The 19th-century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck is credited with saying, “Laws are like sausages. It’s best not to see them being made.” Often, seeing them enforced is even more unpleasant. Worse still is seeing them not enforced.
After four years of dangerous and costly unenforced borders and immigration laws under the Biden administration, American voters opted for a president who pledged to secure our borders and remove millions of people who are here illegally. A year and half into President Trump’s administration, that agenda remains popular. In theory.
The April Harvard-Harris poll finds that 55 percent of the American public supports “deporting all immigrants who are here illegally.” The actual process of doing that, however, is less popular. A Politico poll, also carried out in April, finds that 51 percent of Americans think that the administration’s “mass deportations campaign” has been “too aggressive.” In other words, Americans want illegal aliens to be deported, but they’d rather not see it being done. Unlike making sausages, however, law enforcement is generally carried out in public spaces, making it difficult for the public not to notice.
The cognitive dissonance regarding the public’s desire to see illegal aliens removed from the country and their squeamishness about the process of deporting them can be explained by the collective versus the individual. Collectively, the impact of mass illegal immigration on the lives of most Americans and the communities in which they live is overwhelmingly negative. It imposes unwelcome competition for jobs and wages; exacerbates the squeeze on the availability of affordable housing; impacts vital social institutions, such as public schools and public health; undermines community safety and social cohesion; and costs taxpayers more than $150 billion annually, to name just a few of the harmful effects.
Given the impact on society, it is easy to see why a solid majority of Americans want illegal immigration reversed. Illegal immigration represents large-scale, collective violations of our laws by an amorphous mass of people. Deportation represents the removal of 18.6 million individuals who, for the most part, are decent, hard-working folks who are doing the wrong thing for understandable reasons.
Each one of these people has a minimal, almost infinitesimal impact on society. How does one illegal alien on a job site impact the labor market? How does one illegal alien family occupying an apartment affect the housing market? How does one non-English-speaking child in the classroom make a difference to a big city public school system?
The truthful answer to all those questions is almost not at all. Multiplied by 18.6 million, however, the answer is an awful lot. It’s easy to put a human face on the illegal alien worker who is picked up by ICE on a construction site, who is just trying to make a few bucks to send home to his family in another country. It is perfectly understandable to empathize with his aspirations. It is impossible, however, to identify the precise American worker who might otherwise be welding girders or framing windows at a higher wage, if not for the presence of the illegal alien. It may not be a zero-sum game – one American worker displaced for every illegal alien in the labor force – but the collective harm is significant and undeniable.
Hence, we find ourselves in a situation of inherent contradiction. On the macro level, there remains broad support for “deporting all immigrants who are here illegally” because the collective damage of mass illegal immigration is easy for most people to recognize. On the micro level, the individual culpability of the typical nonviolent illegal alien who is arrested and deported is so minor as to lead many Americans to feel that the act of enforcing our laws is overly aggressive.
Empathy is not a character flaw. But empathy that leads us to lose sight of the reasons why immigration laws exist – to protect the collective security, economic and social interests of the American public – creates a paralysis that can do great damage to the nation.
It is a condition that Canadian behavioral scientist Gad Saad describes as “suicidal empathy,” in which we identify more with the people who have caused harm than the people who have been harmed. As Tom Homan, the man in charge of removing millions of illegal aliens, has acknowledged, it is an unpleasant task but a necessary one because the millions of Americans who have been harmed by mass illegal immigration must have first claim on our nation’s empathy.