The way we live now

November 6, 2005
The Way We Live Now

Migrant Worry

By DAVID RIEFF

The issue of immigration finally seems to have achieved critical mass. Open borders, closed borders; sovereignty versus globalization; even that cruelest of questions, the "valuable" immigrant versus the immigrant who is likely to be a burden: all of these topics are now on the table. Of course, Americans have been concerned about immigration on and off for decades in some parts of the country, especially Florida and the states bordering Mexico. And yet for all the efforts of figures like Pat Buchanan or Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, it is only recently that large numbers of Americans have come to believe that illegal immigration is as important a matter as abortion or taxes.

In part, this is because of the fallout of 9/11. In part, it is because of a generalized belief that the country is being flooded by immigrants - an impression that is hardly false, since the United States has a higher proportion of foreign-born residents than at any time since the 1930's. It is probably also because of the fact that immigrants are now spread throughout most of the country, instead of largely remaining in the great urban centers like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

On the political right, the current disenchantment with the Bush administration owes much to the perception that the president is more committed to legalizing guest workers than to stemming the flow of illegal immigrants. That America's borders have become more porous under the watch of an administration whose proudest boast is its commitment to national security is an outrage to many Americans, especially Republicans. The G.O.P. pollster Frank Luntz said recently that when he brings the issue up in focus groups, "you can't shut people up."

Such a pervasive sense of being engulfed by illegal aliens has also been afflicting Europe. When Dutch voters rejected the E.U. Constitution this spring, many commentators understood their decision as a protest in part against the ever-growing number of immigrants in their midst. And when hundreds of would-be immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa rushed the barbed-wire fences that separate the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla from Morocco, the crisis eclipsed every other issue in Spain and forced the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to re-evaluate its relatively pro-immigration policies.

Supporters of immigration and its foes tend to insist that the issue is simple. American critics of open borders speak in terms of national sovereignty and cultural cohesion. The ideal of the melting pot, they insist, has become obsolete in an age marked by the anti-assimilationist doctrines of multiculturalism and the hard facts of globalization. If the United States is to retain its cultural identity, the argument goes, it cannot accept everyone who wants to come here. And on one level, this is simply a statement of fact. A recent poll showed that more than 40 percent of Mexicans said they would move to the United States if given the opportunity - that is, some 42 million people. And Mexico is doing better economically than many Central and South American countries.

Pro-immigration activists, for their part, speak in terms of globalization and justice. Globalization, they argue, cannot mean the free movement of capital and of middle-class professionals alone (American bankers in Hong Kong, French software designers in Silicon Valley). Like it or not, it also implies the free movement of peoples. In addition, without immigrants the populations of developed countries would either be stagnant (as is more or less the case in the U.S.) or moving into decline, as in Japan and much of Europe. Rich societies need laborers to do jobs that native-born people are no longer willing to do, and they need skilled immigrants to make up for shortfalls of nurses, doctors, engineers and other professionals.

In a sense, the debate boils down to culture and politics versus economics. That is probably why it is business, far more than the liberal left in the U.S. and Europe, that has been the great champion of less restrictive immigration policies. The problem is that even though politicians and businessmen refer to the new immigrants as "guest workers" (the term Europeans used in the 50's and the Bush administration is using today), they are here to stay. And popular discomfort with this reality is not xenophobia alone. A society that grants substantial rights to its citizens may be less willing to accord those rights to strangers.

Some years ago, in an effort to counter a rising anti-immigrant, anti-asylum-seeker mood, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees initiated a campaign with a simple slogan: "Einstein Was a Refugee." The campaign called attention to the undeniable fact that the new wave of immigration was bringing the best and the brightest of the poor world to Western Europe, Australia and the United States. If there was a problem in all this, it was that the brain drain of talented professionals from Africa and Latin America was stripping the "sender" countries of essential citizens. In other words, the "value" in the exchange was all to the benefit of the rich world and the detriment of the poor world.

But can we measure the "value" of an individual? Should we? Ultimately, the immigration debate is also an ethical debate, and as such, it raises hard questions that cannot be answered by appeals to economic calculation, human rights legislation or sentiments of nationalism alone. Difficult as it may be to think in terms of "valuable" versus "valueless" immigrants, or to distinguish between the free circulation of information and the free circulation of individuals, the growing political clamor over immigration will force us to think hard about such questions, and perhaps sooner than we expect.

David Rieff, a contributing writer, is the author, most recently, of "At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention."