Narratives

When you bring a healthy mix of empathy and clear thinking to the tough question of how the United States should deal with immigration, the picture grows complicated because we need a lot of immigrants to serve our own national self-interest. At the high end are immigrants who are hardly among the less fortunate — they are talented and well trained people whose skills we need to meet the voracious demands of our economy. At the opposite end is a mother in Honduras whose husband has been killed by a gang and whose son will be next if she does not find asylum in some other country; her dream is that the U.S. will be that country, but if she and her son get to our border, she may or may not even be considered for political asylum. If we still believe we are a beacon of freedom, we should listen to her pleas. In between these extreme examples are millions of people for whom, over the years, our immigration and naturalization system has worked slowly but well. But there are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. who have never made their peace with the system. They are here without the legal right to be here, living in our midst, undocumented and uneasy. As a nation, we want the benefit of their work but we have been willing to leave them in a limbo built out of a strange mix of hope and fear. This is unfair to those in limbo and unworthy of our country. This is a problem in desperate need of a solution.

Congress has avoided solving challenging immigration questions for years, unable to muster majorities in this complicated domain where many of those who are most directly affected can’t vote. A pathway to citizenship has seemed attainable at times and, at other times, far beyond reach. One might expect employers to help bring sense to the field, but many of them have been drawn into the shadow world, too, because they rely on undocumented workers. In the meantime our southern border has become a travesty.

We have wasted precious energy on the question of whether or not to wall off our entire southern border. Walling off some parts of the border almost certainly makes sense, but in many other areas it is an expensive pipe dream and a waste of money better spent on more personnel and speedier handling of cases.

Most unauthorized crossings of our border with Mexico have historically been men looking for work. However, as troubles grew in Central America over the last decade, the number of families that came north and crossed our southern border without permission grew enormously. While it is hard to know exactly what mix of detention and release during a case will work best for families, one thing is clear: forcibly separating children from their parents is barbaric. Courts have ruled against the practice and it may be behind us, but perplexity about how to handle families remains.

Perhaps the only unchallengeable reality is that, as a country, we need to put more effort into this sector where we have for many years been unable to align law with reality, and have instead left the enforcers of the law with an almost impossible task. As a result, immigration has become a flashpoint of anger and dismay in our politics while a large number of lives have been confused, disrupted, damaged, or lost. If we try harder as a nation, we can do much better. After all, well managed immigration allows people who want to be here to fulfill their dreams even as it strengthens our nation.