Thoughts on immigration

Hurricane Ike is bearing down on the Texas coast as I write this, and Texas emergency officials are trying to reassure illegal immigrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will not be operating checkpoints during the evacuation. The concern is that illegal immigrants may fear deportation more than they fear the hurricane. This is clearly the right decision from a humanitarian standpoint, but I suspect ICE will catch some undeserved flak for it.

Now, I'm generally not a fan of ICE. They often manage to come across as both oppressive and ineffectual, and their practice of setting up traffic checkpoints as far as 100 miles from the border in order to demand people's papers seems more than a little Soviet. But they're also trying to do an impossible job while caught in the middle of an intractable debate.

Like many political debates in the U.S., the one over immigration has been simplified and ossified by extremists. The loudest noises on the issue come from xenophobes like Lou Dobbs, who fears immigrants will spread disease and cause financial instability, and Pat Buchanan, who fears immigrants will dilute Western culture to the point of extinction. Both call for closing the borders and deporting all illegal immigrants, a solution that has an appealing simplicity. But the issue is far too complex for that to work, even if it were possible to implement it.

Illegal immigration isn't a problem created only by employers and immigrants. Whole industries now rely on immigrant labor, a situation that's allowed to persist partly because the U.S. government has a strong, but unstated, policy of encouraging cheap food prices.

Some politicians, McCain among them, favor a guest worker program. But this has its own problems. There are ethical and social problems with having an underclass that has fewer rights than the rest of the population, is paid less, and has no path to citizenship. The 2005 riots in France are an example of what can happen when that sort of subclass begins to feel too alienated from the rest of the country it's in. But a path to citizenship is a non-starter with Lou Dobbs's followers.

Complex problems require complex and thoughtful solutions. Unfortunately, the debate on immigration is almost entirely counterproductive; it focuses on the wrong issues and precludes any nuanced response. Immigration is rapidly joining abortion and gay marriage in the catalog of intractable, ritualized, bumper-sticker-slogan debates.