Amy Chua, Professor at the Yale Law School, wrote an article on the immigration controversy in the Washington Post. She talks a bit the legitimate concerns of immigration critics.
Does this mean that it’s time for the United States to shut its borders and reassert its “white, Christian” identity and what Huntington calls its Anglo-Saxon, Protestant “core values”?
No. The anti-immigration camp makes at least two critical mistakes.
Of course she’s badly mixed up legal and illegal immigration stances here. O’Reilly’s statement about the threat to the “white, Christian male power structure” was addressing the problem of illegal immigrants, as was Samuel Huntington in Who We Are. There have been a few outliers who argue for a “time-out” from legal immigration, but most people aren’t particularly concerned about legal immigration. It is illegal immigration that is the problem – the idea that we can’t control entry to our country, so that something like 5% of our population is here illegally.
So she’s battling a strawman here. There is no serious sentiment for a ban on immigration, we just want an enforcement of current immigration law.
You may be curious as to the “two critical mistakes” she mentioned. They are:
- Immigrants have contributed significantly to the success of the country
- Anti-immigration rhetoric inhibits integration of immigrants into society
Again, she has muddled the issues. Nobody denies the contributions of legal immigrants in this country, though people are waking up to the fact that the importance of immigration from 1910 to 1965 has been largely overstated. And nobody is fulminating against legal immigrants in this country. She’s also completely missed the role of multiculturalism in inhibiting the Americanization of immigrants.
But despite these flaws in the foundation of her arguments, her remedies are very reasonable. None of them are new, but it’s refreshing to see someone from academia touting them. She suggests:
- Overhauling immigration policy (get rid of family reunification, prioritize those with needed skills)
- Make English the official national language
- Immigrants must embrace our civic values
- Enforce immigration law
- Balance immigration better among countries
These are all great ideas – an overhaul of our legal immigration system to optimize its benefit to our society and economy is a virtually free means of improving productivity and our technical edge. It would also make the system less whimsical and more fair. What she doesn’t seem to appreciate is that enforcing the current law, which she spends little time on, is the point of the national controversy on illegal immigration.
Her article would have been much better if she’d focused solely on legal immigration reform, rather than blending illegal and legal immigration issues together. But I respect her for writing this at all – she will probably be pariah to her colleagues tomorrow morning.
Posted by geoff 