Well, I can. Legal immigrants are vetted while the undocumented ones are not. Not only vetted against possible criminal backgrounds, but, unless asylum seekers, also prioritized on the basis of skill set and potential to contribute to the national well-being.
The problem with the current Trump persecution of immigrants is two-fold. One, it’s based on the false premise that there were ever “open borders”, or that any reasonable person wants such things. Second, it’s based on the deeply bigoted premise that any racial minority is an “undesirable”, whether documented or not, and no matter how gifted.
Legal immigration that is beneficial to the host country is well established all over the world. It lately seems to have become perverted in the US.
As in, you don’t see why a legal robotics engineer here on an H1B provides a different value than a robotics engineer who overstayed a student visa?
Sure, they’re both robotics engineers. Now we just need to find a way to make sure that the only people overstaying their student visas are, in fact, robotics engineers.
Joking aside, if we’re trying to curate a limited number of highly qualified immigrants*, we have to be firm about anyone not following our curation process.
*just to clarify, I’m playing devil’s advocate for what I feel is the majority position in America, but I’m one of the “open borders” freaks.
There is some small portion of humanity that doesn’t believe immigration policy should be based on national interest. But I do not see that we can have a democracy, and improve our immigration system, other than on the basis of national interest. And without a democracy, we’ll be worse, as currently seen with the U.S. being a hybrid regime.
As for agricultural workers being slaves, this feels to me like an insult to real slaves. The immigrant farm workers in my area*, generation after generation, have NOT seen their children sold down the river. Instead the children live to do better than their parents. Said children often are in management and the grandchildren, if still in agriculture, own the farm or facility.
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* I mean my area in Pennsylvania. An hour or so walk from here, in Delaware, it was different up to 1865, and even after that, since high school was largely unavailable to Black Delawareans in living memory. (Just one Black high school in the state.)
Literally, this never was true. Most people who wanted to come here could not afford the cost of transportation.
As a thought experiment, what happens if Congress passes a law opening up immigration to anyone in the world who could get to the nearest U.S. consulate or embassy and show a clean local criminal background check form? And let’s say that the State Department was sufficiently staffed for that. Air fares from second and third world countries to the U.S. would then rise, so fewer people could afford to come. But it still would be cheaper (in constant currency) and safer and way less terrifying than a nineteenth century steerage ocean-crossing. Plus. back then you could never talk to your old country family again. This was another enormous deterrent to old-time immigration. So an unprecedented high number (mostly limited by available airliner seats) would quickly come to the U.S. under your plan. This is not because they all want to be here immediately. Many would prefer to plan for a few years. They might prefer to see whether the progressive Democrats stay in power. But they would come right away anyway, because they would correctly believe that such a policy could not last. And it would not. The policy proposed by Chronos would be the biggest gift to nativist politics imaginable. Bye bye progressives.
I do not want all non-criminals who would jump at the opportunity to come here to jump. There is not room on the airliners for everyone, and there is not room here for everyone.
Here’s the secret – there is always room for one more. And then there is room for one more after that. And one more after that. But we will never let in every non-criminal who wants to be here, and such proposals are IMHO of political use only to the Trumpers.
If what you say were true, they’d already be coming here in those numbers. But it’s not. The reason that we’re not drowning in immigrants is that, amazingly enough, most people don’t actually want to come to the US.
IMHo, this may be cart before horse. The reason we only see a limited number of people trying to come is because they know the risk of deportation or the high hurdles of legal immigration. But if the USA announced a free-for-all for everyone in the world, the number would go way up. Even though Trump and MAGA have made America uglier today than before.
Of course they don’t want to come now, when they have to live in the shadows. Plus Trump is in power. Plus the Darien Gap makes steerage look like a walk in the park.
None of us know how many would come in the time a pure progressive immigration policy could remain effective – before the turn of the political tide ended it.
That not knowing is why the policy is a gift to the Trumpers. We need to advocate an immigration policy with quotas. Then the Democrats can trot out reputable economists who have some idea of how many immigrants an area of the U.S. can absorb in X amount of time with the normal wage increase seen with more immigration. There are studies on this based on the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, which did lower wages in Miami for a time (unlike lesser immigration surges, which do the opposite).
Congressional Democrats, and, absent Trump, a few Republicans, do advocate policies that further our national interests and thus have hope of one day being enacted. It’s just you internet progressives that need to get with the program
First, moral judgements about an immigrant’s legal status are judgments of the state, not an individual. Moral judgement applies to acts, and the actor behind an immigrant’s legal status is none other than the state itself. When a racist says Muslims shouldn’t be allowed in the United States, they certainly are insulting Muslims, but the judgement bears directly on the United States itself; the express proposition is that the United States acts wrongly. When a bleeding-heart progressive demands open borders for families fleeing Central American gang violence, who controls the borders but the state itself? These are policy questions, and for the vast majority of people, the implication is that the speaker wants to change state policy. Only potentially, indirectly, is it implied the Muslim has done something wrong by holding certain beliefs or associating with this country; or that the family fleeing gang violence did the right thing by coming to the United States. These latter judge individual actions, not state policy. Reasonable people will readily agree that legality does not strictly determine morality: a legal act may be immoral, or an illegal act moral. Therefore, conceptually, the problem is the racism, not the sidelining of legal status in individual moral judgments.
If you are asking how important legal status is to the policy debate, I won’t pretend tribalism and fear of the unknown aren’t significant factors. Conservatives like their own, and they like the familiar, and they like ideas that the tribe likes, often for those reasons. So do liberals, though they are sometimes more conscientious about it. There are racists and xenophobes all over. Racism, classism, and xenophobia today are visceral responses that can be reinforced rather than fully formed intellectual systems as in the day of Buckley’s National Review. Legal status and the stereotypes it promotes are some of the many influences that lead an individual to identify illegal immigrants as an outgroup. After the outgroup is so identified, depending on how one is exposed to it, it may be associated with stereotypes. From there, racism offers an easy explanation for the association, creating a feedback loop, conscious or not, that can influence one’s views on immigration policy. Law reflects these views, and always will.
That being said, I think legal status and its practical effects are foundational to the liberal/conservative divide, albeit implicitly. Illegal immigrants may not legally work. This is the most concrete symptom. The law itself relegates illegal immigrants to a status which is inherently destabilizing, and aside from economic contributions, stability may be the most important benefit immigrants can provide. Though not impossible, without legal status it is harder to find work, benefit from legal protections, access stabilizing institutions, find stable housing, contribute to the community, etc. Instability can ruin lives, families, and communities; it spawns poverty, psychological trauma, and crime. Nearly everybody can agree on these points. The old school of race-based or hereditary classism is largely dead, even among conservatives; nearly everybody recognizes structural factors influence deviant behavior. (Progressives may be more inclined to say structural factors excuse deviant behavior, or question punishment generally, but that is another question.) Most people may not explicitly identify legal status as the distinguishing feature, but most will likely point to some of the associated negative outcomes, like crime risk, economic strain, or instability. If someone tells you they don’t want illegal immigrants coming in and living off welfare without paying taxes, you won’t get very far proposing illegal immigrants be allowed to work and thus pay taxes.
Where people disagree is whether the law should change, and why. When progressives talk about the benefits illegal immigrants bring, they really mean the additional benefits illegal immigrants could bring if the law changed. If legal immigrants tend to create more stability, and the only difference is legal, the progressive solution is to remove some of the legal barriers that prevent illegal immigrants from reaching their potential. If the hull of a boat is punctured and taking on water, maybe it is time to modify the design. Maybe the design wasn’t up to code to begin with–given our obligations under international law. The more conservative solution is to patch the boat and bail it out. Close the borders, deport any illegal immigrants that are causing trouble (if not all), then maybe talk about incremental fixes. Ultimately, the primary distinction behind the public policy divide is how meaningful the distinction should be between legal and illegal immigration.
I would like to experiment with allowing much higher numbers of legal immigrants. But I’d like to do it like Canada, and give preference to young adults and people with valuable skills, whether that be web development or strawberry picking.
Maybe if we allowed much higher numbers
That seems like a reasonable goal
We would find that that included everyone who wanted to immigrate. I dunno. But I’d rather continue to vet immigrants for obvious criminal backgrounds, and for their ability to contribute to our economy, and see how that goes.
Just fyi, not everyone favors totally open immigration of robotics engineers. Home grown robotics engineers complain it keeps their wages down.
Which doubles back to previous threads on the declining birth rate: unless AI actually does rapidly increase productivity (and taxable productivity at that) most Western economies are going to be running into a shortfall of young adults needed for the economic engine. A bigger pipeline and a path to legal status for those here and already contributing to that engine is desirable out of self interest.
I wouldn’t bank on AI saving the day there, so we need young adults coming in.
It wouldn’t help anyway. It’s demand that drives the economy, not “productivity”; it doesn’t matter how productive industry is if there’s no market. That’s why giving money to the rich and corporations in the name of “trickle down economics” never boosts the economy, while giving money to the common people as a stimulus does boost the economy. Ordinary poeple will spend the money, increasing demand; corporations will just sit on it because they have nothing to spend it on. Nobody is going to build factories and hire people to make products nobody is going to buy.
Immigrants are consumers, who boost demand and thus the economy. AI isn’t.
Demand can be and is global. You need domestic production, be it stuff, services, or ideas (intellectual property). Consumers can’t purchase without wages; government can’t provide public goods without tax revenues. Both happen resultant of production.
This idea that immigrants bring down wages is so damn obvious – despite being wrong – that yes, even highly educated Americans like robotics engineers believe it.
One problem is that there is a tiny bit of truth to it. The immigrants may bring down the wages of the lowest paid robotics engineers. But there will be more robotics engineers, and the American robotic engineers will then have an inside track to become higher paid robotic engineering team leaders and managers. Plus, with more robotics engineers, the Americans in HR, and the legal department, etc., etc. will have greater responsibilities leading to more pay.
