When Enforcing Immigration Law, First Do No Harm

Several people have mentioned to me recently that traveling to the United States has become a “nightmare.”

A Canadian couple I met on vacation told me they had such an ugly experience with a U.S. immigration officer that they would never return to the U.S. My daughter, a U.S. citizen with Global Entry status under U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Trusted Traveler Program, arrived back in New York several days ago and witnessed several other Global Entry travelers being shunted to a regular line for interrogation, probably because some of them may have been green card holders, a condition now considered suspect.

Finally, an English friend told me that one of her friends, also British, was subjected to bitterly humiliating treatment on a recent trip to Boston and has sworn never to return to the States.

One can only imagine what will happen next year during the World Cup tournament in the United States, Canada and Mexico when soccer fans from all over the world, who constitute the raison d’etre of the tournament, try to enter the U.S. to support their teams. Instead of welcoming the visitors and their tourist dollars, Vice President J.D. Vance stirred the pot by warning World Cup fans not to overstay their visas.

Although the United States is known as a country of immigrants, it also has a long xenophobic tradition.

This nativist thread came from those whose families had been in the country for several generations and from earlier waves of immigrants.

In addition to an outright ban on Asian immigration, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 established national quotas for the first time, mainly directed against new arrivals from southern and Eastern Europe.

Because that law neglected to consider immigrants from Latin America, a watershed immigration law in 1965 restricted the influx of people from the Western Hemisphere but made exceptions for family reunification and highly educated people in the context of the scientific race during the Cold War.

That law’s biggest mistake was to put an overall cap on immigration without considering the decline in the U.S. birth rate, then in its early stages. (It would bode ill for the labor market years later.)

Today’s policy focus on closing the doors to new arrivals and expelling millions of immigrants already here betrays total ignorance of the consequences of such policies. Since 2007, just before the financial crisis, the number of native-born U.S. workers has increased some 7.2 million, while the number of foreign-born U.S. workers has increased by about 8.8 million.

Several industries—janitorial work, landscaping, agriculture, construction, hospitality and food services, manufacturing, even entertainment—employ immigrants in such significant numbers that even President Trump conceded recently that the industries could be crippled if the workers are expelled.

A major pretext for deporting immigrants is that they are dangerous criminals. According to a letter sent last year by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Rep. Tony Gonzales, Texas Republican, some 435,000 immigrants with criminal convictions were then in the United States and not being detained by ICE, a minuscule percentage of the 20 million people the administration alleges to be in the U.S. illegally. It’s also a tiny percentage of the 15 million figure others use.

Moreover, the list of “criminal” immigrants covers 40 years and includes not only felony convictions but also traffic violations and misdemeanor offenses. We are talking, therefore, about a tiny percentage of really dangerous criminals (and “not detained by ICE” for deportation means, in most cases, that the hardcore criminals were likely in prison). Undocumented immigrants convicted of homicide numbered approximately 13,000, and, again, virtually all of them were already locked up.

The administration’s unhinged campaign against foreigners has already achieved a collapse in the number of detentions at the border. By the government’s definition, no more rapists and murderers are coming in.

So what exactly is to be gained by the abusive treatment of those already in the United States, who overwhelmingly are hardworking, law-abiding people helping the U.S. economy at a time when the native-born labor force is in decline? (And what about the damage being done by not letting U.S. employers fill the labor gaps with needed technical and medical workers from overseas?)

Enforcing U.S. immigration law is one thing. Insulting and abusing visitors, lawful permanent residents and the “undocumented” yard man who cares for your neighbor’s lawn is quite another.