Ashcroft on Lazarus, Liberty and Immigration

At the base of the Statue of Liberty, symbol of arrival on the shores of freedom for immigrants from Europe for more than a century now, is inscribed a sonnet describing the statue and its symbolic function penned by Emma Lazarus, a Jew from a prominent long-established American family, entitled The New Colossus. In Lazarus's immortalized words, the statue beckons:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

(read the whole sonnet here)

In the close of John Ashcroft's speech, he referenced this poem in connection with his own feeling of pride as a youth in the superiority of the US in almost all areas of human activity. Why are we so much better than every other country out there, he thought?

The arrogance of the very question is striking to those who presuppose American hubris. Is it not hypocritical for a people whose founding documents and government are predicated on the precept that all men are created equal to claim superiority? From here, my tendency would be to argue that any imputation of hypocrisy on this question is overstating Ashcroft's claim. He's not making the argument that Americans are innately, inherently, or essentially better, but rather that their system of government (or lack thereof, really) simply produces better results. Do you need proof of that? It is arrogance to point out facts? The US has consistently the highest GDP in the world, and the highest GDP per capita too. The standard of living here is the highest the world's ever known. When the world's rich want an expert to cure their illness, they come to the US. When the world's young adults want an education, they come to the US. Americans innovate and excel in every field of business and science. And if you exclude the charity that governments give on behalf of their people (who are therefore taxed for it and have no personal say in the matter), then Americans are also by far the most generous individuals on earth, giving more per capita than any other nation. It's not a matter of innate superiority--we're no better than anyone else--but rather the unmatched economic and personal freedom we enjoy that results in such excellence.

But that's how I would argue, if left to apologize for that question of national superiority. Ashcroft himself arrives at the conclusion that it's the liberty that makes us great, but he gets there via this Lazarus poem about immigration. He says, "we're not better than other people; we ARE other people!" America is what can happen to ANY country that allows the very dregs of their societies, the huddled masses, the homeless, the wretched refuse to assert their freedom.

Now what does this have to say about immigration?

I am still very much open to reason on all sides of this topic, but here's where I stand so far:

1. I am against ALL illegal immigration
   
2. The idea of filtering applicants for immigration is necessary and requires some kind of bureaucracy. I'm for making that as small and efficient as possible.
   
3. The federal government has the duty to protect its citizens from attacks, and this means that we must control our borders, ports, and airports with fences, ID cards, and armed guards. One Al-Qaeda member that gets across the border faking a Mexican accent and wearing an I heart America T-shirt is one too many. I think this is a superb function for the military and don't understand why the military should not be deployed for homeland security as well as for foreign military solutions.
   
4. The superior freedom guaranteed by our form of government here in the States has produced an impossible to define set of cultural practices which, despite the fact that they are constantly evolving and arrived through the spontaneous mixture of a wide diversity of cultures (although mostly with a Judeo-Christian value base--which base has endured cultural evolution maintaining obvious dominance in the value system of America to this day), would be nonetheless threatened if too large a culturally homogenous group were ever to gain hegemonic dominance over too large a political constituency. Immigration policies, therefore, must include quotas, and the gates must be shut down when the quota is reached. One thing that should be mentioned in connection with culture at this point is that we live in a day where the technologies of travel and communication make it easier than it has ever been to retain ties to a homeland once you emigrate. Living as a minority in a majority culture is no longer sufficient to ensure assimilation unless the minority community is sufficiently small or spread out as to oblige the newcomers to adapt linguistically and culturally. It is rare for the second generation to self-identify as belonging to the home culture of their parents--in that sense, assimilation is almost always successful even when cultural elements are retained (this contributes to the desired diversity), but when the third generation (2nd born on host-country soil) reverts to radical forms of their grand-parents' home culture as a gesture of separation from their host country, this is evidence that the minority community was too large and/or too concentrated for assimilation to have produced its beneficial effects.
   
5. With quotas being necessary, there is still the question of applicant filtration. Filtering applicants by education, national origin, religion, ethnicity, race, skill level, or any other criteria targeted to exclude those who we don't think will fit in, ASIDE from the criteria necessary to exclude criminals and would-be terrorists is WRONG. This one is going to get me into trouble with many a conservative, but it shouldn't. Ashcroft and Lazarus are RIGHT: it's the freedom that makes our results superior to that which other models of government can produce, NOT the culture, NOT the superior economic or technical conditions themselves, and certainly NOT any essentialist notion of racial, ethnic, gender, or other kind of superiority. Freedom--economic, religious, and otherwise--and this high standard of living here in the US are SO SEDUCTIVE and SO SUCCESSFUL that immigrants, in controlled numbers, can hardly avoid fully Americanizing. And, if the numbers are not too great or too concentrated, the success-oriented attitude of any kind of immigrant can only enrich our society as a whole. Now I am NOT saying that we should not keep CAREFUL track of Moslem immigrants from the Soudan, for example. It would be incompetence for homeland security not to use the tool of profiling to its fullest extent in weeding out the potential terrorists they are mandated to protect us from. But as long as they are not known criminals, no religious test or quota should be applied to immigrants. As for skills we need, YES let's recruit people from everywhere in the world that can serve us better than we can ourselves, and let's streamline the process of immigration to make it easier than for others, but let us NOT disqualify people who we don't think will fit in because they are poor, uneducated, or unskilled. This country is currently at full employment, and the Heritage Foundation Statistics notwithstanding, the fact that Mexicans and other Hispanics even try to cross the border illegally is evidence that there IS a draw for labor. And over generations (of course not right away, or even demonstrably in the first generation, as Robert Rector assumes) even the low-skilled entrants into the US are NOT a net draw, but a net benefit not only to the coffers of the state, but to the society into which they are or will soon be assimilated.
   
6. The federal government has a responsibility to enforce ALL immigration laws, and even though I don't like the idea of turning all business owners into federal enforcement agents, it DOES seem like the most efficient means of catching people who legally entered (eg. on a vacation or student visa) but who will eventually need to support themselves somehow. The alternative would be a huge bureaucracy which, as all bureaucracies do, would eventually perpetuate itself beyond its usefulness either through inefficiency or by changing its mandate for the purpose of self-preservation. We need a national ID card that would filter out this case of illegal immigrants. We should also issue temporary visitor IDs to anyone who crosses the border and be prepared to remove by force egregious flaunters of the privilege of staying here (including, obviously, anyone caught in criminal activity).
   
7. Illegal immigrants should be allowed all the charity individuals and associations wish to shower them with, just as such charity should not be restricted to any other group of needy people, but they should not have privileged access to any state-supported benefits such as health insurance, welfare, higher education, etc. Of course, this issue is at the intersection of many problems for conservatives like myself--the government should not be in the business of insuring people for health, should have a much more limited role in welfare and higher education--but with my other proposals implemented it should become next to impossible (excluding clever forgeries) to live and work illegally in the US already, so this drag on our public resources and our collective taxed pocketbooks should be all but completely alleviated with a remainder of limited statistical significance.
   
8. What to do about those already here? With the national ID card and workplace enforcement in place, those who want to work will now have an incentive to initiate a process whereby they can become legal citizens. Yes they broke the law coming illegally, and with border enforcement keeping out new cases we can now focus on them by allowing them the choice: pay a debt to society or leave the society by force. I don't think it's unfair to demand that those who come forward pay back taxes, and a fine. By some estimates there are 12 million illegals already in the US, of which some are good and some are criminal. So by incentivizing them in this fashion, the large percentage of them who are honest or can be forced into honesty by not being able to support themselves without a job would significantly reduce the amount of work necessary to track down and deport the remainder who are criminals and a liability to our society.
   

   All told, I think we need to be very careful about who we allow into this country in a time when the potential damage done to innocent civilians by non-state aligned or backed individuals presents an unprecedented danger to Americans (and to everyone in the free world!). This should be our number one priority in considering the question of borders and immigration. However, I trust the power of freedom and the means this nation has to convert even the lowliest of individuals far more than most conservative talk show hosts and their listeners--America IS the world, and can turn the wretched of the earth into the gold of its doors.