Thread: Immigration Policy in Free Socities: Principles or Politics?

Although it is from 2009, I thought this Backgrounder from the Center for Immigration Studies poses a very relevant question as political debates over various forms of amnesty legislation heat up again.


Immigration Policy in Free Societies: Are There Principles Involved or Is It All Politics?

By Vernon M. Briggs Jr.
November 2009
Backgrounders and Reports

Download a pdf of this Backgrounder
http://www.cis.org/articles/2009/briggs.pdf

Vernon Briggs, Jr., is a CIS Board member and an Emeritus Professor of Labor and Human Resource Economics at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Before joining the faculty at Cornell, he taught at Michigan State University and the University of Texas at Austin. This paper originally appeared in The Effects of Mass Immigration, copyright 2009 by the Fraser Institute. Reprinted with permission.


Free societies with industrialized economies such as Canada and the United States are characterized by certain unique features. Among these is the fact that they both allow their citizens to come and go across their borders with few restrictions and they annually permit millions of non-citizens to travel, to conduct business, to visit, and to study in their countries with only minimal regulation. Both nations also allow some non-citizens to enter their countries and to work in competition with their citizen work-force for temporary periods under specific conditions. Furthermore, they regularly allow a generous number of non-citizens to immigrate or to take refuge as permanent residents and eventually to become citizens. It is primarily these latter situations, where work and residence issues arise, that pose the question whether years of experience have generated any principles that can guide policy makers when debates re-surface? Or, is it always simply a matter of political power and special interests at the moment that determine immigration policy on an ad-hoc basis?

It is not that politics can ever be entirely avoided, of course, since the sine qua non of all democratic societies is that policy decisions have to be filtered through political institutions before they can be validated and legitimately enforced. Rather, the issue is whether certain principles have achieved the status of quasiparameters to political dialogues when the subject of immigration policy is on the national agenda? It is understood, of course, that political discussions will necessarily lead to differences over the details of policy; but can the framework of these debates start with the recognition of certain uncontested principles?

Too often, if the United States’ experience with immigration reform is instructive, the rhetoric surrounding these discussions becomes hopelessly entangled in a confusion of intentions and motivations of the participants that serve to divert public attention from the national interest to what are but crass private efforts to extract gains for special-interest groups. Policy options are endlessly re-hashed and re-debated as if they have never been discussed or tried before. Research dealing with experience with past endeavors is simply ignored. It often seems that no lessons are ever learned. The result, as one would expect, is usually stalemate in the legislative bodies as the politicians jockey for acceptable positions and widespread cynicism is generated among the populace because changes are not forthcoming while the failures of extant policies continue to fester in their local communities.

For 40 years, the United States has wrestled with attempts to reform its immigration policies after the unexpected revival of the phenomenon of mass immigration following the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 (Briggs, 2003). In 1965, the foreign-born population totaled 8.5 million people; by 2007, the foreign-born population exceeded 39 million persons. As these unintended consequences began to emerge, the U.S. Congress established the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy in 1978 to seek ways to respond to the unanticipated rise in immigration. Less than a decade after the Select Commission issued its final report in 1981, the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform was created in 1990 for the same reasons. Unfortunately, the major reforms advocated by both of these commissions have largely gone unheeded or been only half-heartedly enacted. As a consequence, immigration policy issues continue to ferment and the public is deeply disturbed by the lack of action. The troublesome issue of immigration reform is again waiting at the doorstep of the new administration and Congress that took over in 2009.

The purpose of this paper, however, is not to rehash the 40-year saga of efforts to reform immigration in the United States. It is a woeful tale too frustrating to dwell upon. Rather, the goal is to identify those parameters that, if recognized in advance as being “givens,â€

Thanks. This is useful to quote when writing letters to my representatives.