LEGAL IMMIGRATION, TOO, IS A PROBLEM

National Review

 

Legal Immigration, Too, Is a Problem

By Rich Lowry

December 30, 2024 11:12 AM

 

One of the worst clichés in Republican politics is that illegal immigration is bad, but legal immigration is good.

 

Despite the rise of Donald Trump and of restrictionism in the party, this cliché is alive and well.

 

Even Trump occasionally recites it, and it was a feature of the great Elon Musk-driven H-1B debate on X over Christmas. Earlier this year, Musk said that he’s for increasing legal immigration “significantly” and that he’s only opposed to “a massive number of unvetted people flooding into America.”

 

block quote

As a reminder, I am very much PRO increasing legal immigration significantly.

I’m not anti-immigration, I’m just against a massive number of unvetted people flooding into America, which any rational person should be.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)

February 3, 2024

block quote end

 

Illegal bad/legal good is not a useful way to consider immigration policy. That this thoughtless dichotomy is still so prevalent even among Republicans shows how difficult it is to change the conventional wisdom on immigration. No wonder that we have reached a historic high in the proportion of the U.S. population that is foreign-born, with hardly any public debate.

 

Very few things in this world are ever wholly good and distinctions always matter. On this issue, the question is: What legal immigration are we talking about?

 

Is unskilled legal immigration good? Or skilled immigration? Do we need more engineers or more chain migration? All of these forms of immigration are equally legal.

 

Is legal immigration good at 500,000 entries a year? Or at a million (we are slightly over that now)? Or two million? Or three million? Numbers make a difference.

 

It is, of course, true that immigration that is lawful is better than immigration that is not. It doesn’t follow from this in any way that all legal immigration is ipso facto worthy, yet opposition to the chaos at the border is often taken as a license to not think seriously about the nature or consequences of our legal immigration system.

 

Consider Musk’s aforementioned tweet. It’s not just that he wants a higher number of legal immigrants; he suggests that the only thing wrong with illegal immigration is that the illegal immigrants aren’t vetted.

 

Assuming we could reliably filter out the criminals and terrorist threats, though, would it really make sense to allow millions more unskilled people into the country? Why?

 

The logic here implies ending our de facto open-border policy in regard to illegal immigrants and creating one for legal immigrants.

 

The immigration system, like any other aspect of national policy, should be shaped to serve our interests, which means considering carefully what criteria we want to use to select people who come here and how many we want to bring.

 

I’m very pro–defense spending, but that doesn’t mean I think every defense program is a good idea or that our policy should be run on the basis of what’s good for defense contractors rather than what’s good for the nation.

 

Very often the argument, or so-called argument, we hear from people reflexively in favor of legal immigration is an old Ronald Reagan line about immigrants coming here and becoming Americans in way they can’t, say, become Japanese or German, or invocations of the Statue of Liberty and the famous Emma Lazarus poem.

 

Reagan was right, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be selective in who we permit to immigrate, and we shouldn’t let a statue, or a 19th century poem, dictate the answer to a complex and fraught policy question.

 

The current legal immigration system, which puts very little emphasis on skills, needs to be thoroughly reformed with an eye to the effect immigration has on wages and labor force participation rates among natives and legal residents, how it drives welfare usage, whether it serves the needs of a 21st century economy, and to what extent it erodes a culture of assimilation.

 

It is impossible to debate these things, let alone make serious changes, if the status quo is assumed by definition to be good.

AH: It is as I have said for years: We can't find jobs, housing, etc. for a percentage of the people we have here now. Why are we bringing in more?

There are so many citizens in Canada sitting around on various forms of social assistance, such as myself on ODSP. I have never been given any job training. Why doesn't the government train people sucking off their programs to fill these jobs that need filling before we have to resort to bringing in those from other countries?