Untangling the Immigration Debate

What do we owe people in other countries who would like to come to this one?
The debate is between “walls” and “bridges,” but both sides would turn away most prospective immigrants. Should they?Illustration by Brian Stauffer

A hundred and seventy-four refugees from Syria arrived in Indiana, during the past fiscal year, as part of President Obama’s stated goal of admitting ten thousand Syrians who had been displaced by civil war. There were organizations in Indiana ready to help them, including a nonprofit state-supported group called Exodus. But the state itself was less hospitable: the governor publicly declared the refugees a security risk, and announced that Indiana would refuse to reimburse Exodus for any costs incurred on the Syrians’ behalf. Exodus sued, and the case was argued before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals last month, by which point it had acquired additional political significance: the defendant, Governor Mike Pence, was also the Republican nominee for Vice-President.

During oral arguments, the state’s lawyer was subjected to withering questions from the judges, who wondered whether barring Syrians was an efficient anti-terrorism strategy. (The state cited James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., who had acknowledged that his agency faced a particular “challenge” in checking the backgrounds of Syrian refugees.) One judge asked, “Are Syrians the only Muslims Indiana fears?”

But the judges also seemed unconvinced by the claim that Indiana was in violation of the Civil Rights Act, which outlaws discrimination based on national origin. The U.S. immigration system has long imposed national caps, meant to control not just the size of the immigrant population but its composition, too. “If the President can decide, based on national origin, how many refugees there are,” Frank Easterbrook, one of the judges, asked, “why can’t a state?”

The court eventually ruled that when it comes to immigrants it is the federal government that has the right to discriminate, not state governments. Even now, U.S. immigration rules hold that immigrants “affiliated with” the Communist Party are “inadmissible.” And countless prospective entrants are turned away each year without being given a reason, or the opportunity to ask for one.

What, exactly, are our obligations to people in other countries who would like to come to this one? The argument over Syrian refugees is a good example of how our political conversation tends to sidestep this thorny issue. Ironically, strong opposition from Republicans made it easier for President Obama to avoid explaining how he had determined that ten thousand, not more, was the proper quota for Syrian refugees. Were there security concerns that prevented the U.S. from admitting, say, a hundred thousand? How many Syrian refugees—an estimated five million have fled the country’s civil war—would be too many? Obama didn’t have to entertain questions like these, airily insisting that “refugees can make us stronger,” and claiming, not implausibly, that some of his political opponents seemed to be deficient in “common humanity.”

For much of this year, of course, Obama’s chief political opponent was Pence’s running mate, Donald Trump, who captured the Republican Presidential nomination by giving voice to a sentiment that many Republican voters evidently believe, and that few Republican politicians are willing to express: that immigration is destroying America. A 2014 poll found that a plurality of Republican voters considered immigration to be the country’s top problem, and most Americans want immigration to be restricted or kept at current levels, not increased. In recent years, however, the leaders most supportive of such restriction have tended to be rather marginal figures, like Joe Arpaio, the renegade Arizona sheriff, and Tom Tancredo, the former Republican congressman from Colorado, whose short-lived 2008 Presidential campaign was based on a promise to stop “uncontrolled immigration.” Trump was pretty marginal, too—until he wasn’t. David Frum, the former Republican speechwriter, is a longtime supporter of immigration restriction, but no fan of Trump. He once summed up the immigration debate by paraphrasing an old description of the English Civil War: “a battle between the Wrong but Wromantic and the Right but Repulsive.”

This year, amid an unusually immigration-oriented Presidential campaign, a couple of skeptical scholars are trying to arrive at an analysis that is neither wromantic nor repulsive. David Miller, a political philosopher at Oxford, sets out to answer a simple question: What gives a country the right to control its borders? Trump’s plan to build a grand, ocean-to-gulf wall may be unwise, but would it be wrong? Hillary Clinton has called for “bridges, not walls,” but she, too, wants the government to control who gets in. Miller asks when, if ever, a country is obliged to let a foreigner enter, and remain. George J. Borjas, an economist—and, as it happens, a Cuban immigrant—has a different approach. Instead of asking what we owe immigrants, he wants us to think more clearly about what we’re likely to get in return. Unlike Trump, he isn’t convinced that immigration is an existential threat to America, but he is not convinced, either, by politicians’ constant assurances that immigration is what makes America great. He believes that we should take up a question that is sometimes considered taboo: What if immigration isn’t good for us, after all?

When Trump, at the launch of his campaign, mentioned Mexican “rapists,” he was amplifying a claim made by Ann Coulter, the pundit and provocateur. Two weeks before, Coulter had published a sharp, calculatedly obnoxious polemic called “¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole.” Perhaps the most influential political book of the 2016 campaign, it is full of gruesome anecdotes about sexual assaults committed by unauthorized immigrants. Studies find that immigrants, as a group, commit fewer crimes than natives, but some data sets tell different stories. (One government report suggests that, in California, for instance, unauthorized immigrants are overrepresented in the prison population.) In Coulter’s view, that scarcely matters: any crime committed by an immigrant is one crime—and one immigrant—too many. She declares that “the rape of little girls isn’t even considered a crime in Latino culture.” (In most of Mexico, she notes, children as young as twelve can legally consent to sex with adults.) Just as confidently, she suggests that no one really likes mariachi bands. And she calls for “an immigration policy that benefits Americans.” Like Trump, who seeks to put “America First,” Coulter believes that the U.S. government has a duty, too often unfulfilled, to give priority to the well-being of its own citizens.

Miller calls this notion “compatriot partiality,” and he argues that it is a powerful principle, though one with limits. His new book is “Strangers in Our Midst” (Harvard), a lean and judicious defense of national interests. “Justice permits us to do less for would-be immigrants than we are required to do for citizens,” he writes. “But less is not nothing.” There is, he notes, a widely accepted universal right of exit—regimes that forbid defection are rightly seen as oppressive. But no government recognizes a universal right of entry. Miller thinks that this makes sense, because liberal democracies must uphold “quite demanding standards of equal treatment for all who reside within their borders.”

Such treatment might be difficult, or expensive. In the United States, all immigrant children can attend public school, and anyone accused of a crime is entitled to a legal defense, regardless of immigration status. In Miller’s view, controlling immigration is one way for a country to control its public expenditures, and such control is essential to democracy. He further suggests that “more culturally homogeneous” countries, like Japan, have a right to “protect their inherited national cultures” by restricting immigration. For him, borders are vital to democratic self-determination, particularly since immigration can change the character of a country—“the ‘self’ in ‘self-determination,’ ” he calls it. Miller thinks it is worse for a government to keep a temporary worker “in limbo” indefinitely (and so create a “two-caste” society) than to enforce immigration restrictions in a timely manner. But, in the case of refugees, he perceives a double vulnerability: by applying for asylum, a refugee “makes herself vulnerable” to a state, while imposing on the state a “duty of care.” The state is thereby obliged to accept as many refugees as it can.

How many is that? In 2014, just over a million people became legal permanent residents of the U.S. About two-thirds of them were relatives of current citizens or residents, fifteen per cent were admitted on the basis of professional skill, thirteen per cent were refugees and asylees, and five per cent were winners of a global lottery. (Each year, about fifteen million people apply for fifty thousand U.S. residency visas.) There were also, of course, unauthorized immigrants, who both came and went—for years, estimates of this population have held at eleven or twelve million. The unauthorized arrivals in 2014 also included some seventy thousand unaccompanied minors, who came over the Mexican border after fleeing violence in Central America.

By comparison, only about twelve thousand Syrian refugees have been admitted so far. Overseas, the Syrian exodus has been more destabilizing: hundreds of thousands have entered Greece and Germany, propelling restrictionist movements across Europe. Millions have arrived in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Miller thinks that states are justified in rebuffing refugees only if they impose a “serious cost to social justice and cohesion.” He does not think it is defensible for states to turn away refugees on the basis of cultural or religious identity. And it would be “hypocrisy,” he argues, for a country to bar refugees while welcoming other, more “desirable” immigrants, because a sovereign state is obliged to take seriously the claims of refugees, on human-rights grounds. His book endorses “a qualified right on the part of states to close their borders,” but from an American perspective his approach might seem decidedly permissive.

Miller’s book can be taken as a response to Joseph Carens, an American political scientist who has settled in Canada—a happy beneficiary of the unfair global immigration system that he would like to reform. Three years ago, Carens published “The Ethics of Immigration,” which defends a simple proposition: “Immigrants belong.” Carens argues that anyone who settles in a new country acquires “social membership,” a status that soon becomes a sufficient basis for demanding citizenship; after a few years, it hardly matters how the immigrant arrived. (“The moral right of states to apprehend and deport irregular migrants erodes with the passage of time,” he writes.)

Where Miller sees borders as symbols of national sovereignty, Carens sees them as monuments to global inequality; in his view, citizenship in a rich Western democracy is “the modern equivalent of feudal class privilege.” When considering the pleas of refugees, he goes even further than Miller, suggesting that we should be ever mindful of the baleful history of the nineteen-thirties, when many countries—including America—turned away Jewish refugees from Germany. He writes, “We should always ask ourselves at some point, ‘What would this have meant if we had applied it to Jews fleeing Hitler?’ ” This would mean, as Carens concedes, that countries are “almost never” justified in turning away refugees.

Part of what animates immigration restrictionists like Coulter is the sense that newcomers are being given special privileges. She says it’s crazy to think that “we have to treat immigrants as if they’re black people and we’re making up for the legacy of slavery.” But Carens thinks we do have a special duty to immigrants; namely, a duty to make them feel like members of society. And he wants politicians to be attentive to the “symbolic meaning” of immigration regulations, which might send a hostile message even if they aren’t inherently oppressive. Think of Trump’s Mexican-border wall. His political opponents reacted with horror, as if erecting a barricade were an affront to human rights. But more than twenty-five per cent of the border is walled off already, and no mainstream politician—certainly not Hillary Clinton—has called for the existing walls to be torn down. Trump’s critics opposed his wall primarily because they opposed the message it seemed to be sending: that Mexicans are unwelcome in the U.S.

When Miller and Carens talk about immigrants, they sometimes seem to be talking about entirely different populations. Miller often portrays immigrants as beneficiaries, emphasizing the potential price of caring for them. (He writes from England, where socialized medicine is a fact of life.) Carens, by contrast, assumes that immigrants, when not thwarted by cruel policies, will generally make good use of the economic opportunities available; he suggests that the costs of immigration will be small, or nonexistent. Similarly, Hillary Clinton, who once declared herself “adamantly against illegal immigrants,” is now much more likely to enumerate the ways in which immigrants, whether authorized or not, enrich the nation’s economy; Trump’s proposals, on the other hand, were driven largely by his intuition that immigrants are a drain on resources. Our laws, too, are shaped by assumptions about the economic impact of immigration. Plyler v. Doe was a 1981 Supreme Court case that gave unauthorized immigrant children the right to enroll in public school. Justice William Brennan wrote, for the majority, “There is no evidence in the record suggesting that illegal entrants impose any significant burden on the State’s economy.”

This, indeed, was the conventional economic wisdom then, and, if there is less consensus about it now, that is due in part to the dogged research of Borjas, who has been studying the economic effects of immigration from around the time Brennan wrote those words. Borjas arrived from Cuba as a boy, in 1962, shortly after the revolution, and settled with his mother in a Cuban community in Miami and then in Hoboken, New Jersey. His precipitating insight was that different groups of immigrants bring different skills and face different conditions. Economists, he thought, were wrong to assume that new waves of immigrants would assimilate and thrive simply because previous ones had. His new book, “We Wanted Workers” (Norton), borrows its title from the Swiss writer Max Frisch, who once offered a wistful assessment of guest workers: “We wanted workers, but we got people instead.” Borjas believes that his fellow-economists have done us a disservice by analyzing immigrants as units of labor, while ignoring the other ways in which they influence their new country.

Borjas, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School, described the “pressure” he felt, early on, not to publish research that might be cited by the so-called “xenophobes and racists” who favored immigration restriction. But he shares with many activists, on both sides, a conviction that our current system is unfair. Most visas go to relatives, even though they are not necessarily the neediest applicants or the most constructive potential residents. Borjas notes that Mexican immigrants are “disproportionately drawn from the low-skill workforce,” and offers one explanation: the financial returns on college education are higher, relatively speaking, in Mexico than in the U.S., and so those without degrees have a greater incentive to cross the border. He notes, too, that in 2014 working-age natives and immigrants were employed at almost the same rate (72.5 per cent and 72.9 per cent, respectively), even though 28.2 per cent of immigrants lacked a high-school diploma, compared with only eight per cent of natives.

In theory, an increase in the supply of non-diploma workers should lead to lower wages for this group. But economists disagree about what happens in practice. David Card, a labor economist known for his research on the minimum wage, studied the Mariel boatlift, which brought more than a hundred thousand Cubans to Florida in 1980; he found no evidence that the influx had lowered wages in Miami. Borjas argues that Card failed to find valid cities to compare with Miami and that he failed to separate out natives without diplomas, who were most directly affected. (Some two-thirds of the Mariel arrivals had not graduated from high school.) According to Borjas’s calculations, the boatlift created a labor “supply shock” that lowered wages by at least ten per cent for local natives who lacked a high-school diploma.

Borjas is appropriately skeptical of economic claims. He says that part of the problem with the immigration debate is an “overreliance on economic modeling and statistical findings.” The academic literature is complicated and often contradictory, and all sides have a tendency to cite the numbers that support their ideals. We know that many costs of caring for immigrants are borne by state and local governments, while many benefits flow to the federal government. But, even then, reliable numbers are elusive. Immigration may make programs like Social Security more solvent in the short term. The long-term effect depends, in part, on how those programs are structured by the time today’s immigrants retire. Though many economists view immigration as beneficial, Borjas suspects that it may well be “a net economic wash” for America, which doesn’t mean that there are no winners or losers. He argues that one result has been “a substantial redistribution of wealth from workers”—especially low-skilled ones—“to firms.” If we really wanted to “make natives as rich as possible,” he writes, we would adopt a radical new policy: “admit only high-skill immigrants,” because they do the most to make all of us more productive. But this is not what we do. And so, he infers, appealing to the economic theory known as revealed preference, that must not be what we want—or, at least, not the only thing.

Last year, as his insurgent candidacy began to gain momentum, Bernie Sanders sat for an interview with Ezra Klein, the editor of the Web site Vox. The political world was still figuring out what to make of Trump’s immigration rhetoric, and Klein wondered whether Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, might have a more internationalist perspective. Did he support admitting vastly more immigrants, perhaps even embracing a policy of “open borders”?

Sanders interrupted, looking even more alarmed than usual. “Open borders?” he said. “That’s a right-wing proposal.” He said that it would “make everybody in America poorer,” and added that we should focus, instead, on helping “poor people”—meaning, of course, poor people in America.

Sanders’s characterization of open borders as “right wing” wasn’t without basis. In 1984, as President Reagan was pushing for immigration reform, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal called for a five-word amendment to the Constitution: “There shall be open borders.” This is the rallying cry of the open-borders movement, which combines faith in free enterprise with a relative lack of compatriot partiality. Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, argues that it is immoral to condemn countless would-be immigrants to lives of hardship in an effort to nudge up wages for Americans who didn’t graduate from high school. He says that we should think of “low-skilled” American workers as one more “special interest” demanding favors from a complaisant bureaucracy.

Some studies suggest that immigration inhibits public support for generous social-welfare programs—which, for libertarian supporters of the idea, is in no way a problem. If a country can’t afford to welcome anyone who wants to come, why not charge a steep entrance fee, or slash government benefits for new arrivals, or withhold citizenship? Miller suggests that any such arrangement would be damaging to a country’s democratic identity and civic life—it would represent an abandonment of “liberal principles.” Open-borders advocates would reply that immigration restrictions themselves constitute such an abandonment; they are confident that future generations will wonder how we ever supported such a patently unjust system.

Sanders is not most people’s idea of a nativist: he supports citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, wants to “reverse the criminalization of immigrants,” and calls Trump’s border wall a “boondoggle.” Like Miller, though, he wants to offer a qualified defense of borders that are closed, at least some of the time, to some people. (Perhaps Miller has Sanders in mind when he notes that certain defenders of borders “fear the power of global capitalism and see citizen solidarity as the only countervailing force that can be relied on to oppose it.”) Still, there can be something jarring about hearing a committed egalitarian like Sanders defend our profoundly unequal system of national borders and citizenship. Carens, another egalitarian, is bothered by this tension, and seeks to resolve it by advocating open borders as a distant promise, to be fulfilled only once we have achieved a “significant” reduction in worldwide inequality. One politician who seems to agree with him is Hillary Clinton. In an e-mail recently disclosed by WikiLeaks, she privately told a Brazilian banking group, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future.” This—free migration, based on rough economic parity between countries—is essentially the European Union model, although the citizens of Great Britain decided, this summer, that the parity was a bit too rough and the migration a bit too free.

In debates over immigration, both sides tend to make bold pronouncements about what the natives will or will not stand for. In Coulter’s treatise, natives are righteous and aggrieved, desperate for a political leader who’s willing to confirm what they can see for themselves. (The book seemed to conjure Trump’s Presidential campaign into existence.) Miller encourages limited deference to the natives, reconciling himself to the fact that democracies might choose immigration policies that leave certain humanitarian goals unmet. Those who think that rich countries should admit more immigrants anyway should at least consider the risk of backlash, especially because there are circumstances in which immigration can be plausibly linked to disorder or crime. Robert D. Putnam, the influential political scientist, found that “immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital,” at least in the short term; the claim that diversity makes us strong is, as Coulter acidly notes, a motto, not an empirical fact. She cites the presence of Somali refugees in Minnesota as an example of the costs of immigration, suggesting that the state is now rife with “child prostitutes and machete attacks.” In fact, statistics do not show a state-wide crime wave, although there have been some high-profile attacks. In September, a young immigrant from Kenya of Somali descent stabbed ten people at a mall in St. Cloud, reportedly while saying something about Allah. Such incidents are more memorable than statistics, and they can contribute to the anxiety that erodes support for more immigration.

In the U.K., the government’s unwillingness to bar refugees entering from Europe helped lead to Brexit, which may yet hasten the end of free travel within Europe. In this country, the rise of Donald Trump may mark the demise of the bipartisan immigration consensus; this year, an Open Borders Amendment seems even more far-fetched than it did in 1984. How much immigration should the government allow? One answer that open-borders supporters might offer is practical, if unsatisfying: as much as it can get away with.

Meanwhile, it is not just Trump who promises to put America first. Politicians of all stripes assure us that their favored policies will make Americans stronger together—insisting that it is possible, after all, to be wromantic and right. But Carens makes a startling assertion toward the end of his book. “Admission of refugees,” he writes, “does not really serve the interests of rich democratic states.” In saying so, he seeks not to stem the tide but to make it clear that morality requires states to act in ways that may not be to their advantage. The good news is that voters, too, tend to be driven by much besides self-interest—if this were not the case, we might already have embraced the high-skilled-immigrant program that Borjas says would enrich us. Voters seem to like the idea of providing sanctuary to refugees, especially if they can be convinced that the refugees aren’t gaming the system. In America, especially, voters respond to the sentimental but not fictitious notion that their country draws immigrants from around the world, all hoping and expecting to do better than they could have done at home. Immigration may be, as Borjas puts it, “a net economic wash,” and yet there are still good and strong reasons for us to say that we want more of it. There is, after all, one class of Americans who stand to gain enormously from immigration. The only catch is that these Americans are not Americans at all—not yet. ♦