We Have to Take Some Kind of an L on Immigration, For Now

you can only ignore public sentiment for so long

migrants on the way to the Darien Gap

I am an internationalist, which is to say that I don’t respect the concept of country. As shorthand I sometimes refer to myself as an open borders guy, but this isn’t quite right, as I am in fact a no-borders guy, in common with people from my political tradition. The nation-state is a fiction, and a very recent one, invented for the benefit of capital and imperialism. As such, in my ideal world we’d take in whoever wants to live here; indeed, there would be no formal legal difference between “here” and “there.”

But we obviously don’t live in an ideal world, and it’s important to say that a borderless world is one in which a lot of fundamental changes to our economic and social contracts have already taken place. Here on Earth Prime, we live in a nation state, governed under vestigial democratic principles, in an international system governed by broken and inequitable laws and norms. There’s rich and poor within each country and there’s rich and poor between countries. The latter fact has long led to an international flow of migrants looking to live in rich developed countries, many of whom are willing to move without formal legal right to do so. Driven by war or oppression or old-fashioned hunger, we’ve seen waves of migration into the United States, into Canada, into Germany, into much of the Western world. We’re living through a vast populist backlash to that movement of people into those Western countries, for both grimy reasons of xenophobia and legitimate unhappiness over how chaotic this wave of immigration has been, how unresponsive to the typical levers of government. As with so much else in this era of anti-incumbent rage, a lot of the anti-immigrant fervor seems to be driven fundamentally by the feeling that no one is in control.

It is of course the case that there’s a lot of room for greater legal immigration that doesn’t require the dissolution of borders. And I’m certainly in favor of a policy that simply enables far more legal immigration into the United States. Art of the possible, etc. But that’s what I want, policy - a formal and democratically-determined change to our system through act of Congress that’s durable and legally defensible. Part of what’s been frustrating, for me, is that a lot of left-leaning people have defended this recent wave of immigration even though it was the product of no policy or shitty policy. The Biden administration really did preside over a massive influx of immigrants without valid legal status, in part through asylum claims that no one sincerely believes fit our asylum law. No wonder then that this scenario sparked such large political backlash. And it says something about contemporary American liberalism that so many who carry its banner were perfectly happy to advocate for these waves of migration on purely moral grounds, without stopping to consider the long-term sustainability and defense of that movement of people. Now we live with the consequences.

Here’s an episode of Chris Hayes’s podcast (transcript) where he interviews Jonathan Blitzer, who has a new book out on immigration. (Which I have not yet read, though I will.) Hayes is the host of a show on MSNBC, while Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. I say this as neutrally as I can - this is, correspondingly, as clear of a dispatch from elite establishment liberalism as you could ever find. And the conversation, to me, is deeply frustrating. It reflects the inability of contemporary liberals to embed moral reasoning in a broader framework of feasibility, legal defensibility, political sense, and simple pragmatism. For a decade, I’ve been complaining that too many left-leaning opponents of Trump seem to think that merely being right about him will inevitably result in his defeat, that morality in and of itself can change the world. I see so much of that in Hayes and Blitzer, who have all the resources necessary to see beyond the seduction of “we’re right, and that’s enough.” It’s a conversation about the moral justifications for migration and the wickedness of the policy that prevents it that somehow ignores the realpolitik behind our immigration debate.

Hayes and Blitzer spend a lot of time reflecting on what makes undocumented immigration so understandable, from the point of view of the immigrants, seeming not to know how to react to the refusal of our political system to put the moral logic of the immigrants first. I certainly join them in feeling that the urge to emigrate to a rich Western democracy is perfectly comprehensible, perfectly natural. When they say that they would illegally immigrate because of (for example) the power of drug cartels in some countries, I know what they mean. But political maturity means having the sense to say “So what?” about your own moral intuitions. So what if undocumented immigrants are justified in trying to come here, if the people with votes don’t share that sense of justification? At some point, political practicality has to rule, if we want to do good. So consider the idea of economic refugees, of people fleeing not because of political repression specifically - the intended justification for asylum claims - but to escape poverty, economic need. Here’s Hayes.

I mean, the other thing about this too, right, is that what also makes this complex is like if I was desperately poor somewhere and I want a better life in America, and I heard if I go and present for asylum, I'd have a shot. Like I would do that, like totally. And there are some people who are, who are economic refugees essentially, right? The law does not make space for them. We just don't take people fleeing desperate poverty. But desperate poverty could be as brutal in its own way as either state repression or gang violence. And so again, from the perspective of - put yourself in the shoes of the person who’s fleeing, like these distinctions matter to us because we as Americans get to say who comes in.

Indeed, Americans do get a say as to who comes in. And Hayes and I share the conviction that the American political system, at present, is not letting in nearly as many immigrants as would be morally and practically ideal. But you have to actually make the case to a skeptical public, and I just don’t think you do that by running down a litany of the reasons that migrants might migrate. You have to appeal to the country that might take them, explain to the voters how it’s in their own best interests to allow in more immigrants. (As Marx teaches us, the heart of leftwing politics is teaching people to recognize their shared self-interest.) I think the whole podcast conversation is too grandiloquent for that kind of appeal.

So let’s look at economic migrants and specifically at Guatemala, as an indicative example; Guatemala comes up several times in their conversation as an example of a country where the people have a moral right to flee and to attempt to enter a safer country. Guatemala’s population is about 17.6 million people, and 55% of them are in poverty. That’s just shy of 10 million people who have, Hayes suggests, a right to flee Guatemala under the same basic moral logic that justifies asylum seekers. Does he think the United States should take them all in? It’s unclear, from the conversation. But right now I’m more interested in a different question: what would happen to Guatemala if 55% of its population up and left? It would be utterly devastating for the country, right? Developing countries have long complained about the “brain drain” inherent to the American H1B visa program, which robs them of many of their highest-achieving educated people, generations of doctors and engineers and scientists. (This dynamic is so prevalent in Nigeria that there’s a Yoruba term for it, japa.) Well, imagine if you’re not just taking in the top-performing 1% of a country but instead a majority of the entire population. That’s devastating for the country that’s been left behind, right? Devastating for the labor market, devastating for consumption, devastating for the tax base. And it’s a vicious cycle - the more people leave, the worse the economic situation gets, the more people are impoverished, the more they want to flee/are justified in fleeing. Uncapped, this scenario leaves us with a stretch of unoccupied jungle and mountains between Mexico and Honduras.

These seem like inherently important considerations, and they are even more applicable to countries like Haiti or Yemen. But when you’re framing everything from the perspective of the moral justifications of the immigrants, with no concern for anything else, you’re necessarily occluding broader structural issues. You can say, well, it’s never going to be the case that all impoverished Guatemalans emigrate, or even all the impoverished ones, not realistically. But that’s the point, right? When you’re talking about categorical moral beliefs, shorn from the present political and legal situation, then you end up with arguments for far vaster migrations then you might have intended - arguments which are even more disconnected from immediate political reality. I would gladly welcome in a great number of impoverished immigrants from Guatemala or any number of other countries. But I recognize that a) to do so ethically requires a tremendous effort, and a lot of expense, to achieve linguistic and social and economic integration for those migrants and b) the public is not anywhere near agreement right now. Hayes and Blitzer themselves acknowledge that, if Trump has a mandate to do anything, it’s restrict immigration. Polling reflects complex feelings towards immigration among the American people, as is true of most issues, but there’s no question that the public has clearly signaled a desire for a far more restrictionist immigration policy than what we’ve recently been used to.

You have a lot of people with understandable desire to move to rich developed countries, and their reasons are multifaceted, as Blitzer and Hayes say. And then you have the citizens and leaders of those countries, who have their own motives. When civil war breaks out in one country, some other countries should take in refugees, and there’s at least some provisioning of this humanitarian movement out there, such as in Germany taking in Syrians. That’s all to the good. But from 10,000 feet, you have to consider the conditions that are driving people to emigrate in the first place - the “push factors” that Hayes and Blitzer briefly consider and then wave away. And you have to recognize that a permanent system of endless mass migration looks to most like a huge burden for the receiving countries, a potentially catastrophic situation for the countries of origin, and chaos for everyone. This is just to say that you can be an open borders type like me and still understand that “All the poor people can move to the rich countries” is not a sustainable solution for anyone. The rich countries would cease to be rich and the poor countries would be totally devastated.

Then there’s abandoning core progressive virtues out of a short-term desire to justify undocumented immigration, which happens all the time. Hayes again:

Who do people think are gonna rebuild Los Angeles? Who do you think’s gonna rebuild Los Angeles? Who do you think is gonna clear brush and clear debris hour after hour, day after day, week after week? Who do you think is going to do that? We all know the answer. Yeah. Is it is going to be largely undocumented immigrant later. 100%. That will be the answer to that question, which is one of the most vital things that can happen for the rebuilding of that city right now. And it's going to fall upon folks that have no legal status, that are being demonized and called rapists and murderers by the president of The United States.

If you express this just slightly differently, you can see that it’s exceptionally racist. “You know what would be great? If we let a bunch of people of color into our country and have them do hard, dangerous, demeaning jobs. And get this! We’re going to sneak them in secretly, so they won’t be protected by minimum wage laws, OSHA, regulations on work hours and overtime, and all manner of other labor protections. And most of them are going to be paying into Medicare and Social Security but won’t ever be able to practically draw from those programs that they’ve contributed to. They’ll also be constantly subject to personal, economic, and sexual exploitation because they won’t be able to call the police due to their undocumented status. Why, you might as well call them slaves! This is all very enlightened and liberal btw.”

I’m sorry, but this shit just drives me nuts. Chris, do you really think this is… progressive? “Hey, how do you think we’re going to rebuild Los Angeles without our permanent class of low-wage brown serfs who are completely exempt from all of the good the American labor movement has tried to do for several centuries”? Here’s a funny thing about me, as a leftist: I believe in the minimum wage! In think the minimum wage is good! I know ours is far too low, and that many generations of left-leaning people fought like hell just to have one! But now I’m supposed to celebrate the fact that there’s a slice of our population that illegally accepts less than the minimum wage and who work without all manner of protections and privileges the left has been trying to protect for decades? The fact that we have created a system in which undocumented people work as racially-and-linguistically marginalized Morlocks for the good of the American rich is ugly and awful and not something any progressive person should be defending.

And, yes, it makes me angry that so many undocumented immigrants work for less than the minimum wage; it’s a terrible failure of solidarity. That’s why Bernie Sanders used to be a pretty passionate immigration restrictionist, because of the way that undocumented labor undermines the fight for better labor conditions. Blitzer insists that undocumented labor doesn’t displace American labor, but of course this is a highly contested claim. This dynamic isn’t the fault of the undocumented people, really, it’s the fault of the system. Again, my preference would be to let immigrants in legally and then insist that they obey our minimum wage laws and other labor regulations, like everyone else. But I hear this claim from supposedly-progressive people, the idea that undocumented immigrants are good because our employers can exploit them, and it drives me insane. Lefty people support labor protections and don’t celebrate when people break them.

In general, Hayes and Blitzer talk about immigration in a way that floats far above and away from what’s actually being debated. For example, they fixate on the reasons for immigration, when many Americans seem to focus on the amount of immigration; it’s fine to debate who should be allowed in under the asylum policy, but many voters are less interested in why people are coming in and more in how many of them there are. (There is an ineradicable sense that there are just too many people out there, among many Americans, and while I think that’s dumb it really plays into ambient anti-immigrant feelings.) If 50 million people out there had legitimate asylum claims, would Hayes and Blitzer advocate for letting them all in? I don’t know, they don’t say. Is there any general number that represents an appropriate cap for the number of people the United States should be letting in, regardless of reason? I don’t know, they don’t say. Do they believe that the citizens of advanced democracies have the right to regulate how many people come into their borders at all? Is there such a thing as a noble or justifiable immigration restrictionist position? I don’t know, they don’t say.

Hayes and Blitzer’s conversation just has nothing to do with the actual immigration debate in the United States as it actually exists. I hate to say this, given that I am forever operating on a level of political abstraction that’s far removed from the real world, but, please… touch grass, guys. Right now, the American people seem to be totally uninterested in letting in mass numbers of poor uneducated migrants with limited English skills. I share the typical lefty suspicions about the origins of that resistance, but ultimately it really doesn’t matter - Democrats presided over a massive increase in undocumented immigration without really even seeming to intend to, it’s led to a pronounced political backlash, and the people who have taken over are advancing a harsh restrictionist platform with something resembling a public mandate. Some Democrats are moving to the right on immigration in response, and again we have to pay attention to the realm of the possible. The political worm will turn again, as it always does, and Trump being Trump, the eventual backlash against him will likely be a powerful one. If and when that happens, we should work hard on a big compromise bill that permits a lot more legal immigration. But paying attention to the national debate and the concrete reality of immigration politics in America today, and then listening to that podcast, I can’t help but say… what the fuck are you guys even talking about right now?