A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Obama’s executive order that overrode existing immigration law. The result is more acrimony and chaos.
It is a good time to remember that there are more than just two types of immigration – legal and illegal. There also exist liberal and illiberal approaches to immigration.
Take liberal immigration. It is governed by laws passed by Congress and signed and executed by the president. Liberal immigration would be entirely legal, meritocratic and ethnically blind. Skills and education would matter more than proximity to the border or political clout.
The numbers of immigrants would be balanced by liberal considerations: the need for skilled newcomers to avoid dependency on American society, and concern that their arrival not harm the economic aspirations of poor working citizens.
Liberal immigration would aim at rapidly integrating and assimilating immigrants in accordance with further classical liberal principles. America is not a multicultural society where appearance is essential to our characters, but a uniquely multiracial nation bound by common values where race becomes secondary.
In contrast, illiberal immigration would be the opposite of the above.
A president, by fiat, would nullify existing laws and order federal agencies to ignore them. Or he would issue executive orders contrary to both his prior promises and to the Constitution.
President Obama did not, as he alleges, override Congress because it failed to act on immigration. Instead he ignored it because Congress would not act in a particular fashion that he found ideologically akin to his own beliefs.
Illiberal immigration would also mean that new arrivals could ignore the cost, time and inconvenience of applying for visas. Instead, they would simply enter the U.S. illegally and not be transparent about their illegal status.
Illiberal immigration would turn policy away from ethnically blind considerations to focus on ethnic criteria.
Illiberal immigration would not concern itself with the impact of arrivals on the host country, especially the costs incurred by the public or the effect on the wages and services of the poor and working classes.
Also, illiberal immigration would seek – both explicitly by political intent and implicitly by sheer numbers – to undermine easy assimilation, in hopes of creating bloc constituencies with group concerns rather than individual concerns.
The reason why immigration is now a mess is not because there are no liberal solutions, but because there are so many illiberal stumbling blocks.
Many Americans are willing to allow some sort of exemption to the immigrants residing here illegally. Such an exemption would offer a pathway to permanent legal residency to the majority of immigrants here illegally if some liberal criteria were first applied.
First, close the border to illegal immigration to prevent recurrence of these problems. Texas authorities report that 20,000 foreign nationals have crossed the state’s southern border with Mexico in just the last two months.
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