Some Thoughts on Immigration, Part 1
“There ain’t no asylum here/King Solomon he never lived ‘round here.” – The Clash, “Straight to Hell”
Immigration is a complex and controversial subject. I’m a lawyer who has worked in the humanitarian immigration field, and as I watch Putin’s invasion of Ukraine spur a mass exodus of new refugees, several thoughts come to mind - so many, in fact, that I’m dividing this essay into two parts, the second of which I’ll publish next week. Since most of my immigration work has been with people from Central America, that is my main reference point.
1. The United States is a big country – number three in the world by landmass behind Russia and China, with about three and a half million square miles of land. Even without Alaska and Hawaii, at least twenty European countries could fit within it. Over 80% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas, which comprise about 3% of the total land. Other similar countries are much more densely populated. For example, the United Kingdom has 730 people per square mile, Germany has 608, and France has 308. We, on the other hand, have 93. So there’s plenty of space here. For reference, Germany’s population is about 80 million, and America’s is about 330 million. Over the past several years, about one million immigrants per year have moved to both America and Germany.
2. It’s cliché, but America is a nation of immigrants. If you live in this country, and you’re not Native American, then you or your ancestors all came here within the last 500 years or so. And for the vast majority of that history, the notion of a “right” or “wrong” way to come here didn’t really exist. The first general immigration law wasn’t passed until 1882, and prior to the 1920s, there were no numerical limits on immigration to the US. Of the 25 million immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island from 1880 to World War I, only about 1% were denied entry.
3. America needs immigrants. If it wasn’t already obvious that immigrants keep the country running, it quickly became so during the pandemic. Among other things, immigrants are essential to our food system, and work at every stage of getting nutrition into your belly – they harvest crops, process meat, stock shelves, and prepare food in restaurants. Even before the pandemic, labor shortages for farmwork were a problem. American citizens simply cannot be relied on to do all of this work, which is backbreaking, highly skilled, poorly paid, and socially sneered at. And in economically moribund rural areas across the US, often communities centered around a certain aspect of food production, immigrants are spearheading a revival. Time and time again, the immigrant story in America is one of doing the dirty work that native-born Americans won’t do, in places where native-born Americans won’t live. As the line in our most famous contemporary immigrant story, Hamilton, goes: “Immigrants, we get the job done.”
4. Immigrants’ contribution to America is much greater that merely economic. I have a theory that immigrants are the main thing that sets the US apart from other countries historically, that they are what has made us cool, optimistic, and dynamic. To borrow a familiar phrase, immigrants are actually what make America great. When I think of the immigrants that I’ve known personally and professionally, I’m amazed at their can-do spirit, their boundless energy, and their staggering equanimity in the face of sometimes open hostility from those around them, and the daily reality of life in the shadows of our institutions. When I compare the US to any given country, I usually find that ours is cooler, more optimistic, and dynamic, and that the other country has historically less immigration. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. The immigrant ethic is the American ethic. And of course, some of the greatest Americans were not born here, including Alexander Hamilton himself. I could put a long list here of American immigrants who became rich and famous, but I won’t, because it is better for anyone to be kind and responsible.
5. Which reminds me - the immigrant dream is the American Dream. And I should be more specific. Immigrants who are already rich and accomplished are welcome, but theirs is not the American Dream. The American Dream is the bootstraps dream, the one conservatives love to wax poetic about – starting with nothing and building a life here through hard work and determination. Who knows how many times Ted Cruz has told the story of his father arriving in the US with just $100 sewn into his underwear? He even has it on his website. Only allowing rich and accomplished people to immigrate here is contrary to our fundamental ethos.
6. Asylum is codified in American federal law. If it were not, we would be morally bankrupt as a nation, because it would mean that we are able but unwilling to protect people who are fleeing persecution due to their beliefs or membership in certain groups, like race, nationality, religion, or gender. Indeed, some of the darkest moments in our nation’s history have been when we mistreated potential asylees or refused to hear their claims. An absolutely bedrock ethical principle, in my view, is that the powerful have a duty to treat the powerless humanely (“Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of my brethren you did it to me.” Matthew 25:40). That’s why it’s monstrous to berate waitstaff, and also why we have the eighth amendment.
As far as the proper and legal way to petition for asylum, it is to simply come to the border and request it. This makes sense – if you’re running for your life in your home country, you don’t have the time and luxury to hire an immigration attorney there, gather documents, file an asylum application, and wait the months or years for it to be reviewed. The point of asylum is to save a persecuted person from imminent danger in their homeland.
7. Most people around the world would prefer to live in their own country, if it’s safe, and there’s a future there for them. This is my belief after years of working with immigrants from impoverished, dangerous countries. One’s own country is the home of one’s culture and language and family and friends. In a stable environment, with opportunity, most people don’t have a desire to uproot their lives and go through the immense stress and strain of starting over in another country, cut off both mentally and physically from loved ones.
In a sense then, xenophobia is a form of narcissism. Apparently, many Americans cannot comprehend that people in other countries may not want to live here. In my experience, immigrants from Central America come to our southern border because they have no good options. Their lives are in danger, either from gangs or from abject poverty.
Or take the case of Ukraine, which over the course of a few days has deteriorated into hell on earth. But even before Putin’s invasion, Ukraine was losing population – some 200,000 per year for the last twenty years, according to the World Bank. After all, Ukraine was already Europe’s second-poorest country, right on the border of the EU, and there was a war with Russian-backed separatists going in the east. As difficult as the situation was though, it was nothing like what’s happening now. Predictably, the current outflow from Ukraine has been enormous – some two million people over the past two weeks, the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. My point is that conditions on the ground dictate to a large extent whether people emigrate. The worse things get, the more likely people are to leave. Conversely, the better things get, the more likely people are to stay. Incidentally, it has been interesting to see formerly anti-immigrant, conservative politicians advocating for Ukrainian refugees – I wonder what prompted the change of heart.
One legal footnote: in 1996, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). The goal of the law was to curb undocumented immigration by increasing enforcement. A provision in the law mandated that undocumented immigrants who remain in the US for six months must return to their home country for three years if they wish to apply for legal status. Still worse, those undocumented immigrants who remain in the US for over a year must return to their home country for ten years in order to seek legal status. As Madeline Marshall and Melissa Hirsch note in their article on the law,
[b]efore 1996, Mexican immigrants who came to the US unlawfully were about 50 percent likely to return to Mexico within a year. But in the years that followed, more people started staying in the US, according to data from the Mexican Migration Project. There were around 5 million undocumented immigrants living in the US before IIRIRA. Today, it’s at least double that.
In an effort to punish undocumented immigrants in the US and deter potential immigrants abroad from entering the country, what IIRIRA did instead was to lock undocumented immigrants into the country, preventing them from returning to their countries of origin. Which leads me to another point…
8. When the U.S. government is cruel to immigrants as a policy, it doesn’t seem to have much effect on the number of potential asylees coming here. This makes sense for two reasons. One is that normal people in other countries don’t pay close attention to the ins and outs of American immigration policy. And secondly, if someone’s situation is desperate, that person will flee no matter what. What cruelty as a policy does though is blacken our reputation throughout the world and alienate good people who love America and seek only to live and work here in peace.
More on this next week.