Inevitability is a big but largely justified word.

Maybe the simplest, and at the same time the most important, thing that can be said about Latin American immigration into the United States is that it is inevitable, legal or illegal. The signs are all over – whites’ minority status in California, the utter reliance of the American economy on an immigrant labor force in sectors ranging from service to medical to agriculture – and the recent discovery that Mexican immigration into the United States has slowed in the wake of our recession is, rather than some premonition of change, an indication that immigrants are rational actors.

That being said (and you’d be hard-pressed to find a rational actor who doesn’t say it), a pretty surprising number of commentators simply don’t take inevitability and all its connected practical considerations into account. The conversation over Carens’s essay on immigration amnesty in the current issue of the Boston Review provides, some good examples of the shapes this blindness takes.

(For the following, Carens’s basic argument: illegal immigrants should be granted amnesty after a stay of six or seven years in the United States.)

The most common cause, to my mind, is to view the issue as a moral quandary. Amnesty for illegal immigrants is, in fact, a moral quandary, and so this seems perfectly reasonable. However, moral quandaries lead to moral philosophy, which is wonderful and enjoyable and often crucially relevant, but only when kept subordinate to physical realities. Aleinikoff’s response is an interesting example of this, made even more so by virtue of his slightly misleading title (“Pragmatic arguments may, in the end, be most persuasive”). The article is well written, well-thought-out, and begins with a detailed parsing of Carens’s argument, in which Aleinikoff attempts to identify the keystone of the essay. None of this, it seems to me, is particularly relevant. I view his conclusion – that the US citizenry have the moral right to choose their own immigration policy – as both morally correct and practically useless – even, in the case of more hostile states (of which there are more and more, reports El Universal), unworkable. 

There are, of course, less theoretical arguments – arguments along the same lines of Carens’s own argument from personal accounts – that represent an even more direct form of impracticality, simply by virtue of ignoring the core inexorability of immigration. Carol M. Swain’s position is, I think, the most egregious example of this. Her basic argument – that immigration is harmful to the disadvantaged American – is already attacked in Carens’s response as being an unacceptable protection of one population’s comforts while blatantly denying another’s rights. But this isn’t the largest problem with her article: Swain’s comments are simply irrelevant. Perhaps the poor American may experience a drop in wages due to nonunion migrant labor forces.  I can’t say whether this is accurate or not. I think it would be a tragic situation were it true. The immigration that supposedly causes it is, however, not in question – it is a fact of life. These days, the only people who would counsel halting immigration live in makeshift bomb shelters.

Maybe the tone above is harsh. I don’t mean it to be – I find the articles mentioned above and many of the others that I implicitly criticize to be reasoned and intelligent responses to a complex issue. Still, these are some basic fallacies to look for as you read through the articles – as I highly recommend you do.