Here are three different ways to run an immigration regime. First, you could encourage controlled, legal settlement, awarding a certain number of places each year to the best-qualified applicants. Second, you could recruit overseas workers en masse and ship them over to fill your labor shortages. Third, you could retrospectively give citizenship to anyone who sneaks in and stays for long enough.
The first, broadly speaking, was the traditional policy of the United States and Canada. Newcomers to those countries arrived having, as it were, beaten several competitors to win their places. This gave them a commensurate sense of pride and patriotism. Not in every case, obviously, but often enough to make both countries examples of successful assimilation.
The second was the approach taken by much of Europe during the boom years that followed World War II. France turned to its African colonies, Britain to the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, Germany to Turkey. Inevitably, there were problems. Because immigrants tended to be heavily concentrated in certain towns, cultural and linguistic integration was much slower. Some second- and even third-generation migrants felt little loyalty to the countries where they had been born; a few fell for a facile anti-colonialism that made them reject the identity on their passports. Over time, though, the sense of national identity was expanded to include a more diverse population.
The third approach is the one that Western countries, overwhelmed by numbers, are increasingly adopting by default. Millions of sans-papiers — literally millions, though it is necessarily impossible to give an exact figure — have entered Europe over the past four years. Although European governments occasionally make noises about assessing their claims and deporting bogus asylum-seekers, voters can see the figures for themselves. In Germany, for example, of the 406,000 people denied asylum in 2016 and 2017, 357,000 are still in the country.
It is in this context that Americans should look at the columns of illicit migrants marching from Central America. What kind of attitude are the marchers likely to take to a country that they are seeking to break into? How will they view the authorities of a state that they have cheated?
To put the question another way, what does it say about these would-be Americans that they are marching behind a Honduran flag? To put this as gently as I can, it doesn’t suggest much emotional attachment to the ideals of the American republic.
Unbelievably, the marchers are attracting sympathetic murmurs from American leftists. How anyone can back them is utterly beyond me, and I write as a supporter of Hispanic immigration. Indeed, I am technically a Latino myself, born and raised in Lima, Peru — a reminder that we Hispanics are a heterogeneous bunch.
The United States is experiencing a peculiarly severe bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome. The fact that the president has jumped on the Honduran march is enough to push some of his critics into the opposite camp, even if that means taking up a stance that they would never have adopted from first principles. They are now embracing the position that people who force their way illegally into the U.S. should be allowed to elbow their way past those applying properly.
It’s certainly true that President Trump has inflamed the issue, averring that the marchers are funded by the Democrats and that many of them are “bad people.” In fact, it’s hard to think of a story more damaging to the Democrats than one involving mass, organized illegal immigration. And, while all human beings are fallen, many of the marchers seem to be perfectly amiable people, guilty only of ambition, resourcefulness, and courage. But here’s the thing: Immigration policy should be about enforcing fair and impartial rules. We can’t rip those rules up every time we see a mother with a baby in her arms. There are a billion young mothers in poor countries who would doubtless like to live somewhere more congenial. Are we going to invite them all?
Under any system of immigration, inevitably, some scoundrels will get in, and some deserving people will be kept out. That isn’t an argument for abandoning all controls. It is an argument, rather, for realism. As living standards rise in developing countries, as smartphones spread, as migration becomes easier, wealthy countries need to find better ways to decide whom to admit and better ways to deny entry to those refused admission.
Americans who argue that any group of Hondurans who pitch up at the border should be admitted, provided they have a few telegenic women and children in their number, are refusing, in a stunningly self-indulgent way, even to begin to address that challenge. No wonder they’re losing the argument.
