POINT OF VIEW

We are looking at immigration all so wrong in this country

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New York City always has been distinguished as America’s port of entry for immigrants from around the world, and Riverdale is one of New York’s neighborhoods most characterized by its warmth toward immigrants and its international diversity.

Almost a quarter of Riverdale’s population is foreign-born, with more than half of our immigrants (including my parents) coming from Europe, 23 percent from Latin America, and 21 percent from Asia.

This is doubtlessly part of Riverdale’s character — from residents like U Thant and Arturo Toscanini, to the Spanish speakers walking past Russian grocery stores, Riverdale has been a safe haven for the rest of the world for years.

It’s important, however, to support immigration for the right reasons. Much of the liberal discourse around immigration surrounds only utilitarian benefits that immigrants bring the United States’ native-born citizens. A New York Times headline from 2017 opposing the travel ban reads, “How to make America greater: More immigration,” and lauds the billions of dollars immigrants generate.

A piece in The Riverdale Press from December by Tim Markbreiter (re: “Don’t fund wall, Sen. Schumer,” Dec. 13) extols that “immigrants are essentially part of our country’s history, culture and economy.”

These pieces mark a problem that characterizes neo-liberal rhetoric toward moral issues — that immigrants are little but assets to help “our country” or “our economy,” and that our immigration policy — as our other policy — ought to be shaped by a cold utilitarian evaluation of what immigrants bring us.

This argument is reductionist, exploitative, and unflinchingly capitalist — it reduces the personhood, moral character and heritage of immigrants to a marginal bump in GDP, and suggests that immigrants have a duty to justify themselves and their presence to the United States by some tribute they bring.

Even if Riverdale or the United States didn’t stand to gain a dime from allowing immigration — though most scholarship suggests they gain far more than that, and I don’t disagree — there are powerful moral reasons to support immigration and duties we have to immigrants.

The first is a question of redress for harms. From helping turn Afghanistan into the second-largest producer of the world’s refugees; to civilian casualties and the diffusion of arms during the war on drugs in Mexico; to corporate-sponsored overthrows of democratic governments in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East; to spending years rejecting and discriminating against specific groups of immigrants by statute; the United States has been actively responsible for sowing the seeds of global instability that drives displacement and emigration in the first place.

Accepting those emigrants is one place for to start recognition of and recompense for that instability. For America to shirk its duty to the immigrants it created is an abandonment of responsibility, and will only serve to entrench the conditions that bring immigrants and refugees here.

The second is a question of founding principles. Franklin, for example, argued that the Constitution ought to be partial to immigrants at the expense of economic benefits, writing that “the Constitution will be much read and attended to in Europe, and if it should betray a great partiality to the rich, it will only hurt us in the esteem of the most liberal and enlightened men there, but discourage the common people from removing to this country.” The Declaration of Independence indicted George III for his efforts “obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners (and) refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither.”

In “Common Sense,” Paine wrote that America ought to serve as “the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty.” Washington argued that “America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions.”

Madison argued that immigration prevents some ethnic majority or a defining national ethnic character from emerging, writing “for where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest.”

Even a true, principled, Burkean conservative would recognize the moral arguments for immigration are evident in the founding traditions, values and mythos of the United States. Immigration is justifiable on the basis of America’s status as a safe haven, its duty toward immigrants, and on principles of liberty and national right — not simply on the use-value of immigrants.

When we argue that any community — from the neighborhood to the polity, from Riverdale to the United States — should support immigration, we should take care to avoid arguments that consider immigrants to be little more than what they do for us or for our country, and suggest that immigrants come here bound by some duty to native-born Americans.

Instead, perhaps, we should argue from principle and compassion, accord humans human dignity, and begin to ask what we ought to do for them.

Josh Zakharov,

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