Solving for the Immigration Equilibrium
The reality is closer to equilibrium. The Politics is a storm.
Two summers ago I listened to Hollis Robbins’ 2019 interview with Tyler Cowen on Conversations with Tyler and it unraveled the immigration debate a bit for me in a way I wouldn’t have expected. The conversation wasn’t about immigration directly. The portion of interest was about the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that made it a crime not to return escaped slaves to their “owners” even if they had made it to a free state. The law is the context for which Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written.
At its core, the Fugitive Slave Act was an immigration law. I hadn’t thought of it that way before nor was it taught that way to me when I learned about it in school or even undergrad. Hearing the interview at the height of the Trump admin’s family separation policy made made it clear. Watching the political saliency of the border bubble up again under President Biden is a good trigger to revisit some better thoughts.
People migrate en masse to escape. “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” poet Warsan Shire wrote whose Somali born parents migrated to Kenya across a border I once patrolled with the Kenyan partner force I was training. My experience there left me with a complicated sense of borders. I know why we have them. And I know why we cross them. At a border you can see things you can’t see unless you’re there. You can see the people that are running. And you can see what they’re running from. And you can see that borders are economic, political, entities. But mostly you see a sort of equilibrium.
The notion that the border is holding back some tremendous force of movement is only circumstantially true. The tribes along the border we patrolled were on both sides of it. It was the same with the teams I ran in Al Anbar along the Iraqi border with Syria. And again with the teams I had in Basra along the Iraqi border with Iran. It’s also the same thing here south of San Diego where I live now.
The border runs through an equilibrium. But that equilibrium can be upset. Sometimes it’s war. Sometimes famine or civil unrest. But mostly, in America, it’s politics.
In 1850 the border wasn’t between America and Mexico. It was between slave state and free state. The Fugitive Slave Law made it so that some of the self-deception that allowed many Americans to tolerate slavery north of the line no longer possible. The equilibrium was gone. And a side had to be chosen. Within a decade, after centuries of enslaving African Americans, it was war.
The Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy that resulted in the separation of families in very plain sight disrupted the equilibrium too. As 1850’s American law was favorable to the protection of slavery, modern immigration law is favorable to the protection of our borders. The way to push back in both instances was and is to the extent that the laws are enforced. And the way to upset the equilibrium is to insist on enforcement.
Charging people illegally crossing a border with a level of crime that costs them ever seeing their children again and forcing people who didn’t believe in slavery to treat humans as returned property under penalty of law may not be exactly the same thing. But they both fall into the sort of abominable moral hazard that people can’t and shouldn’t live with. We know cruelty when we see it. And we don’t like it. It’s one of democracy’s secrets to success.
Mrs. Bird, the fictional wife of the fictional Senator Bird from Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, gives us a quote that transcends both time and the issue.
“You ought to be ashamed, John! Poor, homeless, houseless creatures! It’s a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I’ll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do! Things have got to a pretty pass, if a woman can’t give a warm supper and a bed to poor, starving creatures, just because they are slaves, and have been abused and oppressed all their lives, poor things!”
The Fugitive Slave Law lost Mrs. Bird. Trump lost the 2020 election in some small part in a close race because he lost the suburban moms who historically viewed themselves as conservative. Trump lost Mrs. Bird.
The equilibrium in immigration in America is that it is both hard to enter the country physically and legally yet even harder to enforce the law once one arrives. Policies on either side that upset that equilibrium will increase saliency in the issue in American politics. And they’ll make it harder to look away. If they’re cruel one way or another, they’ll make it impossible.
We should expect the opposition party in American politics during this administration to try to continue to upset the equilibrium in immigration by making it seem like the hordes of immigrants are amassing on the border.
Having lived on the southern U.S. border for over 20 years now, the only obvious and observable change in reality has been the words politicians use. The reality is equilibrium. The politics is a storm.