Wednesday, April 03, 2019

The Democratic field must not dodge on immigration

Last week on The Weeds podcast, Dara Lind, who is one of the best immigration reporters around, just about begged the crowd of Democratic presidential hopefuls to take up her subject. Well it looks as if Julian Castro has been first out the gate with the others not lagging far behind.

According to the Washington Post:

Castro says his plan is premised on the idea that the southern border is more secure than it has been in decades. The former head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and mayor of San Antonio would end border wall construction, allow deported veterans who honorably served to return to the United States, increase refu­gee quotas and make it easier for family members to be reunited with relatives who are U.S. residents. He would ask Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States, including young people who received protections under the Obama administration and those covered by the Temporary Protected Status program.

He said he would also create a “21st-century Marshall Plan” for Central America to attack the woeful conditions there, seen as the root cause of the recent increase in asylum seekers. For those who reach the country’s interior, he would reconstitute the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, by reassigning its interior enforcement functions to other agencies, including the Justice Department. He would also re-prioritize Customs and Border Protection efforts to focus on drug and human trafficking instead of interior law enforcement.

Castro said he would impose a civil legal process for sorting out refu­gee applications and deportations, with an emphasis on jailing and removing only those with criminal records.

Frankly I would hope this would be a minimum Democratic program. Objective number one has to be ensure realism, humanity, and compassion in our government's immigration policy.

But in order to appear serious to me, any Democrat has to do so much more.
  • It's time for Democrats to make the argument that immigration is good for the country. It is. And we should know this in our bones, since aside for surviving Native people, all of us derived from somewhere else. There are a couple of flavors of pro-immigration argumentation that bolder Democrats could resort to:
    1. The U.S. benefits from what amounts to international brain drain when we admit eager immigrants. Here's one such perspective from Noah Smith in Bloomberg News:

      As opportunities to get rich in China proliferated, Chinese students who came to the U.S. increasingly went back after graduation. But now the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut is hitting a rough patch. ... The country [China] is growing increasingly repressive, not just toward the Uighurs and other minorities, but toward the general public. Even discussion of economic policy is now often off-limits. The country may yet regain its economic footing and resume opening up, but for now all of the trends look bad. ... That there are so many elites who lack confidence in China’s stability and prospects should be a warning for the regime, but for the U.S. it could provide an unexpected bounty. If the U.S. were to welcome those Chinese people and make them Americans, it would receive a healthy dose of entrepreneurial talent.

    2. Here's a straight up pitch for open borders from New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo:

      ... open borders isn’t just a good plan — it’s the only chance we’ve got. America is an aging nation with a stagnant population. We have ample land to house lots more people, but we are increasingly short of workers. And on the global stage, we face two colossi — India and China — which, with their billions, are projected to outstrip American economic hegemony within two decades.

      How will we ever compete with such giants? The same way we always have: by inviting the world’s most enthusiastic and creative people — including the people willing to walk here, to risk disease and degradation and death to land here — to live out their best life under liberty.

    Both these pro-immigration arguments are prudential, but they are not therefore false or inhumane.
  • Democrats need to get serious about how we plan to deal with refugees. Unless, contrary to all current evidence, we succeed in limiting the damage from climate change to levels we show no sign of achieving, millions of human beings will be displaced by fire and flood, hunger and thirst over the next few decades. Exactly how many we don't know; estimates vary between 25 million to 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050. Only a relative few will arrive at our borders, but even a relatively small number (say just 5 million perhaps?) will be a crisis unless we prepare to deal with this flow of suffering humanity. Current international humanitarian law wasn't written for climate migrants, but that won't hold desperate people away. Immigrant novelist Laila Lalami begs us to prepare, morally and practically.

    Like other species on this planet, human beings are a migratory type. When they suddenly find themselves in desperate need of physical safety or economic opportunity, they leave home and start over somewhere new. It has always been this way. The earliest stories we tell ourselves are stories of displacement: Adam’s fall from Eden, Moses’ flight from Egypt, Muhammad’s hegira to Medina. Trying to stop this process through the building of walls strikes me as both ineffective and unnatural — like trying to stop a river from flowing.

    I use the simile deliberately. ... As much as it is an economic, a social and a foreign-policy issue, migration is a climate issue.

    Those who are safe from displacement — at least for the moment — must confront the roles they want to play in this unfolding global story. What responsibility do people in America, for example, have toward those who live in places that have been ravaged by wars the American government has started or abetted? What responsibility do they have toward those who have benefited least from industrialization but stand to suffer most? And how do they plan to adapt to global migration?

    We can either blunder toward this reality unconscious and unwarned -- or we can demand our leaders help the country rise to the challenge.
There plenty of smaller tweaks it would be nice to see Democrats talking about.

They can turn the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) back toward its mission of facilitating migrants becoming citizens. (The Trump Department of Homeland Security is using it to slow-walk applications and find people who cheated on their processing.)

They could look into the successful Canadian system of enabling self-organized groups of five individual citizens to sponsor and help integrate new refugee immigrants.

They could make back and forth traffic across US borders easier -- one of the reasons we have so many (10 million?) undocumented people in the country is that successive administrations dammed up the border with walls and militarized cops, so temporary work in the US turned into a permanent relocation for people who might have gone home.

A smarter immigration system would make less use of courts, but the remaining courts could be extracted from the domain of the Department of Justice and made into normal courts with ordinary legal procedures and independent judges who are not subject to the whims of any Attorney General.

We could hope that a Democratic administration would do many of those things -- but we need to ask our crop of candidates to face the big issues: that immigration is both inevitable and also good and desirable and that climate change will mean more refugees and more challenges to our humanity.

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