Political Ideologies – Illegal Immigration

term_paper_instructions_political_ideologies_illegal_immigration_0 term_paper_instructions_political_ideologies_illegal_immigration_0 resource_document_2_keepingthemout_lettingthemin_1 resource_document_1_the_emerging_migration_state_2 conservative_perspective_section_2_resource_4 class_notes_term_paper_5
PLSC 102 Term Paper on Political Ideologies
The purpose of this assignment, according to Thomas Jefferson:
“Difference of opinion leads to inquiry, and inquiry to truth.”

Illegal Immigration, address the following in at least 6-7 typed pages. You will need to use your lecture notes on the ideological spectrum, and outside research. In addition to books and journals, the following online databases will help you locate opposing views and recent laws/court decisions: Britannica Online, the Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center, ProQuest and LexisNexis (newspaper and newsmagazine searches), and the CQ Researcher. These and other MiraCosta databases can be accessed for free at MCC libraries or at home (using your Surf password). Simply click on “Library” on the MCC website, and then click on “All Online Databases” under “Online Resources.”
You should start your research with your textbooks (check the index), Britannica Online (or another trustworthy encyclopedia), and the Opposing Viewpoints database. Then, after you have a better understanding of your issue, you can move on to other specific sources such as newspaper and journal articles, newsmagazines such as Newsweek and Time, websites for political parties and other sources.
You will need to use at least 8 different sources for your paper other than your course textbooks. At least three of your sources must be something other than websites (i.e articles, books, etc). If you can find a source in print, but you choose to get it online (like a newspaper article from LATimes.com), it does not count as a website source. All sources must be cited in the paper and listed in a separate bibliography (citation format described below).
The paper must be double-spaced, with size 12 Times New Roman font, one-inch margins, and your name, class, and date in the header (not in the body of the paper – click View–>Header&Footer). Do not use any cover pages or folders – only a staple in the upper left corner. Your paper must be in essay format (no outlines). Do not include an introduction or conclusion. Points will be deducted for spelling and grammatical errors, and for deviations from the format described below.

Section 1: Describe how contemporary American liberals approach this issue. You will need to provide an objective, unbiased description, so that most liberals would agree with what you have written. Specifically,
a) Describe their beliefs about this issue – are they in favor, opposed? More importantly, what arguments do they give to support their position?
b) Describe the specific changes they propose to address this issue. You will need to research and describe several policies or ideas for reform, including recent laws (state and federal) and/or court decisions that reflect their position; AND policies or ideas that have not yet been put into law (i.e. they’ve only been proposed).
c) Explain why they hold these beliefs and recommend these policies. That is, what core values and characteristics of liberals explain their position on this issue? Use your notes about the spectrum of ideology (for example: beliefs about change, government, property, traditions, etc.). Points will be deducted if you fail to logically apply all the characteristics and core values we discussed in class, which are relevant to your issue.
In this section, do not just copy a description of liberal beliefs from the text or your notes. Each time you mention a core belief or characteristic, you need to relate it directly to your issue. For example, don’t write “Liberals are for same-sex marriage because of egalitarianism.” INSTEAD, you should write: “The liberal drive to legalize same-sex marriage reflects their egalitarian desire to treat homosexuals equally under the law, just like any other human beings.  In addition, the liberal policy of ___________ stems from their belief that ____________ .”  Do not copy this setup verbatim – vary your word choice and sentence structure.
Section 2: Describe how contemporary American conservatives approach this issue. You will need to provide an objective, unbiased description, so that most conservatives would agree with what you have written. Specifically,
a) Describe their beliefs about this issue – are they in favor, opposed? More importantly, what arguments do they give to support their position?
b) Describe the specific changes they propose to address this issue. You will need to research and describe several policies or ideas for reform, including recent laws (state and federal) and/or court decisions that reflect their position; AND policies or ideas that have not yet been put into law (i.e. they’ve only been proposed).
c) Explain why they hold these beliefs and recommend these policies. That is, what core values and characteristics of conservatives explain their position on this issue? Use your notes about the spectrum of ideology (for example: beliefs about change, government, property, traditions, etc.). Points will be deducted if you fail to logically apply all the characteristics and core values we discussed in class, which are relevant to your issue.
In this section, do not just copy a description of conservative beliefs from the text or your notes. Each time you mention a core belief or characteristic, you need to relate it directly to your issue. For example, don’t write “Conservatives oppose same-sex marriage because of faith and nationalism.” INSTEAD, you should write: “The conservative desire to define marriage as between one man and one woman reflects the influence of major religious leaders, which consider homosexuality a sin, and their related adherence to America’s tradition of heterosexual marriage. In addition, conservatives’ desire to ___________ stems from their belief that ____________.”  Do not copy this setup verbatim – vary your word choice and sentence structure.
Section 3: Describe how contemporary American moderates approach this issue. You will need to provide an objective, unbiased description, so that most moderates would agree with what you have written. Specifically,
a) Describe their beliefs about this issue. What arguments do they give to support their position?
b) Describe the specific changes they propose to address this issue. You will need to research and describe several policies or ideas for reform, including recent laws (state and federal) and/or court decisions that reflect their position; AND policies or ideas that have not yet been put into law (i.e. they’ve only been proposed).
Section 4: Briefly critique at least one argument or policy for each of the three positions described above – what is wrong with these arguments and policies when it comes to your assigned issue? Finally, describe your beliefs AND proposed policies for this issue.
In order to receive full credit on this paper, you must show familiarity with all the major arguments and recent policies/ideas on each side of the debate. More importantly, your paper must exhibit a firm understanding of the core values and characteristics of each ideology and how to apply them to your particular issue. See the rubric on Blackboard for more information on how the paper will be graded.
This assignment will be due at the beginning of class on the date listed on the syllabus. No emailed papers accepted. No excuses about crashing computers, failed printers, lost memory sticks/disks, etc. – all this can be avoided by printing the paper before the due date.
Please contact me if you have any questions about this paper.

Citation: You will need to use at least 8 different sources for your paper other than your course texts. At least three of your sources must something other than websites (i.e use articles, books, etc).
** Do not plagiarize, or borrow other peoples’ ideas without acknowledging them. Quote or paraphrase other authors’ ideas, and include proper citations. However, do not include long quotes – this essay should largely reflect your own critical thinking. Papers suspected of plagiarizing other work will be checked by TurnItIn.com, and may result in severe penalties such as a lower class grade or referral to a Dean.
Whenever you are quoting someone directly, or are paraphrasing their idea, include the author and page number in parentheses at the end of the sentence that references their idea (put this information before the period).
For example:
Some people argue that politics is many things, and it affects everything (Danziger, 165). Moreover, Lasswell states “politics is who gets what, when and how” (Lasswell, 45).
If there is no page number, put some other brief identifying info in the parentheses. For example: (www.house.gov, Committees).ÂÂ

Also include a separate bibliography at the end of the paper where you give me the full citation. The following provides examples of how to cite sources in your bibliography:
Books:
Abramson, Paul R. 1983. Political Attitudes in America. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.
Articles:
Adelson, J. and O’Neil, R. 1966. “Growth of Political Ideas in Adolescence: The Sense of Community.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 4:295-306.
Periodicals:
Sahagun, Louis and Helfand, Duke. May 18, 2000. ACLU Sues State Over Conditions in Poor Schools. The Los Angeles Times. A1:1.
ÂÂ
For websites, cite the organization’s name, the main host address, the date last accessed, and titles for the chain of links which leads someone to your source. Do not copy the entire URL (i.e. web address).
For example: The US House of Representatives. www.house.gov. Last accessed September 6, 2005. Committees, Appropriations, Press Releases.

PLSC 102 Term Paper on Political Ideologies

The purpose of this assignment, according to Thomas Jefferson:

“Difference of opinion leads to inquiry, and inquiry to truth.”

Check the list on Blackboard to see which issue of the following issues you’ve been assigned.

Illegal Immigration, Stem Cell Research, Affirmative Action, or US Foreign Aid (only non-military aid).

After getting your assigned issue from the list on Blackboard, address the following in at least 6-7 typed pages. You will need to use your lecture notes on the ideological spectrum, and outside research. In addition to books and journals, the following online databases will help you locate opposing views and recent laws/court decisions: Britannica Online, the Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center, ProQuest and LexisNexis (newspaper and newsmagazine searches), and the CQ Researcher. These and other MiraCosta databases can be accessed for free at MCC libraries or at home (using your Surf password). Simply click on “Library” on the MCC website, and then click on “All Online Databases” under “Online Resources.”

You should start your research with your textbooks (check the index), Britannica Online (or another trustworthy encyclopedia), and the Opposing Viewpoints database. Then, after you have a better understanding of your issue, you can move on to other specific sources such as newspaper and journal articles, newsmagazines such as Newsweek and Time, websites for political parties and other sources.

You will need to use at least 8 different sources for your paper other than your course textbooks. At least three of your sources must be something other than websites (i.e articles, books, etc). If you can find a source in print, but you choose to get it online (like a newspaper article from LATimes.com), it does not count as a website source. All sources must be cited in the paper and listed in a separate bibliography (citation format described below).

The paper must be double-spaced, with size 12 Times New Roman font, one-inch margins, and your name, class, and date in the header (not in the body of the paper – click View–>Header&Footer). Do not use any cover pages or folders – only a staple in the upper left corner. Your paper must be in essay format (no outlines). Do not include an introduction or conclusion. Points will be deducted for spelling and grammatical errors, and for deviations from the format described below.

Section 1: Describe how contemporary American liberals approach this issue. You will need to provide an objective, unbiased description, so that most liberals would agree with what you have written. Specifically,

a) Describe their beliefs about this issue – are they in favor, opposed? More importantly, what arguments do they give to support their position?

b) Describe the specific changes they propose to address this issue. You will need to research and describe several policies or ideas for reform, including recent laws (state and federal) and/or court decisions that reflect their position; AND policies or ideas that have not yet been put into law (i.e. they’ve only been proposed).

c) Explain why they hold these beliefs and recommend these policies. That is, what core values and characteristics of liberals explain their position on this issue? Use your notes about the spectrum of ideology (for example: beliefs about change, government, property, traditions, etc.). Points will be deducted if you fail to logically apply all the characteristics and core values we discussed in class, which are relevant to your issue.

In this section, do not just copy a description of liberal beliefs from the text or your notes.  Each time you mention a core belief or characteristic, you need to relate it directly to your issue.  For example, don’t write “Liberals are for same-sex marriage because of egalitarianism.” INSTEAD, you should write: “The liberal drive to legalize same-sex marriage reflects their egalitarian desire to treat homosexuals equally under the law, just like any other human beings.  In addition, the liberal policy of ___________ stems from their belief that ____________ .”   Do not copy this setup verbatim – vary your word choice and sentence structure.

Section 2:  Describe how contemporary American conservatives approach this issue. You will need to provide an objective, unbiased description, so that most conservatives would agree with what you have written. Specifically,

a) Describe their beliefs about this issue – are they in favor, opposed? More importantly, what arguments do they give to support their position?
b) Describe the specific changes they propose to address this issue. You will need to research and describe several policies or ideas for reform, including recent laws (state and federal) and/or court decisions that reflect their position; AND policies or ideas that have not yet been put into law (i.e. they’ve only been proposed).

c) Explain why they hold these beliefs and recommend these policies. That is, what core values and characteristics of conservatives explain their position on this issue? Use your notes about the spectrum of ideology (for example: beliefs about change, government, property, traditions, etc.). Points will be deducted if you fail to logically apply all the characteristics and core values we discussed in class, which are relevant to your issue.

In this section, do not just copy a description of conservative beliefs from the text or your notes.  Each time you mention a core belief or characteristic, you need to relate it directly to your issue.  For example, don’t write “Conservatives oppose same-sex marriage because of faith and nationalism.” INSTEAD, you should write: “The conservative desire to define marriage as between one man and one woman reflects the influence of major religious leaders, which consider homosexuality a sin, and their related adherence to America’s tradition of heterosexual marriage.  In addition, conservatives’ desire to ___________ stems from their belief that ____________.”   Do not copy this setup verbatim – vary your word choice and sentence structure.

Section 3: Describe how contemporary American moderates approach this issue. You will need to provide an objective, unbiased description, so that most moderates would agree with what you have written. Specifically,

a) Describe their beliefs about this issue. What arguments do they give to support their position?

b) Describe the specific changes they propose to address this issue. You will need to research and describe several policies or ideas for reform, including recent laws (state and federal) and/or court decisions that reflect their position; AND policies or ideas that have not yet been put into law (i.e. they’ve only been proposed).

Section 4: Briefly critique at least one argument or policy for each of the three positions described above – what is wrong with these arguments and policies when it comes to your assigned issue? Finally, describe your beliefs AND proposed policies for this issue.

In order to receive full credit on this paper, you must show familiarity with all the major arguments and recent policies/ideas on each side of the debate. More importantly, your paper must exhibit a firm understanding of the core values and characteristics of each ideology and how to apply them to your particular issue.  See the rubric on Blackboard for more information on how the paper will be graded.

This assignment will be due at the beginning of class on the date listed on the syllabus. No emailed papers accepted. No excuses about crashing computers, failed printers, lost memory sticks/disks, etc. – all this can be avoided by printing the paper before the due date.

Please contact me if you have any questions about this paper.

Citation:

You will need to use at least 8 different sources for your paper other than your course texts. At least three of your sources must something other than websites (i.e use articles, books, etc).

** Do not plagiarize, or borrow other peoples’ ideas without acknowledging them.  Quote or paraphrase other authors’ ideas, and include proper citations. However, do not include long quotes – this essay should largely reflect your own critical thinking. Papers suspected of plagiarizing other work will be checked by TurnItIn.com, and may result in severe penalties such as a lower class grade or referral to a Dean.

Whenever you are quoting someone directly, or are paraphrasing their idea, include the author and page number in parentheses at the end of the sentence that references their idea (put this information before the period).

For example:

Some people argue that politics is many things, and it affects everything (Danziger, 165). Moreover, Lasswell states “politics is who gets what, when and how” (Lasswell, 45).

If there is no page number, put some other brief identifying info in the parentheses. For example: (www.house.gov, Committees). 

Also include a separate bibliography at the end of the paper where you give me the full citation.  The following provides examples of how to cite sources in your bibliography:

Books:

Abramson, Paul R. 1983. Political Attitudes in America. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.

Articles:

Adelson, J. and O’Neil, R. 1966. “Growth of Political Ideas in Adolescence: The Sense of Community.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 4:295-306.

Periodicals:

Sahagun, Louis and Helfand, Duke. May 18, 2000. ACLU Sues State Over Conditions in Poor Schools. The Los Angeles Times. A1:1.

 

For websites, cite the organization’s name, the main host address, the date last accessed, and titles for the chain of links which leads someone to your source. Do not copy the entire URL (i.e. web address).

For example: The US House of Representatives. www.house.gov. Last accessed September 6, 2005. Committees, Appropriations, Press Releases.

PLSC 102 Term Paper on Political Ideologies

The purpose of this assignment, according to Thomas Jefferson:

“Difference of opinion leads to inquiry, and inquiry to truth.”

Check the list on Blackboard to see which issue of the following issues you’ve been assigned.

Illegal Immigration, Stem Cell Research, Affirmative Action, or US Foreign Aid (only non-military aid).

After getting your assigned issue from the list on Blackboard, address the following in at least 6-7 typed pages. You will need to use your lecture notes on the ideological spectrum, and outside research. In addition to books and journals, the following online databases will help you locate opposing views and recent laws/court decisions: Britannica Online, the Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center, ProQuest and LexisNexis (newspaper and newsmagazine searches), and the CQ Researcher. These and other MiraCosta databases can be accessed for free at MCC libraries or at home (using your Surf password). Simply click on “Library” on the MCC website, and then click on “All Online Databases” under “Online Resources.”

You should start your research with your textbooks (check the index), Britannica Online (or another trustworthy encyclopedia), and the Opposing Viewpoints database. Then, after you have a better understanding of your issue, you can move on to other specific sources such as newspaper and journal articles, newsmagazines such as Newsweek and Time, websites for political parties and other sources.

You will need to use at least 8 different sources for your paper other than your course textbooks. At least three of your sources must be something other than websites (i.e articles, books, etc). If you can find a source in print, but you choose to get it online (like a newspaper article from LATimes.com), it does not count as a website source. All sources must be cited in the paper and listed in a separate bibliography (citation format described below).

The paper must be double-spaced, with size 12 Times New Roman font, one-inch margins, and your name, class, and date in the header (not in the body of the paper – click View–>Header&Footer). Do not use any cover pages or folders – only a staple in the upper left corner. Your paper must be in essay format (no outlines). Do not include an introduction or conclusion. Points will be deducted for spelling and grammatical errors, and for deviations from the format described below.

Section 1: Describe how contemporary American liberals approach this issue. You will need to provide an objective, unbiased description, so that most liberals would agree with what you have written. Specifically,

a) Describe their beliefs about this issue – are they in favor, opposed? More importantly, what arguments do they give to support their position?

b) Describe the specific changes they propose to address this issue. You will need to research and describe several policies or ideas for reform, including recent laws (state and federal) and/or court decisions that reflect their position; AND policies or ideas that have not yet been put into law (i.e. they’ve only been proposed).

c) Explain why they hold these beliefs and recommend these policies. That is, what core values and characteristics of liberals explain their position on this issue? Use your notes about the spectrum of ideology (for example: beliefs about change, government, property, traditions, etc.). Points will be deducted if you fail to logically apply all the characteristics and core values we discussed in class, which are relevant to your issue.

In this section, do not just copy a description of liberal beliefs from the text or your notes.  Each time you mention a core belief or characteristic, you need to relate it directly to your issue.  For example, don’t write “Liberals are for same-sex marriage because of egalitarianism.” INSTEAD, you should write: “The liberal drive to legalize same-sex marriage reflects their egalitarian desire to treat homosexuals equally under the law, just like any other human beings.  In addition, the liberal policy of ___________ stems from their belief that ____________ .”   Do not copy this setup verbatim – vary your word choice and sentence structure.

Section 2:  Describe how contemporary American conservatives approach this issue. You will need to provide an objective, unbiased description, so that most conservatives would agree with what you have written. Specifically,

a) Describe their beliefs about this issue – are they in favor, opposed? More importantly, what arguments do they give to support their position?
b) Describe the specific changes they propose to address this issue. You will need to research and describe several policies or ideas for reform, including recent laws (state and federal) and/or court decisions that reflect their position; AND policies or ideas that have not yet been put into law (i.e. they’ve only been proposed).

c) Explain why they hold these beliefs and recommend these policies. That is, what core values and characteristics of conservatives explain their position on this issue? Use your notes about the spectrum of ideology (for example: beliefs about change, government, property, traditions, etc.). Points will be deducted if you fail to logically apply all the characteristics and core values we discussed in class, which are relevant to your issue.

In this section, do not just copy a description of conservative beliefs from the text or your notes.  Each time you mention a core belief or characteristic, you need to relate it directly to your issue.  For example, don’t write “Conservatives oppose same-sex marriage because of faith and nationalism.” INSTEAD, you should write: “The conservative desire to define marriage as between one man and one woman reflects the influence of major religious leaders, which consider homosexuality a sin, and their related adherence to America’s tradition of heterosexual marriage.  In addition, conservatives’ desire to ___________ stems from their belief that ____________.”   Do not copy this setup verbatim – vary your word choice and sentence structure.

Section 3: Describe how contemporary American moderates approach this issue. You will need to provide an objective, unbiased description, so that most moderates would agree with what you have written. Specifically,

a) Describe their beliefs about this issue. What arguments do they give to support their position?

b) Describe the specific changes they propose to address this issue. You will need to research and describe several policies or ideas for reform, including recent laws (state and federal) and/or court decisions that reflect their position; AND policies or ideas that have not yet been put into law (i.e. they’ve only been proposed).

Section 4: Briefly critique at least one argument or policy for each of the three positions described above – what is wrong with these arguments and policies when it comes to your assigned issue? Finally, describe your beliefs AND proposed policies for this issue.

In order to receive full credit on this paper, you must show familiarity with all the major arguments and recent policies/ideas on each side of the debate. More importantly, your paper must exhibit a firm understanding of the core values and characteristics of each ideology and how to apply them to your particular issue.  See the rubric on Blackboard for more information on how the paper will be graded.

This assignment will be due at the beginning of class on the date listed on the syllabus. No emailed papers accepted. No excuses about crashing computers, failed printers, lost memory sticks/disks, etc. – all this can be avoided by printing the paper before the due date.

Please contact me if you have any questions about this paper.

Citation:

You will need to use at least 8 different sources for your paper other than your course texts. At least three of your sources must something other than websites (i.e use articles, books, etc).

** Do not plagiarize, or borrow other peoples’ ideas without acknowledging them.  Quote or paraphrase other authors’ ideas, and include proper citations. However, do not include long quotes – this essay should largely reflect your own critical thinking. Papers suspected of plagiarizing other work will be checked by TurnItIn.com, and may result in severe penalties such as a lower class grade or referral to a Dean.

Whenever you are quoting someone directly, or are paraphrasing their idea, include the author and page number in parentheses at the end of the sentence that references their idea (put this information before the period).

For example:

Some people argue that politics is many things, and it affects everything (Danziger, 165). Moreover, Lasswell states “politics is who gets what, when and how” (Lasswell, 45).

If there is no page number, put some other brief identifying info in the parentheses. For example: (www.house.gov, Committees). 

Also include a separate bibliography at the end of the paper where you give me the full citation.  The following provides examples of how to cite sources in your bibliography:

Books:

Abramson, Paul R. 1983. Political Attitudes in America. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.

Articles:

Adelson, J. and O’Neil, R. 1966. “Growth of Political Ideas in Adolescence: The Sense of Community.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 4:295-306.

Periodicals:

Sahagun, Louis and Helfand, Duke. May 18, 2000. ACLU Sues State Over Conditions in Poor Schools. The Los Angeles Times. A1:1.

 

For websites, cite the organization’s name, the main host address, the date last accessed, and titles for the chain of links which leads someone to your source. Do not copy the entire URL (i.e. web address).

For example: The US House of Representatives. www.house.gov. Last accessed September 6, 2005. Committees, Appropriations, Press Releases.

RESOURCE SITE

Keeping them out, letting them in

Commentary, July-August 2008

Keeping them out, letting them in

MOST OF today’s political debates in America fall into a familiar pattern. On issues ranging from taxes, health care, energy, education, and abortion to the Iraq war and government surveillance of suspected terrorists, liberals and conservatives assume distinct and often diametrically opposed positions. But in the last few years, one issue–immigration–has roiled American politics in unconventional ways. Crossing social and economic lines, differences over this issue have pitted the views and perceived interests of one minority (Hispanics) against another (African-Americans), caused divisions among people of shared religious faith, and set liberals concerned about the welfare of American workers against liberals who believe the United States has a duty to welcome newcomers from less developed nations.

But the issue is most neuralgic, it would seem, on the Right–to the point where divisions over it threaten to split apart the conservative coalition. In this internal conservative debate, a leading magazine like National Review is on one side, a leading newspaper like the Wall Street Journal on the other; much of the talk-radio world is on one side, President Bush and Senator McCain are on the other. The differences are deep, intense, and at times personal.

Now along come books by two leading advocates of the opposing camps. Speaking for the restrictionist camp is Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and a contributor to National Review and National Review Online, who has written The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal. * Speaking for the latitudinarian camp is Jason L. Riley, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and the author of Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders. ([dagger])

ON BEHALF of their respective causes, both Krikorian and Riley marshal an impressive number of facts and studies. Both write clearly and comprehensively, and both display polemical talent. But that is where the similarities end.

Unlike many critics of immigration, Mark Krikorian does not argue that today’s newcomers are fundamentally different from yesterday’s–i.e., less prepared for American life or less interested in acculturating to its norms. Immigrants, he says, “are what they’ve always been.” Instead, it is America that is different–to the point where “a policy that served us well in our adolescence is harmful in our maturity.”

Surveying the “impacts” of immigration, Krikorian strives to document how immigrants are indeed a threat to our economy and our sovereignty; how they cost too much, overpopulate the country, and fail to assimilate; how they are responsible for lengthening our commutes, causing urban sprawl, and thereby radically transforming our once-tranquil landscapes and even creating a “tree deficit.” Yet none of this, he insists, is a knock on immigrants per se; the problem, instead, is “modern society” in general and, more specifically, “modern America,” which simply can no longer accommodate mass immigration as it once could and did.

On these grounds, Krikorian flatly opposes further influx, legal no less than illegal. He wants to keep out both immigrants and guest workers, those who are skilled and those who are unskilled, those who come from Europe and those who come from Latin America, from Asia, or from Africa. “Modern America has outgrown mass immigration,” he states categorically, and we therefore need to adjust our policies accordingly.

Nonsense, says Jason Riley, who contends in Let Them In that a liberal immigration policy not only is consistent with an American tradition that “has served us quite well over the past two centuries” but will make today’s America better in almost every respect. An open-border policy, Riley writes, will increase overall productivity, keep us younger and stronger than our overseas competitors, and provide vital human capital. It is also wholly compatible with the needs of homeland security. For Riley, then, we seal the border at our peril. What we really need to do is to provide more, not fewer, legal ways for immigrants to enter America.

Designed explicitly to be a myth-buster, Riley’s book is organized around many of the anti-immigrant claims made by critics like Krikorian. “Time and again,” Riley concludes, “my own reporting and research found these claims”–namely, that immigrants pose a demographic threat, steal jobs from native-born Americans, overburden our welfare system, threaten our security, and are refusing to assimilate–“to be overblown when they weren’t counterfactual.” He concludes: “We still have much more to gain than lose from people who come here to seek a better life.”

WHO GETS the better of the argument? In some respects, Krikorian does. Riley is capable at times of ascribing bad or even racist motives to those with whom he disagrees. Mocking immigration critics, he devotes part of his first chapter to going after, among others, Krikorian himself, whom he accuses of being a “puppet” of one John Tanton, “a radical environmentalist and staunch supporter of Planned Parenthood.” He also warns readers not to assume that Krikorian’s arguments are made in good faith.

Krikorian’s book, with its measured tone and carefully qualified assertions, testifies to the unfairness of this particular charge. But The New Case Against Immigration is hardly free of other defects, while Riley’s book has many virtues of its own. In particular, Let Them In excels in its analysis of the economic benefits of immigration, and in showing that individual states with large legal and illegal immigrant populations are faring better than one might suspect.

But that is just the problem: each author insists that his case is based on solid empirical evidence, leaving the lay reader struggling to decide whose evidence to believe and how to adjudicate their competing interpretations. Krikorian, for example, asserts on the basis of fact and argument that mass immigration makes it less likely that low-skilled American workers will be hired and more likely they will drop out of the labor market altogether. Wrong, answers Riley, citing a study by the economist Giovanni Peri according to which the inflow of immigrants to California over a 25-year period cannot be shown to have worsened the employment opportunities of natives with similar education and work experience.

Assimilation? “Ending mass immigration [will] not guarantee the restoration of a common civic culture,” Krikorian concedes, “but continuing it does guarantee that any attempt at such restoration will fail.” For Riley, by contrast, it is not immigrants who are assaulting our common American culture but our own homegrown elites. His solution to the problem? “Keep the immigrants. Deport the Columbia faculty.”

What about demographics? “The artificial population growth caused by [mass immigration] is undermining a variety of modern goals related to quality of life,” according to Krikorian. Afraid not, Riley counters. Not only is the United States “nowhere close to being overpopulated,” but “[t]o the extent that immigrants facilitate U.S. population growth and wealth creation, they are part of the solution, not the problem.”

Would America at least benefit from immigrants who are skilled professionals? No way, says Krikorian. Because of their “transnational lifestyles,” skilled professionals pose an even greater challenge to “patriotic assimilation” than uneducated immigrants. They also displace American workers with comparable skills and training and remove an incentive for us to reform our low educational standards. Riley will have none of it. “[H]igh-skill immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Southeast Asia do more than create extra jobs for U.S. employers,” he writes. “They also seem to have a knack for creating entirely new companies that employ thousands of people.”

Even scholars are treated like ping-pong balls. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, cited favorably by Krikorian, Calculated that in 2004, low-skill immigrant households represented a net annual burden to American taxpayers of nearly $20,000 per household. According to Riley, however, Rector’s study is a “shoddy” and poorly argued piece of work. Again, Krikorian adduces a study by the Harvard economist George Borjas, who found that the immigration wave of the 1980’s and 1990’s caused a drop in the annual earnings of all categories of American workers, especially male high-school dropouts. According to Riley, Borjas “had to rig his model”–and Riley seeks to show how.

ON AND on it goes. So unwilling is each author to concede even a single point to the other side that they come to sound more like lawyers than like analysts. In real life, there are simply not that many issues in which all the arguments line up on one side. That is certainly the case when it comes to immigration policy.

Thus, one should be able to concede that illegal immigration is a problem, both in terms of violating our laws and in terms of costs imposed on some communities. At the same time, one should be able to acknowledge that low-skilled workers fill actual needs, that high-skilled immigrants have added an enormous amount to our economy, and that the grit, drive, and adaptability of many of our newest immigrants are admirable qualities.

Though one would not know it from the positions staked out by Krikorian and Riley, many people do in fact hold such nuanced views. There is no real constituency in this country for open borders pure and simple; neither is there one for putting a stop to legal immigration altogether. A debate does rage over what to do with the millions of people who are already in the country illegally, but a broad consensus seems to have formed on the need both to prevent further illegal immigration and to rationalize the current system of legal immigration, which is an unholy mess. *

What of the politics of the issue? This, too, is a complicated story. Immigration has been a galvanizing issue in border states like California, which in 1994 passed a referendum, Proposition 187, denying access to education and health care to illegal immigrants and their children and requiring public employees to report such immigrants to the authorities. Yet as a national issue, immigration hardly registered until recently; according to Riley, it did not come up even once in the 2004 presidential debates.

That all changed in President Bush’s second term. As a former governor of Texas, Bush was philosophically and emotionally disposed to welcome immigrants. “Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande River,” he said many times. “Immigration is not a problem to be solved, it is the sign of a successful nation. New Americans are not to be feared as strangers, they are to be welcomed as neighbors.”

In early 2006, Bush acted on his 2000 campaign commitment to reform the immigration mess by pushing for legislation that would increase enforcement measures but also create a guest-worker program. At the same time, a Senate bill supported by both Bush and John McCain would have allowed illegal immigrants to earn legal status if they met certain requirements. Both the President’s initiative and the Senate proposal, the latter quickly labeled an “amnesty” program, caused large parts of the conservative talk-radio world to mobilize in opposition and much of the Republican base to move toward open revolt. The response helped kill the legislation.

But politics is a tricky business. As Riley reminds us, congressional Republicans hoped that by taking a strong stand against the illegal-immigration “crisis” in the spring of 2006, they would help their party’s electoral prospects come fall. One can understand the thinking behind this. Immigration had indeed become an important issue for Republican voters, at times more important even than the Iraq war and national security; it stood to reason that tough or even harsh rhetoric would benefit a candidate in the primaries.

But what worked in the primary season did not resonate nearly so well in the general election. In fact, as Riley writes, “the strategy bombed,” and it bombed “even in places where illegal immigration [was] a huge problem.” In Arizona, which Riley calls “ground zero in the border wars,” the Republican contenders J.D. Hayworth and Randy Graf went down to defeat; so, in Colorado, did Bob Beauprez, who had made opposition to illegal immigration a centerpiece of his run for governor. Other GOP candidates suffered a similar fate.

It is true that 2006 was a terrible political year for Republicans in general, and these candidates might have lost anyway. But it is just as likely that their approach backfired, and especially among Latino voters. The Republican share of the Hispanic vote, which had more than doubled in a decade (from, according to Riley, 21 percent in 1996 to 44 percent in 2004) plunged to just 29 percent in 2006.

HOW CAN we reconcile the fact that Bush and McCain’s pro-immigration efforts caused such a fierce populist backlash with the fact that those championing an anti-immigration platform went down to defeat in 2006? And how is it that John McCain, running against a raft of GOP candidates who made a priority out of stopping illegal immigration, has won the presidential nomination of the Republican party?

The answer may be that the politics of immigration has, at least until now, been locked in a kind of status quo ante. Anyone who tries to liberalize immigration laws (as former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer did with his proposal to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants) will set off a furious counterreaction. At the same time, anyone whose opposition to illegal immigration appears to border on the obsessive will encounter a brick wall. Yes, McCain won the GOP nomination (a strike against those preoccupied with stopping illegal immigration) but in the process he was forced to jettison his own Senate plan in favor of concentrating on border security first (a strike for those preoccupied with stopping illegal immigration).

Among Republican strategists, there are two schools of thought going forward. According to one, any continuation of the GOP’s less-than-concealed hostility toward Latino voters might well end by relegating the party to permanent minority status, since Latinos are among the fastest-growing demographic groups in America. According to the other, Latinos will always vote for Democrats over Republicans, so trying to accommodate their demands will ultimately harm the party’s message. Which is correct? Riley summarily dismisses a Krikorian-like anti-immigration platform as political “fool’s gold.” He may be right, but the issue is hard to predict.

WHEN ALL is said and done, what emerges most powerfully from the opposing cases presented by Krikorian and Riley is that where one situates oneself along the spectrum of the immigration debate depends on one’s view of America itself–of who we are, and where we are.

Krikorian writes that his book is “not a pessimistic or declinist argument.” But in fact it is; threaded throughout The New Case Against Immigration is the idea that, unlike in the past, America can no longer incorporate newcomers. Globalization, modernity, and our own failures as a nation have conspired to make legal and illegal immigration a grave and growing threat.

Yet, on empirical grounds alone, this fundamental pessimism conflicts with the reality of modern American life. In the decade between 1995 and 2004, for instance, the number of illegal immigrants roughly doubled. According to the Krikorian thesis, this should have exacted a huge toll on our country’s social, civic, economic, and environmental well-being. And yet during that same period, as Yuval Levin and I have documented, * a vast number of social indicators–including the rates of teen pregnancy and sexual activity, binge drinking and smoking, abortion, drug use, education, and divorce–markedly improved, while in areas like welfare and crime, where one might think illegal immigration would have made things much worse, the improvement had the dimensions of a sea-change.

In brief, as our illegal-immigration “problem” has become more acute, our social and civic life has become stronger. The same is true of the economy–which throughout the past two decades, and despite severe challenges, has been the envy of the world. We have witnessed sustained growth, increases in worker productivity and manufacturing activity, low rates of inflation and unemployment, gains in real after-tax incomes, and record-high tax revenues and stock-market gains. Even the slowdowns have been shorter and shallower than in previous decades.

According to Krikorian, the “artificially increased number of people” in America has “eroded, or even wiped out,” the progress we have made in dealing with the problem of the environment. But here, too, the sheer magnitude of recent improvements belies his claim. As Gregg Easterbrook summed things up in Time a few years ago:

“Aggregate emissions,” the sum

of air-pollution categories, have

fallen 48 percent since 1970,

even though the U.S. population

rose 39 percent during that period

…. Air pollution can decline

as the population rises because

antipollution technology keeps

getting better and because Clean

Air Act controls on cars, power

plants and factories have be

en

growing stricter for two decades.

IF, MOREOVER, the pessimistic view fails to square with the empirical record on a variety of key issues, it is also at odds with the American creed and the American story. The United States is one of only two nations in the world founded on an idea. (The other is Israel.) In America’s case, the founding idea is embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Our liberal democracy is built on the principle that ethnic, cultural, and religious differences can be overcome by a dedication to common ideals, including human equality, social opportunity, and representative government under the rule of law.

That this creed and this story have progressed–sometimes more slowly, sometimes more rapidly, but essentially without fail–ever since America’s founding is nothing short of miraculous. To take people from every corner of the earth–people who speak different languages, practice different faiths, embody different histories, and follow different customs–and enable them to cohere into a single nation that is thriving and whole is an unprecedented achievement in human affairs. That is what America has been and what, despite everything, it seems determined to remain.

Obviously this idea of America does not provide guidance on every question of immigration policy. But it does present a useful starting point. One cannot help sensing that it is an idea in whose appeal and durability Krikorian and those who share his perspective have lost confidence. Nor can one help remarking, that, in a book dedicated entirely to the subject of immigration, a reader will search in vain for a single good word about immigrants.

In the final paragraph of his introduction, Krikorian invokes both Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. There is something unusual in this. As it happens, Lincoln said very little about immigration while President; he had, after all, a Civil War to contend with. We know, however, that in November 1862 he countermanded an order by General Grant to keep Jewish merchants out of Union lines; that he was very friendly with the large German immigrant population in Illinois; and that, to him, America’s founding idea was precisely what made it capable of welcoming new immigrants and transforming them into true citizens.

In a speech in the summer of 1858–a speech from which, ironically enough, Krikorian quotes–Lincoln noted that while some Americans could claim a connection by blood to the founding generation, many others had arrived since that time who should, by virtue of their shared ideals, nevertheless be counted as descendants of the founders:

We have … among us perhaps

half our people … who have

come from Europe … or whose

ancestors have come hither and

settled here, finding themselves

our equals in all things. If they

look back through this history to

trace their connection with those

days by blood, they find they

have none … but when they

look through that old Declaration

of Independence they find

that those old men say that “We

hold these truths to be self-evident,

that all men are created

equal,” and then they feel that

that moral sentiment taught in

that day evidences their relation

to those men, that it is the father

of all moral principle in them,

and that they have a right to

claim it as though they were

blood of the blood, and flesh of

the flesh of the men who wrote

that Declaration, and so they are.

As for Ronald Reagan, he held a view directly opposed to Krikorian’s, both in practical terms–he signed a 1986 bill granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants–and philosophically. For Reagan, the point to emphasize was the great and vivifying diversity that immigrants brought to this country, and that flowed into and became as one with the national fabric. Riley quotes Reagan’s words:

We have a statue in New York

Harbor … of a woman holding a

torch of welcome to those who

enter our country to become

Americans. She has greeted millions

upon millions of immigrants

to our country. She welcomes

them still. She represents

our open door. All of the immigrants

who came to us brought

their own music, literature, customs,

and ideas. And the marvelous

thing, a thing of which

we’re proud, is they did not have

to relinquish these things in order

to fit in. In fact, what they

brought to America became

American. And this diversity has

more than enriched us; it has literally

shaped us.

If you believe in this vision of America, you will find the cover of Krikorian’s book particularly jarring: a picture of Lady Liberty, her hand not raised up but stretched out to signal “Stop,” her torch not just extinguished but absent. She is no longer lifting a lamp beside the golden door; she is instead pulling up the drawbridge to an aging, gated community.

As between that vision of America and Jason Riley’s, not to mention Lincoln and Reagan’s, I side with Lincoln and Reagan; and so, I believe, do most Americans.

* Sentinel, 304 pp., $25.95.

([dagger]) Gotham, 256 pp., $22.50.

* See, on this point, Yuval Levin’s “Fixing Immigration” in COMMENTARY, May 2007.

* “Crime, Drugs, Welfare–and Other Good News,” COMMENTARY, December 2007.

PETER WEHNER, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., served in the Bush White House as director of the office of strategic initiatives. His “Obama’s War” appeared in our April issue.

Wehner, Peter

en

Full Text:  COPYRIGHT 2008 Commentary, Inc.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com

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Wehner, Peter. “Keeping them out, letting them in.” Commentary 126.1 (2008): 55+. Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 27 Mar. 2011.

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The Emerging Migration State1

Headnote

Since 1945, immigration in the core industrial democracies has been increasing. The rise in immigration is a function of market forces (demand-pull and supply-push) and kinship networks, which reduce the transaction costs of moving from one society to another. These economic and sociological forces are the necessary conditions for migration to occur, but the sufficient conditions are legal and political. States must be willing to accept immigration and to grant rights to outsiders.

How then do states regulate migration in the face of economic forces that push them toward greater openness, while security concerns and powerful political forces push them toward closure? States are trapped in a “liberal” paradox – in order to maintain a competitive advantage, governments must keep their economies and societies open to trade, investment, and migration. But unlike goods, capital, and services, the movement of people involves greater political risks.

In both Europe and North America, rights are the key to regulating migration as states strive to fulfill three key functions: maintaining security; building trade and investment regimes; and regulating migration. The garrison state was linked with the trading state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen the emergence of the migration state, where regulation of international migration is as important as providing for the security of the state and the economic well being of the citizenry.

In response to a plea from high-tech businesses that German industry was at a competitive disadvantage because of its lack of access to foreign computer and software engineers, the German government in May 2000 launched a new “green card” program, designed to recruit up to 20,000 highly skilled workers, from outside the European Union. To garner support for the initiative and to head off criticism from those who cling to the myth that Germany is not a country of immigration (Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland), Chancellor Gerhard Schröder asserted that “We [Germans] must make sure that in these times of globalization we don’t suffer from a lack of cosmopolitanism. . . . There’s a huge amount of international competition for the best people, and Germany would be making a big mistake if it didn’t take part.” This statement reflects a sea-change in Germany’s foreigner policy (Ausländerpolitik) which is on the verge of becoming a legal immigration policy (Einwanderungspolitik). Together with the change in German nationality law – adopted by the Red-Green government in 1999 and which for the first time injected an element of birthplace citizenship (jus soli) into German law – the new green card program is pushing Germany in a decidedly liberal direction. Yet, at the same time that the green card policy was announced, the Schröder government declared that foreign high-tech workers would not be allowed to bring their families with them. After criticism from human rights groups and gentle reminders from experts about the difficulty of preventing “guest workers” from settling, the government quickly revised its policy to allow for the possibility of settlement and family reunification.

This recent episode in German immigration history illustrates well the dilemma that modern states must face in dealing with “globalization”2 and rising levels of international migration. States are trapped in a “liberal paradox” (Hollifield, 1992a). Since the end of World War II, international economic forces (trade, investment, and migration) have been pushing states towards greater openness, while the international state system and powerful (domestic) political forces push states towards greater closure. This is a liberal paradox because it highlights some of the contradictions inherent in liberalism, which is the quintessentially modern political and economic philosophy and a defining feature of globalization.

Since the eighteenth century, when Adam Smith laid down the precepts of economic liberalism in his treatise on The Wealth of Nations, the ideology of free trade has come to dominate international relations. With Britain’s rise to power – which reached its zenith in the Victorian era of the late nineteenth century – and America’s dominance of the post-World War II international system, it has become increasingly difficult to refute Smith’s argument that laissez-faire economics and free trade are the best ways to enhance the wealth, power, and security of the nation-state. The debacle of World War I and its aftermath of isolationism, intense nationalism, protectionism, and depression only served to reinforce this lesson. After 1945, the victorious Western democracies, led by Britain and the United States, were determined not to repeat the mistakes of the 1920s and 30s, and they set about constructing a new international order, based on liberal principles of free trade and respect for fundamental human rights (Rosecrance, 1986; Jacobson, 1996).

The problem, however, is that the source of power and authority in international relations continues to revolve around the nation-state. Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the international legal system has been based upon the inviolability of the nation-state. In the Grotian tradition of international law, in order for a state to exist, it must have a territory, a population, and the capacity for self-governance. Once a state has fulfilled these criteria, it may be recognized as independent, and it takes on the legal attribute of sovereignty, which Stephen Krasner (1999) wryly describes as “organized hypocrisy.” If a state is sovereign, it has a legal personality and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

Transnationalism, in the form of trade, cross-border investment, and migration, can challenge the sovereignty and authority of the nation-state. Migration in particular represents a challenge, in the sense that the (unauthorized) movement of individuals across national boundaries can violate the principle of sovereignty, which requires a degree of territorial closure (HoIlifield, 1994b; Sassen, 1996; Joppke, 1998a). In every region of the globe – with the partial exception of Western Europe – borders are sacrosanct and they represent a fundamental organizational feature of the international system (Andreas and Snyder, 2000). Unlike trade in goods or international financial flows, migration can change the ethnic composition of societies and disrupt what Rey Koslowski (2000) has aptly described as the “demographic maintenance regime.” If too many foreigners reside on the national territory, then it may become difficult for a state to identify its population vis-a-vis other states. The national community may feel threatened, and there may be a social or political backlash against immigration. Finally – and this is most important from the standpoint of political liberalism – the citizenry or the demos may be transformed in such a way as to violate the social contract and undermine the legitimacy of the government and the sovereignty of the state itself (Walzer, 1983). Thus, migration can be seen as a threat to national security, and it can lead to conflicts within and between states (Weiner, 1993, 1995; Huntington, 1996). Hence the liberal paradox: the economic logic of liberalism is one of openness, but the political and legal logic is one of closure (Hollifield, 1998). How can states escape from this paradox?

In order to answer this question, we need 1) to review the causes and consequences of international migration in historical perspective, and 2) to look at the ways in which states have tried to regulate it in an era of globalization, but 3) with an eye to understanding the evolution of what I shall call the migration state. In international relations theory, states are defined primarily by their security or military function. The Westphalian state is above all else a garrison state. Realists like Hans Morgenthau (1978) and neo-realists like Kenneth Waltz (1979) view the state as a unitary rational actor, with the overweening responsibility to maximize power, protect its territory and people, and pursue its national interest. However, at least since the beginning of the industrial revolution in Europe, the state has increasingly taken on an economic function. Ensuring material wealth and power has required states to risk greater economic openness and to pursue policies of free trade, giving rise to what Richard Rosccrance (1986) has called the trading state. As a result, states have been partially liberated from their dependence on territory and the military as sources of power. International relations theory has moved away from the narrow realist view of the state, recognizing that in an increasingly interdependent world, power is more diffuse (Keohane and Nye, 1977). In this neoliberal view, states are increasingly linked together by international trade and finance, forcing them to alter their grand strategies and seek new ways to cooperate. Here I shall argue that migration and trade are inextricably linked – two sides of the same com. Hence the rise of the trading state necessarily entails the rise of the migration state, where considerations of power and interest are driven as much by migration (the movement of people) as they are by commerce and finance.

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION

To go back to the German example, we can see clearly how migration has become a driving feature of the international political economy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Germany, which only loosely could be defined as a state until it was unified by Bismarck in 1870, was primarily a country of emigration, with millions of Germans migrating to East Central Europe and to the Americas (Bade, 1992). Not until relatively late in the nineteenth century did the German economy begin to grow at a sufficient rate to absorb its surplus population and excess labor supply. Strong supplypush factors were at work, compelling Germans to go abroad. At the same time there were powerful demand-pull forces, leading German farmers and workers to emigrate to neighboring countries, such as France, Switzerland, and the Low Countries, in search of employment, while many went to Russia ot the United States, lured by the promise of cheap land and a new start. In eighteenth century Russia, this migration was organized by the German-born empress, Catherine the Great, who sought to upgrade Russian agriculture and tame the eastern frontier by bringing in skilled German farmers as pioneers who could teach Russian peasants new farming techniques. For centuries, states have been in the business of organizing mass migrations for the purposes of colonization, economic development, and to gain a competitive edge in a globalizing economy. In this respect, Chancellor Schröder’s quest for Indian software engineers is but the latest chapter in the long history of globalization and migration.

Once an international market for labor has been created, however, it may be difficult to manage or regulate it. Migration can quickly become self-perpetuating because of chain migration and social networks (Massey, 1987, 1998). Word begins to spread from one family and one village to another about the possibilities for gainful employment – or even striking it rich. At the same time, the individual risks and costs associated with migration are reduced by these kinship networks, which can grow into transnational communities and constitute a form of social capital (Morawska, 1990; Portes, 1996, 1997). As international migration accelerates, states are forced to respond by developing new policies to cope with newcomers and their families (in the host country) or to deal with an exodus and potential return migration (in the sending country). Again, looking at the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – a period of relatively free migration – many states with open frontiers, like the United States and Russia, were happy to receive immigrants, whereas overpopulated societies, with a growing rural exodus and burgeoning cities, were happy to be rid of masses of unskilled and often illiterate peasants and workers (Thomas, 1973; Bade, 1992; Nugent, 1992).

By the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, however, the sending societies in Europe were well into the industrial revolution and entering a demographic transition, with falling birth rates and more stable populations. Nationalism was on the rise (Hobsbawm, 1990), and it was increasingly important, in terms of military security, for states to be able to identify their citizens and to construct new demographic regimes (Koslowski, 2000). The need to regulate national populations, for purposes of taxation and conscription, led to passport and visa systems and the concomitant development of immigration and naturalization policies (Torpey, 1998). Every individual was expected to have one and only one nationality, and nationality, as a legal institution, would provide the individual with a measure of protection in a hostile and anarchic world of nation-states (Shaw, 1997). Countries of emigration, like Germany, tended to opt for nationality laws based upon jus sanguinis (blood, kinship or ethnicity), whereas countries of immigration, like the United States and France, developed a more expansive political citizenship based upon jus soli (soil or birthplace). The German nationality law of 1913 had a strong ethnic component, and it was designed specifically to accommodate return migration, whereas birthright citizenship in the United States, as codified in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, was more inclusive (Brubaker, 1989, 1992; Schuck, 1998). It is important to remember, however, that the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in the aftermath of the Civil War, and its primary purpose was to grant immediate and automatic citizenship to former slaves (Kettner, 1978). Moreover, American immigration policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries evolved along racial lines, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the National Origins Quota system, enacted in 1924 (Smith, 1997; King, 2000; Hollifield, 2000c).

Until 1914, international migration was driven primarily by the dynamics of colonization and the push and pull of economic and demographic forces (Hatton and Williamson, 1998), even though many receiving states were struggling to put in place national regulatory schemes to manage the growing international market for labor. Illegal or unauthorized immigration was not recognized as a major policy issue, and there were virtually no provisions for political migration, i.e., refugees and asylum seekers. To a large extent, efforts to regulate international migration would be rendered moot by the outbreak in 1914 of war in Europe, which stopped economic migration in its tracks. However, war and decolonization fostered the rise of intense and virulent forms of nationalism – often with a strong ethnic dimension. War sparked irredentism and the redrawing of national boundaries in Europe, which in turn fostered new kinds of migration. Millions of displaced persons, refugees, and asylum seekers would cross national boundaries in the twentieth century to “escape from violence” (Zolberg, Suhrke and Aguayo, 1989). Thus, World War I marked a crucial turning point in the history of migration and international relations. States would never return to the relatively open migration regimes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when market forces (supply-push and demand-pull) were the dominant forces driving international migration (Thomas, 1973). The twentieth-century world became increasingly closed, and travel would require elaborate documentation. World War I also marked the beginning of the end of imperialism, with struggles for independence and decolonization in Asia and Africa, movements that would eventually result in the displacement of more millions of people.

In the mterwar years, the Westphalian system of nation-states hardened and became further institutionalized in the core countries of the EuroAtlantic region, and it continued to spread around the globe with the creation of new states (or the reemergence of old ones) in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Old and new states guarded their sovereignty jealously, and peoples in every region gained a stronger sense of citizenship and national identity. Because of these developments, international migration took on more of a political character, with diaspora and exile politics coming to the fore (Shain, 1989). Henceforth, crossing borders had the potential of being a political as well as an economic act, and states reasserted their authority with a vengeance. The rise of anti-state revolutionary movements, such as anarchism and communism, provoked harsh crackdowns on immigration and the roll-back of civil rights and liberties, in the name of national security and national identity (Reimers, 1998; Smith, 1997; King, 2000).

The interwar period was marked by intense protectionism and nativism (Eichengreen, 1989; King, 2000). States enacted draconian laws to protect their markets and their populations. The international community was not prepared to deal with new forms of political migration. Under international law, states are not required to admit aliens, but if they do, they are obliged to treat them in a humane and civilized manner. This concern for the rights of aliens was clearly enunciated in Articles 22 and 23 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which created a kind of rudimentary human rights law, aimed at protecting those in former colonies (Shaw, 1997).

The events of the 1930s and 40s in Europe radically changed legal norms governing international migration. The Holocaust and World War II led to the creation of the United Nations and a new body of refugee and human rights law. Although states retained sovereign control over their territory, and the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of others still holds, the postwar international order created new legal spaces (i.e., rights) for individuals and groups. The 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees established the principle of asylum, whereby an individual with a “well-founded fear of persecution,” once admitted to the territory of a safe state, cannot be arbitrarily expelled or sent back to the state of his or her nationality. Under international law, the individual is entitled to a legal hearing, but it is important to remember that no state is compelled to admit an asylum seeker (Goodwin-Gill, 1996). If, however, the state is a signatory of the Convention, it cannot legally send an individual back to his or her country of origin if he or she is threatened with persecution and violence. This is the principle of nonrefoulement.

The United Nations Charter as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in Dccember 1948, reinforced the principle of the rights of individuals “across borders” (Jacobson, 1996). Likewise, as a direct response to the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity, the international community in 1948 adopted and signed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Alongside these developments in international law, we can see a growing “rights-based liberalism” in the politics and jurisprudence of the most powerful liberal states in Europe and North America (Cornelius, Martin, and Hollifield, 1994; Joppke, 2001). These liberal developments in international and municipal law feed off of one another, creating new rights (legal spaces) for aliens at both the international and domestic levels.

Why are these legal developments so important, and how can they help states escape from the liberal paradox? Unlike trade and financial flows, which can be promoted and regulated through international institutions like the WTO and the IMF, the movement of individuals across borders requires a qualitatively different set of regulatory regimes – ones based squarely on the notion of civil and human rights. It is almost a truism to point out that individuals, unlike goods, services or capital, have a will of their own and can become subjects of the law and members of the societies in which they reside (Hollifield, 1992a; Weiner, 1995). They also can become citizens of the polity (Koslowski, 2000). The question, of course, is how far states are willing to go in establishing an international regime for the orderly (legal) movement of people (Ghosh, 2000), and to what extent would such a regime rely upon municipal as opposed to international law (Hollifield, 2000a)?

REGULATING MIGRATION IN AN ERA OF GLOBALIZATION

The last half of the twentieth century has marked an important new chapter in the history of globalization. With advances in travel and communications technology, migration has accelerated, reaching levels not seen since the end of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, roughly 175 million people are living outside of their countries of birth or citizenship.3 Even though this figure constitutes a mere 2.5 percent of the world’s population, the perception is that international migration is rising at an exponential rate and that it is a permanent feature of the global economy. It seems that economic forces compelling people to move are intensifying. With more than half the world’s migrant population in the less-developed countries (LDCs), especially those rich in natural resources, like oil or diamonds, the biggest regulatory challenge confronts states like Nigeria, South Africa or the United States, which share land borders with overpopulated and underdeveloped states. Supply-push forces remain strong, while the ease of communication and travel have reinforced migrant networks, making it easier than ever for potential migrants to gather the information they need to make decisions about whether or not to move.

To some extent supply-push forces are constant or rising and have been for many decades. What is variable, however, are demand-pull forces, both in the OECD world and in the wealthier LDCs, many of which suffer from a shortage of skilled and unskilled labor. The oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf are perhaps the best examples, but increasingly we have seen labor shortages in the newly industrialized countries (NICs) of East and Southeast Asia as well (Fields, 1994). Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example, have become major importers of cheap labor from other LDCs in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines and Thailand. Taiwan also has experienced rising levels of illegal migration from mainland China, which poses a security threat for the island country.

With very few exceptions, however, these LDCs have not evolved elaborate laws or policies for governing migration. Wealthier Third World states have put in place contract or guest worker schemes, negotiated with the sending countries and with no provisions for settlement or family reunification. These types of pure manpower policies leave migrants with few if any rights, making them vulnerable to human rights abuses and arbitrary expulsion. The only protections they have are those afforded by the negotiating power of their home countries, which may choose to protest the treatment of their nationals. But, more often than not, the sending countries are unwilling to provoke a conflict with a receiving state over individual cases of abuse for fear of losing access to remittances, which are one of the largest sources of foreign exchange for many LDCs (Russell, 1986). Hence, economics and demography (forces of supply-push and demand-pull) continue to govern much of international migration in the developing world, and the liberal paradox is less acute because there are fewer legal or institutional constraints on the behavior of states vis-à-vis foreign nationals. Summary deportations and mass expulsions are viable options for controlling immigration in nonliberal states.

In the advanced industrial democracies, immigration has been trending upward for most of the post-World War II period, to the point that well over 40 percent of the world’s migrant population resides in Europe and America, where roughly 10 percent of the population is foreign born (IOM, 2000; OECD, 1998). Postwar migration to the core industrial states of Europe and North America has gone through several distinct phases, which make these population movements quite different from the transatlantic migration of the nineteenth century or economic migrations in the Third World today. As pointed out above, the first wave of migration in the aftermath of World War II was intensely political, especially in Europe, where large populations were displaced as a result of the redrawing of national boundaries, irredentism, and ethnic cleansing. Much of the remaining Jewish population in Europe fled to the United States or Israel, whereas the large ethnic German populations in East Central Europe flooded into the newly created Federal Republic of Germany. The partitioning of Germany, the Cold War, and the division of Europe contributed to the exodus of large ethnic populations, seeking refuge in the democratic West. Until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, 12 million German refugees arrived in West Germany.

Once this initial wave of refugee migration had exhausted itself and Europe began to settle into an uneasy peace that split the continent between the superpowers – thus cutting (West) Germany and other industrial states in Western Europe off from their traditional supplies of surplus labor in Central Europe – new economic forms of migration began to emerge. The massive effort to reconstruct the war-ravaged economies of Western Europe in the 1950s exhausted indigenous supplies of labor, especially in Germany and France. Eike the United States, which launched a guest worker (bracero) program (1942-1964) during World War Il to recruit Mexican agricultural workers (Calavita, 1992), the industrial states of Northwest Europe concluded bilateral agreements with labor-rich countries in Southern Europe and Turkey, that allowed them to recruit millions of guest workers during the 1950s and 60s (Miller and Martin, 1982).

However, from the beginning of the guest worker phase, we could see an important distinction between those European states, like France, which had a legal immigration policy that allowed for the settlement of immigrant workers and their families, and those states, like Germany or Switzerland, which attempted to maintain strict rotation policies with a minimum of settlement and family reunification (Rogers, 1985; Hollifield, 1992a; Cornelius, Martin and Hollifield, 1994). Britain was something of a special case in that its economy was growing at a slower pace and it had continuous access to Irish labor to fill any gaps in the British labor market. Moreover, the struggle to regulate post-colonial migrations began earlier in Britain than in the former imperial powers on the continent (e.g., France and Holland), thus injecting a bias towards restriction into British policy (Layton-Henry, 1992; Joppke, 1998c; Hansen, 2000).

The guest worker phase ended in the United States with the winding down of the bracero program in the 1950s, whereas in Europe it continued until the first signs of economic slowdown in 1966. However, the big shift in migration policy in Western Europe came in 1973-74, following the first major oil shock and recession, which rapidly spread around the globe. European governments abruptly suspended all foreign/guest worker recruitment and took steps to encourage foreigners to return home. Policies were put in place to discourage or, wherever possible, prevent settlement and family reunification. The prevailing sentiment was that guest worker migrations were primarily economic in nature and that these workers constituted a kind of economic shock absorber (Konjunkturpuffef). They were brought into the labor market during periods of high growth and low unemployment, and they should be sent home during periods of recession (Miller and Martin, 1982; Rogers, 1985; see also Castles and Kosack, 1973). Moreover, during the recessions of the 1970s, the hardest hit sectors in the West European economies were heavy industry and manufacturing, both big users of cheap, unskilled foreign labor. In these circumstances of recession and rising unemployment, it seemed logical that guest workers should behave, like all commodities, according to the laws of supply and demand.

The governments of Western Europe had succeeded in creating an international labor market, in response to a high demand for unskilled or semi-skilled foreign labor. Yet just when this labor migration was no longer needed, powerful supply-push forces and networks came into play to sustain it at high levels, even after the official suspension of recruitment programs in 1973-74. Turkish migration to Germany and North African migration to France continued well into the 1980s, taking the form of family rather than worker migration. What made the family reunification phase of postwar migration possible was the intervention of courts, extending rights of residence to guest workers and their families (Hollifield, 1992a, 200Ob). Executive and administrative authorities were hampered by legal/constitutional constraints in their quest to reverse the migration flows. States with universalistic, republican traditions (like the United States, France, and to a lesser extent Germany), along with elements of separation of powers, including a strong and independent judiciary, had much greater difficulty in cutting immigration flows (Weil, 1991; Hollificld, 1994a, 1999h; Joppke, 1998b, 2001). Again, Britain, with its system of parliamentary supremacy, unitary government, and the absence of a universalistic, republican tradition constitutes something of an exception among the industrial democracies – Gary Freeman refers to Britain as the “deviant case” (Freeman, 1994; see also Messina, 1996; and Hansen, 2000).

The difficulty of using guest workers for managing labor markets in Western Europe is a perfect illustration of the liberal paradox. Importing labor to sustain high levels of noninflationaiy growth during the 1950s and 60s was a logical move for states and employers. This move was in keeping with the growing trend towards internationalisation of markets for capital, goods, services and labor; and it was encouraged by international economic organizations, particularly the OECD (Hollifield, 1992a). But, as the Swiss novelist Max Frisch pointed out at the time, the European governments had “asked for workers, but human beings came.” Unlike goods or capital, migrants (human beings) can and do acquire rights, particularly under the aegis of the laws and constitutions of liberal states, which afford migrants a measure of due process and equal protection. When it became clear that the guests had “come to stay” (Rogers, 1985), the initial reaction of most governments was to stop further recruitment of foreign workers, try to induce those residing in the country to return, and prevent family reunification. When this proved not to be possible, these liberal states had to accept the fact that large numbers of guest workers and their family members would become permanent settlers, leading most governments to redouble their efforts to stop any future immigration.

The settlement of large foreign populations transformed the politics of Western Europe, giving rise to new social movements and political parties demanding a halt to immigration (Betz, 1994; Kitschelt, 1995; Messina, 1996). Public opinion was by and large hostile to immigration, and governments were at a loss how to manage ethnic diversity (Freeman, 1979; Ireland, 1994; Fetzer, 2000; Bleich, 2003). Problems of integration began to dominate the public discourse, amid perceptions that Muslim immigrants in particular posed a threat to civil society and to the secular (republican) state. The fear was (and is) that dispossessed and disillusioned youth of the second generation would turn to radical Islam, rather than following the conventional, secular, and republican path to assimilation (Kepel, 1988; Kastoryano, 1997). European societies looked increasingly like the United States where older, linear conceptions of assimilation had given way to multiculturalism and an increasingly uneven or segmented incorporation, whereby large segments of the second generation, particularly among the unskilled and uneducated, experienced significant downward mobility (Hollifield, 1997b; Santel and Hollifield, 1998; Portes and Rumbaut, 1996; Alba and Nee, 2003).

In part because of this (perceived) crisis of integration and the threat it posed, pressures for greater control of immigration intensified, not only in Western Europe, but in the United States and Australia as well. However, in the face of these political pressures, it is important to note the pervasive and equally powerful rights-dynamic in the liberal democracies. Rights for minorities and foreigners were deeply embedded in the jurisprudence and the political culture of these societies, helping to blunt the impact of nativist and xenophobic movements. The more draconian laws, like the 1986 and 1995 Pasqua Laws in France, Proposition 187 in California, or the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in the United States, were either struck down by the courts or substantially modified to conform with liberal, constitutional principles (Hollifield, 1997a, 1999b, 200Ob; Schuck, 1998; Tichenor, 2002). Even though all states have the right to expel unauthorized migrants, deportation is not a very attractive policy instrument, and it is used sparingly and largely for its symbolic and deterrent effect (Ellermann, 2003). Mass expulsions (like Operation Wetback in the United States in the 1950s) are not politically or legally viable.

In spite of the enormous pressures on the asylum process that were building in the last two decades of the twentieth century, European democracies maintained a relatively strong commitment to the 1951 Convention and the international refugee and human rights regime. In the 1980s and 90s, asylum seeking became the principal avenue for entry into Western Europe, in the absence of full-fledged legal immigration policies and in the face of growing fears that large numbers of asylum seekers would undermine the refugee regime and destabilize European welfare states.

In this atmosphere of crisis, control policies shifted in the 1990s to stepped up external (border) control – Operations Gatekeeper and Hold the Line on the U.S.-Mexican border and die Schcngcn system in Western Europe to allow states to turn away asylum seekers if they had transited a “safe third country” – internal regulation of labor markets (through employer sanctions and the like), and integrating large, established foreign populations (Brochmann and Hammar, 1999; Cornelius et al, 2004). Controlling borders in Europe required a renewed emphasis on international cooperation, especially among the member states of the European Community (EC). The EC, soon to become the European Union (EU), was committed to building a border-free Europe, relaxing and eventually eliminating all internal borders in order to complete the internal market. This process of integration was given new impetus by the Single European Act of 1986, which called for the elimination of all barriers to the movement of capital, goods, services and people within the territory of the EC by January 1992, and by the Maastricht Treaty on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), ratified in 1993, which established a new kind of European citizenship (Caporaso, 2000). Given the desire of member states to stop further immigration, creating a border-free Europe meant reinforcing external borders, building a “ring fence” around the common territory, and moving towards common asylum and visa policies (Hollifield, 1992b; Uçarer, 1997; Guiraudon and Lahav, 2000).

A series of conventions dealing with migration and security issues were drafted to help construct a new European migration regime, including the Schengen Agreement of 1985, whereby EU governments committed themselves to eliminating border checks in exchange for common visa requirements to control the movement of third-country nationals (TCNs). In the same vein, the Dublin Convention of 1990 requires asylum seekers to apply for asylum in the first “safe country” where they arrive. Schengen and Dublin helped to establish buffer states in the formerly communist countries of Central Europe. EU member states could return asylum seekers to these now safe third countries without violating the principle of nonrefoulement. The Dublin and Schengen Conventions also were designed to eliminate “asylum shopping” by requiring signatory states to accept the asylum decision of other member states. Thus an asylum seeker is permitted to apply for asylum in only one state, assuming he or she did not transit a safe third country before arriving on the common territory.

Project 1992 together with the Maastricht process launched the most ambitious program of regional integration and economic liberalization in European history. But just as this process was taking off in 1989-90, the strategic situation in Europe was turned upside down, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR and its communist satellites in East Central Europe. This change in the international system, which began in the 198Os during the period ofglasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev, made it easier for individuals wishing to emigrate from the East to leave and seek asylum in the West. The result was a dramatic increase in the number of asylum seekers in Western Europe, not just from Eastern Europe, but from all over the world.

International migration had entered a new phase in the 1980s and 90s, with refugee migration and asylum seeking reaching levels not seen since the period just after World War II. The situation in Europe was further complicated by a resurgence of ethnic nationalism (Brubaker, 1996), by war in the Balkans, and by a dramatic increase in the number of refugees from almost every region of the globe. By the mid-1990s there were more than 16 million refugees in the world, with two thirds of them in Africa and the Middle East. The U.N. system for managing refugee migration, which had been created during the Cold War primarily to accommodate those fleeing persecution under communist rule, suddenly came under enormous pressure (Teitelbaum, 1984). The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was transformed virtually overnight into one of the most important international institutions. The UNHCR was thrust into the role of managing the new migration crisis, as the Western democracies struggled to contain a wave of asylum seeking. The claims of the vast majority of those seeking asylum in Western Europe and the United States would be rejected, leading Western governments (and their publics) to the conclusion that most asylum seekers are in fact economic refugees (Fetzer, 2000). By the same token, many human rights advocates feared that genuine refugees would be submerged in a tide of false asylum seeking.

Whatever conclusion one draws from the high rate of rejection of asylum claims, the fact is that refugee migration surged in the last two decades of the twentieth century, creating a new set of dilemmas for liberal states (Teitelbaum, 1980, 1984). A large percentage of those whose asylum claims were refused would remain in the host countries either legally, pending appeal of their cases, or illegally, simply going underground. With most of the European democracies attempting to slow or stop all forms of legal immigration, the number of illegal immigrants, many of whom are individuals who entered the countiy legally and overstayed their visas, has increased steadily. Closing off avenues for legal immigration in Western Europe led to a surge in illegal migration. But with the perception among Western publics that immigration is raging out of control and with the rise of right-wing and xenophobic political parties and movements, especially in Western Europe, governments are extremely reluctant to create new programs for legal immigration or to expand existing quotas.

Instead, the thrust of policy change in Western Europe and the United States has been in the direction of further restriction. To give a few examples, Germany in 1993 amended its constitution in order to eliminate the blanket right of asylum that was enshrined in Article 16 of the old Basic Law. France in 1995-96 enacted a series of laws (the Pasqua and Debré Laws) that were designed to roll back the rights of foreign residents and make it more difficult for immigrants to naturalize (Brochmann and Hammar, 1999). Also in 1996, the Republican-majority Congress enacted the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which curtailed social or welfare rights for all immigrants (legal as well as illegal) and severely limited the due process rights of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers.

Yet, at the same time that the U.S. Congress was acting to limit immigrant rights, it took steps to expand legal immigration, especially for certain categories of highly skilled immigrants. The H-IB program, which gives American businesses the right to recruit foreigners with skills that are in short supply among native workers, was expanded in the 1990s. In France in 1997 and in Germany in 1999, laws were passed by left-wing governments to liberalize naturalization and citizenship policy (Hollifield, 1999b, 2(H)Ob,c). Most European governments recognize that they now preside over multicultural/immigrant societies, and attempts to ostracize settled foreign populations only feed the flames of xenophobia and racism. Moreover, with stagnant or declining populations and a shortage of highly skilled workers, European governments are now turning to new recruitment programs, seeking to emulate some aspects of American and Canadian immigration policy, and make their economies more competitive in a rapidly globalizing world. How can we make sense of these seemingly contradictory trends? Have states found ways of escaping from the liberal paradox, or arc they still caught between economic forces that propel them toward greater openness (to maximize material wealth and economic security) and political forces that seek a higher degree of closure (to protect the demos, maintain the integrity of the community, and preserve the social contract)? This is already a daunting task – for states to find the appropriate “equilibrium” between openness and closure – but they also face the very real threat of terrorism. The attacks of September 11, 2001 on the United States served as a reminder that the first responsibility of the state is to provide for the security of its territory and population.

THE EMERGING “MIGRATION STATE”

International migration is likely to increase in coming decades unless there is some cataclysmic international event, like war or economic depression. Even after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States, the liberal democracies have remained relatively open to international migration. Global economic inequalities mean that supply-push forces remain strong, while at the same time demand-pull forces are intensifying (Martin and Widgren, 1996). The growing demand for highly skilled workers, as we have seen in the German case, and the demographic decline in the industrial democracies create economic opportunities for migrants. Transnational networks have become more dense and efficient, linking the sending and receiving societies. These networks help to lower the costs and the risks of migration, making it easier for people to move across borders and over long distances. Moreover, when legal migration is not an option, migrants have increasingly turned to professional smugglers, and a global industry of migrant smuggling – often with the involvement of organized crime – has sprung up, especially in the last decade of the twentieth century. Hardly a week passes without some news of a tragic loss of life associated with migrant smuggling (KyIe and Koslowski, 2001).

But migration, like any type of transnational economic activity (such as trade and foreign investment), cannot and does not take place in a legal or institutional void. As we have seen, states have been and still are deeply involved in organizing and regulating migration, and the extension of rights to non-nationals has been an extremely important part of the story of international migration in the post-World War II period. For the most part, rights that accrue to migrants come from the legal and constitutional protections guaranteed to all “members” of society (Hollifield 1992a, 1999a). Thus, if an individual migrant is able to establish some claim to residence in the territory of a liberal state, his or her chances of being able to remain and settle will increase. At the same time, developments in international human rights law have helped to solidify the position of individuals vis-à-vis the nation-state, to the point that individuals (and certain groups) have acquired a sort of international legal personality, leading some analysts to speculate that we are entering a post-national era, characterized by “universal personhood” (Soysal, 1994), the expansion of “rights across borders” (Jacobson, 1995), and even “transnational citizenship” (Bauböck, 1994). Others have argued that migrants have become transnational, because so many no longer reside exclusively within the territory of one state (Glick-Schiller, 1999; Levitt, 2001), opting to shuttle between a place of origin and destination. This line of argument gives priority to agency as a defining feature of contemporary migrations; but it ignores the extent to which state policies have shaped the choices that migrants make (Hollifield, 200Od; Waldinger and Fitzgerald, 2004). The migration state is almost by definition a liberal state inasmuch as it creates a legal and regulatory environment in which migrants can pursue individual strategies of accumulation.

But regulating international migration requires liberal states to be attentive to the (human or civil) rights of the individual. If rights are ignored or trampled upon, then the liberal state risks undermining its own legitimacy and raison d’être (Hollifield, 1999a). As international migration and transnationalism increase, pressures build upon liberal states to find new and creative ways to cooperate, to manage flows. The definition of the national interest and raison d’Etat have to take this reality into account, as rights become more and more a central feature of domestic and foreign policy. New international regimes will be necessary if states are to risk more openness, and rights-based (international) politics will be the order of the day (Hollifield, 1992b, 1994b, 200Ob; Cornelius et ai, 2004; Ghosh, 2000).

Some politicians and policymakcrs, as well as international organizations, continue to hope for market-bascd/economic solutions to the problem of regulating international migration. It is hoped that trade and foreign direct investment – bringing capital and jobs to people, cither through private investment or official development assistance – will substitute for migration, alleviating both supply-push and demand-pull factors (Bhagwati, 1983; Martin and Widgren, 1996). Even though trade can lead to factorprice equalization in the long term, as we have seen in the case of the European Union (Stolper and Samuelson, 1941; Mundell, 1957; Straubhaar, 1988), in the short and medium term exposing LDCs to market forces often results in increased (rather than decreased) migration, as is evident with NAFTA and the U.S.-Mexican relationship (Martin, 1993; Massey et ai, 2002). Likewise, trade in services can stimulate more “high end” migration because these types of products often cannot be produced or sold without the movement of the individuals who make and market them (Bhagwati, 1998; Ghosh, 1997).

In short, the global integration of markets for goods, services and capital entails higher levels of international migration. Therefore, if states want to promote freer trade and investment, they must be prepared to manage higher levels of migration. Many states (like Canada and Germany) are willing, if not eager, to sponsor high-end migration because the numbers are manageable and there is likely to be less political resistance to the importation of highly skilled individuals. However, mass migration of unskilled and less educated workers is likely to meet with greater political resistance, even in situations and in sectors like construction or health care, where there is high demand for this type of labor. In these instances, the tendency is for governments to go back to the old guest worker models in hopes of bringing in just enough temporary workers to fill gaps in the labor market, but with strict contracts between foreign workers and their employers that limit the length of stay and prohibit settlement or family reunification (Miller and Martin, 1982; Hönekopp, 1997). The alternative is illegal immigration and a growing black market for labor – a Hobson’s choice.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the rise of what Richard Rosecrance (1986) has labeled the trading state. The latter half of the twentieth century has given rise to the migration state. In fact, from a strategic, economic and demographic standpoint, trade and migration go hand in hand. Because the wealth, power and stability of the state is now more than ever dependent on its willingness to risk both trade and migration (Lusztig, 1996; Hollifield, 1998), as our German example shows. In launching a modest “green card” program, Germany is clearly seeking to emulate the United States and Canada on the premise that global competitiveness, power, and economic security are closely related to a willingness to accept immigrants. Germans in particular and Europeans in general are (reluctantly) following the American and Canadian examples in order to enhance their material power and wealth. But, in one important respect, Germany and Europe have an advantage over the United States, and Canada or Australia for that matter. Germany is part of a regional economic enterprise (the European Union), which is not only creating a free trade zone, but also a free migration area.

Now more than ever, international security and stability are dependent on the capacity of states to manage migration. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for states to manage or control migration either unilaterally or bilaterally. Some type of multilateral/regional regime is required, similar to what the EU has constructed for nationals of the member states. The EU model, as it has evolved from Rome to Maastricht to Amsterdam and beyond, points the way to future migration regimes because it is not based purely on homo economicus, but incorporates rights for individual migrants and even a rudimentary citizenship, which continues to evolve (Caporaso, 2000). The problem, of course, in this type of regional migration regime is how to deal with third-country nationals (TCNs). As the EU expands and borders are relaxed, the issue of TCNs, immigrants, and ethnic minorities becomes ever more pressing, and new institutions, laws and regulations must be created to deal with them (Geddes, 1994, 2003; Guiraudon, 1998). In the end, the EU, by creating a regional migration regime and a kind of supra-national authority to deal with migration and refugee issues, allows the member states to finesse, if not escape, the liberal paradox (Geddes, 2000, 2003). Playing the good cop/bad cop routine and using symbolic politics and policies to maintain the illusion of border control help governments fend off the forces of closure, at least in the short run (Rudolph, 2003). In the end, however, it is the nature of the liberal state itself and the degree to which openness is institutionalized and (constitutionally) protected from the “majority of the moment” that will determine whether states will continue to risk trade and migration (Hollifield, 2000d).

Regional integration reinforces the trading state and acts as a midwife for the migration state. In the EU, migrants, including TCNs, are gradually acquiring the rights that they need in order to live and work on the territory of the member states (Groenendijk, Guild and Barzilay, 2000; Geddes, 2003; Hollifield, 2000b). Regional integration blurs the lines of territoriality, lessening problems of integration and national identity. The fact that there is an increasing disjuncture between people and place – which in the past might have provoked a crisis of national identity and undermined the legitimacy of the nation-state – is less of a problem when the state is tied to a regional regime, like the EU. This does not mean, of course, that there will be no resistance to freer trade and migration. Protests against globalization and nativist or xenophobic reactions against immigration have been on the rise throughout the OECD world. Nonetheless, regional integration, especially when it has a long history and is deeply institutionalized as it is in Europe, makes it easier for states to risk trade and migration and for governments to construct the kinds of political coalitions that will be necessary to support and institutionalize greater openness.

Not surprisingly, Mexican President Vicente Fox, like his predecessors, is looking to Europe as a model for how to solve problems of regional integration, especially the very delicate political issue of illegal Mexican immigration to the United States. His argument is that freer migration and a more open (normalized) border are logical extensions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The previous Mexican government, under Ernesto Zedillo, by moving to grant dual nationality to Mexican nationals living north of the border, took a big step towards consolidating and extending the rights of this, the largest migrant population in North America. But the U.S. government is reluctant to move so fast with economic and political integration, especially after the attack of September 11, 2001, preferring instead to create new guest worker programs or to continue with the current system, which tolerates high levels of unauthorized migration from Mexico (Massey, 2002). Clearly, however, North America is the region that is closest to taking steps towards an EU-style regional migration regime, and the United States is facing the prospect of another legalization. In the long run, it is difficult for liberal states, like the United States, to sustain a large, illegal population. For this reason, amnesties, legalizations, or regularizations have become a common feature of the migration state.

Even though there are large numbers of economic migrants in Asia, this region remains divided into relatively closed and often authoritarian societies, with little prospect of granting rights to migrants and guest workers. The more liberal and democratic states, like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, are the exceptions; but they have only just begun to grapple with the problem of immigration, on a relatively small scale (Cornelius et al., 2004). In Africa and the Middle East, which have high numbers of migrants and refugees, there is a great deal of instability, and states are fluid with little institutional or legal capacity for dealing with international migration.

In conclusion, we can see that migration is both a cause and a consequence of political and economic change. International migration, like trade, is a fundamental feature of the postwar liberal order. But, as states and societies become more liberal and more open, migration has increased. Will this increase in migration be a virtuous or a vicious cycle? Will it be destabilizing, leading the international system into greater anarchy, disorder and war, or will it lead to greater openness, wealth and human development? Much will depend on how migration is managed by the more powerful liberal states, because they will set the trend for the rest of the globe. To avoid a domestic political backlash against immigration, the rights of migrants must be respected and states must cooperate in building an international migration regime. In this article, I have argued that the first, halting steps towards such a regime have been taken in Europe and that North America is likely to follow. As liberal states come together to manage this extraordinarily complex phenomenon, it may be possible to construct a truly international regime, under the auspices of the United Nations. But I am not sanguine about this possibility because the asymmetry of interests, particularly between the developed and the developing world, is too great to permit states to overcome problems of coordination and cooperation. Even as states become more dependent on trade and migration, they are likely to remain trapped in a liberal paradox for decades to come.

Footnote

1 I would like to thank Rainer Bauböck, Klaus Bade, Ewald Engelen, Christian Joppke, Douglas Massey, Rainer Münz, Christopher Rudolph, and Dietrich Thränhardt, as well as the editors of this volume, Josh DeWind, Mark Miller, Alejandro Portes, and Lydio Tomasi, for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

2 Here defined simply as increasing levels of international exchange.

3 The trend in international migration has been steadily upward since the end of World War II (TOM, 1996, 2000).

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AuthorAffiliation

James F. Hollifield

Southern Methodist University

Copyright Center for Migration Studies Fall

2004

Word count: 11166

10000025

Subjects

Industrial democracy

,

Economic trends

,

Trade policy

,

Immigration policy

,

Economic conditions

Title

The Emerging Migration State1

Authors

Hollifield, James F

  

Publication title

The International Migration Review

Volume

38

Issue

3

Pages

885-912

Number of pages

28

Publication year

2004

Publication Date

Fall 2004

Year

2004

Publisher

Blackwell Publishers Inc.

Place of Publication

New York

Country of publication

United States

Journal Subjects

Population Studies

,

Sociology

,

Political Science

ISSN

01979183

CODEN

IMGRBI

Source type

Scholarly Journals

Language of Publication

English

Document Type

Feature

Document Features

References

ProQuest Document ID

215272708

Document URL

http://prox.miracosta.edu/login?url=/docview/215272708?accountid=28060

Copyright

Copyright Center for Migration Studies Fall 2004

Last Updated

2010-06-08

Database

2 databases

View

Conservative ideas on immigration.

Section 2 of paper.

Open the Gate

JASON RILEY. Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders. GOTHAM BOOKS. 218 PAGES. $22.50

NO ISSUE MORE divides conservatives today than immigration. Every night on his highly rated CNN show, Lou Dobbs inveighs against the “army of invaders” scurrying across our country’s “broken borders.” Angry calls urging immediate construction of a 2,000-mile-long wall along the Mexican border light up lines on talk radio stations. Even in states far removed from Mexico – where the bulk of America’s undocumented immigrants originate – questions like whether or not the government ought to bestow illegal immigrants with driver’s licenses have become a major campaign theme (Hillary Clinton’s once inevitable presidential nomination first began to show cracks when, asked during a debate about her home state thenGovernor Eliot Spitzer’s plan to allow undocumented workers access to New York drivers’ licenses, she equivocated). The Minutemen – a vigilante group that patrols the Mexican border to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants – entered the public fascination upon its founding in April 2005, and nas earned the vocal support of large elements of the conservative movement.

The conservative crack-up over immigration has been long brewing but reached its culmination in the spring of last year when President Bush announced his support for the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2,007, sponsored by Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and Arizona Senator John McCain. The bill attempted to fix the patchwork of regulations that have governed the nation’s immigration policies since the Immigration Act of 1965, the last major piece of legislation governing the country’s immigration laws. Most controversial about the 2.007 bill was its attempt to bestow a form of legal status upon the estimated 12. million illegal immigrants believed to reside in the United States through the creation of new “z” and “Y” visas that would grant them the right to remain here and eventually apply for citizenship provided they pay a fine and back taxes. This aspect of the legislation was immediately derided by immigration restrictionists as “amnesty,” a word that would come back to haunt McCain as he progressed through the Republican presidential primaries and eventually became the party’s presumptive nominee. The bill failed due largely to the hue and cry whipped up by conservative talk radio, which directed a storm of angry phone calls, faxes and emails to congressional offices. Columnist Peggy Noonan declared that President Bush had “torn the conservative coalition asunder” with his support for the measure.

Though the base of the Republican Party turned against him, Bush’s defenders responded with equal vitriol. The usually gracious former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said the bill’s opponents were “anti-immigrant” and afflicted with “rage” and “national chauvinism.” Linda Chavez, the first Hispanic female nominee to a presidential cabinet, alleged that some immigration critics “think Latinos are freeloaders and welfare cheats who are too lazy to learn English.” In April 2006, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol mocked the House Immigration Reform Caucus (a group of restrictionist representatives, almost entirely Republican) as the “House Caucus to Return the Republican Party to Minority Status” and called them “yahoos.” The animosity reached a crescendo when the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, the most prominent anti-restrictionist voice in the right-of-center immigration debate, ridiculed the editors and writers of National Review, who vehemently opposed the bipartisan bill. A proposed televised debate between the two publications about the legislation came to naught amidst mutual accusations of cowardice.

On one side of the immigration debate are what might fairly be called “pro-business” conservatives and libertarians, who argue that an ever-larger pool of skilled and unskilled workers enables employers to hire at lower salaries and in turn give consumers cheaper products, benefiting the overall American economy. This is a rather straightforward argument, and it has been made, vociferously, for decades on Capitol Hill by various business lobbies. Bill Gates, for instance, recently proposed that the government eliminate entirely the cap on H-1B visas, the coveted spaces allotted to high-skilled workers in technology fields. Many Christian evangelicals, a critical GOP constituency, also take a liberal stand on immigration, forming their opinion based upon biblical dictates about caring for the poor and dispossessed.

On the other side are immigration restrictionists, centered at a small set of issue-specific Washington think tanks and advocacy groups, who have widespread support in talk radio land. Many restrictionists oppose not only illegal immigration but also any “natural increase” in legal immigration. Some, like the paleoconservative eminence Pat Buchanan and Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, favor closing our borders to immigrants altogether. From these two irreconcilable schools is the war over immigration being waged.

INTO THIS CONTENTIOUS debate enters Jason Riley, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the author, presumably, of that newspaper’s fiercely pro-immigration masthead editorials. Here, in Let Them In: The case for Open Borders, he puts forth the most persuasive, sustained case for a liberal immigration policy yet published.

Riley begins by showing that however hyperbolic their reaction to resurgent anti-immigration sentiment may be, it is not for nothing that present and former Bush administration officials have characterized opposition to the immigration bill as an expression of “racist” or “nativist” sentiment. This is because the immigration restrictionist movement is demonstrably tied to white supremacists and eugenicists. For instance, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the leading anti-immigration group in Washington, has received $1.5 million from the Pioneer Fund, a eugenicist philanthropic organization. John Tanton, the preeminent funder of antiimmigration efforts, has openly speculated, “As Whites see their power and control over the their daily lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night?” Riley documents how much of modern day anti-immigration sentiment is predicated on centuries-old Malthusian fears of overpopulation proffered by long-since discredited population theorists like Paul Ehrlich. Careful students of American history will notice that the language of restrictionists – characterizing immigrants as shiftless, lazy, and crime-prone – borrows motifs from the openly racist arguments leveled against southern and eastern European immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Immigration critics frequently protest that people like John McCain and his colleague Lindsay Graham unfairly characterize them as racists and nativists. The problem is that so many of them are.

Of course, it is hardly the case that every opponent of liberal immigration reform is a racist, and having dispensed with the manifestly prejudicial, Riley devotes the bulk of his argument to convincing these rational, middle-of-the-road Americans why dramatically increasing the number of legal immigrants is good for the country as a whole. He does this in part by demolishing the argument trotted out most frequently by immigration opponents, that immigrants are “taking American jobs.” The claim is belied by the most obvious piece of economic data: the unemployment rate. For well over the past decade, the unemployment rate has rarely risen above 5.5 percent, one of the lowest in the developed world. How could illegal immigrants from Mexico – who pour into the country at a rate of some half a million a year, and whose numbers doubled between 1995 and 2.004 – be taking American jobs when so many Americans are working? To be fair to economic populists, the oft-repeated saying that unskilled immigrants “do the jobs Americans won’t do” isn’t entirely accurate; if we deported 12 million people and closed the border, currently unemployed native-born Americans would probably take some of the janitorial, agricultural, and other menial jobs currently filled by low-wage immigrants. But many of these positions would remain unfilled, simply because the vast majority of able Americans, including those unemployed, are overqualified for this sort of work. And with the deportation of so many unskilled workers, the cost of filling these positions – picking crops, emptying wastepaper baskets, and the like – would dramatically rise, incurring a toll that would be transferred onto American consumers.

Another claim made by the antiimmigration lobby, one more salient for middle and upper-middle class voters not “threatened” by unskilled immigrant laborers, is that immigrants are freeloaders who come to the United States to suck off the teat of Uncle Sam. Never mind the absurdity of alleging that people who make death-defying trips across hundreds of miles of barren desert do so to live off a nonexistent welfare state, there is little factual basis for such a claim. Riley introduces a fascinating statistic: 60 percent of nativeborn Americans “collect more in government services than they pay in taxes.” Illegal immigrants, meanwhile, cannot receive federal welfare benefits. The only way in which they “take” from the government is indirectly, via their use of services provided to the general population like police and fire departments. While anti-immigration demagogues complain that illegal immigrants receive free health care – in 1994, California voters approved Proposition 187, which would have denied public schooling, health care and social services to illegal immigrants; the measure was overturned by a federal court – they are only able to take advantage of this benefit by visiting emergency rooms, something many illegal immigrants are hesitant to do in fear of being reported to immigration officials (Congress has made repeated attempts to require nurses and doctors working in hospitals that receive federal money to report suspected illegal immigrants to immigration authorities). Moreover, illegal immigrants make up for whatever benefits they might extract from the government via their contribution to the Social Security system (foreign workers, Riley claims, pay $5 trillion more in payroll taxes than they receive in Social Security). The claim that low-skill immigrants are lazy wards of the state is also undermined by the fact that they have a higher labor-force participation rate and a lower unemployment rate than native-born Americans. Moreover, welfare rolls have declined precipitously since the introduction of welfare reform in 1996, a decrease that has been concomitant with the rise in legal (and illegal) immigration. Immigration restrictionists have thus far been unable to explain away this salient trend.

Riley admires the work ethic of Hispanic immigrants. Hispanic males have the highest labor-participation rate in the country, he reports, a figure that must astound the likes of Patrick Buchanan and Lou Dobbs. Riley, who is black, contrasts this positive feature with the high unemployment and welfare roll rates for native-born African Americans. All this matters because an unlikely ally of the anti-immigration crowd has been poor blacks, attracted by the argument that newly arrived Mexicans willing to work for very little are taking their jobs. Riley argues, however, that 1960s Great Society programs have ingrained a welfare culture among many black males, and while the economy grew dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s, work force participation among less-educated black men actually fell. African-Americans have to look deeper, Riley argues, to find the causes of persistent black unemployment rather than blame hardworking fellow ethnic minorities, as some African-American political leaders have done.

The most desperate argument of the restrictionists is one with the boradest potential appeal: national security. There are two parts to this argument. The first is that immigrants from Latin America are crime-prone; the second, related, point is that welcoming in large numbers of people from south of the border would leave us vulnerable to terrorists. Every week, Lou Dobbs and his pugnacious counterpart on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, go out of their way to cull local news stories and highlight crimes perpetrated by illegal immigrants. Yet as Riley shows, citing numerous government and nongovernmental studies, immigrants commit less crime than native-born Americans and have been committing less crime for decades. According to the Justice Department, while noncitizens make up 7 percent of the population, they account for only 6.4 percent of prisoners. This should not be surprising, considering the fact that the vast majority of immigrants – especially those hailing from Latin America, who face great hazards in doing so – come to America to work and make a better life. As for the fear that a generous border policy would leave the country susceptible to Islamic terrorists, no potential terrorists have been caught sneaking across the southern border, and limited counterterrorism funds would be far better spent on programs other than the construction of a massive wall that determined Islamists could easily penetrate if they so desired.

MOVING ON FROM the economic case against immigration, Riley gets to the heart of the debate, which is really a cultural one. Underlying the antiimmigration cause is a not-so-veiled concern about the type of people who are entering the country in such great numbers. One suspects that if the 12 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States hailed from Great Britain or Germany, those forces arrayed against comprehensive immigration reform would be lacking just a little bit of their ardor. Pat Buchanan admitted as much in 1991, when he asked, “If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?” A primary impulse of the restrictionists is a deep-seated fear of what Latino immigrants bring to the United States, and an apprehension that these newcomers will remake America in their own image. Riley presents the arresting statistic that 40 percent of new illegal immigrants are foreigners who overstay their visas. Surely the fact that these culprits are rarely ever mentioned in the vitriolic immigration debates has something to do with the fact that so many of them originate from places other than south of the border, seeing that so few visas are given to unskilled workers.

Many restrictionists attack what they claim is their latitudinarian adversaries’ nonchalance about illegal immigration, or complain that open-borders advocates somehow downplay its importance. This is a curious accusation to make: Senators McCain and Kennedy, along with President Bush, liberal immigration proponents all, supported a proposal that put an end to the gaping holes in the country’s immigration policy that had allowed for such massive numbers of illegal immigrants to enter the country. The 1007 proposal was modeled on a 1986 measure, signed by President Ronald Reagan, that provided a gradual path for immigrants residing illegally in the United States to legal citizenship (while also making it illegal to knowingly hire an undocumented worker). Yet neither the 1986 measure nor its zooy counterpart addressed the reason why so many foreigners had entered the country illegally: The demand for their labor vastly outweighed the number of visas the government was willing to dispense. The problem has remained unresolved, but the solution is simple: Increase the number of visas for foreign workers to meet our economic needs. Favoring liberal immigration policy and border enforcement is hardly mutually exclusive, and too many immigration critics are presenting policymakers with a false choice. Writing recently in Commentary, former Bush administration official Peter Wehner described this either/or perception when he conceded that “Yes, McCain won the GOP nomination (a strike against those preoccupied with stopping illegal immigration) but in the process he was forced to jettison his own Senate plan in favor of concentrating on border security first (a strike for those preoccupied with stopping illegal immigration).” This dichotomy ignores the method by which we can decrease illegal immigration and increase its legal alternative in one fell swoop. If the number of visas for Mexicans is increased so as to meet the demand necessitated by American businesses, those people risking their lives to cross the Rio Grande to live a life in the shadows will gladly opt to enter the country via a legal process that ensures they won’t be hunted down by immigration authorities and deported forthwith. “The question isn’t whether [illegal immigration] is a problem but how to solve it,” Riley writes.

If there’s one weakness in the book, it is Riley’s failure to tackle adequately the argument that last year’s immigration bill, with its path to citizenship for people who entered the country illegally, would penalize those immigrants who obey the law in making their way to the United States. These immigrants rightfully protest that any such “amnesty” clause would allow other immigrants who “cheated” to “cut the line.” There is validity in this concern, and cause for anger as well, given the maddening process that is American immigration law and the very few coveted spots available. Riley ought to have at least addressed these concerns, even if just to brush them aside by pointing out that the monetary fine and garnishing of back taxes meted out to amnesty recipients were proper penalties. But at the end of the day, letting practically any qualified person into the country who is physically able and not a threat to national security would eliminate the problem of “lines” altogether.

If the economic and moral arguments for immigration do not weigh on the consciences of conservatives, surely the electoral ones must. The anti-immigration cause, whatever its merits, has proven disastrous on the campaign trail. The presidential campaign of Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, the gop’s standard-bearer of immigration restriction, barely registered in polls and was everywhere acknowledged for what it was: an exercise in vanity. He has described illegal immigration as nothing less than “a scourge that threatens the very future of our nation.” Yet the majority of Republican voters didn’t seem to think so. Nevertheless, the failure of the Tancredo message to take hold didn’t stop other candidates from trying to mimic his rhetoric, leading Tancredo to describe his pleasure at witnessing his rivals “trying to out-Tancredo Tancredo.” Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney repeatedly attacked former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for once operating a “sanctuary city” where illegal immigrants could live without fear of being apprehended by federal authorities. This tough image was undermined by the revelation that not long before, Romney had hired a landscaping company that had many undocumented workers in its employ. Former Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth, one of the severest critics of legal and illegal immigration and co-author of a book entitled Whatever It Takes: Illegal Immigration, Border security, and the War on Terror, lost his 2006 re-election bid to a Democratic challenger by 4 points. His district had been reliably Republican and lies about 100 miles, at its southernmost tip, from the Mexican border. All of these anecdotes are of a piece with the most important electoral trend in the immigration debate, the fact that Latinos will comprise 20 percent of the electorate by 2020. This is something that will just happen, no matter how hard Tom Tancredo wishes it away, and it is something to which Republicans must become accustomed.

Appealing to Latino voters is hardly a quixotic strategy for Republicans. Hispanics have a strong work ethic and are culturally conservative. Riley points to poll data showing that Republicans won 44 percent of Latino votes in the 2004 presidential election, but a June 2007 poll showed Democrats winning Hispanics 51 percent-21 percent. Lest this cold, political calculation in favor of increasing immigration appear cynical, it ought not detract from what is pragmatic public policy. With a presidential election on the horizon in which Hispanic voters will prove to be crucial swing voters in a number of states, Let Them In could not have arrived at a more opportune time.

ULTIMATELY, ILLEGAL immigration appears to be a concern more for media elites than it does average voters. A Pew poll conducted last year found that only 6 percent of voters place illegal immigration as their top issue of concern, far behind the Iraq War, terrorism, and the economy. And beneath the din of talk radio demagoguery and sparring matches between intellectual conservative publications, there actually appears to be something of a rightof-center consensus on the issue. A New York Times poll taken during last year’s immigration debate found that 66 percent of Republicans supported the McCain-Kennedy bill’s legalization provisions. Another poll, commissioned by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, reported that 75 percent of Republicans believed it was “not realistic” to make undocumented immigrants go back to their home countries in order to seek legal status here in the United States (a key concession sought by conservative opponents of the bill), and 81 percent found it impractical to demand their outright deportation. A Los Angeles T/mes/Bloomberg poll last year found that 60 percent of Americans supported “allowing illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes to become citizens if they pay fines, learn English and meet other requirements” – essentially the provisions of the McCain/Kennedy “amnesty bill.” The American people, and even supposedly nativist conservatives, it seems, are naturally pro-immigration, which is hardly surprising given the unique history of our country.

If the history of immigration policy has taught us anything, it is that its presence as a political issue is not going to go away. Given the upheavals in the American economy caused by outward capital flows and the displacement of much of the American workforce due to an increasingly flexible labor market, a small, rarefied sector of Americans will continue to be wary of immigration, and immigrants themselves. They will back calls for sealing the border and deporting anyone who has entered the country illegally, and vote for candidates who make vaguely racist appeals. For the time being, we will have to endure the Lou Dobbses, Patrick Buchanans, and Tom Tancredos. The demands of our economy, however, insist that we reject them. The common sense and decency of the average American suggest we will.

Sidebar

The unemployment rate has rarely risen above 5.5 percent in the past decade. How could illegal immigrants from Mexico be taking American jobs when so many Americans are working?

Sidebar

The claim that low-skill immigrants are lazy wards of the state is undermined by the fact that they have a higher labor-force participation rate and a lower unemployment rate than native-born Americans.

AuthorAffiliation

James Kirchick is an assistant editor of the New Republic.

Copyright Hoover Institute Aug/Sep 200

8

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Subjects

Immigration policy

,

Presidential elections

,

Aliens

,

Political campaigns

Title

Open the Gate

Authors

Kirchick, James

  

Publication title

Policy Review

Issue

150

Pages

93-100

Number of pages

8

Publication year

2008

Publication Date: Aug/Sep 2008

Year: 2008

Section: BOOKS

Publisher: Hoover Institute

Place of Publication: Washington

Country of publication: United States

Journal Subjects:

Political Science

ISSN

01465945

CODEN

POREDP

Source type: Scholarly Journals

Language of Publication : English

Document Type: Book Review-Favorable

ProQuest Document ID

216456762

Document URL

http://prox.miracosta.edu/login?url=/docview/216456762?accountid=28060

Copyright

Copyright Hoover Institute Aug/Sep 2008

Last Updated

2010-06-09

Database

3 databases

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· ProQuest Education Journals

· ProQuest Research Library

· ABI/INFORM Global

IMPORTANT NOTES PERTAINING TO TERM PAPER

These notes that follow pertain to the term paper. They explain the political and ideological spectrum which you will explain in the paper by following the outline as shown in the term paper instructions document.

POLITICAL SPECTRUM

Radicals Liberals Moderates Conservatives [Status quo] Reactionists

__________________________________________________________________________________

LEFT CENTER RIGHT

–The further left you get along the political spectrum, the stronger the values get for that politcal area.

-The further right you get along the political spectrum, the stronger the values get for that political area as well.

-Most liberals are considered democrats.

-Most conservatives are considered republicans.

-In the center are the moderates who agree with both liberal and conservative ideas and policies.

-As you can see, conservatives and reactionists (also known as extremists) are closer to the status quo, therefore they value and work to protect it more.

LEFT SIDE OF POLITICAL SPECTRUM

CORE VALUES OF THE LEFT SIDE

-Rationalism

-Internationalism

-Egalitarism

-Individualism

Radicals

-Want revolutionary change immeadiately

-Most of them are very unhappy with the status quo

-Examples: Malcom X, Martin Luther King

Liberals

-Want a lot of change, sooner than later

-Support the basic powers of the status quo

-Key feature of the left side of the spectrum and of liberals: “Faith in human reason to solve most complex socioeconomic problems”

Classic Liberals

-Viewed the government as oppressive

-Viewed the free market as a savior for preservation of status quo and of country

-Believed property was an individual right

Modern Liberals

-Viewed the free market as opressive instead.

-Viewed the government as a savior instead.

-Believed property was NOT an individual right but instead a SOCIAL right.

STATUS QUO: EXISTING STATE OF AFFAIRS

RIGHT SIDE OF POLITICAL SPECTRUM

Moderates

-Center of core values for right and left side of spectrum.

-Want some change

-Want and value compromise

-Believe in the Golden Mean “All things in moderation” – Aristotle

Conservatives

-Want little change due to being slow and cautious

-Want to conserve the status quo, very happy with it.

-View the status quo as a collective knowledge of past generations that should not be tampered with too much.

-Key feature of conservatives and right side of spectrum: “Skeptical in human reason to solve socioeconomic problems”

-Worried about unintended consequences with too much change

-Believe property is an individual right.

Core values of the right side of the spectrum

-Faith in non-human institutions. i.e. Religion (faith based initiative), free market.

-Elitism , based on merit

-Nationalism, that some countries are better and USA comes first.

-Order, authority, and stability.