In this segment, I ask Mike a question about immigration. I was trying to get him to go beyond the typical talking points, and I asked him a question that eventually we all need to answer to ourselves regarding immigration. It is my belief that immigration reform gets sidetracked by the issue of illegal immigration, that we don’t discuss what we want when it comes to legal immigrants nearly enough.
Click here for one of the best resources I have found for starting a conversation on this issue.
Here are the questions I asked in this interview:
In Martin Gross’ book, National Suicide, he makes the argument that government keeps growing because the government is so big that most members of Congress don’t have really know how government works. There are so many agencies and bureaucracies, that even an ambitious new Senator will have a hard time knowing where to start. Where do you propose to start?
You tend to cover many of the conservative platforms regarding immigration. However, at some point the Immigration Act of 1965 is going to need to be updated. Determining who can legally immigrate to a country is a process that is always inherently discriminatory. If America is to give a priority to a certain type of immigrant, what factors should determine what kinds of legal immigrants we should invite to our country?
Let me paraphrase his substantive view on immigration from this interview:
“blah blah blah.”
“…Oh, and they should speak English already.”
From this admittedly limited clip, I don’t think this guy really knows much about the issues at hand (economic issues involved in migration policy, sociological research on integration, motivations for migration, etc.). Thanks for this demonstration of his ineptness on this issue, Ben.
To be fair Jake, I would suggest that most people don’t know much about the issues you recommend – even those who study it for a living, since those who do study it for a living are doing so through a very limited paradigm. However, where I do agree that the issues you mentioned are important, you seem to be obsessively focused on how migration affects the migrant, while completely ignoring the rights of a host society to accept the migrant in the first place. What my question presupposed is whether a host society should have any say on what kind of migrant they should allow. This is a discussion that no one seems willing to participate in, so I don’t hold it against Mike that he didn’t have a well-scripted answer ready. Currently our immigration discussions seems to focused on what we don’t want. I think you and I can both agree that is a pretty lousy place to start.
To be fair, Mike said that a migrants ability to speak English ought to be considered. He said a good argument can be made for inviting immigrants that speak English. Aside from the knee-jerk liberal reaction that this is discriminatory, I am curious why you think having immigrants speak English is a bad idea – or in a broader sense why language shouldn’t also be a factor to consider alongside some of the issues that you mentioned. I don’t think you, or I, or Mike would say “Speak English or stay out,” but just like a university admission board picking from a competitive pool of qualified applicants, wouldn’t it be somewhat reasonable to say we might weight an immigrant with multilingual capabilities higher than one that does not. Let’s take English out of the picture, since that is a problematic language to be privileging for some people. I am going to get back to immigration after this primary is over, so sorry to leave you hanging there.
You got it quite wrong in assuming that I am starting from the standpoint that “all that matters is the policy’s effect on the migrant.” While this is certainly a central concern of mine, the three points I bring up (parenthetically) have actually more to do with the benefit of the host country than the welfare of the migrants, although these two dimensions are necessarily deeply interconnected.
I suppose we can take this up once your primary is over, but just to defend quite briefly my point here:
Economic issues: I am referring to an international equilibrium of allowing the most efficient workers fill the work sectors where they are needed. This benefits both the host society and the migrants – they find work, and they fill a niche in our economy that obviously needs filling. If there were no demand nor supply, we wouldn’t see such an enormous drive for people to come here. Current policies provide a barrier to this efficient distribution, and I argue that it damages our economy.
Research on integration: This is the most interesting. There is an immense body of research on “assimilation” and “acculturation,” both in the US and internationally. The interesting finding is that when groups are forced to assimilate rapidly, this ends up being a “downward assimilation,” into the lower socioeconomic strata and the result is lower education rates and higher crime rates, etc. However, when migrants’ maintain strong connections to the sending culture and strong cultural resources (i.e., language, traditional kinship structures, parental cultural values), then these groups tend to fare much better in education, socioeconomic outcomes, and lower negative social outcomes such as crime. And guess what, they still end up learning English (the necessity of monolingual English policy perspective is a farce). In sum, the cultural resources that migrants bring with them help them actually succeed (socioeconomically) in American society. If your readers want references, I would be happy to provide them.
Motivations for migration: The basic assumption that Lee (he is certainly not unique in this respect) seems to be making is that migrants are coming to live off the fat of the land. Couldn’t be further from the truth. Most of the migrant families that I have worked with spend probably at least 150% of the hours that you or I or Mike Lee spend working in a week. Most of them have multiple jobs — often for both parents. This certainly goes back to point number one here, I would seriously challenge this fallacious assumption that the motivation of the vast majority of migrants is to come and create a tax burden or get a free ride here is complete nonsense — but, it makes for good political one-liners.
Anyway, we can get into this when you get back to posting about it. But, my main point is that you are quite wrong to say that I am advocating a policy that benefits migrants at the expense of the host society. On the contrary, I am arguing that our current policy is shooting our own economy in the foot, and that typically conservative (and some liberal union-based) arguments against a large influx of legal migrants are often based on empirically falsified cultural assumptions, and yes, ethnonationalism.
By the way, to excuse him for not knowing much about these issues is a pretty poor excuse for someone who wants to join the senate right now, when immigration policy is likely to be one of the biggest issues confronting them in the near future.