Mending Wall

One of the small ironies of the immigration issue is that Mitt Romney is the first generation child of an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico.  His father, George Romney, was born in a Mormon colony in the Chihuahua mountains and went on to be governor of Michigan, evidence that some immigrants can aspire to high places, just not poor brown-skinned ones.  Viewed that way, Mitt’s immigration positions are remarkably similar to the common story of the affluent city couple who moves to the suburbs for all they have to offer, then looks askance at new couples moving in from the same old neighborhood because of what they might do to home values in the new place.

Immigration has always had a dark and twisted history that way.  New Englanders, themselves the descendants of tormented pilgrims, looked down their noses at the unruly Irish, iron miners in Minnesota whose ancestors came from different eastern European countries had to be sent down into the mine in different elevator loads to avoid fighting between groups, and the U.S. fought a war with Mexico to claim territory for its own settlers which had been the home of some Latino families since before the pilgrims first  landed. We then began questioning the citizenship of families who for centuries had routinely travelled and had family ties across the new border, and demanded they prohibit the easy access of their cousins.

America is in a curious position as a country whose wealth and fundamental values have been shaped by the often forceful migration into others’ territory by its own peoples and by the countless migrations of the hopeful poor into and all throughout the country, and yet is apprehensive of whoever are the newest people on the block. We are always moving somewhere else, yet we constantly mutter about building walls to keep out the criminal types.  But we’re not very good at it.  To paraphrase Robert Frost, something there is in us that doesn’t like a wall.  Frost also wrote, “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence.”  We tend not to do that, and it costs us.

One of the big ways it costs us is that we, particularly the baby boomers, as a country are growing older and less able to handle the tasks and acquire the viewpoints of the young.  The turnover of work from the old to the young has before been handled by calling up the next generations; but the numbers of American born young people who can harvest our salad and write our software and care for us in a hospital are growing fewer and fewer. Such gaps have always been handled through immigration of young, willing hands, and we need millions more of these than we have, just to compensate for our growing old.  There are communities in our country that are dying because our immigration policies deny them the workers they need to survive.  Other countries, such as Japan, with declining population growth visibly stagnate when an anti-immigration ethos prevents renewal of the workforce. But we are blindly building walls without understanding what we are walling out.  Romney’s suggestion of a permanent visa to those who earn advanced degrees is almost comical that way; he will understand better when he, or someone he loves, stays in a hospital without adequate staff.

It costs us more morally.  As soon as we open the door of our new house, we seem to forget why people seek to move.  The pilgrims did not leave England to get rich.  People do not sneak past border guards with rifles and crawl through miles of desert in blazing heat and without food or water simply to live in a big house with water sprinklers.  They do not come only because they want to.  They come because their children are starving, or because of severe oppression.  Many will return for retirement to their native land, because that will always remain their home.

They come out of sheer desperation, and with vast regrets.  And they come without permission because the immigration quota system is so stacked against them that it can take ten to twenty years to work their way up the line to eligibility for legal entrance.  A family can starve in much less time than that. George Romney was lucky that way; his family came into the U.S. about 1912, just before the quota system was established in 1920.  A few years later in their immigration effort, and Mitt might not even be a U.S. citizen.    A wealthy, well educated Greek couple we know, with property in the U.S., tried for many years to obtain permanent resident visas, and the queue was so long for them that they finally gave up.  Imagine the lot of a Mexican farmer with children starving because NAFTA has destroyed the economy of his village.  A work visa or U.S. citizenship is for him the impossible dream, and he knows it.

Our moral and economic blindness is hiding the obvious: we need immigrants of all types, and they need us.  One obvious resolution would be permanent worker visas not limited by quotas or education levels or by a requirement not to return for periodic visits to a country of origin; that could both enable that farmer to feed his children without desperation or regrets, and provide the 2 million immigrants per year that the Federal Reserve says we need to keep our economy going.  We need to remove our blinders and find ways not just to mend walls but to tear them down.