Nicholas Kristof starts his latest New York Times column with an op-ed trick that is often attempted but rarely pulled off well:
A BOOK, “The Christian Examiner,” warns that “ill-clad and destitute” immigrants are “repulsive to our habits and our tastes.”
A former mayor of New York City cautions that they bring disease, “wretchedness and want” to America. And Harper’s Weekly despairs that these immigrants are “steeped in ignorance” and account for a disproportionate share of criminals.
Boy, those foreigners were threatening — back in the mid-1800s when those statements were made about Irish immigrants.
Is there a reader anywhere in the world who was surprised to learn that these quotes did not come from the recent past? That it wasn’t Rudy Giuliani who talked about “wretchedness and want”? And what’s the implicit point here? That because some people made arguments about previous waves of immigration that are now generally seen to have been overwrought, mistaken, or offensive, all claims that current policy is too liberal should be dismissed? Apparently so:
Many Americans see foreigners moving into their towns, see signs in Spanish, and fret about changes to the traditional fabric of society.
That’s an echo of the anxiety Theodore Roosevelt felt in 1918 when, referring to German and other non-Anglo European immigrants, he declared, “Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.” That’s an echo of the “yellow peril” scares about Chinese and Japanese immigrants.
Kristof’s answer to this concern is the assertion that immigration enriches the country: “Nations, like carpets, benefit from multiple kinds of threads, and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, was right: ‘It is a good rule of thumb to ask of a country: Are people trying to get into it or out of it?’” I agree with that rule of thumb! But it’s not one that gets you very far in deciding how many and which of the people trying to get in should get in, or the manner in which they should be let in.
Look, people aren’t legal or illegal, behaviors are. If an investment banker is convicted of insider trading, he doesn’t become an illegal. So let’s refer not to “illegal immigrants” but to “undocumented immigrants.”
Thieves, embezzlers, rapists, murderers, con artists, jaywalkers: We categorize people on the basis of the illegal actions they have taken all the time (which is not to say that these acts are morally equivalent to one another or to breaking immigration laws).
It’s difficult for me to judge the legality of Obama’s executive action, because I’m not an expert on legal issues like prosecutorial discretion. But neither are critics furious at Obama. We have a broken, byzantine immigration system — anybody who deals with it is staggered by the chaos — because politicians are too craven to reform it. At least Obama is attempting to modernize it.
Yes, it’s troubling that Obama previously argued he didn’t have this authority. Yes, his executive action is on a huge scale — but it is not entirely new. Obama’s action affects 45 percent of undocumented immigrants, compared to the 40 percent affected by President George H.W. Bush’s in 1990. Let’s leave the legal dispute for the experts to resolve.
Whether the president is exercising power that belongs to the legislature is not a narrow and technical question to be handed over to the lawyers. To say that it is one is already to have stacked the deck against self-government. The “at least he’s trying” excuse would apply to a very broad range of executive power grabs. (At least President Bush was trying to fix Social Security!) And see here for some context on that 40-percent figure.
I see a different hypocrisy in Obama’s action. He spoke eloquently Thursday evening about the need to treat migrants humanely — and yet this is the “deporter in chief” who has deported more immigrants than any of his predecessors. We as taxpayers have spent vast sums breaking up families and incarcerating honest men and women who just want to work. By a 2011 estimate, more than 5,000 children who are United States citizens are with foster families because their parents have been detained or deported.
If it’s wrong in principle to deport a lot of illegal immigrants, then it’s hard to see how any immigration policy other than open borders could be enforced. If that’s what Kristof is arguing for, he should say so.
Kristof concludes that we should have empathy for illegal (sorry! undocumented!) immigrants because members of his family have broken or considered breaking the immigration laws. I guess we’re supposed to assume that many of us could tell similar family stories. I’m not sure that’s true. But the claim that we should have empathy for illegal immigrants strikes me as one of Kristof’s most defensible points. What it shares with all of his better points is that one can believe it while still opposing Obama’s policy.