10 Apr Immigration Reform and National Security
10.04.06
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Bill Hing over at ImmigrationProf Blog has some interesting thoughts on the connection between immigration reform and national security. Quoting a West Point national security expert, he argues that “By bringing the people that are here out of the shadows, and creating an orderly mechanism for identifying and documenting the low-risk individuals who travel to this country to work, and by curbing policies such as separating families that entice otherwise low-risk individuals to cross the border illegally, a comprehensive immigration reform plan would help these initiatives better focus on those who have come here to do us harm.”
Meanwhile, Bill West at the Counterterrorism Blog argues here and here that national security would be sacrificed if we moved toward legalization of undocumented workers. “The guest worker and legalization proposals are fantasies that will lead only to massive failure, fraud and a total collapse of an immigration system that is virtually there already.”
I have not followed immigration reform issues closely enough to have an opinion on this issue, but I would welcome the comments of others.
I’m with Bill Hing on this one. In any case, until or unless the economy of Mexico and, indeed, the economies of other countries in Central America dramatically improve vis-a-vis that of the U.S., illegal immigration will be an ongoing issue, not solved in any meaningful way by ‘immigration reform’ legislation (I don’t want to imply, however, that no legislation whatsoever is desirable, hence the endorsement of Hing’s argument above). Those interested in approaching this topic from the vantage point of political philosophy and ethics, might want to consider the following from Robert E. Goodin, found in Brian Barry and Robert E. Goodin, eds., Free Movement: Ethical Issues in the Transnational Migration of People and of Money (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992): ‘At least within the Anglo-American democracies, the standard way of arguing for freer movement seems to be liberal egalitarian in form. The premises at work here are, essentially, two: one is egalitarianism; the other is universalism, which in the present context amounts principally to globalism. The first holds that distributions of life prospects ought to be roughly equal, or at least substantially more equal than they now are. The second holds that our focus, in… Read more »