Sure, but be careful: who, exactly, actually supports *open borders*?
You may be able to find a handful of (non-crank) examples, but for the most part no significant Dems support it.
Also, one must keep in mind that the BOrdER CRisIS!!! is largely a right-wing fabrication. Migration patterns and causes are complex. Spikes are often the res…
Sure, but be careful: who, exactly, actually supports *open borders*?
You may be able to find a handful of (non-crank) examples, but for the most part no significant Dems support it.
Also, one must keep in mind that the BOrdER CRisIS!!! is largely a right-wing fabrication. Migration patterns and causes are complex. Spikes are often the result of things that happened years before and many factors are not under the control of the gov't. Decades ago there were tons of crossings (or so it's estimated). The recent apprehension rate is similar to a spike in 1986 (when the apprehension % was much lower).
First of all, the border crisis is real, it'a not a fabrication of anybody, although the Right uses it for their own ends, and the Left just closes their eyes and denies it. I'm only aware of one country in the world that is not a failed state that has numbers of illegal immigrants comparable to ours. That country is Mexico, and it only allows them there because of the certainty that they're passing through -- to us. That is NOT a normal situation or, in my view, a stable one, or an acceptable one.
Second, when I talk about someone believing in "open borders", I mean something extremely specific: the belief that anyone who wants to migrate to the United States should be permitted to enter and settle, probably after a background check, and perhaps after passing a health screening (although that, I expect, would be highly debatable and hotly debated), but with no quotas, no language requirements, no pre-existing connection to the country, no screening for desired skills, and no exclusions for lack of them. In other words, the immigration policy we had in 1870, computerized and minus the racism of that era. I think that I've just described the immigration policy desired by a large proportion of Democrats, and by an even larger proportion of the Left in general
That's a perfectly valid position for purposes of debate, and I would be genuinely interested in knowing how your views diverge for it. What's not valid is obfuscation on the point: people who believe in what I've outlined should own it, not evade it. Intellectual dishonesty will not move the debate forward to any useful place.
The Republican Party has become the party of Trump - characterized by a combination of ignorance, racism, and bigotry. There is no way to hold rational policy discussions with such people. I have no problem with expanding the criteria for refugee status to include humanitarian reasons. People coming from countries other than Mexico more often than not are fleeing not only dire poverty but life threatening poverty due to natural disasters and also violence, although the violence may be related to many factors in addition to politics or war.
I agree with you on the uselessness of negotiating with what the Republican Party has become. It's not salvageable, and needs to be replaced with a new Center-Right party that believes in democracy and the Constitution for the health, and quite possibly the survival, of the country.
I'm not necessarily opposed to expanding overall immigration once we fix our legal immigration system, and can understand what our economic needs really are. I am opposed to using immigration as a form of international social work. We no longer need armies of the unskilled to staff factories that no longer exist. We should be helping people solve their problems at home; we have no obligation and it makes no sense to move them and their problems here.
“I think that I've just described the immigration policy desired by a large proportion of Democrats, and by an even larger proportion of the Left in general.” I don’t think the proportions who hold such views are “large,” although the left flank that does think that way has outsize influence. It would be interesting to conduct a massive poll on the issue. I’d guess that 80%+ of the public wants immigration controls.
From my perspective, the larger problem is that the Right refuses to propose reasonable solutions because immigration is a strong, effective and convenient wedge issue.
We do, in fact, need the armies of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, virtually all of whom are employed under the table if they’re willing to work. Ironically, the biggest consumers of their labor are MAGA contractors and farmers. Strip out illegal immigrants, and GDP would drop several percentage points.
Sorry for the delay in responding -- I had a mountain of housework to get through. But it did give me a chance to get my thoughts in order. I'm highly skeptical that we need "armies of unskilled and semi-skilled workers", certainly not at 19th Century levels. We are going to need a certain, probably rather large, number of unskilled workers in certain areas going forward, but it's essential to ensure that they're not being brought in so that we can keep doing things that we shouldn't be doing anyway, like underpaying food service employees as a matter of policy, or growing strawberries and almonds in the desert.
My biggest frustration with immigration reform is that it's frozen in the neverending culture war. My next biggest frustration is that objectively, it's not a hard problem: most of our peer democratic nations, not only rich ones but middle-income ones as well, have solved it to the satisfaction of their citizens, usually years ago. (Sweden, we learned last week, is a partial exception to this but not in their specific "best practice" that appeals to me.) That means that we're a huge outlier, which is bad, but it also means that we don't have to invent much, because there are lots of best practices out there that we can adopt and adapt. I'll be calling out Australia, Brazil, Canada, and Sweden, because there are aspects of all of their systems that I think can teach us something.
One last introductory point that neither side never gets around to discussing: real, effective immigration reform is going to cost A LOT OF MONEY. Some of it will come from funds that are misspent now, but Congress has been starving the immigration services for a long time, and any new system is going to need a lot of additional funding.
I think that our Immigration System should comprise four Immigration Channels: An Ordinary Immigration Channel, a Humanitarian Immigration Channel, a Family Unification Immigration Channel, and a Special Immigration Channel. Basic ground rule: annual admission to the Family Unification Channel is everyone who qualifies; annual admissions in the other channels can be set by policymakers, and can be redistributed within a Channel if necessary, but annual admissions in each Channel will only consider the policies for that Channel, and not affect the numbers permitted to the other Channels. So for example, a surge in asylum grants in the Humanitarian Channel may mean fewer slots available for refugees, because asylum status and refugee status are elements of that Channel, but it won't affect numbers in the other three Channels.
The State Department, in consultation with Defense and Homeland Security, should place the nations of the world on one of four lists, that should be universally publicized and reviewed every six months. More politically correct names may be found, but effectively the lists will be: 1. Authoritarian States that limit or forbid movement of their citizens and/or contact with foreigners; 2. Failed States where there is no effective civil authority or diplomatic activity; 3. States suffering major natural disasters, where normal civil and diplomatic services are disrupted in the judgement of the State Department, and 4. Normal States. Residents of States on Lists 1 and 2, and any on List 3 specifically qualified by the State Department, may apply for admission to the United States in the Humanitarian Channel at a port of entry, i.e., at the border. Anyone from a country other than those MUST apply for admission at a US diplomatic mission in their country of residence, and will be denied admission if they present themselves at a port of entry without that pre-clearance.
Admission to the Ordinary Channel would be via a point system. In Canada and Australia, points are given for such things as youth, level of education, field of study, ability to speak the national language, professional and/or artistic accomplishments, etc. We should also grant points for non-academic skills, like toolmaking, plumbing and hydraulics, electrical, repair of large industrial equipment, and so on. The Labor and Commerce Departments have statisticians who can provide invaluable information and analysis on what the volume and distribution of this Channel should be; they can also estimate our need for unskilled labor, and a way could be found to fill that need through the point system also.
Admission to the Humanitarian Channel would be either through the asylum process as defined by International Law -- which would apply mostly but not entirely to citizens of the countries on the first list above -- and refugees from wars or natural disasters. In Brazil, these people are housed near their point of entry for processing, and are released in a week or two with working papers already in hand. Our aim should be to do the same. In Sweden, they are provided with housing and a living allowance, enrolled in language training if they don't speak Swedish, and have a case worker who works on job placement for them, including training if necessary, and checks in with them on their progress regularly. If they blow off their language training and/or consistently refuse the jobs that are offered, they may lose their government benefits, or suffer additional sanctions. Again, I think that this is a model worth emulating. I would also eliminate Temporary Protective Status: if a person is admitted, s/he is admitted, and it makes no sense to put that person in continuous anxiety, or spend government resources trying to enforce this half in/half out status.
The Family Unification Channel would be for spouses, children, parents, and grandparents (and grandchildren, if dependent on the above) of citizens and permanent residents. This is the model that Brazil follows, in support of a constitutional right that all Brazilians have to live in their own country with their immediate family. This policy allows them to process residence visas for qualified individuals basically on demand, as long as the degree of relationship is proven. Proxy marriages are not allowed, to prevent marriage fraud. Adult siblings are only allowed if they are disabled and fully dependent on the applicant for support. In this way, Brazil strikes a good balance between encouraging family migration, and discouraging chain migration.
Brazil also administers its version of the Green Card in a way worth copying. There's nothing to prevent permanent residents from becoming naturalized, but no pressure to do so, either. Unlike the US, a permanent resident can stay out of the country as long as he or she wants; if they're absent for over two continuous years they lose their residency, but returning for even a day before the two years pass starts the clock again.
The Special Immigration Channel would be reserved for foreigners who make meaningful, and especially those who make self-sacrificing contributions to the United States of America. This would normally be an individual, not a group honor, with one notable exception. All non-citizens who enlist in the Regular (i.e., not Reserve) Armed Forces of the United States (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard) should receive (unless they choose to decline) their citizenship papers with their Honorable Discharge or, if they choose to make the military their career, at the successful completion of their first enlistment. Anyone who swears to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" and then puts his or her life on the line to do it has conclusively proven his or her worthiness. Republics are notoriously ungrateful; in this we should make an exception.
That’s quite a comprehensive plan, and I think you’ve addressed most of the primary issues. A few things are missing, though, including what to do with the millions of illegal immigrants who are currently in-country, as well as the massive backlog of 600,000+ Indians (in particular) here on H1Bs who are waiting in some cases for 70 years for their green-card “date.” In addition, some sort of expanded guest-worker program is needed for seasonal labor and other workers who intend to split their time between the US and Mexico/Central America/South America. Actually, if this latter category were handled better, many more immigrants in the “illegal” category would leave and then return only on an as-needed basis instead of mostly staying permanently to avoid the need for another border crossing. Up until 1965 or so, Mexicans and other Latin Americans crossed the border back and forth freely with little controversy.
As an aside, I found it interesting that you cited Brazil as an example given that there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of illegal Brazilian immigrants currently in-country, largely in Florida and Massachusetts. I gained exposure to the scale of the illegal Brazilian community when two successive friends of mine married Brazilian women over the past decade or so.
Good questions. the H1Bs are easy: give a Green Card to every one of them who wants one and has passed or can pass a criminal background check -- now, and do it as a one time thing over and above the limits of any new system. They'd pass any point system and they're immediately productive. That's a no-brainer for me. Long term illegals are a tougher question, but I have some ideas on that.
As I've said before, I'm highly skeptical of any "seasonal labor" scheme that subsidizes crops that wouldn't be economical to grow in this country without importing below market rate labor: I think that we should be importing those crops from countries where they CAN be grown economically, and use our land in more productive ways. I suppose that I could go along with a permit plan, where growers were issued permits, one per employee, to bring in a set number of workers with a requirement that they pay prevailing wage and provide a defined benefit package, both to be defined and audited by the Department of Labor, and with crippling sanctions on growers who evaded the system. I doubt that we'd see much seasonal labor under that kind of scheme, but I'd be comfortable that the seasonal labor that we did see was being treated fairly.
I know Brazil well, because that's where I live, and I've experienced the immigration system as a legal immigrant and a naturalized Brazilian -- I'm a dual citizen now. I was impressed with the way I was treated, and impressed with the way that the hundreds of Venezuelan refugees who were being processed at the same time I was were treated, too.
The illegal Brazilian communities in the US are an example of how susceptible the US immigration (non) system is to being gamed. Obviously, no Brazilian has "a justified fear of persecution", and no Brazilian qualifies for asylum under any sane interpretation of international law. Brazil itself is even a haven for refugees. Most of the Brazilians in the US also aren't close to poor: the majority of them belong to what in Brazil are called "The New Middle Class", the people who advanced from poverty to lower middle class lifestyles during the twelve years that the PT was in power, under Lula and Dilma Rousseff.
There is, for lack of a better term, an illegal immigration industry based in the medium sized city of Governador Valadares in the State of Minas Gerais. Technically I suppose that you could call it "organized crime" because it IS organized and it IS illegal -- in the US, if not exactly in Brazil -- but that conjures up images of mafiosi and drug lords, and for the most part, it's not that. It's more like a bunch of entrepreneurs in a reasonably prosperous area who realized that there was money to be made in gaming the US immigration system, and a lot of people who could afford (sometimes probably with help) their services. A large percentage of illegal Brazilians in the US are from Valadares and its environs -- so many, in fact, that when the US does send a deportation flight to Brazil, it doesn't land in São Paulo, Rio, or Brasília. It lands in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, an easy 214 mile bus ride to Governador Valadares. The passengers can be home for dinner.
I agree that the vast majority of H1Bs should be granted green cards immediately. They’re productive, educated, generally law-abiding taxpayers who are huge net benefit to the country.
I don’t think the US should abandon agricultural production of any sort merely because bringing in the harvest of a particular crop requires labor that most Americans are currently unwilling to perform. I see it as a national security issue. If things get bad enough (I hope they don’t) and there’s a true, broad-based national food production emergency, Americans *will* step in to perform the required tasks. Fortunately, we’ve never reached that point so far. The limiting factor to me is and should be water availability. Growing cotton in Arizona, for example, seems absurd to me.
I know plenty of illegal Brazilian immigrants from Manaus and Coritiba, even …
To add a thought: Current Brazilian migration to the US seems analogous to Italian migration throughout the early to mid-20th century. It’s just that there’s no Ellis Island, rubber-stamp legal immigration available to Brazilians, so they come or stay illegally via illegal crossings and visa overstays, respectively. The low end of lower middle class apparently isn’t very attractive to them, as it wasn’t to 20th century waves of Italian immigrants. Neither group was or is starving.
Italian immigrants as a group unfortunately went on to become among the most strident, bigoted opponents to further immigration. It’s a cycle of violence of sorts. They felt badly-treated and hold their nominally “legal” Ellis Island entry as some sort of badge of honor that confers a right to pull up the ladder behind them.
I’m grossly over-generalizing, of course, given that my information is merely anecdotal/observational.
One additional thought: I know a fair amount about illegal Brazilian immigration to the US because, following my divorce from a Sicilian immigrant, I was presented with a few Brazilian women for green-card marriages by my friends who were married to Brazilian women.:)
I can't think of a single crop requiring stoop labor that not growing here would be a matter of national security. A lettuce crisis? A strawberry disaster? Nah. And if it makes economic sense to mechanize it, the growers will. I consider Mexico to be a highly reliable source for not only our uneconomical agricultural products, but also for a lot of the manufactured goods and subassemblies that we used to buy from them and moved to China. Now, there's a national security issue for you.
With you on Arizona, and the Imperial Valley of California for that matter. If we don't do something proactive about the Colorado River very soon, lack of water is going to make the important decisions for us, and not in ways that we'd choose.
Thanks for the response and clarifications. Agree that getting clear on definitions is going to be vital in the immigration debate. To your points in rough order...
Well, if it's an actual *crisis* it's been a crisis (on and off) for decades. Typically, when I see that word used it means something drastic and that something has changed, a turning point has been reached, and so on. In particular, a substantial sudden change for the worse. But if you want to use it to mean "a problem", I guess I can live with that. E.g. we've had a nuclear weapons *crisis* for 70 years.
Having said that, to be sure, I agree with you: it *is* a significant problem. Not one to be dismissed. I'll note, as an aside, it unfortunately has gotten swept up into the culture war agenda. So, whereas once upon a time Dems and the GOP could actually work on comprehensive immigration legislation, they no longer can. And, I'd assign something like 80% of the blame for the impasse on the GOP.
Next, OK, good, I understand your definition. I try to use the term "open immigration" policy to describe what you've stated (because "open borders" conveys the idea that there are literally no border controls - like pre-1924 - which is, of course, precisely why the right uses the term). From here it gets complicated. What, exactly, is the background check? Who is allowed in? What's the exact process? And so on.
Polling seems dependent on precise wording. For example, if I used your descriptions above, I expect you'd get a good chunk of the left to agree. However, the minute you start qualifying ("minimal background check, plenty of bad actors are likely to get in", "can come in for any reason at all, no hardships required", etc.) I'll bet you 100:1 you get a lot of backpedaling. Interestingly, I was reading a Cato Inst (not a friend of the left) analysis and polling on the subject and even they say a majority of Dems are *against* the policy you've described (well, at least as far as I can discern it - again, wording).
I'm glad you agree that good-faith discussion is a must. It's so hard to come by these days. (And, sorry, again I'd have to say the Trumpist right takes the cake in terms of bad faith.) My own views are surprisingly ambivalent on the subject. If I were Grand Poobah, I'd create a bi-partisan panel of immigration nerds and say "go figure it out". Should there be reasonably strong border controls? Yep. But should there be a rational process for immigration that's not ridiculously burdensome? Yep. Do we have to distinguish between economic refugees and political and other refugees? Yep. For the latter, I think we need to have a sensible and caring process; either, the US is a beacon of hope for the world or we're just talking crap. Anyhow, the over-the-top passion some folks have on the subject seems weird to me.
I guess I should stop there. Good chat; happy to keep going if you are.
You're so right about how horrible it is that this has fallen into the culture wars. That's one of my two big frustrations. The other one is that THIS AIN'T BRAIN SURGERY!!!!! Other countries have figured out how to do this: they have good ideas that we could just copy, if we would just climb down off our barricades and talk. " If I were Grand Poobah, I'd create a bi-partisan panel of immigration nerds and say "go figure it out"." You've absolute got my vote for that.
I live in Brazil. Left and Right reached consensus on immigration here long ago, and while Lula and Bolsonaro disagree on just about everything else, there's no light between them on immigration. It's a non-issue. This country has a more liberal policy than the US on asylum and admitting people on humanitarian grounds, with special concern for natural disasters and stateless people. There are a lot of Afghan and Syrian refugees, a lot of Haitian refugees, and, especially where I live, a LOT of Venezuelan refugees. They're processed quickly and respectfully, for the most part, and have labor cards for legal work within a couple of weeks, if they're determined to be eligible to stay. Brazil follows general international "first safe country" principles: people admitted on humanitarian grounds are free to move about the country and to engage in international travel if they clear it with the Federal Police, but if they leave without advising the Federal Police, they're assumed to be looking for a better deal somewhere else, and to have relinquished their humanitarian status. They can't come back.
People with a Brazilian parent, spouse, or child can request permanent residency. I married a Brazilian in July 2017, in the US. We registered our marriage at the Brazilian Consulate that month, I had my resident visa in August, and I moved to Brazil in November. While Brazil is very liberal with immediate family, it has built-in safeguards in the system to prevent chain migration: people entering the country this way can bring parents, grandparents, and minor children. They can only bring adult siblings who are disabled and totally dependent on the immigrant.
One of the worst aspects of the US system that doesn't get enough attention is the way it abuses LEGAL immigrants. A Brazilian marrying an American here and doing what I did in reverse would probably have to wait at least a year for the similar visa, and be treated with a great deal more suspicion.
Non-family based immigration is based strictly on skills. A potential immigrant needs to have a job offer in hand from a Brazilian employer. This skews non-family immigration strongly toward STEM and other technical fields, if in a rather heavyhanded way. Illegal immigration is controlled through stringently enforced employer penalties for hiring illegals, and does not seem to exist in any meaningful way.
A permanent resident foreigner in Brazil has all of the non-political rights of a citizen and is under no pressure to become a citizen, although s/he may, within one to four years. Unless from a Portuguese-speaking country, the candidate has to prove the ability to speak, read, and write Portuguese at about high school graduate level to be naturalized; the language requirement is lifted after a person has been a permanent resident for fifteen years.
Canada and Australia have a point-system based evaluation system for non-humanitarian immigration that I like more than Brazil's. It gives points for age, language ability in the national languages (Canada), level of education, field(s) of study, professional achievements, and other criteria.
My ideal immigration regime would include an asylum and humanitarian regime more like Brazil's, processing speed like Brazil's, family admission policies like Brazil's, treatment of long-term permanent residents like Brazil's. and a point system for all other immigration, like Canada's.
In the US, there WERE health checks before 1924, which were often applied in a discriminatory way, especially against what was explained as "feeblemindedness". My reference earlier to 1870 was to that pre-1924 system. Whether in 1870 (pop. 38.9 M) or 1920 (pop. 106 M), we were a rapidly industrializing country with a chronic labor shortage that needed vast armies of unskilled labor to staff new and growing factories. We're now a post-industrial country of 331.4 M, and I don't think that massive unskilled immigration is relevant to our current reality. If anything, I think it would tend to perpetuate abuses and inefficiencies that we should be fixing instead.
Wow, great info. I was somewhat aware of what Canada is doing, but know nothing about Brazil. Fascinating. To your point, these other countries can get this stuff done...why can't we? And, it's not just immigration. Other places don't get rabid when it comes to other issues, e.g. abortion. (Interesting aside: some polling in Canada shows that many Canadians are concerned that action on abortion in the US will spill over into Canada and cause unrest.) Now even health care is off limits to constructive reform. Just ask Chuck Grassley, if you can catch him in a moment of candor.
Well, we know why we can't get it done. Once something gets sucked into the culture war tornado, it ain't happening.
Also agree with your last point: policies can't be static. What made sense in 1922 doesn't necessarily work for 2022.
P.S. cool you're living in Brazil now. Whereabouts? Have a friend with relatives in Salvador. Got that election coming up...should be interesting. You'll have to tell us if Bolsonaro is as nuts as he is portrayed.
I live in Manaus, where the Solimões meets the Rio Negro to form the Amazon proper. It's a water world with a city of over 2 million in the middle of it, and no land connections to most of the rest of the country. A wonderful, fascinating, sometimes frustrating place.
Salvador's a lovely city. My husband is about to get his law degree and is jobhunting; the Northeast coast is a definite possibility for us.
Bolsonaro is worse than he's portrayed, hard as that may be to believe. This is the first election in which I get to vote, and I'm looking forward to voting against him. Manaus has been full of smoke for the past month, and I think it's because deforestation has picked up because the environmental criminals are afraid that he WILL lose, and are trying to destroy as much as they can, while they can. A second term for him would be an environmental, political, and moral disaster.
I don't mean to suggest that Australia, Canada, and Brazil have immigration solved: they still have problems (in Brazil, mainly resource-based), and there's the issue of scale. None of those countries are anything like the magnet for immigration that the US is. The US not only has to find the will to reform, it has to come up with the money. It won't be cheap, and the tendency ever since Bill Clinton left the Presidency for both parties has been to just issue debt for public services and let future generations worry about it rather than to ask people to pay their fair share. But that's a different discussion!
Thanks for the good conversation. Enjoy your weekend. 🤝
I want to nominate both of you as Grand Poobahs of the newly established revised U.S. Immigration Policy. I just don’t understand why the two of you have both come up with tangible ideas in a short amount of time but we can’t seem to elect people that have the ability and desire to do the same? You both give me hope.
Thanks for hanging with us! And here I thought the two of us were just yacking away. :-)
BTW, I found an interesting analysis on some aspects of the border issue. If nothing else, it has some choice data points and good insights, some of which are surprising. Their view is that some of our policies are doing the opposite of what was intended.
Sure, but be careful: who, exactly, actually supports *open borders*?
You may be able to find a handful of (non-crank) examples, but for the most part no significant Dems support it.
Also, one must keep in mind that the BOrdER CRisIS!!! is largely a right-wing fabrication. Migration patterns and causes are complex. Spikes are often the result of things that happened years before and many factors are not under the control of the gov't. Decades ago there were tons of crossings (or so it's estimated). The recent apprehension rate is similar to a spike in 1986 (when the apprehension % was much lower).
First of all, the border crisis is real, it'a not a fabrication of anybody, although the Right uses it for their own ends, and the Left just closes their eyes and denies it. I'm only aware of one country in the world that is not a failed state that has numbers of illegal immigrants comparable to ours. That country is Mexico, and it only allows them there because of the certainty that they're passing through -- to us. That is NOT a normal situation or, in my view, a stable one, or an acceptable one.
Second, when I talk about someone believing in "open borders", I mean something extremely specific: the belief that anyone who wants to migrate to the United States should be permitted to enter and settle, probably after a background check, and perhaps after passing a health screening (although that, I expect, would be highly debatable and hotly debated), but with no quotas, no language requirements, no pre-existing connection to the country, no screening for desired skills, and no exclusions for lack of them. In other words, the immigration policy we had in 1870, computerized and minus the racism of that era. I think that I've just described the immigration policy desired by a large proportion of Democrats, and by an even larger proportion of the Left in general
That's a perfectly valid position for purposes of debate, and I would be genuinely interested in knowing how your views diverge for it. What's not valid is obfuscation on the point: people who believe in what I've outlined should own it, not evade it. Intellectual dishonesty will not move the debate forward to any useful place.
The Republican Party has become the party of Trump - characterized by a combination of ignorance, racism, and bigotry. There is no way to hold rational policy discussions with such people. I have no problem with expanding the criteria for refugee status to include humanitarian reasons. People coming from countries other than Mexico more often than not are fleeing not only dire poverty but life threatening poverty due to natural disasters and also violence, although the violence may be related to many factors in addition to politics or war.
I agree with you on the uselessness of negotiating with what the Republican Party has become. It's not salvageable, and needs to be replaced with a new Center-Right party that believes in democracy and the Constitution for the health, and quite possibly the survival, of the country.
I'm not necessarily opposed to expanding overall immigration once we fix our legal immigration system, and can understand what our economic needs really are. I am opposed to using immigration as a form of international social work. We no longer need armies of the unskilled to staff factories that no longer exist. We should be helping people solve their problems at home; we have no obligation and it makes no sense to move them and their problems here.
“I think that I've just described the immigration policy desired by a large proportion of Democrats, and by an even larger proportion of the Left in general.” I don’t think the proportions who hold such views are “large,” although the left flank that does think that way has outsize influence. It would be interesting to conduct a massive poll on the issue. I’d guess that 80%+ of the public wants immigration controls.
From my perspective, the larger problem is that the Right refuses to propose reasonable solutions because immigration is a strong, effective and convenient wedge issue.
We do, in fact, need the armies of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, virtually all of whom are employed under the table if they’re willing to work. Ironically, the biggest consumers of their labor are MAGA contractors and farmers. Strip out illegal immigrants, and GDP would drop several percentage points.
Sorry for the delay in responding -- I had a mountain of housework to get through. But it did give me a chance to get my thoughts in order. I'm highly skeptical that we need "armies of unskilled and semi-skilled workers", certainly not at 19th Century levels. We are going to need a certain, probably rather large, number of unskilled workers in certain areas going forward, but it's essential to ensure that they're not being brought in so that we can keep doing things that we shouldn't be doing anyway, like underpaying food service employees as a matter of policy, or growing strawberries and almonds in the desert.
My biggest frustration with immigration reform is that it's frozen in the neverending culture war. My next biggest frustration is that objectively, it's not a hard problem: most of our peer democratic nations, not only rich ones but middle-income ones as well, have solved it to the satisfaction of their citizens, usually years ago. (Sweden, we learned last week, is a partial exception to this but not in their specific "best practice" that appeals to me.) That means that we're a huge outlier, which is bad, but it also means that we don't have to invent much, because there are lots of best practices out there that we can adopt and adapt. I'll be calling out Australia, Brazil, Canada, and Sweden, because there are aspects of all of their systems that I think can teach us something.
One last introductory point that neither side never gets around to discussing: real, effective immigration reform is going to cost A LOT OF MONEY. Some of it will come from funds that are misspent now, but Congress has been starving the immigration services for a long time, and any new system is going to need a lot of additional funding.
I think that our Immigration System should comprise four Immigration Channels: An Ordinary Immigration Channel, a Humanitarian Immigration Channel, a Family Unification Immigration Channel, and a Special Immigration Channel. Basic ground rule: annual admission to the Family Unification Channel is everyone who qualifies; annual admissions in the other channels can be set by policymakers, and can be redistributed within a Channel if necessary, but annual admissions in each Channel will only consider the policies for that Channel, and not affect the numbers permitted to the other Channels. So for example, a surge in asylum grants in the Humanitarian Channel may mean fewer slots available for refugees, because asylum status and refugee status are elements of that Channel, but it won't affect numbers in the other three Channels.
The State Department, in consultation with Defense and Homeland Security, should place the nations of the world on one of four lists, that should be universally publicized and reviewed every six months. More politically correct names may be found, but effectively the lists will be: 1. Authoritarian States that limit or forbid movement of their citizens and/or contact with foreigners; 2. Failed States where there is no effective civil authority or diplomatic activity; 3. States suffering major natural disasters, where normal civil and diplomatic services are disrupted in the judgement of the State Department, and 4. Normal States. Residents of States on Lists 1 and 2, and any on List 3 specifically qualified by the State Department, may apply for admission to the United States in the Humanitarian Channel at a port of entry, i.e., at the border. Anyone from a country other than those MUST apply for admission at a US diplomatic mission in their country of residence, and will be denied admission if they present themselves at a port of entry without that pre-clearance.
Admission to the Ordinary Channel would be via a point system. In Canada and Australia, points are given for such things as youth, level of education, field of study, ability to speak the national language, professional and/or artistic accomplishments, etc. We should also grant points for non-academic skills, like toolmaking, plumbing and hydraulics, electrical, repair of large industrial equipment, and so on. The Labor and Commerce Departments have statisticians who can provide invaluable information and analysis on what the volume and distribution of this Channel should be; they can also estimate our need for unskilled labor, and a way could be found to fill that need through the point system also.
Admission to the Humanitarian Channel would be either through the asylum process as defined by International Law -- which would apply mostly but not entirely to citizens of the countries on the first list above -- and refugees from wars or natural disasters. In Brazil, these people are housed near their point of entry for processing, and are released in a week or two with working papers already in hand. Our aim should be to do the same. In Sweden, they are provided with housing and a living allowance, enrolled in language training if they don't speak Swedish, and have a case worker who works on job placement for them, including training if necessary, and checks in with them on their progress regularly. If they blow off their language training and/or consistently refuse the jobs that are offered, they may lose their government benefits, or suffer additional sanctions. Again, I think that this is a model worth emulating. I would also eliminate Temporary Protective Status: if a person is admitted, s/he is admitted, and it makes no sense to put that person in continuous anxiety, or spend government resources trying to enforce this half in/half out status.
The Family Unification Channel would be for spouses, children, parents, and grandparents (and grandchildren, if dependent on the above) of citizens and permanent residents. This is the model that Brazil follows, in support of a constitutional right that all Brazilians have to live in their own country with their immediate family. This policy allows them to process residence visas for qualified individuals basically on demand, as long as the degree of relationship is proven. Proxy marriages are not allowed, to prevent marriage fraud. Adult siblings are only allowed if they are disabled and fully dependent on the applicant for support. In this way, Brazil strikes a good balance between encouraging family migration, and discouraging chain migration.
Brazil also administers its version of the Green Card in a way worth copying. There's nothing to prevent permanent residents from becoming naturalized, but no pressure to do so, either. Unlike the US, a permanent resident can stay out of the country as long as he or she wants; if they're absent for over two continuous years they lose their residency, but returning for even a day before the two years pass starts the clock again.
The Special Immigration Channel would be reserved for foreigners who make meaningful, and especially those who make self-sacrificing contributions to the United States of America. This would normally be an individual, not a group honor, with one notable exception. All non-citizens who enlist in the Regular (i.e., not Reserve) Armed Forces of the United States (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard) should receive (unless they choose to decline) their citizenship papers with their Honorable Discharge or, if they choose to make the military their career, at the successful completion of their first enlistment. Anyone who swears to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" and then puts his or her life on the line to do it has conclusively proven his or her worthiness. Republics are notoriously ungrateful; in this we should make an exception.
That’s quite a comprehensive plan, and I think you’ve addressed most of the primary issues. A few things are missing, though, including what to do with the millions of illegal immigrants who are currently in-country, as well as the massive backlog of 600,000+ Indians (in particular) here on H1Bs who are waiting in some cases for 70 years for their green-card “date.” In addition, some sort of expanded guest-worker program is needed for seasonal labor and other workers who intend to split their time between the US and Mexico/Central America/South America. Actually, if this latter category were handled better, many more immigrants in the “illegal” category would leave and then return only on an as-needed basis instead of mostly staying permanently to avoid the need for another border crossing. Up until 1965 or so, Mexicans and other Latin Americans crossed the border back and forth freely with little controversy.
As an aside, I found it interesting that you cited Brazil as an example given that there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of illegal Brazilian immigrants currently in-country, largely in Florida and Massachusetts. I gained exposure to the scale of the illegal Brazilian community when two successive friends of mine married Brazilian women over the past decade or so.
Good questions. the H1Bs are easy: give a Green Card to every one of them who wants one and has passed or can pass a criminal background check -- now, and do it as a one time thing over and above the limits of any new system. They'd pass any point system and they're immediately productive. That's a no-brainer for me. Long term illegals are a tougher question, but I have some ideas on that.
As I've said before, I'm highly skeptical of any "seasonal labor" scheme that subsidizes crops that wouldn't be economical to grow in this country without importing below market rate labor: I think that we should be importing those crops from countries where they CAN be grown economically, and use our land in more productive ways. I suppose that I could go along with a permit plan, where growers were issued permits, one per employee, to bring in a set number of workers with a requirement that they pay prevailing wage and provide a defined benefit package, both to be defined and audited by the Department of Labor, and with crippling sanctions on growers who evaded the system. I doubt that we'd see much seasonal labor under that kind of scheme, but I'd be comfortable that the seasonal labor that we did see was being treated fairly.
I know Brazil well, because that's where I live, and I've experienced the immigration system as a legal immigrant and a naturalized Brazilian -- I'm a dual citizen now. I was impressed with the way I was treated, and impressed with the way that the hundreds of Venezuelan refugees who were being processed at the same time I was were treated, too.
The illegal Brazilian communities in the US are an example of how susceptible the US immigration (non) system is to being gamed. Obviously, no Brazilian has "a justified fear of persecution", and no Brazilian qualifies for asylum under any sane interpretation of international law. Brazil itself is even a haven for refugees. Most of the Brazilians in the US also aren't close to poor: the majority of them belong to what in Brazil are called "The New Middle Class", the people who advanced from poverty to lower middle class lifestyles during the twelve years that the PT was in power, under Lula and Dilma Rousseff.
There is, for lack of a better term, an illegal immigration industry based in the medium sized city of Governador Valadares in the State of Minas Gerais. Technically I suppose that you could call it "organized crime" because it IS organized and it IS illegal -- in the US, if not exactly in Brazil -- but that conjures up images of mafiosi and drug lords, and for the most part, it's not that. It's more like a bunch of entrepreneurs in a reasonably prosperous area who realized that there was money to be made in gaming the US immigration system, and a lot of people who could afford (sometimes probably with help) their services. A large percentage of illegal Brazilians in the US are from Valadares and its environs -- so many, in fact, that when the US does send a deportation flight to Brazil, it doesn't land in São Paulo, Rio, or Brasília. It lands in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, an easy 214 mile bus ride to Governador Valadares. The passengers can be home for dinner.
I agree that the vast majority of H1Bs should be granted green cards immediately. They’re productive, educated, generally law-abiding taxpayers who are huge net benefit to the country.
I don’t think the US should abandon agricultural production of any sort merely because bringing in the harvest of a particular crop requires labor that most Americans are currently unwilling to perform. I see it as a national security issue. If things get bad enough (I hope they don’t) and there’s a true, broad-based national food production emergency, Americans *will* step in to perform the required tasks. Fortunately, we’ve never reached that point so far. The limiting factor to me is and should be water availability. Growing cotton in Arizona, for example, seems absurd to me.
I know plenty of illegal Brazilian immigrants from Manaus and Coritiba, even …
To add a thought: Current Brazilian migration to the US seems analogous to Italian migration throughout the early to mid-20th century. It’s just that there’s no Ellis Island, rubber-stamp legal immigration available to Brazilians, so they come or stay illegally via illegal crossings and visa overstays, respectively. The low end of lower middle class apparently isn’t very attractive to them, as it wasn’t to 20th century waves of Italian immigrants. Neither group was or is starving.
Italian immigrants as a group unfortunately went on to become among the most strident, bigoted opponents to further immigration. It’s a cycle of violence of sorts. They felt badly-treated and hold their nominally “legal” Ellis Island entry as some sort of badge of honor that confers a right to pull up the ladder behind them.
I’m grossly over-generalizing, of course, given that my information is merely anecdotal/observational.
One additional thought: I know a fair amount about illegal Brazilian immigration to the US because, following my divorce from a Sicilian immigrant, I was presented with a few Brazilian women for green-card marriages by my friends who were married to Brazilian women.:)
Good discussion -- thanks.
I can't think of a single crop requiring stoop labor that not growing here would be a matter of national security. A lettuce crisis? A strawberry disaster? Nah. And if it makes economic sense to mechanize it, the growers will. I consider Mexico to be a highly reliable source for not only our uneconomical agricultural products, but also for a lot of the manufactured goods and subassemblies that we used to buy from them and moved to China. Now, there's a national security issue for you.
With you on Arizona, and the Imperial Valley of California for that matter. If we don't do something proactive about the Colorado River very soon, lack of water is going to make the important decisions for us, and not in ways that we'd choose.
Thanks for the response and clarifications. Agree that getting clear on definitions is going to be vital in the immigration debate. To your points in rough order...
Well, if it's an actual *crisis* it's been a crisis (on and off) for decades. Typically, when I see that word used it means something drastic and that something has changed, a turning point has been reached, and so on. In particular, a substantial sudden change for the worse. But if you want to use it to mean "a problem", I guess I can live with that. E.g. we've had a nuclear weapons *crisis* for 70 years.
Having said that, to be sure, I agree with you: it *is* a significant problem. Not one to be dismissed. I'll note, as an aside, it unfortunately has gotten swept up into the culture war agenda. So, whereas once upon a time Dems and the GOP could actually work on comprehensive immigration legislation, they no longer can. And, I'd assign something like 80% of the blame for the impasse on the GOP.
Next, OK, good, I understand your definition. I try to use the term "open immigration" policy to describe what you've stated (because "open borders" conveys the idea that there are literally no border controls - like pre-1924 - which is, of course, precisely why the right uses the term). From here it gets complicated. What, exactly, is the background check? Who is allowed in? What's the exact process? And so on.
Polling seems dependent on precise wording. For example, if I used your descriptions above, I expect you'd get a good chunk of the left to agree. However, the minute you start qualifying ("minimal background check, plenty of bad actors are likely to get in", "can come in for any reason at all, no hardships required", etc.) I'll bet you 100:1 you get a lot of backpedaling. Interestingly, I was reading a Cato Inst (not a friend of the left) analysis and polling on the subject and even they say a majority of Dems are *against* the policy you've described (well, at least as far as I can discern it - again, wording).
I'm glad you agree that good-faith discussion is a must. It's so hard to come by these days. (And, sorry, again I'd have to say the Trumpist right takes the cake in terms of bad faith.) My own views are surprisingly ambivalent on the subject. If I were Grand Poobah, I'd create a bi-partisan panel of immigration nerds and say "go figure it out". Should there be reasonably strong border controls? Yep. But should there be a rational process for immigration that's not ridiculously burdensome? Yep. Do we have to distinguish between economic refugees and political and other refugees? Yep. For the latter, I think we need to have a sensible and caring process; either, the US is a beacon of hope for the world or we're just talking crap. Anyhow, the over-the-top passion some folks have on the subject seems weird to me.
I guess I should stop there. Good chat; happy to keep going if you are.
You're so right about how horrible it is that this has fallen into the culture wars. That's one of my two big frustrations. The other one is that THIS AIN'T BRAIN SURGERY!!!!! Other countries have figured out how to do this: they have good ideas that we could just copy, if we would just climb down off our barricades and talk. " If I were Grand Poobah, I'd create a bi-partisan panel of immigration nerds and say "go figure it out"." You've absolute got my vote for that.
I live in Brazil. Left and Right reached consensus on immigration here long ago, and while Lula and Bolsonaro disagree on just about everything else, there's no light between them on immigration. It's a non-issue. This country has a more liberal policy than the US on asylum and admitting people on humanitarian grounds, with special concern for natural disasters and stateless people. There are a lot of Afghan and Syrian refugees, a lot of Haitian refugees, and, especially where I live, a LOT of Venezuelan refugees. They're processed quickly and respectfully, for the most part, and have labor cards for legal work within a couple of weeks, if they're determined to be eligible to stay. Brazil follows general international "first safe country" principles: people admitted on humanitarian grounds are free to move about the country and to engage in international travel if they clear it with the Federal Police, but if they leave without advising the Federal Police, they're assumed to be looking for a better deal somewhere else, and to have relinquished their humanitarian status. They can't come back.
People with a Brazilian parent, spouse, or child can request permanent residency. I married a Brazilian in July 2017, in the US. We registered our marriage at the Brazilian Consulate that month, I had my resident visa in August, and I moved to Brazil in November. While Brazil is very liberal with immediate family, it has built-in safeguards in the system to prevent chain migration: people entering the country this way can bring parents, grandparents, and minor children. They can only bring adult siblings who are disabled and totally dependent on the immigrant.
One of the worst aspects of the US system that doesn't get enough attention is the way it abuses LEGAL immigrants. A Brazilian marrying an American here and doing what I did in reverse would probably have to wait at least a year for the similar visa, and be treated with a great deal more suspicion.
Non-family based immigration is based strictly on skills. A potential immigrant needs to have a job offer in hand from a Brazilian employer. This skews non-family immigration strongly toward STEM and other technical fields, if in a rather heavyhanded way. Illegal immigration is controlled through stringently enforced employer penalties for hiring illegals, and does not seem to exist in any meaningful way.
A permanent resident foreigner in Brazil has all of the non-political rights of a citizen and is under no pressure to become a citizen, although s/he may, within one to four years. Unless from a Portuguese-speaking country, the candidate has to prove the ability to speak, read, and write Portuguese at about high school graduate level to be naturalized; the language requirement is lifted after a person has been a permanent resident for fifteen years.
Canada and Australia have a point-system based evaluation system for non-humanitarian immigration that I like more than Brazil's. It gives points for age, language ability in the national languages (Canada), level of education, field(s) of study, professional achievements, and other criteria.
My ideal immigration regime would include an asylum and humanitarian regime more like Brazil's, processing speed like Brazil's, family admission policies like Brazil's, treatment of long-term permanent residents like Brazil's. and a point system for all other immigration, like Canada's.
In the US, there WERE health checks before 1924, which were often applied in a discriminatory way, especially against what was explained as "feeblemindedness". My reference earlier to 1870 was to that pre-1924 system. Whether in 1870 (pop. 38.9 M) or 1920 (pop. 106 M), we were a rapidly industrializing country with a chronic labor shortage that needed vast armies of unskilled labor to staff new and growing factories. We're now a post-industrial country of 331.4 M, and I don't think that massive unskilled immigration is relevant to our current reality. If anything, I think it would tend to perpetuate abuses and inefficiencies that we should be fixing instead.
Over to you.
Wow, great info. I was somewhat aware of what Canada is doing, but know nothing about Brazil. Fascinating. To your point, these other countries can get this stuff done...why can't we? And, it's not just immigration. Other places don't get rabid when it comes to other issues, e.g. abortion. (Interesting aside: some polling in Canada shows that many Canadians are concerned that action on abortion in the US will spill over into Canada and cause unrest.) Now even health care is off limits to constructive reform. Just ask Chuck Grassley, if you can catch him in a moment of candor.
Well, we know why we can't get it done. Once something gets sucked into the culture war tornado, it ain't happening.
Also agree with your last point: policies can't be static. What made sense in 1922 doesn't necessarily work for 2022.
P.S. cool you're living in Brazil now. Whereabouts? Have a friend with relatives in Salvador. Got that election coming up...should be interesting. You'll have to tell us if Bolsonaro is as nuts as he is portrayed.
I live in Manaus, where the Solimões meets the Rio Negro to form the Amazon proper. It's a water world with a city of over 2 million in the middle of it, and no land connections to most of the rest of the country. A wonderful, fascinating, sometimes frustrating place.
Salvador's a lovely city. My husband is about to get his law degree and is jobhunting; the Northeast coast is a definite possibility for us.
Bolsonaro is worse than he's portrayed, hard as that may be to believe. This is the first election in which I get to vote, and I'm looking forward to voting against him. Manaus has been full of smoke for the past month, and I think it's because deforestation has picked up because the environmental criminals are afraid that he WILL lose, and are trying to destroy as much as they can, while they can. A second term for him would be an environmental, political, and moral disaster.
I don't mean to suggest that Australia, Canada, and Brazil have immigration solved: they still have problems (in Brazil, mainly resource-based), and there's the issue of scale. None of those countries are anything like the magnet for immigration that the US is. The US not only has to find the will to reform, it has to come up with the money. It won't be cheap, and the tendency ever since Bill Clinton left the Presidency for both parties has been to just issue debt for public services and let future generations worry about it rather than to ask people to pay their fair share. But that's a different discussion!
Thanks for the good conversation. Enjoy your weekend. 🤝
I want to nominate both of you as Grand Poobahs of the newly established revised U.S. Immigration Policy. I just don’t understand why the two of you have both come up with tangible ideas in a short amount of time but we can’t seem to elect people that have the ability and desire to do the same? You both give me hope.
Thanks for hanging with us! And here I thought the two of us were just yacking away. :-)
BTW, I found an interesting analysis on some aspects of the border issue. If nothing else, it has some choice data points and good insights, some of which are surprising. Their view is that some of our policies are doing the opposite of what was intended.
Check it out:
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/rising-border-encounters-in-2021