The Case for Being Pro-Immigrant and Pro-Border at the Same Time

Every restaurant owner in America understands something that half of Washington cannot seem to grasp. The place with a good host stand is the place people want to get into. Nobody has ever said, "That restaurant has a reservation system, a line out the door, and a host who checks names. It must hate customers." They say the opposite. They say the food must be good, and they stand there in the cold, patiently, because there is an order to things and they are in it.

Now apply that to the country. The people who hate the host stand, the ones who say any rule at the door is cruelty, are not welcoming anyone. They are telling the people standing in line that their patience is for suckers. And the people who want the door welded shut are telling every immigrant who ever built something here that he should have stayed home. I think both of them are wrong, and I think the position most Americans actually hold, which is that we should be generous and orderly at the same time, has been treated as a squishy middle when it is in fact the strongest case on the board.

Let me make that case in a straight line.

The argument in five steps

One. A nation is a political community with a right to decide who joins it. This is not a Republican talking point. It is the oldest idea in political theory. The Constitution gives Congress the power to establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and the Supreme Court has held for well over a century that controlling the admission of foreigners is an attribute of national sovereignty. A country that cannot say who comes in has not got a front door. It has a gap in the fence.

Two. A country that controls its door can afford to open it wider. Public consent is the currency of generous immigration policy. When voters believe the system is orderly and the rules are enforced, they tolerate large numbers of newcomers and, historically, welcome them. When they believe the system is a joke, consent drains away and the politics turns bitter. If you want a country that says yes to many people, you have to be a country that can say no to some.

Three. Fairness to the people in line is a conservative value. There is a family somewhere right now that filled out the forms, paid the fees, passed the medical exam, waited for years, and did not step over the line. They did what the law asked. Every time the law is ignored for someone else, that family learns that rule-following was the wrong strategy. A conservative defends the person who played by the rules, because a society where cheaters win and rule-followers lose does not stay a society for long.

Four. Assimilation works better when the status of newcomers is clear. A person with lawful status can work openly, join a church, start a business, enlist, testify against a criminal and put down roots. Someone without it lives in the shadow. A conservative who cares about family and community should want newcomers inside the system, not outside it.

Five. Therefore the two positions are not opposites. They depend on each other. The more seriously we enforce the border, the more confidently we can run a generous legal system. The more generous and workable the legal system is, the less any family has a reason to go around it.

That is the case. Now let me test it.

The steelman: the legal line is too long and broken

Here is the strongest version of the opposing argument, as someone who sincerely holds it would put it.

"You say go through the line. But the line is a fiction. For many people there is no line. If you are an adult sibling of a citizen from a country with a heavy backlog, you may wait a generation. If you are a laborer with no college degree and no family here, there may be no category you can qualify for at all. You tell people to wait their turn, but the turn never comes. Enforcement-only conservatism is asking people to stand in a line that does not move, and then blaming them for walking around it."

I want you to notice how much of that is true.

The American legal immigration system is built on categories set by Congress. Immediate relatives of citizens, meaning spouses, minor children and parents, are admitted without a numerical cap. Other family categories are capped by statute. The law sets a floor of 226,000 family-sponsored preference visas each year and a base of 140,000 employment-based visas each year. On top of that, no single country may receive more than 7 percent of the total preference visas in those two groups. The diversity visa program, created in the Immigration Act of 1990, makes 50,000 visas available by lottery. The State Department publishes a monthly Visa Bulletin showing the cutoff dates for each category and country. I do not need to give you a single wait-time number, because you can read the bulletin yourself and see that for some categories and some countries the dates are many years behind.

So yes. Some lines are very long. For some people the legal route for a low-skilled worker with no family in the country is thin or absent. A conservative who says, "just follow the rules," while the rules offer no door, is not making an argument. He is reciting a slogan.

The answer: fix the line, do not abandon the door

Here is why the steelman does not lead where its defenders want. A long line is a reason to repair the line. It is not a reason to abolish the host stand. Three points.

First, the existence of a bad legal system does not turn illegal entry into an equal alternative. If your town has a slow permit office, the answer is to fix the permit office, not to say that building without a permit is now fine. A system that rewards the person who skips the line makes the line longer, because every unlawful success is a signal to the next person.

Second, the people best placed to describe the failure are the people who run the system. The line is long because Congress has not changed the caps in decades, and the per-country limit stops the queue from moving fast for the largest source countries. Those are choices Congress made and can change. The remedy is legislative.

Third, a broken legal path makes the border harder to enforce, and that is the conservative reason to fix it. Every Border Patrol agent spends time on people who, given a lawful way to work in a seasonal job, would have used it. A workable lawful channel lets agents focus on the people who really have to be stopped. I take up how the work visas are structured in H-1B, H-2A and H-2B, What Each Work Visa Does and Who Can Use It.

What the Jordan Commission saw

If you think this idea is a modern invention of squishes, look at the record. In 1990, Congress created the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which came to be called the Jordan Commission after its chair, Barbara Jordan. Jordan was a Texas Democrat. She was the first Black woman from the South elected to the U.S. House, and she was a member of the House Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment hearings in 1974. When she left Congress she was one of the most respected voices in the country, and President Clinton's administration and congressional Republicans both listened to her.

The commission's work in the 1990s was a bipartisan blend of the two halves I have been describing. It argued for stronger enforcement, including a reliable system for employers to verify that the people they hire are authorized to work. That recommendation helped lead to the pilot programs in the 1996 immigration law, which became the ancestor of E-Verify, a story covered in E-Verify Explained, the Free Federal Check Most Employers Skip. It also argued that legal immigration should be managed to serve the national interest, and it recommended narrowing the family categories so the system would focus on the nuclear family: spouses and minor children. Jordan died in January 1996, and her name remains attached to the idea that credible enforcement and a lawful system are the same project.

I mention it because the lesson is the one in my five steps. The person many Americans of both parties trusted most on this subject believed that you cannot have a humane system without a credible one, and that a credible one has to be willing to say no.

Reagan's bargain, and why it only half worked

Ronald Reagan understood the same thing, and he paid for it. In November 1986 he signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It offered legal status to people who had lived in the United States continuously since before January 1, 1982, and it created penalties for employers who knowingly hired people not authorized to work, along with the I-9 form that every new hire fills out. It was a bargain: legalization now, enforcement afterward.

Reagan's closing image for America, in his January 1989 farewell address, was the shining city on a hill, with walls and with doors open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. Walls and doors, in the same sentence. I have always thought that sentence settles an argument that Washington has been having ever since. The walls are not the opposite of the doors. The walls are what make the doors mean something.

The enforcement half of the 1986 bargain was never fully built, and that is the story told in Reagan Signed the 1986 Amnesty and Got Only Half of the Bargain. The sequel, the arguments of the next four decades, is in Four Decades of Republican Immigration Fights, From Reagan to the Gang of Eight. The lesson I take is not that Reagan was wrong. It is that if you do the generous half and skip the enforcement half, you lose the public's trust for a generation.

What repair of legal immigration would look like

I will not pretend there is only one answer, and conservatives disagree on the details. But here is a list of the kinds of repairs that someone who holds both positions can defend.

1. Make the rules legible. A family should be able to look up where it stands and what it is waiting for, and an honest answer should not require a lawyer.
2. Match the categories to the national interest. Debate openly how much weight the system should give to family ties, to skills, to employer need and to the lottery, and have Congress make the choice in a statute instead of leaving it to drift.
3. Offer lawful seasonal channels that actually work. Farms, resorts and construction firms need workers for part of the year. A lawful channel that is slow or costly pushes both employers and workers toward the unlawful one.
4. Verify who is working. If a worker's authorization is checked at hiring, the employer who follows the law is not undercut by the one who does not.
5. Enforce the exits as well as the entrances. People who arrive lawfully and stay past the date are part of the picture, a point developed in The Visa Overstay Problem and the Exit Tracking Congress Ordered in 1996.
6. Keep the path to citizenship open and dignified for those who qualify. Naturalization is the end of the story a lawful immigrant is trying to write, a path laid out in Becoming an American Citizen Step by Step, From Green Card to Oath.

Notice that none of these requires giving up the border. They require taking it seriously enough to make the legal system worth using.

The objection from the other flank

I owe a fair word to the people on the other side of this: the ones who say that "pro-immigrant" is a trap, that it is a code word for open borders, and that any conservative who uses it has surrendered the field. I understand the suspicion. The word has been used that way. But I am using it in its plain sense: I am in favor of immigrants, meaning the people who come lawfully, work hard, raise families, join the Army, start the corner business and bring the cousin from the old country to a church supper. I do not think a conservative has to be against them to be for the law. In fact, the argument for the law is stronger when it comes with respect for the people the law lets in.

If your argument cannot survive a conversation with a lawful immigrant sitting at the table, it is not much of an argument. Every Republican who has had a naturalized neighbor, a business partner from another country or an immigrant soldier in the unit knows this in his bones. The case against illegal immigration is stronger, not weaker, when it is made by people who plainly like the legal kind.

To talk about it in practical terms with people who see it differently, see How to Talk About Immigration at the Table Without Losing the Room.

The verdict

Here is my verdict, plainly. A country is entitled to control its border, and a country that does so with confidence can afford to be generous with those who come in properly. The people in the line deserve fairness. The people at the door deserve a door that works. A system that is both orderly and welcoming is not a contradiction. It is the only version of immigration policy that can hold a democratic majority for fifty years.

The bottom line

• A nation has the right to decide who joins it, and a nation that enforces its rules can afford to be generous.
• Fairness to the families who waited in line is a conservative value. Do not reward the person who skipped the line while the person who followed the rules is still waiting.
• The legal line really is too long for many people. The fix is for Congress to repair the categories and caps, not to give up on the border.
• The Jordan Commission and Reagan's 1986 law show that credible enforcement and a lawful path belong together.
• In your next argument, say out loud that you are for legal immigrants and for the law. It is a stronger position than either slogan.