All decent human beings, all people who care about both the economic health of this country and the values it stands for, should reject, resoundingly, the nativist xenophobia hawked, cynically, by the current president to a tragically receptive segment of our population. Illegal immigration is less than one fifth of what it was 20 years ago, and reached that low mark prior to Trump\u2019s election. Our border security is quite sufficient, in reality, with crime rates by illegal immigrants being lower than crime rates by natural born citizens and crime rates by geographic locale being inversely correlated to the proportion of the population that are immigrants in that locale (i.e., more immigrants = less crime). Those are statistical facts.<\/p>\n
There is absolutely no evidence that even a single terrorist has ever come across our southern border, according to Trump\u2019s own justice department. The 4000 number that Sarah Huckabee Sanders used refers to people arriving at airports from countries that we consider to be countries that terrorists frequently hail from; they are not even suspected of terrorism, and they do not come across the southern border. In fact, the justice department and anti-terrorism experts in general consider the Canadian border to pose a greater danger of providing a conduit for terrorists, because there is much more radical Islamic influence in Canada than in the Latino countries south of us.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also a fact that at a certain point further investment in border security costs more per person successfully prevented from crossing the border illegally than that person costs us if they do cross the border illegally. In fact, it\u2019s extremely likely that we have already passed that point. Non-partisan analyses of the costs and benefits that illegal immigrants provide to our coffers and our economy range from net benefits on both scores at both the state and federal levels to fairly marginal net costs on both scores. No peer-review study has come to the conclusion that costs are any significant portion of GDP, or that they are anywhere near posing an economic crisis to the country.<\/p>\n
Conversely, that which is currently illegal immigration DOES redress a critical and rapidly growing demographic imbalance between retirees drawing out of pension funds and working people paying into them. Developed countries really have little choice, if they want their pension funds to remain solvent, but to legalize and normalize fairly massive immigration of working age people.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, the argument that the nativism and xenophobia on very prominent and obvious display by this president and his followers is just a commitment to the rule of law, not an anti-immigrant stance, is belied by both the nature of the issue and the facts. We determine what the laws are, and virtually everyone agrees that we need immigration reform, which means changes in the laws. So the real debate is over what the laws should be and how we should implement them. The divide in the debate is between those who favor a kinder and more open society and those who favor a crueler and more closed society.<\/p>\n
That it isn\u2019t just, or even primarily, about enforcing current laws is highlighted by the fact that when Trump proposed changes in the law to make immigration more restrictive and favor \u201cNorwegians\u201d over people of color, and when crueler and more restrictive choices of policy not dictated by currents law were implemented, his supporters passionately supported and defended his choices, demonstrating that the debate isn\u2019t over enforcing the law but rather shutting out precisely the people we used to welcome.<\/p>\n
Those who echo Trump\u2019s narrative on immigration often compare the nation to a house, insisting that just as we use walls and locks to exclude people at will from our homes we should do so to exclude them from our country. It is redundant at this point to address the ineffectiveness of a wall (something a review of expert analyses of border security makes perfectly clear), so instead let’s focus on the errors in that analogy.<\/p>\n
A country isn\u2019t a house. It wasn\u2019t legally purchased from its previous owners; it was stolen. Its property lines aren\u2019t\u200b determined by developers selling lots; they\u2019re determined by military conquest. Its walls don\u2019t separate inhabitants from the elements, but rather secure those who managed to divert more of the Earth\u2019s resources to themselves against those who have been violently relegated to diverting less to themselves. And it is not a refuge from the world financed by inhabitants\u2019 labors external to it, but rather a complex economic, social, and cultural entity that thrives by means of its robust interactions with the world around it.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s address the last point first, because it is the one that cuts across values and appeals directly to systemic realities. Our nation functions through an internal and external market economy, engaging in market exchanges within our borders and across borders. Classical (and conservative) economic theory maintains that the fewer barriers there are to such market exchanges, the more wealth is generated by them, the ideal being a \u201cfree market,\u201d characterized by unhindered market activity. Advocacy for strengthening national borders and obstructing the flow of people across them is a contradiction of this ideal. Less ideologically pure understandings of market dynamics also recognize the value of allowing labor to travel to where there is demand for it. Whatever limits we feel we must place on that free flow of goods and people in service to a free market, the fact that it is a consideration is one of the principal ways in which a country differs from a house, not just on scale, but also in systemic attributes.<\/p>\n
But a country differs from a house in other ways as well, on moral and historical dimensions. We can\u2019t return land to all those with historical claims on it, but we can stop pretending that we have some absolute, inherent moral authority to deprive entry to those who are the descendants of the ones we stole it from seeking to work hard and provide opportunity for their children under our rule of law. Those who *have* always pass laws to protect what they have from those who don\u2019t; one can defend that through a cynical insistence that might makes right but not through a claim to having the morally virtuous position. The morally virtuous position would be to recognize our moral debt to humanity as a result of the historical moral infractions through which we secured our privileged place in the global political economy.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s a pretty easy form of \u201cgenerosity\u201d to let hard working people come here and do our dirtiest, most difficult jobs for the lowest wages, contributing to our economy, to our coffers, and to our culture. The fact is that most analyses show net gains to our economy, many show net gains to our state and federal coffers, and all show a net gain in our demographic distribution of workers to retirees, a critical imbalance at present that massive immigration redresses.<\/p>\n
You people who think we should wall out the less fortunate because you feel threatened by them are the least fortunate of all, coveting material wealth that isn\u2019t being threatened by inflicting passive and active brutalities on those most in need. You\u2019re not Christians; you\u2019re what Christians exhort us not to be.<\/p>\n
This entire nativist, xenophobic narrative is a fabrication, refuted by fact, by reason, by our own national interests, and by basic human decency. And it is one that an opportunistic con-artist has leveraged, as he\u2019s leveraged other similarly dishonest scams before, to stoke up the bigotries of a certain segment of our national population in order to serve his own personal self-aggrandizement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
All decent human beings, all people who care about both the economic health of this country and the values it stands for, should reject, resoundingly, the nativist xenophobia hawked, cynically, by the current president to a tragically receptive segment of our population. Illegal immigration is less than one fifth of what it was 20 years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[14,16,13,21,33],"tags":[31941,31942,202,353,273,935,1221,359,434,31929,31940],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412804"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=412804"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412809,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412804\/revisions\/412809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=412804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=412804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=412804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}