Immigration Ethics

Borderland: An Interview Series on Immigration Ethics

Amy Reed-Sandoval on Migration, Gender, and Pregnancy

In the second episode in this video series our guest is Amy Reed, Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and participating faculty in the Latinx and Latin American Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the author of Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice, which was published last year by Oxford University Press, and co-editor of Latin American Immigration Ethics and Ética, Política, y Migración.

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The Case Against Immigration

WashingtonPost.com: The Case Against Immigration Go to Chapter One Section • Go to Book World’s Review The Case Against Immigration By Roy BeckChapter One: A Nation of (Too Many) Immigrants?

Since 1970, more than 30 million foreign citizens and their descendants have been added to the local communities and labor pools of the United States.(1) It is the numerical equivalent of having relocated within our borders the entire present population of all Central American countries.

Demographic change on such a massive scale–primarily caused by the increased admission of legal immigrants–inevitably has created winners and losers among Americans. Based on opinion polls, it appears that most Americans consider themselves net losers and believe that the United States has become “a nation of too many immigrants. What level of immigration is best for America, and of real help to the world? Although we often hear that the United States is a nation of immigrants, we seldom ask just what that means. It can be difficult to ask tough questions about immigration what we see nostalgic images of Ellis Island, recall our own families’ coming to America, or encounter a new immigrant who is striving admirably to achieve the American dream.

But tough questions about immigration can no longer be avoided as we enter a fourth decade of unprecedentedly high immigration and struggle with its impact on job markets, on the quality of life and social fabric of our communities, and on the state of the environment.

Efforts to discuss these questions alarm some business interests and others who support high immigration. They often express shock that Americans could consider violating what they claim to be the country’s tradition of openness by cutting immigration. But they misunderstand U.S. history. It is the high level of immigration during the last three decades that has violated our immigration tradition. The anti-immigration tenor of the times is not nearly so much because Americans have changed as that immigration has changed.

Chain Migration and the Diversity Visa Program: Legal Immigration at Its Worst

Mayor Eric Adam’s remarks that migrants will “destroy New York City” foreshadows the coming battle over legal immigration reform. Democrats know that President Biden’s radical open-border policies have overreached, and the American public is concerned. Even establishment, left-leaning polling operations are reluctantly picking up the trend that more and more Americans see immigration as a problem.

The legal immigration debate, of course, is not a “yes” or “no” question, although that is how pro–mass immigration groups like to frame the issue, as Gallup did in publishing its recent polling results. This misleading slant obscures serious failures in our poorly conceived immigration system that most Americans would soundly reject if they understood it.

Conservatives can win the immigration debate when they focus on the questions of how many migrants should be admitted and how those should be selected. This will require smart work in Congress designed not only to reduce widespread immigration fraud, but to push all admission numbers down and, most crucially, restrict “family reunification” to only the nuclear family.

Conservatives acknowledge that the United States, a prosperous, continent-spanning country of 330 million, will always take in some number of legal migrants. For example, admitting just the foreign spouses of American citizens brings in some 250,000–300,000 immigrants yearly. Yet that number is artificially high as a result of the current flawed system; the high number mainly represents newly-minted American citizens, who, having recently immigrated themselves, are now reaching back to the home country for brides and husbands. Curtail the current system’s poorly conceived family-reunification process and over time the foreign spouse number will also begin to drastically fall.

In winning hearts and minds, our presidential candidates and allies in Congress should return to two initiatives that have eluded us in previous legislative fights. First, they must end chain migration by eliminating the visa categories that authorize arrived adult immigrants to later bring their parents, grown children and siblings to the U.S. These subsequent immigrants, selected for no other reason than their family relations, arrive in America and repeat the exact same cycle that made their arrival possible: They file paperwork for their extended families—parents, adult children and siblings—and the process repeats like a never-ending chain letter.