Last summer, I gave a talk at the National Conservatism Conference titled “Immigration and the Desire for Rootedness.” I argued that, when it comes to immigration questions, philosophical and ethical arguments matter, even if the end result is a reduction in the number of immigrants. While one side uses the ideas of tolerance and inclusivity to say we should allow anybody and everybody to come into this country and the other side wants to restrict immigrants either over concerns of economics or culture, I have for all intents and purposes said “a pox on both your houses.” Neither side looks at immigration from the human perspective, but instead reduces it down to a pure policy question. How did we get to the point where an Iraqi immigrant like myself—a soft restrictionist—has to defend the human dignity of immigrants against both the Left and the Right?
Today’s political parties and their ideas are the heirs of those that came before them. At the turn of 20th century, it was those who called themselves Progressive that wanted to restrict immigration. Today’s Progressives, by contrast, have swung to the opposite extreme of their political forefathers, desiring no restrictions whatsoever. Those on the Right—I hesitate to call them conservatives—have become either hard restrictionists or advocates for purely economic merit-based selection.
In The Guarded Gate, Daniel Okrent tells the story of an America that allowed its immigration policy to be driven by an evil philosophy: eugenics. Racism, religious hatred, and anti-Semitism played a role, of course, but they were all based on the same evil suppositions that “biological laws” dictate the difference between inferior and superior people, that character is heritable and as such can be bred out of humanity, and that the character of whole groups of people can be judged by appearance, genetics, and countries of origin.
Read the rest of the essay at Law and Liberty