Donald Trump has promised to severely curtail legal and illegal immigration as he takes office for the second time. In this episode of “The Opinions,” the writer Binyamin Appelbaum argues that while the United States needs to improve its immigration enforcement, the country also desperately needs immigrants for cultural and economic vibrancy. Immigrants, Appelbaum explains, are the country’s “rocket fuel,” and he argues for specific legal changes to ensure the United States’ immigration policy matches its national interests.
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For the last year, I’ve been spending a lot of time reporting on immigration. And I’m specifically trying to understand what immigration means to this country, what is broken about the current system and how we can fix it.
Today, on Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration, I’m watching, with concern, his plans to start cracking down on immigration. I think it is undoubtedly the case that the U.S. needs to assert control over who enters and lives and works in this country, but it would be a profound mistake to reduce immigration or to try to deport the people who live here already.
The U.S. needs immigration. Immigration is this nation’s rocket fuel. It brings people to this country who bring with them creativity, ambition and resources. Immigrants are people who have the skill, the talent and the daring to make what is often a very difficult journey to a new country and they have a long history of contributing to American society. “They” is almost a funny way to talk about it — we Americans are mostly the descendants of immigrants, if we are not immigrants ourselves.
It is also the case that the United States needs immigrants perhaps more than ever because we are no longer having enough babies to sustain our own population.
This is already happening in some parts of the developed world. Japan is the most striking example. It was the first developed country to tip into population decline about 15 years ago. Since that time we’ve seen large parts of Japan emptying out. Many communities are no longer functional and many houses have been abandoned. There are no longer enough postal workers to deliver the mail on Saturday.
When a population is continually declining, it’s a big problem and it’s one that is very much in our national interest to avoid. I really wanted to get my hands around what this looks like in practice, so I visited a pair of cities. First, Houston, a city that has just seen a population boom built in large part on the arrival of millions of immigrants. And then Birmingham, Alabama, which is also a Sunbelt city, but in a state that has made it as difficult as possible and as unattractive as possible for immigrants to come. It by contrast has seen a lot of stagnation.
I think the contrast between these two cities is really the difference between what happens when you welcome immigrants and what happens when you try to scare them away.
Modern immigration to Houston really kicks into high gear in the 1980s. It begins with a downturn in the city’s fortunes. The oil industry hit a rough patch and many oil industry workers left Houston. At this point some of the city’s landlords started advertising in Spanish for new tenants, drawing in an immigrant population that until then had been more rural and more concentrated in the southern part of the state. So Houston began to attract large numbers of Latin American immigrants and that kicked off a boom cycle that continues right up to the present day. It led to a change in the face of the city, this cultural vibrancy, and economic vibrancy, that has driven Houston right up to the present moment.
Alabama is the flip side of the coin. It is a state that has tried to make life difficult, for undocumented immigrants in particular, and not always particularly pleasant for legal immigrants either. In 2011, the state passed a law that included some of the harshest immigration provisions in the country. Some of that law has since been repealed, but it’s a state that really has gone out of its way to convey the message that they don’t want people from other countries, and especially undocumented immigrants, to come there.
The consequence is that the state’s largest city, Birmingham, has stagnated while other Sunbelt cities have boomed. And so now it’s a city of vacant lots and job openings.
The story of the role that immigrant labor plays in this country actually begins in some ways with the civil rights movement. If you look at the history of this, it is just as we are taking action as a country to say that it’s not OK to treat African American workers as second class citizens that we are simultaneously making our peace and becoming remarkably comfortable with treating immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, in the same way: As second class workers who do not enjoy a full set of rights, who are not allowed to vote, who have no path to citizenship. It’s a very uncomfortable echo in our nation’s history.
Entire industries like meatpacking, lawn care and home construction are heavily populated by immigrant workers who are willing to work for less money than many American workers and in more difficult conditions than many American workers. That’s obviously enormously attractive to employers and it creates this perverse incentive to preserve their illegal status so that they can be taken advantage of. That’s not a good situation for the immigrant workers, it’s not a good situation for American workers and it’s not a good situation for companies that want to play fair.
There are three big changes that we need to make in federal immigration policy in order to create a system that effectively serves our national interests. The first is that we need to end this system in which there is a caste of workers who are doing jobs for less money and in inferior conditions. That requires border security and overhauling the asylum process, but most importantly, it requires holding employers accountable for their workforces, something we’ve really never done.
If you just do that in isolation, it’ll be a disaster because we will very quickly run out of workers. You need to expand legal immigration to make it easier for people to come here.
The third leg of this is that there is a population of more than 11 million people already in this country who have made their lives here. There’s an ineluctable unfairness in the fact that they’re here while other people have been waiting to come in legally. But there is also no better option than to take advantage of the fact that they already are here and to create, for the vast majority of them, a path to citizenship that allows them to become full figured members of this society. It is only by granting people citizenship that we can guarantee them the rights and obligations that we ourselves have.
Our political debate about immigration has gone off the rails. On the one hand, particularly in recent election cycles, you had Democrats moving quite close to the position that anybody who got into the United States on any terms should be embraced and thanked for being here.
On the other hand, you had Republicans increasingly arguing that even legal forms of immigration were bad for this country: detrimental to workers, to the economy, to our culture and to our safety. Both positions are out of alignment with reality.
We need a legal immigration system that effectively serves the national interest. There’s the opportunity for someone to step forward and reclaim a middle ground that was once regarded as conventional wisdom. The most important way to think about immigration is as an investment in this nation’s future. It is an opportunity for us to have the country that we want.
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