Principled Immigration

This Saturday my son Andrew will be engaged in a debate on illegal immigration. In light of this I am wanting to study and reflect on this issue. Toward this end I would like to turn to Mary Ann Glendon's article on Principled Immigration in the June/July 2006 edition of First Things.

Glendon speaks to the fact that we are in an age of mass migrations and wide movements of population groups all over the world. The United States is not exempt. It is a time of exceptional stress.

In the United States alone, about a million new immigrants have entered every year since 1990, bringing the total immigrant population to more than 35 million, the largest number in the nation’s history.

Glendon then goes on to tell us that there is and will be an increasingly great need for immigration in the United States. She writes...

Despite what population-control advocates had predicted in the 1960s and 1970s, the chief demographic problem facing most countries today is not overpopulation but its opposite. All over the world, even in developing countries, populations are aging. In the wealthier nations, where the process is most advanced, declining birth rates and increased longevity mean that our populations now include a much smaller proportion of children and a much larger proportion of disabled and elderly persons than ever before.

Social-welfare systems were originally constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the basis of a proportion of seven to nine active workers for every pensioner. That is simply not going to be the case if we rely on our current replacement population. As baby boomers retire with increased life spands, over the next 25 years the U.S. as a whole will increasingly look like Florida with one retiree for every five workers. She quotes our President...

President Bush stressed the urgency of the situation in his 2006 State of the Union Address, warning that “the retirement of the baby-boom generation will put unprecedented strains on the federal government. By 2030, spending for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid alone will be almost 60 percent of the entire federal budget. And that will present future Congresses with impossible choices—staggering tax increases, immense deficits, or deep cuts in every category of spending.”

The cause of declining birth rates and consequently inadequate population replacement has been the break down of the family. Glendon then presents the heart of the problem as she decries the lack of clear discussion about this issue among policy leaders....

Consequently, there has been little discussion of what should be obvious: An affluent society that, for whatever reason, does not welcome babies is going to have to learn to welcome immigrants if it hopes to maintain its economic vigor and its commitments to the health and welfare of its population. The issue is not who will do jobs that Americans don’t want. The issue is who will fill the ranks of a labor force that the retiring generation failed to replenish.

So, we come to the important question...Why aren't Americans happy about immigration if immigrants are in fact a key factor to saving our nation from future collapse??? Here are some reasons...
1) Immigration somewhat reduces the wage earned by some existing Americans.
2) Immigration (in the illegal sense) increases the tax burden on American citizens. There are 12 million illegals in our nation.
3) Immigration has raised concerns about terrorists coming into our nation.
4) Immigration forces us to have to open up to more people who are "different" from us.

Herein is where the tension lies. There is a need for population replacement in the United States that can only come from immigration. However, this replacement comes with an immediate financial costs and the fear of fracturing our cultural cohesion.

What is the solution??? Glendon uses principles from the 2003 Joint Pastoral Letter issued by the Mexican and U.S. bishops, Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope. She writes...

The letter asserts that (1) persons have the right to find opportunities in their homeland; (2) when opportunities are not available at home, persons have the right to migrate to find work to support themselves and their families; (3) sovereign nations have the right to control their boundaries, but economically stronger nations have a stronger obligation to accommodate migration flows; (4) refugees and asylum seekers fleeing wars and persecutions should be protected; and (5) the human dignity and rights of undocumented migrants should be respected.

What is clear is that we need to be open to aggressive immigration, but it needs to be balanced with the legality and sensitivity to the needs of its current citizen. This requires policy makers who can be guided by "principled immigration."