Middle ground worth seeking on immigration

One important task for a columnist is figuring out which ideas can be usefully argued over and which ones can’t. The responses to my column last week urging Democrats to negotiate with Stephen Miller and President Donald Trump on immigration, because a deal hammered out with restrictionists would have more durability and democratic legitimacy, were helpfully divided between the first category and the second.

The argument-ending rejoinders ran as follows: Trump is a racist, Miller is a racist and making major deals with them normalizes presidential bigotry. Since I agree that Trump’s race-baiting is disgraceful, I respect that rejoinder, and I don’t think my own arguments are likely to dislodge people from a firm point of moral principle.

But another kind of response is worth disputing. Instead of making a moral judgment, it purports to make an empirical one, implying that the serious case for immigration restriction is all but nonexistent and that negotiating with restrictionists is therefore like negotiating with flatearthers.

I want to challenge this view by expanding on two points that I mentioned last week, both of which offer reasons to regard immigration as a normal policy question with costs as well as benefits to any course.

First, as mass immigration increases diversity, it reduces social cohesion and civic trust. This is a finding that strongly comports with the realworld experience of Europe and America, where as cultural diversity has increased so has social distrust, elite-populist conflict, and the racial, religious and generational polarization of political parties.

It is a testament to immigrants’ grit and determination that they can thrive working long hours for low wages. But the social order of, say, the Bay Area or greater Paris is not one that can serve for an entire country — and it ill-serves not only lower-middle-class natives but also the descendants of the immigrants themselves, whose ability to advance beyond their parents is limited by a continued arrival of new workers who compete with them for jobs, wages and housing.

Thus our rich and diverse states also often feature high poverty rates when their cost of living is considered, while secondand third-generation immigrants often drift into the same stagnation as the white working class.

They do so out of sight and mind for the winners in this system, who inhabit a world where they see only their fellow winners and their hardworking multiethnic service class.

Now all of the foregoing is one-sided. It leaves out the real advantages of immigration, economic and humanitarian, which are part of the policy calculus as well — as is the recent decline in illegal immigration, and the fact that the problems I’ve identified are more manageable in America than Europe. Hence my own view that keeping current immigration levels while bringing in more immigrants to compete with our economy’s winners and fewer to compete for low-wage work represents a reasonable middle ground.

But the calculus is not simple, a middle ground is actually worth seeking, and recent immigration plays a role not only in America’s greatness but in our divisions and disappointments as well.