I am not sure there’s a political issue that is more important to get right than immigration. I say this despite my strong suspicion that by the time we’ve reached the level of abstraction at which immigration is discussed as an “issue,” we’ve already given too much away. Abstraction itself is not the problem—it’s basic to how language works, how reasoning works—but the specific abstractions we use to talk about people who move across national borders direct our attention away from everything that matters.
I can say, for example, that the freedom to move seems as basic as the right to speak, worship, marry, or exist; I can say that the immigrant is one of the biblical writers’ favorite types, right up there with the orphan and the widow, for “person you have to be good to.” But the mental gesture by which I classify millions of other people as examples of the issue of immigration, even for the purpose of defending them, also deadens me to what matters here. Suddenly we’re debating not this threatened lady, this malnourished baby, this scarred man, but immigrants, people who raise a grave issue that must be balanced against other issues like homogeneity or social cohesion or whatever. Homogeneity is for gallons of milk, not communities of people, and social cohesion is something we create every day through our behavior, not something we guarantee in advance by making sure that everybody is the right kind of White person. We have only to translate this language into particulars to see how ridiculous the debate is. On the one hand, this young person wishes to escape persecution, to live near family, or simply to have a job; on the other hand, it makes Grandpa uncomfortable when people speak Spanish at the grocery store.
In any case, we must get immigration right. The world’s rich countries have ensured that large portions of this planet are in the process of becoming uninhabitable. As though the centuries of theft that made these countries rich in the first place weren’t bad enough, we also turned up the heat and raised the sea level. The next two centuries will be centuries of movement and displacement—or centuries of death on an inconceivable scale. The choice facing those of us who live in rich countries lies, then, between these two options. We can keep the lights on and the breadbasket full and the schools open for the children of our victims, who will live with our children in conditions that, against the backdrop of human history, are pretty good; or we can be tough on immigration and suffer the economic consequences of demographic collapse, plus the political consequences of a draconian immigration regime—which is, in practice, a draconian regime for everybody. We can actually be the America of myth—a place where all sorts of people build worlds together—or we can be the America that eats itself.
