Illegal immigration has long been an agonizing issue in America. When people have crossed the border without permission, should we let them stay while others patiently wait their turn to live here legally? Do these people take more from America than they give? Does America need them? Can America absorb them?
And, should the controversial rule known as Title 42, which kept immigration at a lower level during the pandemic but could open the floodgates if the Supreme Court so decides, be lifted?
No easy answers.
Conservatives generally will say I’m wrong, that there is only one answer and it is easy to reach: illegal immigrants are a drain on American society and should be sent back to where they came from. Of course Donald Trump encapsulated this when he first announced he was running for President and claimed, "They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they’re rapists.”
There is an easy answer to that: he was wrong.
The headline of a collaboration for The Marshall Project by four universities that studied the relationship between illegal immigration and crime was, “The link between immigration and crime exists in the imaginations of Americans, and nowhere else.” They looked at the forty-year history of immigration and crime in 200 metropolitan areas, from behemoths like New York City to modest-sized cities like Muncie, Indiana. Their statistically-supported conclusion? “Most areas experienced decreases in all types of violent crime.” The ten places with the largest increases in immigrants all had lower levels of crime at the end of the period than at the beginning. In other words, proportionately, immigrants evidently commit fewer crimes than our own citizens.
Another argument against illegal immigrants is that they are an intolerable drain on America’s treasures.
Wrong again.
Although they are not here legally, they pay taxes. The libertarian Cato Institute studied their contributions and found that about half of them file— in keeping with IRS rules— tax returns. Many who don’t file still have taxes deducted from their paychecks. Several studies show that overall, on average, illegal immigrants pay about 8% of their incomes in taxes. For the record, that percentage is a far sight higher than what Donald Trump paid for several years, including as recently as two years ago.
On top of income taxes, if they don’t own their homes, they rent, which means that indirectly through their landlords, they still pay property taxes in their cities and counties and states. And of course just like the rest of us, they pay sales taxes on every penny they spend.
Yet they don’t get as much in return as we do. They pay into Social Security, they pay into Medicare, but they don’t get the benefits of either. And they only get help from Medicaid in an emergency.
You could argue that many of these immigrants aren’t the worst of the worst, they are the best of the best.
Think about why they come. Oppression at home, and levels of poverty that put their families’ survivals on the line. Think about what they leave behind: their own food, their own language, their own culture, their own loved ones. They exchange all that for life in crowded dormitories and back-breaking work from dawn to dusk. Think about what they do: they pick our vegetables, they repair our rooftops, they clear our plates.
Studies have long shown, they are not taking jobs from Americans. They are doing jobs Americans don’t want to do. I have friends who have hired illegal immigrants. What they tell me is, there are no harder workers on earth.
That’s the upside.
But there’s a downside too. If immigrants increasingly pour in, no matter what they give to this nation, there comes a point where we just can’t afford to absorb more. It looks like society has reached that point. Illegal immigration has become an epidemic, and with very few exceptions, nothing good comes from an epidemic.
El Paso has become the poster boy. With the pandemic-era Title 42 law in limbo, El Paso has had thousands crossing the Rio Grande in a single day.
The city’s mayor last weekend declared a state of emergency. If the Supreme Court sides with the Biden Administration and ends the prohibitive practice of Title 42 and allows the floodgates to open wider, they are looking at thousands more. Homeless shelters and food banks already are bursting. The numbers are untenable. There just aren’t the resources to handle a surge like that. And as some move on to other parts of the country, it mirrors the challenge in American cities now from coast-to-coast. In Denver for example, 1,300 immigrants have arrived without notice in the past two weeks and with temperatures now reaching a wind-chill level of minus-25 degrees, city officials are struggling to find safe spots to put them. The mayor said Wednesday, “We are at a breaking point.”
There are mean-spirited solutions, from Donald Trump’s cruel separation of immigrant children from their parents, to his ineffective border wall (which Mexico never paid for, by the way), to the three-mile barrier of shipping containers, topped with razor wire and stacked two high, that Arizona’s soon-to-be-former governor Doug Ducey put up.
Having been sued by the Department of Justice, he has just agreed to take it back down.
But letting the Title 42 law lapse is no solution either. Because as bad as it is that in this wealthy nation there are not enough resources to feed and house this many new people, there is also no sustainable strategy to deal with them, short-term or long. Neither political party has come up with a master plan, not just to handle the influx we’re seeing right now, but to reform our laws, to revisit both the system of immigration and the enforcement of border security.
As much as I believe these immigrants need help and in most cases deserve it, we are now stretched too thin in America. We’ve gotten to the point where some new arrivals have joined American citizens homeless on the street. That doesn’t do anybody any good.
It’s a bitter pill for progressives to swallow but there have to be limits. Not because illegal immigrants are bad people. The evidence points to the contrary. But there have to be limits because if thousands keep crossing into this country every day, the nation isn’t prepared to offer them the better lives they seek.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Why not more seasonal worker passes? Wouldn’t that help somewhat? Come in, do some work, leave for a while, then come back in a year.
Well put Greg. The fact that a nation of immigrants has been politically incapable of reforming our immigration laws is scandalous. That won’t happen in the next 2 years with Trumpist Martinets in charge of the House.