Thoughts on Immigration, Part One

I have been thinking about justice and immigration lately. I think that justice is not served by having huge numbers of people coming to this country illegally, working in terrible conditions, and worried about being deported. Justice means more people staying in their home countries, with their families and their history, while earning a decent living there, and a decent living without fear in this country for those who still come here. This is going to be a multi-post series, looking at the root causes of immigration injustice, and how we might begin to fix them in a quest for justice. This quest will not be easy, and the causes so intertwined with each other and other issues that it may seem impossible to unpick them and begin to find justice. But we must try, or know that we are also guilty of the injustice.

Many people in the United States don’t want to think about immigration, as witnessed by their reflexive call to close the borders to all but a very few people. Other people don’t want to think about the root causes of immigration, as witnessed by their focus only on dealing with the immigrants crossing the border, helping them in the desert and then once they are in this country. I don’t really blame either group. The world is much simpler when you look at it in black and white.

The first problem is the immigration laws that intentionally make it difficult to come to this country to work. There is huge resistance to changing them, but as long as it is too hard to get here legally, then people will be coming illegally. However, this won’t solve the reasons why people come here. Even if waiting lists and periods were shortened and the backlog of legal immigrants dealt with, there would soon be even more people trying to come here. There aren’t enough people in this country to hire to deal with the number of people who want to come here, and soon we would be right back where we started. (And I don’t believe we can return to the days when there were no controls at all over who moved here — we live in a world where there are people who wish to do us great harm, and we gain nothing by ignoring that fact. Countries very rarely, particularly in modern times, exert no control over who crosses their borders.)

Tomorrow I will discuss the role of labor laws in creating demand for illegal immigration.

Read Part Two; Part Three; Part Four

Related Articles

• No cap or control system will keep determined immigrants out (newstatesman.com)
• You: New York immigrants boost city economy by $200 billion (reuters.com)
• Tough illegal immigration bill headed to Ga gov (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

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Tags: Illegal immigration, immigration, issue, Law, Social Justice, United States