Trump right to keep out migrants
President Trump climbed down on separating families at the border, but the underlying argument is not going away.
The central question isn’t whether we should separate families — even most immigration hawks would prefer to hold families together — but whether migrants should stay in the United States or not.
Trump hopes to salvage his “zero tolerance” policy by holding parents and children together, although the practical and legal obstacles will be formidable. The reaction among immigration advocates has gone from outrage about family separations to consternation about family detention — because their ultimate goal is to let the migrants come into the United States and stay.
This is not to deny that the first iteration of “zero tolerance” was a fiasco. The justifications for the policy from administration officials were different and often clashing, and the effort to pin the whole thing on the Democrats was wildly unconvincing.
Democrats don’t want to make it easier for Trump to remove anyone from the country.
It’s easy to lose sight of the radicalism of this position. It’s understandable to oppose deporting an illegal immigrant who has been here for, say, 10 years. He probably has a job. He has a family. He has roots. But these migrants are illegal immigrants who, in some cases, literally showed up yesterday. They have no direct connection to the country and, for most of them, no legitimate claim on it.
The question they pose isn’t whether we are going to let illegal immigrants who are already here stay, but whether we are constantly going to welcome more. It isn’t whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement should hunt people down, but whether it can exclude people.
Some of these migrants will claim asylum, but these claims are mostly bogus. There is no doubt that they are desperate, and desperate to get into the United States. But they aren’t persecuted back home, even if they fear gangs or a violent boyfriend.
The merits don’t matter under the current system, though. If an asylum-seeker passes a credible fear interview — almost all do — and comes into the United States pending adjudication of his case, it is unlikely that he will ever be seen again. And why not? Who wouldn’t take advantage of that opportunity?
Trump is right to want to end this dynamic and swiftly and reliably deport new migrants, which would be the only sure deterrent against the ongoing influx. But unless Congress acts, it will likely prove impossible, and Trump will still get political opposition, although on changed grounds.
In perhaps the first totalitarian analogy in this new phase of the debate, immigration advocate Frank Sharry said Ted Cruz’s proposal to hold parents and children together would create “family gulags.”
Increasingly for the left, the true enemy is enforcement, and the battle has just been joined.
‘The central question isn’t whether we should separate families but whether migrants should stay in the United States or not.’