What is the purpose of immigration policy for any nation? The correct answer is to add to numbers either in general, or in areas of certain aptitudes that are needed to enable a specific, tangible, and quantifiable benefit to the larger society. While feeling and expressing sympathy for people in nations rocked by harsh conditions is noble, it is not a responsible basis for policies related to population growth here.
I once took a water taxi tour up the Hudson River in New York City. The driver, a man on the far end of middle age, virtue signaled to us about how the Big Apple had a history of being open to anyone who landed at its ports, unlike the apparent intolerance of our time that demands approvals and papers to cross national borders. It seemed particularly ironic that I had to purchase a ticket to get on this boat, which was captained by a man who vilified the notion of rules for entry. While there is a certain historical accuracy contained within such arguments about the early history of American population growth, the context is wildly misconstrued. Early U.S. territories and states needed a large influx of people to settle lands, build infrastructure, fill cities, staff the military ranks, and build a nation. Things are a bit different today.
Where did most of these new Americans come from in previous centuries? Europe, the homelands of the original settlers. Among people from our mother continent was a shared desire to build, theological traditions in common, and a desire to establish a new life as part of building a new nation. While there were some early misguided experiments with socialism at the Jamestown settlement, the virtue of working to reap individual reward characterized the ethos of the majority seeking a start in the new world. But that didn’t mean that immigration remained unregulated for long. Before the close of the 18th Century, the 1790 Naturalization Act placed restrictions on who could become an American citizen. Subsequent legislation in the centuries since has sent the door for those wanting entry from wider open to nearly shut at different points in time, based on the nation’s needs and security concerns in given eras.
Policymakers who limited immigration did so with strategic aims of perpetuating an American culture. Of course, those intents are mischaracterized by progressives in our day as xenophobic. They use such four-syllable words while perched safely within their homogenous neighborhoods in places like Georgetown or Martha’s Vineyard. In our time, the argument about immigration has ceased entirely from being about what’s good for the nation, and instead focuses on sympathy for those who want to escape the plight of the homelands that they are unable or unwilling to fight to save or improve. This has led to a surge of people who come not to join the American experiment, but to derive the financial and security benefits of the Western tradition while working to subvert it. The mindset gave us people like Ilhan Omar—who said publicly that her top priority is what’s good for Somalia—as a member of Congress, and Zohran Mamdani—whose mother characterized him as “not an Uhmericcan (American) at all”—as the Democrat nominee for NYC mayor.
Every time there’s a new war in southwest Asia, or Haiti, Americans are told it’s our duty of compassion to receive people by the tens of thousands, add them to our social benefits programs, and bear the inevitable result of being invaded by sizeable populations among us who have little interest in learning our language or appreciating our culture. The relationship progressives demand of us is very one-sided. This is a breach of trust for America’s citizenry, as those of us here legally are given no choice in the importation of new cultures at odds with our own. Nor are we given a vote when it comes to these new masses being immediately absorbed into taxpayer-funded services. The process is deliberately undemocratic.
But all of that’s beside the point of what I actually sat down to write about. I was astonished to read recently that Vermont’s Congresswoman Becca Balint said at a town hall that without further immigration from the 3rd world, “we’re not gonna have anyone around to wipe our a**es.” One might have thought that a leftist finally said the quiet part out loud. But they have been saying the quiet part out loud for years with arguments that America needs open borders because we need a class of people to pick tomatoes, clean hotel rooms, and shingle roofs. The implication is that these are menial, unworthy vocations that should be ascribed to those who open borders advocates seem to view as a servant class of humanity. In recent months, it occurred to me that similar arguments were made to justify the chattel slave trade during the first half of American history. Replace the word “tomatoes” with “cotton” and then ask if we’re really more enlightened than our 18th and 19th-century ancestors. There are many indicators—like the abortion trade, the butchering of children for the transgender agenda, and the human sex trafficking trade—that suggest the opposite is true.
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The moral repugnance of the “Who will pick our tomatoes and wipe our backsides?” argument is mirrored by its basic falseness. As Ryan Girdusky noted recently at the Bob Dole Dinner in Kansas, other nations grow food and build structures without importing millions of people from South America. Just as the antebellum South built an economy around slavery, the America of my lifetime built an economy around a class of foreign labor that’s deliberately shuffled into the shadows. That’s the opposite of compassionate.
Our living generations are at a crossroads in America’s history. We inherited a nation of E Pluribus Unum—Out of Many, One. Will we steward that and hand it to our descendants? Or will we falter under the lie that justice demands a nation in which every culture is respected, except the one that birthed and sustained it? The choice is binary. We must reject thinking that reflects chattel-based moral commitments, and stand for an America-first immigration policy that perpetuates the unique greatness of this land to the ordered liberty benefit of all across the fruited plain.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump, illegal immigration into our great country has virtually stopped. Despite the radical left’s lies, new legislation wasn’t needed to secure our border, just a new president.
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