Immigration

I’m not emotionally invested in the issue of illegal immigration and the US’s southern border. Intellectually, I know it’s important, but there are countless issues and claimed injustices clamoring for our attention, and that one has never made it to the top of mine. But it was one of the key issues in this last election, so I’m trying to think through it. Here’s my attempt to do so. I’m no doubt mistaken on some or many of the following points. If you disagree with anything, let me know; I’ll listen.

Under the current international order, nations can and should declare and enforce their borders and regulate immigration. There are many legitimate considerations when doing so: security, economy, social services, trade, humanitarian, etc.
Culture and values are legitimate considerations when regulating immigration. In 2018, I met an American consultant who was in the process of immigrating to Italy. She explained that the naturalization process could be expedited if she agreed to go to a government-organized citizenship class. The class contained lessons such as “It’s okay for women to go out and about independently” and “It’s okay for women to not wear head coverings”; it was obviously targeted at integrating immigrants from more fundamentalist Islamic countries into a Western liberal democracy. Events such as the 2005 Muhammad cartoons crisis in Denmark, the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting in France, or the 2020 beheading of a teacher and Nice knife attacks in France show that immigrants’ culture and values can be serious challenges.
Concerns over culture and values must be handled with great care and caution because of the ease with which they can be distorted by and play into prejudice, tribalism, and fear of the stranger (the literal meaning of “xenophobia”). Kevin Williamson with the Dispatch demonstrates this well in “The Exotic Cat-Eaters of Springfield, Ohio”:

They come to Ohio from one of the most desperately poor places in the Western Hemisphere. They have few to no belongings. In many cases, they are uneducated, and most don’t speak English well. They do not understand the local culture where they have settled—and it shows: in their dress, in their speech, in their manners, in their housing arrangements, in the food they eat, and in the music they dance to.

Most profess to be Christians, but many maintain superstitious folk magic traditions from their homeland, and many quietly hold to a belief in witchcraft. They blithely violate social taboos. Locals complain that they are stealing their jobs, driving up costs, and consuming too much in the way of social services. And then there are the dietary norms: Though the rumors no doubt exceed the reality, some of them eat animals not generally considered food by the good people of Ohio. Ask the locals, and many of them will quietly say that they wish they would all go back to where they came from.

But that was a long time ago. And while J.D. Vance’s hillbilly ancestors may not have been the inbred, possum-eating, superstitious bushwhackers of legend and lore, as they descended on Ohio from the hills of Kentucky they had more than a little in common with the Haitian immigrants Sen. Vance now spends his days vilifying…
Most illegal immigrants to the US are Latinos from Central and South America. They tend to be more socially conservative, Catholic or at least Catholic in heritage, and interested in assimilating into broader American culture. This suggests that any concerns the US faces over culture and values can be dealt with more easily than the the European challenges exemplified by the Muhammad cartoons crisis or Charlie Hebdo shooting.
The Bible has virtually nothing to say about what a nation’s policies around border enforcement and immigration should be. Therefore, it’s an area in which Christians may have legitimate differences of opinion.
In particular, popular Bible verses such as Matthew 25:45, Deuteronomy 15:11, and Leviticus 19:45 don’t tell us what our policies should be. However, they’re directionally relevant: they indicate that a policy that starts from “How much can we do to help others?” stands a good chance of being more in line with God’s will than a policy that starts from “How can we best advance our own interests?”
Although the Bible doesn’t say what we should do, it does say how we should act. The Christian principle of charity means giving immigrants the benefit of the doubt rather than thinking the worst of them. Honesty and truth-seeking mean that we should never slander others. It’s possible to treat others with dignity and respect even while refusing to do what they want or enforcing the law against them.
I use the term “illegal immigrant” out of habit (it’s what I’ve heard most often) and because it’s accepted by, e.g., Wikipedia. But I believe it may be inaccurate or at least misleading. Most current unauthorized / undocumented immigrants seek to turn themselves into authorities as soon as possible to claim asylum ¹. Claiming asylum is their right by both American and international law, and laws place no particular requirement on where the asylum claims have to occur.
A major contributor to our current challenges with illegal immigration is that our system for handling asylum claims is woefully inadequate for the current influx of immigrants.
Immigration reform has been a recurring source of conflict within the US government. In 2005 and 2006, the House and Senate passed bills but were unable to reconcile them. In 2007, with support from President Bush, the Senate considered a bill that would have granted amnesty to illegal immigrants while tightening border enforcement; it was criticized from both the left and the right and ultimately went nowhere. In 2013, bill S.744 passed the Senate with bipartisan support, again offering a compromise of amnesty, increased border security, and other reforms. The Republican-controlled House refused to take it up, saying that, instead of a single comprehensive bill, they would present a set of piecemeal acts (which they never did). In part out of frustration with this inaction within Congress, President Obama moved forward with Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA, or “Dreamers”). In 2024, Republican Senator James Lankford negotiated a bipartisan bill that, among other measures, would have significantly reformed the system for processing asylum claims. Conservative commentator David French called it “arguably the strictest immigration bill of our lifetime.” Senate Republicans tanked the bill, in part because it didn’t give them everything they wanted and in part because Donald Trump didn’t want to give Joe Biden any sort of win during an election year.
There are over 10 million illegal immigrants living in the US; approximately 3% of the American population.
“The optimal amount of crime is nonzero” ². For example, breaking the speed limit is a crime. I often see trucks on the road with signs saying, “Vehicle speed monitored by GPS.” If we wanted a zero-crime approach to breaking the speed limit, we could imagine GPS-based speed limiters for every vehicle. However, such a mandate would be rejected by the general public: it would be very expensive, it would feel like a significant government intrusion, some speeding seems usually harmless, and sometimes tradeoffs make it the less bad of two choices (hitting the accelerator to avoid an accident; dealing with a family emergency). We could imagine even more draconian anti-speeding measures: e.g., GPS-based speed limiters attached to shock collars that drivers would have to wear. The suffering caused by such measures would surely outweigh the magnitude of the crimes. When considering any legal enforcement, we must also consider costs, government intrusion, tradeoffs, and suffering.
The new administration has proposed a mass deportation of 10 million illegal immigrants or more, ideally aiming to remove every illegal immigrant.
I’ve seen estimates of this costing in the tens of billions of dollars. Most experts seem to think it will raise the cost of living within the US, as business lose access to a large pool of predominantly lower-wage workers and have to pass on those costs to customers.
Humans make mistakes: it’s impossible to do something 10,000,000 times and do it perfectly every time. Mistakes here may include deporting with no recourse people who are legally entitled to be here, imprisoning people who are legally entitled to be here then leaving them in legal limbo while their status is resolved, splitting up or losing track of family members, etc.
I don’t know how the logistics of mass deportation would work. Would all 10 million immigrants be sent to Mexico, since they’re our immediate neighbor and most immigrants came from Mexico? Would that mean a single refugee camp with a population greater than New York City, or several? Mexico’s GDP is less than one-tenth of the US’s; would they have enough resources to feed them? To provide medical care?
According to Wikipedia, “research shows that illegal immigrants increase the size of the US economy, contribute to economic growth, enhance the welfare of natives, contribute more in tax revenue than they collect, reduce American firms’ incentives to offshore jobs and import foreign-produced goods, and benefit consumers by reducing the prices of goods and services… Most scientific studies have shown that illegal immigrants commit less crime than natives and legal immigrants.”
I have limited knowledge of the reasons behind illegal immigration, but the anecdotes I’ve heard hint at significant suffering: Haitian children so poor they eat rocks just to feel something in their bellies. Entire Mexican communities where drug cartels have gotten so powerful that the government comes only with military force or not at all. Venezuelans leaving an economy cratered by socialist strongman rule and the resulting US sanctions.
The history of previous mass deportations is ugly. The most famous deportation in the US, the Trail of Tears, resulted in deporting 60,000 Native Americans and the deaths of thousands to exposure, starvation, and illness. Stalin deported 6 million people within the Soviet Union, resulting in millions of deaths. The US has previously performed mass deportations to Mexico. During the Great Depression, the Mexican repatriation saw the deportation or repatriation of 300,000 to 2 million people to Mexico, mostly children, 40-60% American citizens. In 1954, Operation Wetback deported nearly 1.3 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. As explained by Wikipedia, “One of the biggest problems caused by the program for the deportees was sending them to unfamiliar parts of Mexico, where they struggled to find their way home or to continue to support their families… Those apprehended were often deported without receiving the opportunity to recover their property in the United States, or to contact their families prior to deportation. Deportees often were stranded without any food or employment when they were released in Mexico. Deported Mexicans sometimes faced extreme conditions in their country; 88 deported workers died in the 112 °F (44 °C) heat in July 1955.”
Growing up in a politically conservative household in the twilight of the Cold War, I took it as axiomatic that power corrupts and that one of the reasons to favor a limited government is for fear of government overreach. The most obvious way to have stricter immigration enforcement is to create a “papers, please” environment where law enforcement could demand that suspected illegal immigrants produce proof of legal residence. That kind of atmosphere would have been more associated in my childhood with the Soviet bloc than with free America.
America has a long history of anti-immigrant sentiment: the Know Nothings of the 1850s, the anti-Catholic Blaine amendments, early 20th century advocates for minimum-wage laws who feared being “underlived” by Chinese immigrants who could “live upon a handful of rice for a penance”, prejudice against southern and eastern European immigrants in favor of northern Europeans, and more.
Despite all of this, America has long prided itself on being a nation of immigrants, a melting pot. This is most famously commemorated in Emma Long’s poem “The New Colossus,” enshrined on the statue of liberty:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

“The Evangelical Bro Code & Debriefing America’s Border Crisis”, The Holy Post, at 54:54 ↩
This framing is taken from finance tech expert Patrick McKenzie’s “The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero”, where he explores this concept specifically regarding financial fraud. ↩

Footnotes