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There You Go Again: NR’s anti-immigration fever.

by Daniel T. Griswold

April 16, 2002

Mr. Griswold is associate director of the Center for Trade Policy at the Cato Institute.

After a season of remission, I see National Review has succumbed to another bout of anti-immigration fever. In three successive issues your authors have pushed every button to whip up hostility to immigration in the name of fighting terrorism and winning elections for Republicans. But slamming the door on immigrants will do neither.

In his April 22 article ("May We Get Serious Now?"), John O'Sullivan declares that "the [September 11] hijackers were all immigrants." Dead wrong. None of them were. They were all here on temporary "non-immigrant" tourist or student visas. They never applied to the INS for green cards or any other permanent status.

If every foreign-born person who enters the United States each year is an "immigrant," no matter how short their stay, then the U.S. admits about 30 million such "immigrants" each year, not the 1.5 million O'Sullivan claims. According to the most recent numbers from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, about 24 million foreigners entered temporarily as tourists in 1999 (the same window through which Mohamed Atta and his cohorts entered), another 5 million as business travelers, half a million as students, and half a million as temporary workers. All 30 million entered on temporary, nonimmigrant visas and the vast majority of them left the country after a few days, weeks or months. The million or so foreigners who enter each year to immigrate, that is, to resettle here permanently, make up only about three percent of the total number of foreigners who typically enter the country each year. Repeat: None of the terrorists entered through the relatively small window of immigration.

O'Sullivan and other anti-immigrant crusaders blur this distinction for an obvious reason. Their most pressing agenda is not border security but immigration reduction. They are attempting to hijack legitimate concerns about security to advance their pet political cause. It is revealing that Mark Krikorian spends the vast majority of his March 25 article ("Get Tight") arguing for drastic cuts in the three percent of foreign-born arrivals who come here to immigrate. Of the more than 90 percent of foreigner visitors who enter as tourists or business travelers each year, he can only manage the lame and fatalistic rejoinder that "tourists will keep coming." He wants to close the small window that allows immigrants in, even though none of the September 11 terrorists came through that window, while ignoring the much larger barn door of temporary visas through which all the terrorists entered. The misguided focus on immigration actually hurts the war on terrorism because the resources we now squander to intercept Mexican migrants and to raid construction sites and meatpacking plants could be better used to intercept terrorists and destroy their cells.

Like immigration policy, the 245(i) debate has no real connection to fighting terrorism. This is a humane provision that allows people who are residing in the United States and who are legally qualified to stay here to pay a fee to remain in the country while they apply for permanent residency. These are people who are married to American citizens or other legal residents, who are working, and who have become productive members of their communities. Although they are in technical violation of U.S. law, they pose no threat to our national security. They can be checked and processed by U.S. authorities more thoroughly here than at our overworked consulates abroad, all without disrupting their work and family life. To demand that they be deported, perhaps for years, despite their family and employment connections, betrays a lack of perspective and humanity that reminds one of the inspector in Les Miserables who hounded Jean Valjean for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread to feed his hungry family.

As a long-time reader of National Review, I fear that the magazine's obsession with immigration can only hurt its effectiveness and the conservative cause it espouses. Pat Buchanan and Pete Wilson are poor models of political success. Buchanan spent 12 million taxpayer dollars to spread his anti-immigrant message in 2000 and won less than half a percent of the vote. O'Sullivan, in his April 8 column ("Hasta la Vista, Baby"), argues that approval of the 245(i) provision "by a single vote" in the House last month indicates waning political support for immigration. Nonsense. The border-security legislation containing the 245(i) extension passed by a 2-1 margin (a crucial fact O'Sullivan omits), with the support of such principled conservatives as Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, Henry Hyde, and Christopher Cox, as well President George W. Bush. Those conservatives understand that openness to immigration is not only consistent with a free economy and a free society, but also with our national security.

Finally, O'Sullivan invokes the straw man of "open borders." Nobody who favors immigration believes we should let anybody and everybody into the country. I'm all for free trade, but I also think we should keep out diseased fruit, anthrax, and weapons-grade plutonium. In the same way, we can enjoy the benefits of admitting peaceful, hard-working, family-oriented immigrants while doing all we can to stop terrorists. The main border-security bill approved overwhelmingly by the House and now awaiting passage in the Senate would do just that. It would enhance the ability of border agencies to identify, track, and apprehend terrorists who try to enter the country, all without the unnecessary and self-destructive baggage of new restrictions on legal immigration.

We need to get smart about circumventing terrorists who would enter our country to do us harm. John O'Sullivan, Mark Krikorian, and their anti-immigrant allies, however, are aiming at millions of people whose only crime is a desire to better their condition through peaceful work.

This article originally appeared in NRO on April 16, 2002.