. I believe in enforcing immigration laws because I believe in the rule of law. I also believe in reforming existing immigration laws because they obviously aren’t working. As I said earlier, I do not have any problem with individual illegal immigrants at all but you can’t run public policy that way. I have befriended, protected and hired them before. Two of them, illegal immigrants from Ukraine and Peru saved my ass when they were painting my house and I accidentally started a forest fire that was just about to explode across onto three towns worth of conservation land. That wasn’t a fun two hours to get it under control but you didn’t see it on the national news so I view that as a huge success.
There are many people like me and we aren’t hateful at all. In fact, my preferred strategy is to heavily fine and possibly imprison CEO’s and business owners that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. The fines could be used for humanitarian relief.
The problem with Americans liberals is that they are strong on ideas but weak on law and order. Many of them couldn’t run a lemonade stand because they can’t see past their constant stream of tears. Sometimes you just need adults to enforce laws because that is the only way a nation can function. If the laws are bad, you need to change them, not ignore them completely.
Because an individual’s life belongs, first and foremost, to the individual who must live it. We are not the property of society, we are the creators of society.