Immigration Can Be Fixed

The use of fear to drive votes and actions is a common tactic employed by Republicans to divert attention from real issues or to distort the conversation in order to achieve their ends even when it isn’t in the best interests of the average American. As usual Republicans are doing their best to scare Americans about immigrants on the southern border.

If Republicans really wanted to address undocumented immigration and the tens of thousands seeking asylum in the United States they’d call for increased funding of immigration judges  and look for ways to improve conditions in the countries where most immigrants are coming from. Instead they rail against desperate people as if they were violent criminals seeking to destroy our homes. There are real solutions to be had if only we look to what has worked in the past and apply those lessons today.

In the 1950’s to the 1980’s many European nations saw huge numbers of immigrants Spain looking for jobs because the Spanish economy was in shambles and opportunities were scarce. As the effects of joining the European Union caused modest improvements in the national economy during the 1990’s the rest of Europe saw a drastic decline in the number of Spaniards within their borders as fewer left their homes and many who had returned to them. Leaving your home, your family and friends, your society and culture to go to a place where another language is spoken and you have no contacts is something only desperate people do. If they feel that they have any chance at all to feed their families and have a roof over their heads few will risk giving that up for an uncertain reward.

Now look at Germany, a nation of 82 million, which has absorbed around 1.2 million immigrants from Syria and the surrounding area. Those immigrants were driven from their homes by violence and the poverty it caused to a nation with a drastically different culture, climate, and language. Germany chose to accept them in spite of right wing nationalist demonization and then invested in easing their assimilation by providing counseling, language classes, and access to their public education system. In a decade those immigrants have by and large joined the workforce and through their taxes and economic activity are well on their way to repaying the country’s investment in them.

We can also look back to successful programs from our own past such as the Bracero program of the 1950’s through which Mexican farm workers got temporary work visas allowing them to work legally in the United States and travel back and forth across the border. Americans farmers got the workers they needed when they needed them and undocumented immigration was drastically reduced. There were abuses of the program often by the farmers and corporations who withheld or discounted the workers’ pay but it generally worked.

There are now between 10 and 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, a decline of more than 10% since 2010 mostly due to Mexicans leaving as their home nation’s economy improved thus reducing the incentive to stay here.

In order to address undocumented immigration the United States must assist Central and South American nations build their economies so that their citizens can hope to earn a decent living, implement some form of guest worker program, increase the number of asylum hearing officers at the border to address the multi-year backlog of asylum cases, and legalize marijuana and perhaps other drugs which will stem much of the violence in Mexico, Guatemala and other Central American nations that in turn drives immigration.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - April 14, 2021