This letter is a response to Eric Levitz’s article of November 30, 2018, Mass Immigration Creates Problems For the Left. Tighter Borders Can't be the Solution.
First, the term “immigration restrictionism” is a rather meaningless term. It has no meaning unless one explains what level of immigration you’re restricting from. All modern American administrations have “restricted” and “limited” immigration. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the administrations of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes, Obama or Trump. Even if we had so-called “open borders” we would still try to “restrict”, limit and stop criminals, terrorists and people with dangerous communicable diseases from entering the country. “Immigration Restrictionism” is an emotionally charged term that gets people riled up, but it has no meaning in a discussion about actual levels of immigration. The only meaningful discussion is about what specific number of immigrants & refugees should be allowed into the USA on a yearly basis and how that compares to immigration & refugee numbers of other years. Immigration is always “restricted” one way or the other.
Regarding the main point of the article, of whether a modern successful progressive welfare state can survive with open borders in a world of hundreds of millions of desperate people; I think it’s already been firmly established beyond reasonable doubt that a successful, strong, stable, progressive welfare state can't prosper and survive with the chaos of an uncontrolled, erratic, completely open immigration flow. I agree with the arguments of John Judis and Angela Nagle that were mentioned in the article. I further elaborate on my reasoning on that topic in my blogpost at this link:
https://reasonableimmigration.blogspot.com/2018/08/hey-fellow-progressives-you-cant-have.html.
Yes, there’s no doubt about it, the American immigration laws of the time around WW2 were racist and anti-Semitic and the St. Louis incident was disgusting, and of course we and other democracies should have taken in many more refugees from Europe. However, some 200.000 Jewish immigrants and refugees were admitted into the USA between 1933 and 1945, including the Einstein and Kissinger families – which is worth noting for a vehemently anti-Semitic country like the USA of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Twice in your piece, Eric, you blame the United States’ 1924 immigration Act for being partially responsible for allowing the tragic and horrific killing your grandma’s family. But if you’re going to place historical blame, rather than blaming immigration laws for causing additional people to be murdered in the Holocaust, doesn’t it make more sense to blame the Western Democracies for appeasing Hitler and not stopping him early-on and preventing the Holocaust altogether? ----- There are many ways to look at history and immigration; my ancestral family tree includes Native Americans (back to my eighth great-grandfather in the 1600’s) that first welcomed the Pilgrims into their tribal territory, but then half a century later many members of the tribe were involved in a war, they ultimately lost, to turn back the tide of immigrant settlers taking their land and bringing in horrible diseases. One can see that there are many different frames of reference for looking historically at immigration and open borders. Let’s please base our immigration policies on current and future conditions, not on regrettable historical events and policies.
You make the point that we’re going to have to take in the refugees of the world because the industrialized nations caused climate change. First, all refugees are not created by climate change and by the United States' and other industrialized countries’ economic and foreign policies. Also, most people around the world would choose to live in this time of history and generate more carbon (be more prosperous economically) rather than live in our barbaric past, despite climate change, and take their chances in this century. So please stop feeling guilty about being part of so-called Western Civilization. Secondly, in the coming decades we’re going to have our own home-grown American climate change refugees already living within the USA as the Southwestern U.S. deteriorates from heat and decreasing natural water supplies, and as many coastal areas in the U.S. become uninhabitable. We’re going to have to worry about our own “interior refugees” first before taking in hundreds of millions of refugees from around the world. A good argument can be made that climate change has already forced some Americans to move from New Orleans and Puerto Rico and that they are our first climate change interior refugees.
In the final analysis, you need to realize that the United States is not an international refugee rescue organization. We live in a world of sovereign nation states, and sorry, but the primary purpose of a good national democratic government is to first take care of its own citizens and respect their democratic choices. In our republic, whether you like it or not, it’s the sovereign right of the people to determine how many people they want to admit into their country. Living in Minnesota, the state with the most refugees per capita, I’ve learned that there is a limit to a region’s capacity for absorbing refugees successfully. Nevertheless, we can increase our refugee intake as we decrease our overall immigration levels. The USA is currently taking in only around 30,000 refugees per year and this could easily be increased to 100,000 now and maybe even a lot more in the future if necessary. But there are limits to the numbers of refugees that we can successfully absorb at any one time.
I disagree with your interpretation of the polls on immigration. Virtually all polls and surveys show that while Americans like having some immigration, a strong majority of all different kinds of Americans consistently over recent decades haven’t wanted immigration increased. The government continually tries to bring in more immigrants than the majority of Americans want and when they learn what the actual numbers of immigrants coming in are, they are usually shocked at how many people are being allowed in. See my blogpost on the subject: https://reasonableimmigration.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-warning-to-national-democratic.html.
Finally, you totally left out how America’s population is already above an environmentally sustainable level for providing a high standard of living for all Americans. Our energy and agricultural systems are unsustainable. We have severe water problems around the USA, not just the shortages in the arid Southwest. We’re rapidly sprawling over our ranchland, farmland and countryside, and degrading much of our remaining farmland by erosion, improper inputs, pollution, etc. No environmental problem in the USA is improved by massively increasing the U.S. population.
There is a moral argument that the United States and other Western Democracies could or should take in most of the world’s refugees, but that’s not going to happen. Sorry, the West will only be taking in a small percentage of the world’s projected refugees in the upcoming decades. Instead, we need to help people around the world so that they’re able to keep from ever becoming those future projected refugees.
If the world is not able to stop the creation of huge new numbers of refugees, maybe China can take a few hundred million of them. China is one of the world’s main greenhouse gas producers, and is projected to lose up to 400,000 million people over the next 50 years (see: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/chinas-worrying-decline-in-birth-rate-china-daily-columnist) and so based on your argument that the carbon producing nations are responsible for creating many of the refugees, China should take in a few hundred million of the refugees and they’ll be needed in China to replace the declining number of workers. Japan and Russia, among other countries, could also start taking in their share.
My final summary regarding the article is that a successful progressive welfare state can’t function with open borders for now and in the foreseeable future, and while the United States will continue receiving many immigrants and refugees, it must keep the numbers at reasonable and prudent levels.
John Brainard, Editor
Minneapolis, Minnesota
