By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, April 23, 2020
I am not very much worried about President Donald Trump’s
tweet-bombing the U.S. immigration system, even though it could conceivably
affect my family. (Nefarious . . . Canadians!) I am pretty sure I have
seen this movie before.
Here is how it goes: President Trump finds himself mired
in something that he isn’t very good at (governing, administration, being
president, etc.) and as he gets bored and begins to lose the political fight,
he makes some kind of dramatic proposal, invariably via Twitter, and the
politico-media world is, for a day or two or three, convulsed. Trump’s team
convenes and tries to figure out some kind of at least barely plausible legal
or constitutional rationale for what the president has proposed, and then
begins developing the policy he already has announced. Somebody you know from
Fox News will go on television and say this has been under careful
consideration for months and that all the top people have been working around
the clock on it, and other people you know from Fox News will pretend to
believe that.
And then the drama starts to unravel. The big idea turns
out to have a lot of qualifiers. In this case, that means things such as
exempting “guest workers” from the purported ban, irritating my friend Mark
Krikorian (of the Mayflower Krikorians) and other anti-immigration
activists. Many other exemptions are under consideration as well, legal
questions remain unresolved, and the Trump administration probably will end up
putting six months of work into its 60-day moratorium, the principal effect of
which, if it actually comes to pass, will be a larger backlog in green-card
processing.
The story repeats itself: Trump announces a prohibition
on travel from China in response to the coronavirus, and more
than 40,000 people (and counting) fly here from China while the
conversation changes to whether we call this virus from Wuhan the Wuhan virus.
Trump demands a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United
States” but his administration ends up continuing to hand out thousands of
visas to nationals of the targeted countries: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria,
Yemen, etc. Trump promised to deport every single illegal immigrant
residing in the United States and, if necessary, to create a special federal
force to do that. That hasn’t happened, though the estimates suggest that the
number of illegals in the United States has declined — as it has been declining
since 2005. Build the wall, and make Mexico pay for it, etc.
The situation of illegal immigrants is worth considering.
I do not think it is very likely that some poor bum from Decatur ended up on
Skid Row because he lost a spot in the computer-science Ph.D. program at
Stanford to an Indian national and couldn’t endure the thought of going to
Cornell instead. But some workers on the raggedy edge of solvency do compete
head-to-head with illegals. Contrary to the popular impression, illegals are
not concentrated in agriculture (only about 4 percent of illegals work in
farming, and the vast majority of farm workers are not illegals) but instead
are spread out through construction, hospitality, and services, especially in
positions such as housekeepers, drywall installers, landscapers, dry cleaners,
car washers, manicurists, and similar positions. But
there is no industry or job in which illegals make up the majority of workers.
The neo-Malthusian view that there are not enough jobs to
go around is mistaken (people are assets, not liabilities, and jobs are a
means, not an end), but if you were to take that view seriously, then it would
make a lot of sense to prioritize illegals — which is, of course, what Trump
and other immigration hawks have been telling us they want to do. Illegals by
some estimates make up as much as 5 percent of the total work force, and, to
the extent that they compete with U.S. citizens in the labor market, they often
are competing mostly with workers whose next-best option is not very good. In
this, they are different many legal immigrants: The guy who was runner-up to
Hyderabad-born Satya Nadella for the top job at Microsoft is probably still
doing okay in life.
Only a couple of months ago, President Trump was saying
he wants more immigrants — not just more, but radically more, immigrants
in “the largest numbers ever.” In early April he proposed expanding the number
of temporary workers admitted to the United States. “Reprehensible,” Mark
Krikorian said. The administration has been all over the map when it comes to
legal immigrants.
And illegals, too.
There are reasons to be concerned about illegal
immigrants beyond the labor market, of course. Trump as a candidate made a big
stink about illegal immigrants and violent crime, but his administration has
not done a thing about that, and we still have illegals belonging to Central
American gangs carrying
out murders in American cities. Illegals are also themselves more
vulnerable and likely to be victimized in various ways. And, of course, seeing
to it that the laws on the books are actually enforced should be a norm. We
write them down for a reason.
So why is the Trump administration sitting on its hands
when it comes to illegals but assertive when it comes to legal immigrants and
would-be legal immigrants?
The answer is: For the same reason the gun-grabbers
concentrate their efforts on federally licensed firearms dealers and the people
who do business with them — the nation’s least-criminal demographic — rather
than prosecuting real-life straw-buyer cases or making sure that offenders do
real time for weapons charges. It is pretty easy to police law-abiding people
who are voluntarily submitting themselves to a legal process (whether that is
immigration or buying a gun), filing paperwork, and undergoing background
checks. Chasing actual lawbreakers around? That’s work.
Changing the law is work, too — signing an executive
order is pretty easy.
But it is not much of a policy strategy. The Trump
administration has not even managed to secure such elementary reforms as
mandating the use of E-Verify or a similar system to cut off the main lure of
illegal immigration at the source. Even when Republicans controlled both houses
of Congress, President Trump could not be bothered to negotiate even a modest
legislative package on his signature issue.
But he can write his name on an executive order that may
inconvenience a few thousand people who are attempting to lawfully follow the legal
immigration process for a few months. Some of them may wonder why they didn’t
just go the illegal route, which might have been easier.
Maybe when the president is done with that, he can find a
couple of grad students to bully. There’s an election coming up, after all.
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