Please forgive my going somewhat off-topic in this usually art-centric blog, but all professional fields (including the artworld) are impacted by the plight of migrants seeking to enter and remain in the US. As the daughter of an immigration lawyer (who died in 2010 (at the ripe age of 96), I was forcefully struck by the resonance of two opinion pieces offering two very contrasting perspectives on the current migrant crisis. As it happened, they were published on the same day (Tuesday, Feb. 6) in the hardcopies of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, respectively.
In a weirdly overwrought, overwritten article, Gerard Baker, the WSJ “Opinion” page’s Editor at Large (perhaps evading revision by that newspaper’s usually demanding copy editors due to his exalted masthead status), characterized the overwhelming influx of migrants as “the most powerful indictment of a political and cultural elite whose hegemony is long overdue to meet its nemesis.”
Baker further fulminates:
The demographic reality of an overpopulated and still immiserated global south that is disgorging hundreds of millions of people to the wealthy north is making chaos of the attitudes and decisions of a ruling elite that—by design or accident—seems hell-bent on the West’s self-annihilation.
Perhaps I exaggerate. [Perhaps?!?]
Here’s how the NY Times’ Opinion Columnist, Paul Krugman, tackled the same subject on the same day, from a sharply contrasting perspective:
This seems like a good time to point out that negative views of the economics of immigration are all wrong. Far from taking jobs away, foreign-born workers have played a key role in America’s recent success at combining fast growth with a rapid decline in inflation. And foreign-born workers will also be crucial to the effort to deal with our country’s longer-term problems….
The United States stands out for its ability to combine disinflation with vigorous economic growth. And one key to that performance has been rapid growth in the U.S. labor force, which has risen by 2.9 million since the eve of the pandemic four years ago. How much of that growth was due to foreign-born workers? All of it….In fact, I’d argue that the influx of foreign-born workers has helped the native born….
Foreign-born workers are crucial to America’s fiscal future….Immigration is one of America’s great sources of power and prosperity.
That said, Krugman acknowledged (at the beginning of his article) that “modern nations can’t—practically or politically—have open borders, which allow anyone who chooses to immigrate.” At the end of his piece, he concedes that “the mess at the border needs to be fixed.”
But how? It seems that, paradoxically, migrants now want to be picked up by border agents, as explained in the Times several days earlier by Miriam Jordan, who covers “lawful and unlawful immigration” for the Times. She noted that when migrants manage to cross the border and then apply for asylum in order to be allowed to remain here, “underfunded immigration courts that adjudicate claims are strained by the swelling caseload, so applications languish for years, and all the while, migrants are building lives in the United States.”
My father, whose lifelong job was Investigator for the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS—precursor of today’s Department of Homeland Security), would have completely understood the strategy behind the delay tactics of today’s migrants.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
In an unpublished 1994 article that he had pitched (unsuccessfully) to the NY Times‘ “Op-Ed” page, my father had noted this:
Asylum is often discussed in terms of “humanity” and “compassion.” The present realities are not discussed. Due to the asylum remedy, immigration is uncontrolled and has been for decades. Anybody can get into the United States illegally and then use legal devices to stay. An illegal alien applies for asylum, if he has no other means of avoiding deportation. Then the crushing workload of immigration employees who handled asylum requests was so great that the alien could get even years of delay before getting his hearing. The word “asylum” is astonishingly true, for you get “asylum-from-deportation” by applying for an asylum hearing.
In other words: The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Back then (perhaps even today?), some immigration officials (including my father) felt personal sympathy for some of those whom they were assigned to investigate. I can remember my Dad’s sleeping overnight in his downtown office to process the huge influx of Hungarian refugees fleeing Communist rule in the late 1950s. Some of new arrivals spoke little or no English when they became my elementary school classmates, but they went on to become my peers at the Bronx High School of Science, a highly selective school to which they gained admission using their rapidly acquired English-language proficiency.
Years later, when asked by my son (for a school assignment) about his profession, my father answered the question, “What kind of case did you enjoy working on the most?” by stating: “Naturalization proceedings.” Why? “A happy ending.” The kind of case that he enjoyed the least? “Deportation proceedings—an unhappy ending for the individual involved.” And when asked, “Why did you choose your specialty?” he answered: “I had an interest in the subject, as both of my parents [Eastern Europeans] were immigrants and not native born.”
All of which is to say: Given their own life experiences, even immigration officials can respect and empathize with those whom they’re assigned to investigate.