An Elusive Immigration Compromise – New York Times

But of course there are counterarguments. Immigration may hurt the wages of high school dropouts, but it offers modest economic benefits to most natives, and obvious benefits to the immigrants themselves. And some of the trends that worry immigration skeptics have improved over the last decade. Illegal immigration from Mexico and points south has slowed substantially since the mid-2000s. The future of immigration looks more Asian than Latin American. Conservative fears of a disappearing southern border or an ever-expanding Spanish-speaking underclass should be tempered somewhat by these shifts.

Moreover, as writers like Robert VerBruggen of National Review and Lyman Stone at The Federalist have pointed out, you can address many of the costs of mass immigration by embracing the new bills points system without also making its steep cuts.

Thats because a system that focused more on skills and education and job prospects would automatically put less pressure on wages at the bottom. It would increase immigrations economic benefits, and reduce its fiscal costs. And it would presumably bring in a more diverse pool of migrants, making balkanization and self-segregation less likely.

So thats probably the immigration compromise were waiting for: a version of the Cotton-Perdue points system, the shift to high-skilled recruitment, that keeps the overall immigration rate close to where it is today.

But there are two obvious impediments.

The first problem is that the Cotton-Perdue proposal is associated with a president whose ascent was darkened by race-baiting, and whose ability to broker any deal is seriously in doubt. By making immigration central to his campaign, Trump helped make this bill possible. But his campaign rhetoric also makes it more polarizing than its substance deserves, and his incompetence makes its legislative prospects dim.

The second problem is that mainstream liberalism has gone a little bit insane on immigration, digging into a position that any restrictions are ipso facto racist, and any policy that doesnt take us closer to open borders is illegitimate and un-American.

Thats how we got the strange spectacle of CNNs Jim Acosta, ostensibly a nonpartisan reporter, hectoring the White Houses Stephen Miller last week with the claim that Emma Lazaruss poem about the huddled masses means that the U.S. cannot be self-interested in screening new arrivals.

It was a telling moment, as was Acostas self-righteousness afterward. Liberalism used to recognize the complexities of immigration; now it sees only a borderless utopia waiting, and miscreants and racists standing in the way.

As long as these problems persist a right marred by bigotry, a liberalism maddened by utopianism it is hard to imagine a reasonable deal.

But as long as a deal eludes us, the chaotic system we have is well designed to make both derangements that much more powerful, both problems that much worse.

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An Elusive Immigration Compromise - New York Times