Dear Libertarians, Immigration Is Bad.

Libertarian Alex Nowrasteh recently published a pamphlet entitled “The Most Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong”. In it, he attempts to refute a selection of what he considers the most common arguments for lower levels of immigration to the USA. In this essay, I explain some disagreements which I have with the pamphlet. This is only a partial overview of the points on which I believe that Mr. Nowrasteh is in error.

He emphasises that “the risk of being murdered in an attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist is […]

small” (p.21). The decision to focus on murders in particular seems debatable: terrorism is bad even when its results are not fatal. So what are some of the facts pertaining more generally to terrorism by foreign-born individuals in the USA? According to the Departement of Homeland Security, “549 individuals were convicted of international terrorism-related charges in U.S. federal courts between September 11, 2001, and December 31, 2016”, 402 of those were born outside the country, and 148 of those were naturalised U.S. citizens, so they were certainly immigrants. Additionally, “since September 11, 2001, there were approximately 1,716 removals of aliens with national security concerns”, and

between 2007 and 2017, USCIS referred 45,858 foreign nationals who applied for immigration benefits to ICE for criminal or civil enforcement action, based on information indicating that such foreign nationals had committed egregious public safety-related offenses within the United States.

Moreover, it seems that the success of avoiding more deadly terrorist attacks which Mr. Nowrasteh highlights is hard-won. The Departement of Homeland Security quotes the following statement by Attorney General Jeff Sessions:

Our law enforcement professionals do amazing work, but it is simply not reasonable to keep asking them to risk their lives to enforce the law while we admit thousands every year without sufficient knowledge about their backgrounds.

Mr. Nowrasteh also stresses that “there have been few vetting failures since 9/11” (p.22). This claim seems correct, but does it really help his case? If few of the terrorists who entered the country were able to do so due to vetting failures, that seems to suggest that the solution to the entry of terrorists is not to improve vetting procedures, but to restrict immigration as a whole, at least from certain countries.

Mr. Nowrasteh notes that “the [9/11] attackers entered on tourist visas and one student visa, not immigrant visas” (p.21). There is certainly a dose of irony to this argument — while it may be true, frequent commentator on immigration Michel Cutler has noted “the clear warnings issued by the 9/11 Commission about the nexus between immigration and visa fraud and the threat of terrorism”. In the article in question, Mr. Cutler quotes said report as saying that,

throughout the 1990s and up to the 9/11 attacks[,] abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity. It would remain largely unknown, since no agency of the U.S. government analyzed terrorist travel patterns until after 9/11. This lack of attention meant that critical opportunities to disrupt terrorist travel and, therefore, deadly terrorist operations were missed.

Finally, there is a subtler terrorism-related threat which can arise from immigration. The USA’s ability to combat terrorism depends on the support of its population, and the immigration of certain groups of people (especially Muslims) can jeopardise this consensus. Thus, Raymond Ibrahim has discussed a famous 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document detailing a plan to undermine the USA and, more broadly, “Western civilization” from within. The document provides a list of organisations which are offshoots or allies of the Muslim Brotherhood, and this list

includes the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA).
All of these Brotherhood front groups remain alive, well, and highly influential in America—and therefore pose a greater long term and subversive threat for the security of the United States than ISIS, al-Qaeda, or any other jihadi organization.

A sobering demonstration of the presence in American society of Muslim radicals masquerading as legitimate, respectable religious organisations came when David Horowitz got into an altercation with a member of UCSD’s Muslim Students’ Association, during which she admitted to being in favour of the leader of Hezbollah’s intention to kill all the Jews on earth.

During the exchange, Mr. Horowitz mentioned that he had asked fifty members of the Muslim Students’ Association at UC Santa Barbara to “condemn Hezbollah and Hamas”, and none of them had done so.

The presence of terrorist-sympathisers is also threatening inasmuch as, in the words of the 9/11 Commission, pre-9/11 terrorists were aided in the perpetration of immigration fraud by “their supporters” in the USA.

However, if there is one domain in which Mr. Nowrasteh seems especially wide of the mark, it is that of culture and integration. For some reason, he thinks it helps his argument to state that

the process of assimilation is a two-way street. Immigrants and their descendants must take up most of the customs, mores, and values held by long-settled natives. The natives must accept the immigrants; their children; and some of their particular customs, religions, and habits as part of the cultural fabric of the country (p.13).

Evidently, Mr. Nowrasteh never even considers that Americans may be perfectly happy with the “customs, religions, and habits” which define their country and their way of life now and may be opposed to changing them, which he considers an inevitable part of the integration of immigrants. While Latin American customs may be, by and large, relatively benign, that would be much harder to argue regarding, say, Middle Eastern customs. Thus, Islamic theology graduate Osman Mahmoodi writes:

There are dichotomous differences of opinion among Sunni scholars in regard to female genital cutting. These differences of opinion range from obligatory to acceptable.

The Shafi’i and Hanbali schools of Islamic jurisprudence consider circumcision to be obligatory for both males and females, while the Hanafi and Maliki schools of Islamic jurisprudence consider circumcision to be Sunnah (preferred) for both males and females.

I hope not to be misunderstood: I prefer the USA to Mexico and Colombia, but those are decent states, and if the USA became another Mexico or another Colombia, I could make my peace with that development. The Mexican government and that of Colombia do not bury people alive for being homosexual. In this light, it is a blessing that most of the U.S. immigrant population is of Mexican origin.¹ I may yet live to see the day when the Americas and India are the last bastions of freedom and democracy, while Eurabia is an Islamist zone of tyranny.

Mr. Nowrasteh’s arguments about the history of integration appear to lack coherence. Bafflingly, he writes:

If you think that immigrants and their descendants during the Age of Migration from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway,

Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, and Wales assimilated just fine, then you shouldn’t be worried about the immigrants from Mexico, China, and India today who are assimilating as well or more

rapidly (p.14).

Who could possibly believe that those immigrants had assimilated “just fine”? Even Mr. Nowrasteh himself paints a very grim picture of the integration of Catholics into American society in the past (pp.14f.). Furthermore, to this day the large differences in rates of violent crime between the nortern and southern U.S. states can be convincingly explained by differences in the ethnic oringins of the people who settled in various parts of the country (see Pinker 2011: 101-102). In particular,

the northern states were settled by Puritan, Quaker, Dutch, and German farmers, but the interior South was was largely settled by Scots-Irish (ibid.: 101).

Thus, the past experiences to which Mr. Nowrasteh refers demonstrate that integrating dissimilar cultures in the same state is a highly challenging task. As even he acknowledges, “assimilation is never perfect” (p.13). So why allow large-scale immigration instead of aiming to boost birthrates at home?

In the book “Beyond the Melting Pot” Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan demonstrate on the example of New York City that the extent to which different cultures have blended together in the USA has traditionally been exaggerated.

Mr. Nowrasteh is similarly self-contradictory when it comes to national sovereignty. He argues that unrestricted immigration does not entail a surrender of sovereignty because sovereignty over one’s borders means the ability to admit as many or as few immigrants as one likes (p.25f.). However, elsewhere in the pamphlet (p.27), he seeks to counter the view that immigrants necessarily vote Democrat by arguing that immigrants in California only ceased to support the Republican Party because of the anti-immigration stance which it adopted in 1994. Yet does this not mean that immigration does undermine sovereignty, in practice if not in theory? A state may remain legally able to restrict immigration, but this may not be feasible in practice because it would antagonise immigrant voters.

Mr. Nowrasteh concludes his pamphlet with these words:

One can, of course, disagree with a proimmigration policy position

after being confronted with

such facts, but that person must

come up with entirely different

arguments.

How lucky it would be, if he had actually refuted the “most common” arguments he lists, that there are other arguments against immigration. For instance, as Michael Cutler has noted, the cost of “ESL” (“English as a second language”) schooling for children obviously represents funds which could be allocated to other educational functions. Mr. Cutler adds that employment in low-wage jobs of the kind that is often occupied by illegal aliens is typically a formative experience for young people and can be valuable for introducing them into the workforce.

Footnote

1. A plurality of new arrivals is from China, which may worry some, considering the political conditions in the PRC. However, the Chinese new arrivals are solidly outnumbered by those from the second and third most popular countries of origin, India and Mexico, which are both democratic.

Reference

Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Penguin.