6 - Fear and loathing at the border

Summary

Americans identify with America, and increasingly there are people – Poles, Italians, Israelis – who identify with two countries. But I do not know of any other identification that I can make, say, with the condition of the people of the Sahara. I repeatedly see pictures in the papers of a starving mother with her child holding out its hand. I think it would be hypocritical if I didn't say that I would feel a little more compassion if one of my pet birds had broken a leg in its cage in my own house.

Clare Booth Luce

In their thoughtful and original analysis of the immigration problem, Jules Coleman and Sarah Harding (Chapter 2, this volume) fail to take sufficient notice of the very deep emotions on the dark underside of immigration policy. One would not know from reading their account that the problem is politically situated in a world increasingly dominated by huge increases in population, rapidly dwindling resources, and ethnic hatred. The politics of immigration are driven by fear and selfishness, by prejudice and desperation.

A satisfactory analysis of the immigration problem must be grounded in this politics. It must incorporate political reality in two separate ways. First, it must evaluate the moral status of the racial, ethnic, and cultural antipathy that animates the immigration debate. Second, even if this antipathy is not morally defensible, the analysis must nonetheless take the fact of its existence into account in formulating a real-world, second-best solution to the immigration problem.