1811 Is Immigration about Making Americans or Facilitating Enclaves
Is immigration, legal and illegal, about making Americans or facilitating enclaves of nation origin? This is not a trick question. It is a question of fundamental purposes and motives. With thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans in route en masse demanding the right to crash the U.S. southern border, with more groups formed and forming, another crisis point is unavoidable.
What to do? It ultimately depends on factors which go beyond surface discussions about what the caravans endure or what to do logistically when they arrive at the border. American’s response will be controlled by competing self-interests, political pressures, legal realities and the effectiveness of identity politics.
Self-interest is what keeps the entire illegal immigration issue stay animated. It is natural even necessary for survival. The question should be, which self-interest should appropriately take priority in a face-off between thousands of Central Americans and the United States? Both parties are full of values, expectations, and motivations but in order to avoid chaos, there has to be a system of choice. Whose choice is what it is all about.
Poverty, violence and corruption are undeniable conditions in Central America. For those subjected to that web, personal and family self-interest would cry for escape. No feeling person could simply ignore an inner demand for redemption. Imagine looking to the north to see a land seemingly flowing with milk and honey-paradise. All you have to do is breach the barrier, possibly endure three weeks of detention, and your new life begins. Link those images with an organizer’s promise of making the journey with thousands at your side and it is pretty much a no-brainer.
For America, the self-interest mandate looks a lot different. As the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution puts it, “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish …”. America’s self-interest is in her DNA, formed at the issuance of her birthing documents and codified in her birth certificate. The pledge of union, justice, tranquility, security, well-being, and liberty is made to “ourselves and our posterity” first.
Regardless of the very human stories represented within the caravans, political forces are driving and steering the debates. Gamesmanship and hypocrisy seem to be the hallmarks of the struggle. Generally, aside from minority groups like the Freedom Caucus, Republicans are all about national integrity and security during election cycles but turn to Jell-O after keeping their office.
Then there is the leftward march of the Democratic party. As recently as 2006, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Chuck Schumer were among many Democrats that voted for installing a border fence. Only ten years later, the party platform called for granting citizenship to all illegal aliens living in our country. Since President Trump took office, Democrats, including the big three, have opposed, by and large, every meaningful physical border security initiative. Now closing the border to caravans is all about identity politics – sloganizing about xenophobia, racism, and nativism.
The legal mess is unbelievable and a nightmare for border states. Current policy, initiated under the Clinton-era Flores Settlement then expanded in 2016, requires reunification of unaccompanied minors with family, legal or illegal, after 20 days. The Supreme Court has also forbidden indefinite detentions of illegal immigrants under Zadvydas v. Davis. Paring these conditions with major loopholes in the Refugee Act and birthright citizenship has placed us where we are now.
With the approach of what amounts to an unarmed assault on one of our borders, with inability (or lack of will) by Mexico to intervene, President Trump is taking the only responsible action left to him, deploying military forces for support and surveillance operations. In the meantime, now that the election is over, the American people must demand action by Congress to include funding for every possible physical intervention.
Which brings us full circle back to the original question put another way. Is immigration about making Americans or about facilitating enclaves? When hoards reach our southern border, choices must be made about whose self-interests will drive solutions, those of foreign nationals even thousands, or those of a nation.