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.”
General
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 making those comparisons, ought to be upon people in general, rather than merely upon people living within some particular jurisdiction.’ [….]
There is every reason to believe that a generously funded, well-targeted programme of foreign assistance could well work to reduce global economic inequalities [readers interested in this topic in particular, should consult, among others, the work of Thomas Pogge, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, Christian Barry, Allen Buchanan, Meghnad Desai, Peter Singer, and Partha Dasgupta]. We now know enough about how to organize aid programmes to be pretty confident of accomplishing those goals, if only we were truly serious about them. The point is precisely that the richer nations are not now, and seem unlikely soon to become, deeply committed to goals of global redistribution.
In such circumstance, we are driven to rely instead upon decidedly second-best mechanisms of global redistribution. If we cannot move enough money to where needy people are, then we will have to count on moving as many needy people as possible to where the money is. In these circumstances, if we really want people in poorer countries to enjoy life chances even remotely similar to those of people in richer countries, then the best way of ensuring that seems to be for the people themselves to move to the richer country. [emphasis added] (Even then, the guarantee is less than iron-clad: much depends on the skills of immigrants, the willingness of domestic employers to employ them and the willingness of governments to apply the same labour and social security laws to them.) Of course, there is likely to be even more political resistance to that policy than the other. Citizens of rich nations are likely to be even more reluctant to welcome lots of destitute foreigners into their country than they historically have been to shipping substantial sums of money abroad to relieve their suffering.
But that, in a way, is precisely the political point underlying exercises in moral philosophy on this topic. The goal of such exercises is to put rich countries on the spot. The aim is to argue that, if arguments for international distrubutive justice are valid and if rich countries do not want to give generously of their money to meet the demands that those arguments impose, then they are morally obliged to pay instead in a currency that they hold even dearer.
Morally, rich countries faced with strong moral arguments for global redistribution have only two options. Ideally, they should provide the poor with substantial sums of foreign aid; failing that, as a moral minimum they must alternatively be willing to admit substantial numbers of immigrants from the poorest countries. If that second alternative is politically even more unacceptable than the first, and if morally those are the only two options, and if people are capable of being moved by reflections upon morality at all, then perhaps citizens of the richer countries might, on second thought, take a more generous attitude towards foreign aid.’