U.S. IMMIGRATION

I thought this was a very sane approach to U.S. immigration by someone with personal experience in achieving a successful status as a U.S. citizen. In the current divisive, insane, and politically motivated discussion of immigration, it is refreshing to read something that has a major element of sense and purpose in trying to solve a problem that U.S. politicians of all persuasions have consistently ignored, in any rational way, for decades. Congratulations to Martin Gurri on writing this piece and to Free Press for publishing it. 

      “Every immigrant faces a tragic choice: Stay who you were and stand apart, or morph into something alien in order to join in. This country, in its wisdom, offers the immigrant an uncommonly generous deal: be a hyphenated American.

I was born in Cuba. At some unremarked moment, I became a Cuban-American. That means, roughly, a U.S. citizen with access to really good food and really loud conversations. I could feel proud of the people I came from and still love the country I have grown old in.

      My parents were scrupulously law-abiding and made sure I was a legal immigrant. Back then, all the immigrants I knew had entered this country legally—many of them, like my family, had escaped Communist oppression. Dreamers and desperadoes have always snuck across the border, but the numbers were rarely significant, and many of them were arrested and sent back to their country of origin. Deportation wasn’t a display of bigotry. It was the law. If you wanted a share of American freedom and prosperity, you had to play by the process. Barack Obama, apostle of hope and change, deported over 3 million illegal migrants—more than any president before or since. That was his duty: to enforce federal law.

      So, I watched the videos of the Los Angeles immigration riots in a state of utter perplexity. Who were those angry, violent people? Were they really illegal migrants who wished to stay in the United States? In that case, why did they wave the flags of the countries to which they were apparently desperate never to return? Why didn’t they say, “I will abide by whatever rules you wish, so long as you give me a chance to live here”? Or, as many conservatives insist, were the riots the work of organized leftist groups? I have so many questions.

      In the days since, a series of rather theatrical Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids have maintained the focus on illegal immigrants, who labor under a double burden of alienation. They must navigate a foreign culture from the underworld of illegality. Their highest hope isn’t citizenship but invisibility, and their relationship to this country and its institutions can’t possibly be one of love or gratitude, but only of fear. The natural tendency is to hide in urban ghettos of shadowy nonexistence, the function of which is to prevent contact with the mainstream culture. As with every illegal enterprise, criminals dominate the scene, preying on the weak and adding to the elemental misery of people who have no recourse to law enforcement.

      Given this context, the Joe Biden administration’s obsession with stimulating illegal entry appears as an act of inexplicable cruelty. All the pathologies remained—the marginality, the exposure to violence and crime, the fear of the authorities. To this was now added complete dependence on a remote and arbitrary bureaucracy. A tacit promise, never actually articulated, hung in the air: that the old system had been magically abolished, and that everyone, from anywhere, was invited to cross into the promised land.

      Yet the Biden immigration people knew all along that they could never deliver on that promise. They lacked the political heft to change the law and the resources even minimally to care for an endless stream of variegated humanity. They could barely handle the illegal migrants who were apprehended, shuffling them across the country and dropping them into haphazard lodgings. What if their numbers doubled—or tripled? The logic of the open borders policy is self-refuting. At some point, a limit must be reached. At that point, the promise will be withdrawn. As the end of its term approached, the Biden administration began closing the border. And then came the reelection of Donald Trump, anti-immigration fundamentalist and ultimate disaster for those who felt they had received a wink and a nudge from the U.S. government.

      The human animal can endure every kind of disappointment but is always betrayed by hope. To the extent that the LA riots were truly an eruption of anger by illegal migrants, let me suggest they were aimed as much at Biden’s false smile of welcome as at Trump’s unrelenting hostility. A system that toggles between total laxity and harsh repression isn’t really a system at all.

      It falls on the president’s “revolution of common sense” to reconstruct a workable immigration process. Right now, that doesn’t appear to be on anyone’s list of priorities. The great howling controversy surrounding Trump on this question is one of the frustrating failures of American politics: BOTH SIDES ARE MISSING THE POINT. The Democrats have come to treat illegality as a test of anti-racist virtue. The MAGA crowd looks on it as an “invasion” to be repelled by the terrible swift sword of the state—including, if need be, the military. For understandable political reasons, but in disregard of sanity in policy making, everyone keeps looking at this from the wrong end of the telescope.

      Here’s a common-sense proposition: Since we can’t invite the whole world inside our borders, let’s consider the matter as one of optimal limits. Once the need to restrain immigration is acknowledged, the next step should be to seek consensus on the practicalities—the maximum number the country can absorb each year, the skills we most urgently need to import, and, of course, the most transparent and fair process for those arriving, as I once did, on the shores of this fortunate land. IN OTHER WORDS, OUR ATTENTION MUST TURN FULLY TO LEGALITY, NOT ILLEGALITY. That should be the content of the politics of immigration: devising rules and procedures for legal entry that are intuitive to Americans as well as to potential migrants. The current system, we should accept, is a soul-devouring labyrinth that deserves to be demolished in its entirety.

      I know a hardworking, honest, exceptionally decent Peruvian family who experienced 15 years of constant anxiety to obtain residency—their papers were mislaid by the immigration people not once, but twice. A visit to an immigration court in Arlington, Virginia, feels like one has been transported to some obscure province of Paraguay. There, I witnessed a judge tell an immigrant that he had committed a felony—and that he should come back in a year for further discussion. This happened not in some extraordinary case, but habitually. There are at least 10 different types of work visas to bring in foreign talent evidently needed by our economy, all hedged with confusing and arbitrary rules. A clean line must be drawn between legal and illegal migrants, and that can only be done by simplifying and clarifying legality.

      I understand this violates the prime directive of the open borders policy: that “no human being is illegal.” But we can’t govern by slogans, and this particular banality enshrines a double injustice: cruel falsehood to illegals, and tremendous unfairness to those, like my parents and that Peruvian family, who jumped through hoops of fire to stay within the law.

      The baffling disorders in Los Angeles demonstrated the self-defeating character of open borders. Whoever the perpetrators were, their violence could only end in failure. If meant as a show of force, it stood no chance of dictating changes on immigration policy. If it was some sort of political theater, the effect was to shock and repel a large segment of the American public. I can’t believe any migrant, regardless of status, actually shares this vision.

      The glorification of illegality can lead nowhere. The people acting out in the streets of LA were no longer Mexicans or Salvadorans, yet they could never be Americans. They are stranded on a sterile island of self-alienation, with no way forward or back—and their anger, as I said, was likely directed as much at those who invited them there as at those who would boot them out.

      Legality, on the other hand, typically ends in assimilation. That was my trajectory. Whole chunks of time go by when I forget I wasn’t born in this blessed country. But assimilation can be achieved at many levels—all it takes is an act of faith, and of affirmation, in the twists and quirks of American life.

      My dad arrived in this country in his early 40s. He spoke English with a thick accent of untraceable origin—he had learned the language by imitating pompous-sounding Linguaphone records. He was doomed to remain, forever, a stranger in a strange land. Yet I remember a conversation, long ago, that was at first about the fate of communism in Cuba but ended with a surprising confession. “Even if the communists get overthrown, I’m not going back,” my dad said. Glancing around our small living room, he added: “This is where I want to be.” He had been a very successful self-made man in the old country and had seen the fruits of his labor snatched away from him. He had succeeded much more modestly here—but he knew, and deeply appreciated, that whatever he earned he would keep.