Thoughts about Immigration

At this time of intense upheaval, when the Trump administration is trying to command loyalty from its followers by stoking division about our country's relationship with immigrants, I want to share my thoughts on the subject.

Our country has many problems, and the more you look at each one, the more you find that they are interconnected, and it is very hard to attack just one or two of them and leave the rest for later.

In this essay, nevertheless, I will attempt to focus on immigration directly and only refer to other related problems as briefly as possible.

Here is a list of what I see as the most serious of these interconnected issues:

• Our country is fiercely divided into two camps of nearly equal size that are hardly on speaking terms with another.
• We have severe problems of income and wealth inequality, but rather than discuss them in those terms, we have been tricked into seeing the division in terms of race and ethnicity.
• We have a steeply falling birth rate - to the point where the age distribution of our population is becoming dominated by older people. As more people are reaching retirement age, the percentage of the population in the workforce whose taxes should pay for the retirement benefits of their parents' generation is becoming smaller. And the generation after that will be even smaller.
• To some degree, this has been offset by immigration: Most immigrants are younger than the average population, and tend to have more children per family.
• Modern communications technology has spread around the world, and combined with more free trade, has allowed many of our traditional manufacturing industries and to move a lot of their production to other countries with lower prevailing wages.
• As a result of this, there are much fewer jobs available for "unskilled labor" in our country, leading to a situation where we have simultaneously too few jobs for unskilled labor and not enough workers with the skill to do the (better paying) jobs that the remaining industries need for more high tech work.

Two more indirectly related problem are

• our crisis in healthcare, health insurance, and drug prices
• the increasing number of people forming a permanent underclass, leading to homelessness, drug abuse and crime

The principles and the problems

There has always been tension between our desire to help distressed people while respecting the rights of others. We try to resolve this tension by establishing general principles of human rights and civil rights. Over long periods of history, this has been seen to yield the most stable societies.

Through much of history, it was possible to work on this in increasing circles of awareness, from family to local community (village), to town, state and country. What was happening on the other side of the world affected us little, and we generally had no reason to be aware of it. Thus we could help poor people in our neighborhood while ignoring the poor people in Africa or India. This is much less practical today. A war in Somalia or Syria drives people into exile, and they show up in Sweden or Mexico asking for admission into our stable, comfortable countries and pleading for the same recognition of their needs as we afford to each other. And while we can help a few, we cannot settle all the displaced people from every war or every dictatorial nation without impoverishing ourselves. This is a moral and practical challenge to our principles of humanity.

On the local level, we have seen up close how rich people have taken an ever increasing proportion of our society's wealth for themselves. This seems to be a recurring theme in history, eventually leading the poor to rebel and overthrow the regime that has exploited them. In our own culture, we saw this in 18th century France, leading to a bloody revolution, and in late 19th century America, where the "gilded age" eventually found a more peaceful resolution through the "progressive" leadership of 1910-1925, culminating with the economic collapse of the 1930s and the "new deal" setting a path towards more economic balance. We seem to now be in another "gilded age".

Every few generations, evolving technology upends the economy, and society has to re-balance.

• Around 1500 AD, it became possible to sail across the oceans, and global trade ensued. Spaniards, Englishmen and Dutch merchants established colonies in South and East Asia and the Americas. Slavery created opportunities for creating wealth based on unpaid labor.
• Around 1750, the steam engine allowed much enlarged mining operations, railways allowed for increased travel and trading, improved farming techniques required fewer farm workers and large factories absorbed those displaced workers.
• In the 20th century, a steady stream of improvements in communication technologies gradually eroded the differences between the poorest countries and "the civilized world". As education spread in China, it became possible to take advantage of lower wages in Asia to produce the manufactured goods consumed in Europe and America cheaper than they could be produced in the countries that consumed them.

In each case, a large group lost their previous livelihood, and a smaller group took advantage of the dislocation to become wealthy themselves.

Migration: Emigration and Immigration

The United States was a little different. From the first colonization onward, the Europeans that settled here did not count the aboriginal population as "people", so they saw an empty country that needed "people" to move in to develop the land, so they encouraged immigration of displaced farm workers and other working class people. In time, as Europe recovered from the displacements of the industrial revolution, the immigrants were coming from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, the Balkans and eventually the Middle East and Asia.

In parallel with this voluntary immigration, there was a large import of African slaves to the cotton and tobacco plantations in the American South, as well as to various types of plantations in the Caribbean and South America. While the European immigrants were generally acknowledged to be "people" and allowed to assimilate, this was less so with the descendants of the enslaved people, which faced severe repression, even in my own lifetime.

So American society has been heavily stratified. Grossly simplified:

• [6] At the bottom, we have the "barely people": Black and Natives. While people from this group in principle can move upwards with access to education, they face many obstacles.
• [5] Next, uneducated laborers. Again, their children can move up with access to education, but they too face obstacles.
• [4] Next, a solid working class with access to education and the ability to gradually improve their conditions through good work ethics.
• [3] Above that, a middle class of people with education and skills to negotiate a decent life for themselves and their children.
• [2] Parallel to that, an academic/intellectual class of thinkers and teachers. And freely intermingled with that, business people ranging from shopkeepers to factory owners.
• [1] At the top, a class of rich people, many born into wealth in families that have been moving upwards for generations.

Of course, there are parallels to this in most countries, although I would claim that group [6] is almost unknown elsewhere, at least in the European countries that I am familiar with. And the Scandinavian countries have been very successful at their goal of creating a society where "everybody is middle class".

When I was a recent immigrant, I told my young daughter that "our country will always have a special place of influence in the world, because every family at some point came from somewhere else, and most maintain a special connection to that place". It pains me that many Americans no longer share that vision.

What should immigration look like, and how do we fall short?

• We allow certain people to travel freely in and out. They may not want to live here, but we benefit from the time they spend here. These include:
  - Rich people, many of which are intelligent and creative.
  - Performers: Sports stars, musicians, movie stars.
  - Very smart people: University professors, researchers.
  - People with other special skills in high demand.
  Such people tend to be welcome everywhere (but in recent times, many of them are beginning to feel uncomfortable about coming here, fearing harassment or worse).
• We feel compelled by conscience (and by international treaties) to accommodate a certain quota of people who have been persecuted in their homeland due to their ethnicity or their work for human rights while living under a dictatorship.
• We accommodate short term visits by middle-class people who are living fine in their home country, but want to experience a different culture when they go on vacation - like we do when we ourselves travel.
• We resist immigration by poor people from poor countries.

It is a significant problem that people around the world know from movies and TV that we have a large and prosperous middle class, and they aspire to come here and join it. The fact that we have a large fraction of our population as well, who live in poverty, is much less publicized. So a lot of people try to get here, that fall into the last category above. It should be easy to reject them, but our treaty obligations mean that people who have a believable claim that they are persecuted in their homeland are entitled to present that claim to an immigration court. And since those courts are so understaffed that there is a two-year waiting list for a hearing, we have found that anyone at all can ask for asylum and be admitted for two years until they can get that hearing in court, so everyone applies, even if they have no probable claim.

But the people waiting for that asylum hearing are not allowed to work, so they have to work for cash paid "under the table" at very low wages and usually under deplorable conditions. Poor housing, rampant wage theft, dangerous workplaces. Mostly in a few industries:

• farm workers
• hotel maids
• restaurant workers
• construction work
• prostitution

It is estimated that we now have upwards of 10 million "undocumented" immigrants living in the USA.

When that many people collude to break or ignore the law, the general respect for the law suffers badly.

Do you agree that these are problems? Are they THE problems?

If you believe that these are not facts, I challenge you to prove them wrong.

Are there solutions?

There is an old saying: "If you find yourself in a hole, STOP DIGGING!" The first order of the day is to (temporarily) stop accepting asylum applications at the land borders and all other ports of entry. Asylum processing is meaningless if it cannot be done expeditiously.

Next, staff the immigration courts with the goal of eliminating the waiting list. By a conservative estimate, there are at least 2 million families waiting for an immigration court hearing. It such a hearing can reach a determination in two hours per case, a judge can handle 1000 cases in a year (an 8-hour workday is 2000 hours per year). So if we want to clear the backlog in two years, we need to have 1000 judges in 1000 hearing rooms, with the necessary support staff (bailiffs, secretaries, janitors etc). And I am probably underestimating this. Oh, and we should allocate some positions for "defense lawyers" for the "clients" of the court. Probably twice as many as judges.

While we work on this, we need a whole new set of laws that define a set of rules for immigration that can actually work. In drafting such laws, I suggest that we look to Canada and Australia to look at their rules and how well they work or where they could use adjustment.

A new set of rules should probably be a point system taking into account such factors as:

• Are they already living here, earning a living and avoiding criminality (apart from the misdemeanors of illegal entry, visa overstay and apartment overcrowding)
• Do they speak good enough English that they can drop into a work crew of mostly English speakers without requiring special accommodation
• Do they have at least the equivalent of an 8th grade education
• Extra points for more education and language skills
• Do they have skills useful for earning the prevailing wage in an industry where jobs are available
• Do they have family members that are in fact US citizens
• Do they understand the nature of a pluralistic, democratic, largely secular society, and are they willing to conform to the expectations of such a society

I know this sounds to many as an impossible dream, but the consequences of NOT getting this underway are really scary to me.

Follow-up

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