New York Times (Editorial)
April 15, 2015
There
was something bracingly honest about an op-ed article in The Washington
Post last week by Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican. Under
the headline “America
Needs to Curb Immigration Flows,” Mr. Sessions, the chairman of the
Senate Judiciary’s immigration subcommittee, argued the case for letting
in fewer foreigners.
Even
hard-liners on the same side of the issue as Mr. Sessions — like
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas and
Representative Steve King of Iowa
— take pains to cloak anti-immigration arguments with benign-sounding
words of tolerant welcome. They say they support legal immigration. It’s
illegal immigration they oppose.
But
here is Mr. Sessions, ditching the usual Republican talking points on
immigration, choosing instead to echo an uglier time in our history,
when nativists wielded the
spurious argument that the more immigrants taken in by America, the
worse off America is. He’s advocating for “slowing the pace” of legal
immigration, supposedly to increase job opportunities for native-born,
low-skilled workers, particularly African-Americans.
He equates a wave of immigration from the 1970s to the present with the
continuing “contraction” of the middle-class. Admitting too many
foreign-born workers, he says, lowers the wages of Americans, and he
worries darkly about the effect of so many foreigners
on “schools, hospitals and many other community resources.”
The
libertarians at the Cato Institute, no bleeding hearts, took the time
for a detailed rebuttal, citing basic free-market reasons that the
zero-sum argument from Mr.
Sessions is off-base. Immigrants lift the economy as new workers and
consumers, and they do not strain the welfare safety net. There is not a
fixed number of jobs over which immigrants and the native-born grapple.
The economy is far more dynamic than that,
and a lot of its dynamism comes from immigration.
This
is all so obvious — or it used to be — that most mainstream Republicans
accepted it. Yet Mr. Sessions accuses the financial and political
“elite” of a conspiracy
to keep wages down through immigration. He seems to be betting that a
revival of 1920s-style closed-borders populism will resonate, at a time
when many Americans are fretting about income inequality and shriveled
opportunity. Politicians on the left — like
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts; Mayor Bill de Blasio of New
York; and Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham law professor who ran a spirited
campaign for New York governor — have persuasively argued that
corporatist forces are making life difficult for the
working woman and man. To excite Democratic voters in her presidential
campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton may have to adopt the same stance, or
at least convincingly fake it.
But
nowhere in that argument is there a case for yanking America’s welcome
mat. Mr. Sessions ignores the truth, proved over centuries, that
immigration over all is good
for the American economy. His tears for low-income Americans fail to
impress, given his party’s obdurate hostility to policies that help the
poor and working class. If he truly wanted to lift them up, he would be
better off supporting labor unions and women’s
rights, higher minimum wages, tougher wage-and-hour enforcement, more
access to child-care and reproductive rights. And immigration reform
that unleashes the economic power of the nation’s shadow unauthorized
population and welcomes the newcomers that our
society and economy need.
America’s
long success as an immigration nation is hard to argue against. Unless
you never wanted the immigrants here in the first place, which Mr.
Sessions now seems
willing to admit.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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