What is a rational immigration policy?
The government’s proper role in managing immigration is the same as its proper role in any activity. To protect individual rights. To protect them where however, everywhere? Not everywhere obviously, so this presumes some sort of jurisdictions line, more commonly called as the border. Geographical separations via border lines are then necessary to objectively communicate to all people which government is enforcing its laws on what geographical area. The essential question here however is, does government have any moral authority to restrict people’s movement over these borders?
To answer this question we go back to the governments proper role, to protect the individual rights of people within its jurisdiction. Thus if a person or persons that will cause physical harm are entering the jurisdiction, the government has the moral authority to restrict their access. This however is really the only justification the government has to restrict someone’s movement across borders. Concrete examples of such people are criminals, terrorists, and anyone that is carrying a serious infections disease. In order to prevent such people from crossing the border the government does in fact need to screen everyone who is crossing. The conservatives are right on this point, the border does need to be protected in order to prevent people from crossing the border without being screened. Where they are wrong of course, is what constitutes in the current screening process as justification to restrict someone’s movement across the border. One such invalid criteria is a quota. If the screening process was only limited to the valid justifications, the threat of harm to other people, then the need for peaceful people to illegally cross the border would be eliminated. Anyone still crossing the border illegally would have to be a criminal.
From here the issue only gets more complicated. US is not as free of a country as it used to be. Such an immigration policy would most definitely attract a large wave of immigration, mostly from poorer countries. Our welfare systems could get overloaded. It is true that in the 19th century US took on an enormous amount of immigrants and at the same time the economy grew faster than any other time in history. This is generally true in an economically free country. Since the 19th century however, US has expanded its welfare state, and there is certainly a danger it could get overloaded. Currently statistics show that immigrants, legal or illegal, add to the economy more than they take. This however would not necessarily continue to be true if we went forward with the above immigration policy. There is certainly some issues to consider and monitor, but we do need to start moving back towards a more rational immigration policy.
