An Immigration Conversation with a Conservative

Donald Trump’s reelection as president of the United States has been partly identified with his promise to “close the border” to illegal immigration and the threat of a mass deportation of millions of those who have been living in America, sometimes for almost a lifetime. If this threat is carried out, it would be one of the largest forced migrations in modern history.

Classical liberals and libertarians have long argued for the right of freedom of movement. An essential element to any meaning of personal freedom, they argue, is the liberty to peacefully live, work, visit, or retire to wherever an individual wants. This idea and ideal has had special significance for a country like the United States, which more than almost another place has been a land of immigrants, a great melting pot of many peoples, many cultures, religions, ethnicities and races.

What has bound them all together has been the common founding concept of the country: that people are individuals with their rights to life, liberty, honestly acquired property, freedom of association under rule of law, and limited constitutional government. Government is not meant to privilege or benefit any specially designated group over any other groups or individuals.

Has the principle always been practiced? Are there scandalous and morally shocking instances and episodes when it has not been followed? Most certainly. But the fact that people may fall short of the ideal they preach, does not annul the rightness and justness of that ideal that constantly draws people back to it.

Among the advocates of greater immigration restrictions are very often American Republicans and conservatives. I frequently find myself in conversation with them over this issue. The following exchange between me and such a conservative is a stylized summary version of such conversations.

Conservative: We have to control the borders from the mass influx of undocumented, illegal migrants.

Richard: Why? What do you think is the problem with people from other countries coming to America?

Conservative: They come here and they take our jobs; they burden us with taxes for their welfare benefits; they are criminals, rapists, and drug dealers who reduce the quality of life, bringing violence to our streets. And they vote Democrat.

Richard: Well, to begin with, I think the recent election shows that a very sizable number of Hispanics, many of whom are the children or grandchildren of immigrants from Central and South America, do not automatically vote Democrat. They voted for Trump, not Harris, in large numbers. So, being Hispanic does not mean you are genetically programmed to vote Democrat.

Conservative: Yes, thank goodness. The Democrats are always playing the race and ethnicity card, and it did not completely work this time. But what about the next election? They are not going to stop.

Richard: No, I don’t expect the Democrats to stop, given their collectivist and statist ideology. But, clearly, people have minds of their own. Plus, like previous waves of immigrants, the second and third generation make better lives for themselves than their grandparents or parents had in the “old country,” just like your and my ancestors. And once people get into the middle class, they often take pride in working for a living, having a home, building up a nest egg, doing their best so their children do better than them. That tends to make you less willing to have what they have earned taxed away and have your life regulated by the government.

Conservative: But what about all those people coming here and stealing our jobs?

Richard: Actually, the vast majority of immigrants, legal and illegal, start by working at jobs that others do not want to do or not at the market price that others are willing to pay, given the kind of work to be done. Hard work in construction or landscaping and gardening; or being nannies and domestics; or doing labor intensive work in the service industries (office cleaning, restaurants); these are what many of the unskilled immigrants do as their entry-level opportunity in America.

They fill niches that in the division of labor it is difficult to find people to do at what the work is considered worth to an employer. They complement much that is done in the marketplace, not substitute for it. The same pattern is seen in earlier waves of immigrants: doing the work that others didn’t want to do, accepting lower pay due to the low skill set the immigrant often has, and then moving up the “ladder” either themselves or their children. And the pattern repeats with the next wave of often unskilled or low skilled immigrants from other places.

Conservative: But what about the ones who come here to sit on welfare at taxpayers’ expense? This is going to financially bankrupt us.

Richard: Let me ask you first: If there were no welfare programs that both legal and illegal immigrants could receive, would it matter as much to you if the border was far more open, or even just “open”? In other words, like in previous generations before the welfare state, people who came here had to support themselves or with the generosity of private charities if they fell on hard times?

Conservative: Well, I guess not. It would certainly be a lot less of a problem. But … they come from places very different from where our ancestors came from in Europe. Their culture, their language, their religion are different. They are going to change America too much from the America that I like, and want, and I think is better.

Richard:  May I ask, do you know where your ancestor came from? [The answers, obviously, vary; Germany, Poland, Italy, Russia, England or Ireland, Greece, Sweden, etc.] Let me suggest that in many, if not most, cases, your ancestors were not always welcomed with open arms by those who had earlier been born here, both before and after immigration restrictions were put into place. Protestants were suspicious of Catholics; those of German or British ancestry were fearful of Poles and Russians and Italians coming to America, especially viewing those from Eastern Europe as inferior Slavic types that would dilute the gene pool. They all seemed concerned about the arrival of Jews from Russia and other Eastern European countries: Jews don’t believe in Jesus; they have strange customs and religious rituals; they are cheating businessmen; and they are all communists.

Guess what? We are them. The “typical” American is a blend, a mixture, of all these and many other groups. It is not a cliche to say that America is a land of immigrants, because except for the native Americans and those who were brought against their will in chains, we are all the descendants of earlier waves of those arrivals from other lands. Those who want to come, now, are not really different from our ancestors. And if they are free to come in, and are free to work and prosper like those before us, they will enrich and strengthen what it means to be an American. Just like other waves of immigrants in the past were added to the mix and made what we today call “America.”

Conservative: OK, I see what you are driving at. And you may be right if we think in the longer run. But we live in the here and now. What about those who add to the welfare rolls, who live off taxpayers’ money? Didn’t Milton Friedman once say that we could have free immigration with no welfare state, or a welfare state but with closed or restricted immigration? And as long as we have a welfare state, what choice do we have?

Richard: What you are arguing for, it seems to me, is a very strong case for working to repeal the welfare state. The fundamental issue is not, per se, who gets welfare payments of various and sundry types, but the problem is the injustice and financial burden of anyone getting other people’s honestly earned income through government redistribution of wealth. If we say that a welfare state demands immigration barriers due to the fear of others coming into another place to live off the people in that area, then don’t we need immigration restrictions between states to prevent Americans from migrating from one part of the country where welfare benefits are less to another area in which they are higher and more generous? What about between the counties within each of the fifty states?

Sure, a person may very well get up and move from one state in the Union to another for better welfare benefits, but do we want border guards and immigration officers at each and every state line, checking whether that person has a job in the state they are moving into, whether they have a criminal record in the state from which they are leaving, whether they have relatives in the state they want to go to who pledge to support them until they have a job in the new location? Isn’t that migrant going to compete for a job in the state to which they desire to move; don’t we need state governments to have their own employment central plan to determine if more people are needed to do particular types of work? So, we have to have state-level immigration quotas? And what if some people from states “X,” or “Y” or “Z” illegally enter state “A”? Will each state have to have its own investigators who surveil and break into homes to check residence and employment documents? Each state rounding up illegals from state “X,” detaining them, and then deporting them back to state “X” from state “A”?

Conservative: This all sounds crazy, ludicrous. We are all Americans, not foreigners coming from another country.

Richard: But is that not what we do with people who attempt to come into the U.S. and stay here illegally from Mexico? What if the United States had annexed all of Mexico after the Mexican War of the 1840s?  Then all of the people complained about today who are coming illegally to America would have a legal right to do so because Sonora or Baja California or the Yucatan peninsula would be part of the United States. They would be American citizens simply moving from one part of the same country to another. So why should lines that governments draw on a political map of the world prevent ordinary human beings from living, working, visiting or retiring to anywhere they want? Why should the Rio Grande be a wall rather than simply a river with bridges over it enabling people to freely go about their personal business from one side to the other? Like those crossing the Mississippi River from Iowa to Illinois?

Conservative: It still seems and sounds pie-in-the-sky to me.

Richard: You and I have often talked about how government is out of control; how it spends too much; that it regulates more and more; how it undermines personal and economic freedom;  how it wants to know all of our comings and goings; how government tries to tell us what words to speak and how to interact with others inside and outside of the marketplace; how they deny parental responsibility and treat our children as the property of the state.

If we continue down this road of stricter and more prohibitive immigration controls, there is no way to avoid a greater loss of the freedom we are both already deeply concerned about. The task should be to work toward the repeal of the welfare state and its ethically wrong and economically disastrous consequences. Not reduce people’s freedoms more because the government already intrudes and controls so much already. We should beware of the dangerous path of one government intervention becoming the rationale for others due to the negative and harmful effects of the earlier ones. The goal is to reverse State power, not expand and increase it due to the effects of the State power already imposed. Immigration restrictions only superimpose more injustices and economic inefficiencies on a society already far too overburdened with both.

Conservative: I have to think about some of what you have said. See you at the next Republican lunch meeting. Save me a seat at your table.

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This is not an unusual type of conversation I have had with conservatives and Republicans. I would suggest that they are the means by which friends of freedom try to move society in better directions, one mind at a time.

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