One’s a Clinton administration alumnus; the other served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. A Brookings Institute senior fellow and the founder of the Weekly Standard, both named Bill, hardly seem like a political pair, but in the age of populism, radical centrism is all the rage.
Bill Galston and Bill Kristol launched the New Center, an organization they say “does not split the difference between Left and Right, but offers a principled alternative to both.” Their first policy paper tackles immigration, in the words of Galston and Kristol, “the poison infecting our politics.”
Critics will say that the New Center’s immigration proposal looks rather close to those advocated for by the Gang of Eight in 2013. But unlike the Gang of Eight bill on immigration, the New Center doesn’t split the baby. And unlike 2013, legitimate political voices are calling to abolish ICE or slash legal deportation in half.
With immigration driving Europe into mayhem — either down the angry nationalist route of Hungary or the open borders and crime-fest of Germany and Sweden, which may produce the same result in the long run — Galston and Kristol try to capitalize of a growing, fearful new center of the United States, increasingly divorced from our political parties.
The New Center’s proposal is built on a few basic tenets which will automatically offend fringes of the Left and Right. First, the proposal doesn’t engage in any sort of global utilitarianism or left-wing fantasies of an immigration system weighing Americans and non-Americans equally. Galston openly rejected the fallacy of immigration driven by the notion of “global justice,” pointing out that so long as America is prosperous, it’s the most charitable nation in the world. Furthermore, the New Center prioritizes both good policy, that which is economically rational, and good politics, that which is somewhat popular with the people. Their proposal keeps current legal immigration levels constant.
“Not only is it a dealbreaker,” Galston said of the New Center’s refusal to slash the immigration rate. “But economically, it makes no sense.”
The New Center’s proposal focuses on three major issues: how to keep illegal immigrants out of the country, what to do with the ones already here, and how to reform our legal immigration system.
The first point posits relatively straightforward solutions: Fortify the border with physical barriers — not always a wall — and better legal measures to quicken deportation as well as a crackdown on illegal immigrants already in the country. This includes mandatory use of E-Verify and implementation of biometric monitoring of foreign nationals here on visas. These are generally inoffensive, common-sense plans that most of the center-left and center-right can probably agree with.
The next two points are more contentious.
The New Center’s compromise between granting some degree of amnesty to immigrants already here and radically cutting back on chain migration in favor of skills-based migration is not too functionally dissimilar from what Republicans began to float last spring to resolve the DACA issue. This, of course, means that Kristol and Galston know that they’re selling their proposal to 2021, not 2019.
The New Center bolsters most aspects of their proposals with both public opinion and economic logic. Sixty-three percent of Americans support giving Dreamers work permits and a path to citizenship in exchange for instituting meritocratic immigration in place of our existing familial system. So, why not allow that trade-off?
Tellingly, the brunt of the New Center’s paper isn’t detailing their policies, which are described in enough detail to guide meaningful legislation, but instead tries to establish a common set of facts. America-Firsters may try to ignore that immigrants with STEM degrees contributed 30 to 50 percent of American productivity growth from 1990 to 2010. Leftists may recoil at the reality that we’re one of the only countries to prioritize family reunification over merit-based immigration.
But that’s the importance of the New Center’s paper: not just proposing variations of policy that other people have already suggested before, but forcing anyone who reads them to face the full truth, one that’s become increasingly obfuscated by growing partisan rancor.
Editor’s Note: The Weekly Standard, where Kristol is editor-at-large, is owned by Clarity Media Group — which also owns the Washington Examiner.
