FROM THE ACTIVIST
A Radical Approach to Immigration Reform
MATTHEW SCHREPFER
Congress is gearing up for another attempt at comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform. After the disaster of the 2012 election, ongoing demographic shifts may actually pressure Republicans to pass it this time, although a bet on Republicans’ rationality or instinct for self-preservation hasn’t been a winning one recently. A lot could be said about the plan, put forward by a bipartisan group of U.S senators, but before we engage too deeply in the specifics of this debate, it would be useful for socialists to orient ourselves by considering what a real leftist policy on immigration would look like.
On the issue of undocumented immigrants already in the United States, the answer is easy: full and immediate amnesty, and a rapid path to citizenship. The existence of a reserve army of terrified quasi-serfs easily exploited by large companies like Wal-Mart, due to their lack of papers, is clearly unacceptable. Deporting them all is logistically impossible, economically undesirable, and utterly inhumane. Furthermore, once amnesty is granted, attempting to punish them, for example with longer waits for citizenship, in order to serve some simplistic and bourgeois idea of cosmic hurts the undocumented and helps no one. Above all, the solution should not maintain the second-class status from which the undocumented currently suffer, which a delayed path to citizenship would likely reinforce.
The topic of absorbing future immigrants, however, is more complex. It is obvious that the current, heavily militarized border security regime is a terrible idea that amounts to a familiar mélange of expensive and ineffective policies that the American national security apparatus pulls off so well. But are fully open borders a reasonable answer for Leftists?
It may seem so: what right does the state have to say where people can and can’t live? Arbitrary limits on immigration have often been the state expression of xenophobia, an attitude anathemic to any self-declared socialist. Moreover, what about the improvement of living conditions that most immigrants seek in coming to the United States?
The issue is not so simple. Some problems commonly raised by opponents can and should be dealt with rather easily—for example, the idea that a wave of immigrants would overburden our public infrastructure, which we should (and could) be improving in the first place.
However, a problem that should concern the Left is the impact a huge influx of immigrants would have on the current welfare state. Given the current nature of current immigration, most who would come to this country would use at least some forms of government provided safety net programs , probably most of all government subsidized health care. Moreover, waves of new immigration have historically caused resentment among native whites who dislike seeing government benefits go to people who don’t look like them. With liberalized immigration policy, the country would likely see an increase in demand for welfare state services simultaneous with a decrease in support for them. It is possible that immigrants themselves may provide political support for the welfare state, but immigrants are generally less likely to vote or be politically engaged. Poor and unskilled immigrants are unlikely to provide a political counterbalance, the precise reason that many libertarians have historically supported liberal immigration policies.
The threat to the welfare state posed by open borders is overblown. The large presence of racial minorities is often offered as a reason the American welfare state is less robust than that of more ethnically homogenous European states, and certainly a look at the recent history of those states is not encouraging. Waves of immigration from African and Middle Eastern states appears to have fueled the rise of racist, xenophobic far-right parties and a decline in support for the welfare state in the great European social democracies like France, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands. However, there are other factors involved in those changes, the financial crisis and subsequent austerity foremost among them, and it is not clear whether immigration actually is a cause of the far right’s resentment or merely a handy target for it. For instance, it would undeniably be wrong to blame immigrants in Greece for the rise of Golden Dawn.
The very fact that America has always had a lot of racial minorities, and that their population is already increasing pretty significantly, suggests that just adding some more is unlikely to erode support for the welfare state very much. Anyone who was going to be driven to oppose the welfare state out of racial resentment has almost certainly already been driven to oppose it, so increased immigration likely won’t make things worse, and since as mentioned above immigrants are a population likely to support the welfare state themselves they may very well make things better.
Ultimately, the immense improvement in living standards for most immigrants and the unjustifiability of arbitrary state restrictions on people’s movement is sufficient, I believe, to outweigh such concerns. It is also the case, of course, that the United States’ policies toward Latin America, both economic and political, have contributed greatly to the poverty that drives people to cross our borders in the first place. It would be helpful if American policy toward the region was less destructive and invasive, and that should be part of the conversation as well. It must be accompanied by other policies, but open immigration and amnesty should be a cause any Leftist could support.
No comments:
Post a Comment