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new world oyster's avatar

Immigration lawyer here. I think one of the defining characteristics of this age is an inability to separate policy goals from personal moral sentiments. It’s gotten so bad that we end up relying for civil order just on the inertia of laws and policies made in the past. Take asylum law as an example. The definition of a “refugee” is very specific. It covers, for example, a fear of returning to your country because of persecution based on your political affiliation. However, most of our asylum applicants are fleeing gangs in Central America or are women from the same region fleeing domestic abuse. And the gangs are real, and they’re scary, and the domestic abuse is often horrific. But it doesn’t meet the current laws. And we lawyers and advocates and judges who are liberal-leaning can shake our heads and shrug and say, “What can you do? The law is the law. Damn that law.” But as far as I know, nobody has ever proposed changing it. If we did change it, basically every person in Mexico and Central America would qualify for asylum. And nobody seems to want that. Trump says out loud he doesn’t want it, to boos and jeers. Biden, to crickets, works out complicated deals where Mexico detains migrants on their side of the border where they then die in horrific fires. We’ve become profoundly dishonest with ourselves about what we want and what is good for us as a people. Nobody out there, at least in my community, is having any kind of rational discussion about what we want out of our asylum program, or what our goals are for our H1B program (which we use to import most of our engineers, doctors, and tech workers), who stands to benefit and who stands to lose. What are the implications for our democracy and sense of nationalism? How do we square that with our economic wants? Who do we want here? Skilled? Unskilled? Christian? Hindu? Very conservative Venezuelans? Very liberal Europeans? How do we balance labor with personal pity? Nobody is talking about it. And not talking is making us dumber. We’re like medieval peasants seeking shelter in a building made by some past civilization that we no longer know how to repair or engineer.

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SCA's avatar

Excellent as always.

There's something that Americans who haven't had experience of living in a poor third-world country for at least a little bit of time do not understand: that poor people aren't a species, but a very diverse group who have very diverse viewpoints about themselves. When I lived in a South Asian country I came to understand that many extremely poor people had middle-class values and aspirations for themeslves, and many others didn't.

We should want, here, to accept for permanent immigration status those people whose values make them good candidates for successful assimilation because they have a strong sense of themselves as sharing *our* basic values, regardless of the specifics of their cultures.

But of course the second and subsequent generations may betray that expectation. But if you fail to even attempt to choose wisely, you will end up with a very bad result.

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