The insensitivity of our governing classes is exactly analogous to the insensitivity of the (very imaginary) social workers in my little story. Just as social workers have no business trying to “guilt” a family into taking on more than they can handle, the Open Borders Lobby has no business trying to “guilt” the middle and lower classes of this country into accepting more immigrants than they can handle.
The benefits of immigration (and there are many) are spread over large numbers of people. The costs of immigration are concentrated on the people at the lower end of the economic ladder. George Borjas estimates that the immigration of the last 20 years has resulted in nearly 5% reduction in the wages of those without high school diplomas. If the ruling elites in this country had taken these people and their concerns seriously for the last twenty years, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in today.
Just as foster parents do a noble thing to take in needy children, America is doing a fine thing to take in so many economic and political refugees. But the moral responsibility for their plight is not America’s. We didn’t cause other countries to become poor or chaotic, any more than the foster parents caused the children to be neglected by their birth parents.
America is not morally required to take in every poor person who wants to come, any more than foster parents are required to take every child that comes into the system. The most direct way to help the economic refugees is to straighten out the economies of their home countries, so they can provide jobs for their own people.
Asking a family to take more kids than they can handle is asking them to be permanently overextended. They won’t be able to take care of genuine emergencies. America has responded to refugee crises time and again. We won’t be able to absorb the next wave of the equivalent of the Vietnamese boat people, if we are dealing with a permanent emergency with illegal Mexican immigrants.
Finally, consider this. The economics of open immigration suggests that migrants will be drawn here until their standard of living here approximates the standard of living in their home country. They are better off, but only marginally so. My imaginary foster family could convince themselves to continue taking in children until the whole family was only marginally better off than the families the kids were taken from in the first place. They might listen to every sad story and say, “sure, let’s get this poor child out of the filthy, rat-infested drug den they came from. We have room on the sofa.” But we want more for our children than being just marginally better off than the most neglected. Likewise, America’s first obligation is to the people we already have. We owe it to ourselves to be good stewards of our resources.
America’s deserves its vision of itself as a generous, welcoming, open people. But we also reserve to ourselves the right to say when enough is enough. The Tough Guy Father figures who are trying to deal with the immigration issue are not being a bunch of meanies. They are really trying to protect us from our own generosity, so we can live to give another day.