Immigration reform must address fear
Geert Wilders may sound like the name that they’d give to a villain in a science fiction movie, but he is also probably the most important international political figure that you never heard of until last week.
Wilders, the leader of an anti-Muslim political party in the Netherlands, finished a distant second in Wednesday’s Dutch national elections, but not before dragging the campaign dialogue in that historically liberal country into the realm of cultural intolerance, religious prejudice and xenophobia.
Wilder’s defeat caused a collective exhale among political establishment types from Amsterdam to Washington, who had feared that the Brexit vote in Great Britain and Donald Trump’s election here in the U.S. would trigger farright victories throughout Europe this year. Upcoming elections in France, Germany, and possibly Italy, present similarly fervent populist and nationalist challenges to the political mainstream in those countries. A victory for an ultra-conservative candidate in the Netherlands could have provided tremendous momentum for like-minded hopefuls across the continent.
All of which should serve as a reminder to those of us on this side of the Atlantic that our escalating debate over the Trump administration’s approach to immigration and border policy is far from a uniquely American phenomenon.
Throughout the West, questions of national and cultural identity, tolerance and diversity are being raised by working-class voters who believe that newcomers to their communities are forcing a shrinking economic pie to be divided into smaller and smaller portions. For several decades, political traditionalists like myself have promoted globalism as an economic and cultural cure-all for society’s challenges. More recently, we’ve learned that not everyone is as sophisticated — or as well insulated — as we are.
On the same day that Dutch voters were casting their ballots, this same fight was being waged on multiple fronts in this country as well. Federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland blocked Trump’s revised travel ban on refugees from parts of the Muslim world. In Sacramento, the state Legislature continued to wrestle with a so-called “sanctuary state” proposal, which would prohibit local law enforcement agencies from using their resources to enforce federal immigration law. And in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, a man whose fiancee was killed by an undocumented immigrant in an automobile accident told a national television audience about a condolence call that he had received from President Trump.
I have written previously about the economic, political and moral need for immigration reform. But the increasingly heated debate on this topic has made it clear that reform opponents are unlikely to be persuaded by a strategy that relies on sermonizing, insults and condescension. There’s no question that some of those who support crackdowns on undocumented immigration are motivated not by economic concerns but by sheer bigotry. (Special thanks to Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, for his ongoing cooperation in proving this point.) But the vast majority of those who oppose immigration reform — and expanded free trade, for that matter — are not hateful or angry. They are frightened.
For those Americans who fear globalization, the most convenient scapegoats to blame for their economic anxieties are those who come here from other countries seeking better lives for themselves and their families. There is ample evidence that the overall economic benefits of immigration and trade far outweigh the downside, but that’s not an easy message to sell to a laid-off factory worker who is feeling the full brunt of those disadvantages. The broader economic growth statistics and rising stock market will be of small consolation to him as he tries to figure out where a high school education will take him in a post-industrial economy.
The challenge of explaining to the economically dispossessed that the threat to their jobs comes not from immigration and trade but from advances in technology is a considerable one, made even more difficult by the likelihood that the necessary audience is more likely than not to own a smartphone that provides a steady stream of contradictory information. But it has to be done. Otherwise, the most unacceptable explanations become the most widely accepted ones.
If the voters who support Trump’s immigration crackdown are simply castigated for their intolerance, they will have little reason to reconsider their thinking. The much more difficult and time-consuming alternative, helping them understand that there are better ways to provide for their own economic futures than denying opportunities to others, will also be a more productive one.