February 2, 2025

FREDDIE DEBOER: As a Big Fan of Immigration, I Recognize the Utility of Assimilation.

The debate about Haitian immigrants in Ohio provoked a ton of racist and xenophobic commentary; I think there were also some legitimate gripes from residents, most importantly the driving down of pay in the low-wage job market. And yet I think we can also recognize that scenario as a failure for the Haitians as well. Can it really be considered humane to airdrop 15,000 Haitian migrants into an alien culture with minimal assistance in finding housing, learning English, getting jobs, and otherwise integrating into the local community? I very much believe that it can not. Too many on the left who support more legal immigration, as I do, refuse to engage with mass immigration as a challenging effort in social engineering, rather than simply as a benevolent opening of doors.

There’s a whole other macro dimension to this, which I will develop in another piece – the simple fact that, on a long enough timeline, “All of the poor people move to the rich countries” simply can’t be the solution, and that’s especially true because of how badly those outflows can hurt poorer countries. (I thought that this Lydia Polgreen piece looking at mass migration from 10,000 feet failed to really consider this dimension, but it’s the first in a series and there may be more explanation to come.) This points to a dimension of the immigration debate that restrictionists often ignore: if you really want fewer undocumented immigrants in the United States, you should work to improve international institutions and help to tear down the structural walls that keep a lot of countries unstable and poor. Ultimately, I have very banal views on all of this: I don’t feel any greater moral obligation to someone who lives a mile south of the border with Mexico than I do to someone who lives a mile north of it, I think immigration makes us strong, and I think we are a graying nation with real structural problems with our social safety net that immigration could ease. But none of that erases just how difficult mass immigration can be, and I think too many immigration proponents have hidden behind accusations of bigotry rather than confronting this difficulty. I love New York and hearing all the languages and smelling the exotic foods and seeing people go by in the clothes from their home cultures. But that’s the easy part. The rest of it is complicated and often hard.

Whatever your thoughts on assimilation, these videos are certainly not it:

 

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll