America’s Changing View On Immigration Policy

This week, Gallup released a new poll about how satisfied Americans are with the management of U.S. immigration policy. The poll revealed that the percentage of Americans who are “dissatisfied out of a desire for less immigration” has doubled in just two years of the Biden administration—ballooning from 19% in 2021 and 35% in 2022 to 40% in early 2023. It should surprise no one that the nation’s taste for more immigration has soured. 

This shift in sentiment is due in part to the never-ending line of migrants at our southern border and the nonprofit organizations passing out gift cards to them.   Not to mention the 2,400 known gotaways per day who run from border enforcement agents. Add to that the audacity of the supposed “refugees” who protested that a luxurious Manhattan hotel was a better fit for them than the shelter our taxpayer dollars provided. The guilt trip over desperate asylum seekers that was poured onto us by open borders advocates now rings hollow. Put simply, President Joe Biden’s policy of loose borders and lax immigration enforcement is not working for the American people. The outright costs to taxpayers, the burden on infrastructure, and employment-related problems are quickly mounting.  All things considered, it’s time to shift the immigration conversation back to what has always mattered most—the question of how many. 

Immigration will always be a numbers game. Advocates for more migration play on American generosity and the thriver's guilt of white Americans. One can observe this pattern after the passage of 1960s Negro Civil Rights when Americans started to believe we needed another human rights project.  Although we had not fully unified our multigenerational Black and white countrymen. Despite that unfinished business, the need for a new project manifested in the pro-immigration Hart-Celler Act of 1965. With this Act, Americans were convinced to make the ambitions of migrants equal to the equity due to native-born citizens. After all, many white Americans hail from the white settler colonial class and/or were descendants of “Great Wave” European immigrants (1870-1924). The conflict is a question of how children of immigrants could, in good conscience, deny access to others. But what well-meaning Americans missed then, as they do now, is that the number of would-be migrants outside our borders should remain greater than the number of positions we make available within our nation. Frankly, there will always be a long line.

Like some of his predecessors, President Biden is unwilling to accept how numbers work. For example, President Lyndon Johnson said the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act would not significantly change the numbers of migrants and he denied that immigration would have negative effects on native-born citizens. It’s clear now that Johnson was wrong. The reality is the 1965 Act reopened mass immigration from the entire world and, as a result, undid the economic and political gains multigenerational American citizens accumulated in the 60 years of immigration restriction started by the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. 

And while the 1924 Immigration Act was wrong to target Asians for exclusion, we simply cannot fix that error today by erasing our borders to allow illegal migration and replacing millions of Americans with legally permitted (visa) workers from China and India.  Immigration policies should constrain immigration from everywhere. And external labor sourcing should be an option of last resort used only when we have fully exhausted our internal labor options and satisfied the ambitions of American citizens. Which we haven’t.  

Yet, politicians continue to add more people and then hide the real impacts. According to Jeremy Beck, Vice President of the grassroots non-profit NumbersUSA, “In terms of impact, the total numbers matter more than the way immigrants arrive. A new arrival wants food, financial resources, shelter, and other material goods, whether they are issued a green card in the mail or a "permisso" at the border. Last year, about a million people received green cards. Another 900,000 were released into the U.S. after arriving illegally. Another roughly one million overstayed a visa or avoided apprehension at the border. That's about 3 million people in one year, not including those arriving on guest worker visas. To put that 3 million in context, New York City declared a state of emergency after receiving only 30,000.”

So, why do some deny that the current approach to U.S. immigration is a measurable failure?

The short answer is, we’ve lost sight of first principles. And as a result, the unfettered, rapid changes in migration have cost Americans dearly.  For example, because of mass immigration since the 1965 Act, descendants of U.S. slaves lost their position as 2^nd largest population group. And now all Americans must compete for economic stability against a steady stream of replacement workers. Mass immigration depresses our wages and because of extra labor options, employers feel no pressure to raise our pay thus our income remains well below inflation and the ever-rising cost of living. 

We can hope that a doubling of dissatisfaction is a sign that The People are ready to refocus the purpose of immigration policies. Namely, we have formal processes to gatekeep migration so that our nation controls the impacts, pace, and timing of additional numbers of immigrants with the expressed aim of not harming us, the existing American populous. Accountability is baked into that shift, up to and including the impeachment of executives who abandon their duty to us. Refocusing includes implementing a moratorium on all immigration until the mess of the Biden administration is sorted and corrected, up to and including deportation. And most of all, realigning with first principles means we refuse to be gaslit by the idea that policies should allow the demand for migration to outstrip the best interests of American households. 

We shouldn’t need to remind folks that America is home to current occupants.  It’s not a blank slate upon which money moves and through which workers are shuttled. It is unAmerican for leaders to establish policies that, in effect, deny that reality.

Putting first things first requires placing the interests of American citizens at the forefront of immigration policy—not prioritizing the expansive profit margins of employers nor catering to the never-ending supply of aspiring migrants. With the interest(s) of the American people in mind, the call to action is, to force leaders, to always analyze potential impact(s) beforehand and then send us a proposed answer to the question, “how many is too many, at this time.” Our elected officials and their appointees should consider themselves on notice to listen to the American people—cause apparently, we’ve had enough.