Will Wilkinson has had a big influence on my thinking about migration, nationalism, and related subjects, so I read his pro-immigrant case for ending birthright citizenship with interest. At the heart of his argument is a kind of “grand bargain”: more people would be allowed to live and work in the United States, but they’d be excluded from the benefits of America’s generous welfare state. Will argues that this bargain can only be struck if we end birthright citizenship, because otherwise the children of immigrants will automatically be eligible for the same government benefits as other citizens.
Will is in good company. Milton Friedman, for example, was for open borders in principle but believed that it was incompatible with the welfare state, and Will’s proposal can be seen in the same vein. Still, I found his argument completely unpersuasive. Ending birthright citizenship is a terrible idea, both as a matter of policy and as a matter of pro-immigrant political strategy.
To start with, Will doesn’t really acknowledge how important birthright citizenship is in its own right. I’ve written before about the DREAM Act, which is designed to help thousands of non-citizen kids whose parents brought them to the United States when they were young. These kids are the clearest-cut victims of our immigration system. Through no fault of their own, they live in a kind of legal limbo; they’re not allowed to live or work in the country they’ve called home for as long as they can remember. Ending birthright citizenship would dramatically expand the number of kids who wind up in this predicament and risk creating a permanent, multi-generational underclass.
We also shouldn’t forget that the most important constituency for immigration reform is the immigrant community itself. In the long run, the good guys are likely to win the immigration debate because today’s anchor baby is tomorrow’s pro-immigrant voter. Ending birthright citizenship would permanently reduce the political clout of the immigrant community and harming the long-term prospects for immigration reform.
Will counters that ending birthright citizenship would make it politically feasible to enact other reforms that would help immigrants more. But I’m not so sure. For starters, there’s no reason to think birthright citizenship is the key obstacle to decoupling migration from government benefits. Legal immigrants and their children are already eligible for many government benefits. Green card holders are generally eligible to send their children to public schools. They have restricted access to Medicaid and S-CHIP, but they generally get full eligibility after 5 years, and hospitals will generally treat immigrants (legal or otherwise) that show up in their emergency rooms. Similarly, adult immigrants’ access to food stamp is limited for the first five years, but legal immigrant children are eligible for food stamps immediately. So if you think the problem is that immigrants impose too large a burden on taxpayers (which, to be clear, I don’t), there’s plenty of room to restrict immigrants’ access to benefits without amending the Constitution.
More importantly, I don’t think concerns about immigrants receiving government benefits are the major political obstacle to immigration reform. Generally speaking, ordinary voters who are afraid immigrants will go on welfare are also afraid they’ll steal our jobs, sell drugs to our children, refuse to learn English, and vote for Democrats. Ending birthright citizenship will make those people happy, but it won’t make them more likely to support immigration reform. I think Yglesias is right that opponents of birthright citizenship are generally opponents of migration in general. There’s a rarified class of libertarian intellectuals who follow Milton Friedman in being strongly pro-immigrant conditional on limiting their access to government benefits, but this cohort is too small to be electorally significant, and most of them are on board with reasonable immigration reforms anyway.
>We also shouldn’t forget that the most important constituency for immigration reform is the immigrant community itself. In the long run, the good guys are likely to win the immigration debate because today’s anchor baby is tomorrow’s pro-immigrant voter. Ending birthright citizenship would permanently reduce the political clout of the immigrant community and harming the long-term prospects for immigration reform.
Wow – you say that like its a good thing! You asked in an earlier post why people get emotionally involved in immigration as opposed to speeding violation. I think you personify why many conservatives are anti-immigration and I can’t tell if you’re being deliberately obtuse and provocative here or just don’t get it.
Conservatives believe in the nation-state as the basic unit of the international political order. Conservatives are likely to believe in patriotism and American exceptionalism and see virtues like limited government, liberty, and the rule of law as flowing from culture (see talk about the anglosphere). And with those beliefs in place Conservatives hear your position expressed above as “if enough citizens don’t agree about immigration we’ll just import non-citizens from another country who agree with us until we win.”
This is paranoid but not without foundation. Politicians of both parties pander to the immigrant community in an effort to buy political loyalty (GWB anyone?) The Labour party in the UK is perceived to have done just exactly this – imported voters to try to change the social makeup of the country in ways more congenial to Labour’s political goals – (cf a column at The Daily Mail – http://tinyurl.com/yl6w6ym )
This is exactly what enrages conservatives about the immigration debate. And the people most likely to purchase immigrant political loyalty aren’t doing so in order to usher in a libertarian utopia. Lots of libertarian leaning people can see this – just browse the comments in your posts at the Atlantic for proof.
Conservatives believe in the nation-state as the basic unit of the international political order. Conservatives are likely to believe in patriotism and American exceptionalism and see virtues like limited government, liberty, and the rule of law as flowing from culture (see talk about the anglosphere). And with those beliefs in place Conservatives hear your position expressed above as “if enough citizens don’t agree about immigration we’ll just import non-citizens from another country who agree with us until we win.”
OK, but this is pure question-begging. You can just as easily turn it around and say that conservatives are trying to disenfranchise a group of Americans that they think won’t vote for them. A child born on American soil and raised in the United States is an American, regardless of who his parents are.
What basis is there to believe that the children of immigrants are less favorable to “virtues like limited government, liberty, and the rule of law” than the children of American citizens? And if it’s true that the children of immigrants aren’t supporting your preferred electoral candidates, might that have something to do with those candidates being hostile to immigrants?
Also, I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that American conservatism was founded on the premise that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” But maybe our Creator endows us with different rights depending on which country you’re born in and who your parents are.
To start at the end:
Right – so I guess part of what I should have included in my list of things conservatives believe in is the concept of citizenship. Conservatives believe in inalienable rights but they recognize that a nation cannot provide these rights for the whole world. All men should be free; but it has more typically been progressive ideology that has advocated enforcing this inalienable right around the world. Denying citizens of other countries entry and a path to citizenship in our country is not a denial of their human rights – it is a recognition of the limits of our power. Or do you demand that the US imperially extend the guarantees of the constitution to all? Perhaps we should airlift pistols to the benighted citizens of the UK and lend Israel a few jurors! Don’t forget to send some ballots to Cuba!
Within the framework of sovereign states it is not inconsistent to refuse to extend to citizens of another country the rights and privileges of the citizenship in this country. If you are a transnationalist I can see why this attitude might seem quaint but comports with the general conservative respect for the constraints of human nature, political systems and power.
To return to the points you raise:
We’re talking about Eric Balderas again, aren’t we? To be honest I continue to support the tie of birth to citizenship since it is a protection against the disenfranchisement of citizens – I oppose giving the government latitude in determining who is and who is not a citizen. However the debate about anchor babies is not as simple as you imply – Eric Balderas is one hard case that makes bad law, the mother who sneaks across the border to give birth on US soil and so has a child who is a citizen is the opposite hard case that could also lead to bad laws. And it is not question begging – unless you also think that lowering legal migration limits also disenfranchises all the potential citizens who might have become American citizens. It seems axiomatic to me that attempting to change the political makeup of the country by encouraging citizens of other countries to immigrate is more objectionable, more sinister, than limiting the rate of change by limiting immigration.
Is there a conflict between those two sentences? Try this on for size: “If it’s true that the recipients of the welfare state aren’t supporting your preferred electoral candidates, might that have something to do with those candidates being hostile to the welfare state?” It is precisely this pernicious logic that makes conservatives suspicious of immigration. Government largess (and citizenship to non-natives is a form of largess) tends to be a one way ratchet; of course immigrants and potential immigrants will like politicians who wish to open the spigot rather then close it. This doesn’t make it a good idea or eliminate the concern that politicians will act in the best interests of citizens of other countries in order to further their careers but at the expense of our nation’s own best interests.
You don’t have to convince me that immigrants are by and large good for America in a multitude of ways – I’ve been pro-immigration since reading Julian Simon back in my college days. But again – to conservative ears your rhetoric sounds suspiciously like an attack upon concepts like citizenship and sovereignty and raises hackles in ways that most regulatory discussions never will do.
Tim, I’m generally with you on this one — the rights granted to an individual by virtue of US citizenship are in fact human rights, and extending those rights to as many people as possible is the moral path. One must not abandon the concept of “citizenship” to believe that citizenship should be more inclusive and easier to obtain.
The one point Wilkinson brought up that I didn’t see addressed in your rebuttal is the evidence from other countries showing higher rates of immigration after ending birthright citizenship. Ignoring theoretical objections, why would that be true from a pragmatic standpoint? Should those stats give us pause, or no? I’m just curious.
Rhayader, I don’t know enough about the politics of European countries to speculate on why that might be true. But I don’t think this kind of weak correlation tells you all that much. There could be any number of other factors at work.
Yeah, see I had the same reaction, and to me it makes real trouble for Wilkinson’s argument. The general theory — that stricter legal limits on immigration make people more amenable to expanded immigration — is counterintuitive to begin with. In the absence of strong data suggesting he’s on the right track, I can’t get on board with Will’s position.
I have a feeling he’s playing Devil’s Advocate a bit here, and making conjectures about political viability instead of focusing on theoretical validity. Not that political viability isn’t an important consideration, of course — but I can’t picture Will Wilkinson sitting up at night worrying about the ethical implications of birthright citizenship.
“At the heart of his argument is a kind of “grand bargain”: more people would be allowed to live and work in the United States, but they’d be excluded from the benefits of America’s generous welfare state. ”
See, I think that’s a perfectly fine general idea, (since I support it myself), but I don’t think removal of birthright citizenship is the way to go. If it were somehow automatically bundled up with the kind of free labor market he proposes, I’d vote for it anyway, because I like the free labor market more than I dislike ending BC.
Lots of the “immigrants take our public resources” people believe that illegal immigrants also do so, even though they aren’t technically eligible. Illegal immigrants are basically the test case for this plan: if the right-wing were willing to go for a freer labor market just for the promise that immigrants wouldn’t officially get public services, one would think they’d be vaguely more favorable to illegal immigrants, who technically fulfill this criteria already. But they’re not, because they think illegal immigrants are sneakily getting it anyway.
If you don’t want new immigrant citizens to have access to our expensive entitlement programs (and the taxes to pay for them), just make a law declaring that. We exclude lots of other people from them already. If the pro-immigration crowd is right, there will continue to be immigrants (though perhaps some less) who come here for the jobs, even without the safety net. If the anti-immigration crowd is right that most immigrants are just leeches who get so much more public money than they pay in, then immigration should slow down quite a bit.
I think this is what Will is attempting to propose, I just don’t think ending BC will actually satisfy the right-wing critics. Why not go directly to the source of their complaints?