The Week (Opinion)
By Edward Morrissey
December 22, 2015
The debate over immigration has become a huge problem for the GOP.
Donald
Trump started things off earlier this year when he promised mass
deportations for those who had entered the country illegally, after
building a wall on the southern
border and "making Mexico pay for it." Trump later softened his
position, promising to allow "the good ones" to re-enter the U.S.
immediately, presumably ahead of those already waiting in line for legal
entry. His actual policy proposal makes no mention of
mass deportation at all; the only reference to deportation in Trump's
position paper is to "illegal aliens in gangs" such as MS-13. But like
many of Trump's statements, the policy matters much less than venting
the frustration felt by voters.
Long
ago, the 9/11 Commission declared the southern border (and the northern
border as well) a national security risk in our new age of radical
Islamist terrorism. The
report also warned about serious flaws in the management of visas, an
issue raised once again by the failure to vet one of the perpetrators of
the San Bernardino terrorist attack, who entered the U.S. on a K-1
"fiancé" visa in July 2014. That track record
of failure has Americans understandably angry about our impasse on
immigration policy, and Trump's simplistic and broad pronouncements both
reflect and empower those voters.
But
if Trump offers simplistic slogans, then the rest of the Republican
presidential field gets too cute by half on immigration policy. For the
last couple of weeks, the
debate apart from Trump has focused on the semantics of "legalization"
and whether it amounts to amnesty.
All
Republican candidates in this cycle agree that the first steps on
immigration policy are to build a wall and overhaul the visa program,
both long overdue after the
9/11 Commission warnings in 2005. Without that sequencing, the U.S.
risks exacerbating its illegal immigration problem in the short and long
term, as we saw after the 1986 compromise that left border and visa
security practically unchanged. When those first
goals are accomplished, the question of how to deal with the
undocumented immigrants remaining in the U.S. — perhaps 11 million or
more — becomes acute. This debate over their final status erupted in a
clash of claims between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio at last
week's debate.
Cruz
and Rubio have emerged from the pack to become serious challengers to
Trump, and both are jockeying to be his prime alternative. In many ways,
the two senators are
similar in policy, but Cruz opposed Rubio's "Gang of Eight" effort in
2013 to create a bipartisan solution to immigration reform. Cruz latched
onto the process by which longstanding immigrants here illegally would
gain legal status in the U.S., and declared
that he "did not intend" to allow legalization. Rubio then accused Cruz
of changing his position, highlighting an amendment Cruz had offered to
the Gang of Eight bill that would have blocked citizenship but not
legal-resident status. Ever since, the two have
jousted over the parsing of the language in the bill and public
statements each has made.
This
spat, like Trump's statements, acts more as a signal of muscularity on
immigration than a serious policy debate. Cruz wants to gain credit for
being more serious
than Trump but more assertive and trustworthy than Rubio, while Rubio
wants to undermine trust in Cruz to jump over him to challenge Trump. A
serious policy debate, though, would ask whether legalization alone
would work, let alone refusing it.
Let's
start with Cruz's position. Denying a path to legal status would
eliminate the incentives that would drive illegal immigrants to
self-identify, which would allow
the U.S. to run background checks and reduce the scope of
national-security efforts to find potential troublemakers. In fact, that
position gains nothing, and looks more like Mitt Romney's
"self-deportation" position that got roundly rejected in 2012. It would
leave millions in a black-market status, perpetuating an underclass
that would increase the issues immigration reform would seek to reduce,
especially crime and security. In that sense, Trump's statements are
more internally coherent than Cruz's — and perhaps
as pragmatic.
What
about legalization without naturalization? That does create incentives
to come out of the shadows, and proposals to deny broad classes of the
population an option
for naturalization do have some precedent. However, this also cuts
across conservative demands for assimilation over obsessive
multiculturalism, which is important both culturally and politically.
Legalization without an eventual path to citizenship would
provide a powerful disincentive to assimilation. In the long run, it
would also be almost impossible to sustain politically, especially as
that population becomes much more mainstream.
Also
missing from this discussion is the foreign-policy aspects for
immigration, especially over the long term. Thanks to the sharp increase
in focus on ISIS in the GOP
primaries, we have had some debate on how best to incentivize Middle
East regimes to deal with the problem. However, we have had no
discussion at all on how prospective presidents would do the same with
Mexico and Central American nations to reduce the flow
of economic refugees into the U.S. How do we put pressure on these
nations to reform their economies, their governments, and their use of
capital to create environments where their people have reasons to stay
put? The only mention at all in this direction
has come from Trump and his insistence that he'll get Mexico to pay for
our border wall.
The
lack of substantive discussion on immigration highlights the fact that
there are no easy answers, no simplistic solutions. People of integrity
and principle on all
sides have legitimate reasons for their positions, be it an adherence
to the rule of law or the need to welcome the poor and downtrodden.
Voters are not angry because those positions have not been amply
represented; they're angry because few are looking for
pragmatic and systemic solutions rather than talking points and
slogans, and that Washington has had more than a decade and is still no
closer to a solution.
The
next Republican nominee had better start working on the former and
dispensing with the latter. Signaling might make sense in a primary
where little real difference
exists between the candidates. In a general election, voters will want
solutions and a sense that a candidate knows the issues rather than
relies on high-altitude slogans. And that applies to more issues than
just immigration.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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