Unrestricted immigration - a radical ideology
There are two classes of questions related to ongoing mass immigration into America. The first and most fundamental question is quite simply: do we want immigration at all? The second class involves second order policy questions of how many and from where.
A huge amount of effort has been spent by immigration reductionists since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on formulating second order policy statements as to why less immigration is consistent with American principles. Indeed, it's pretty clear that continued mass immigration is distinctly not in the interests of the American nation.
Yet these policy arguments all presuppose that the answer to whether we should have immigration at all is a resounding yes. Not many politicians have focused on this fundamental question, with a notable exception: Donald Trump in his candidacy has confronted the fundamental question as opposed to the arcane minutia of policy corrections.
Which is why he is so popular with the American people who overwhelmingly want less, not more, immigration.
Chilton Williamson, Jr. points this out in his substantial article The Ideology of Unrestricted Immigration, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Summer 2016:
Trump does not, indeed, appear to have studied the immigration issue in depth, or at all. That is exactly why what he has to say about it resonates as strongly as it does with significant portions of the electorate. What Trump has really been saying is: “To hell with all these excuses for why illegal immigrants are still crossing our borders in droves. Why they can’t be deported once they’re here, or encouraged to self-deport. We the People don’t have to give You People in Washington reasons why we won’t tolerate illegal immigration any longer, and why we don’t want America to be transformed, by them or by legal immigration, or anything else for that matter. we don’t want any such thing and we are the voters to whom you are constitutionally responsible.” That is not a calibrated “policy” argument, of course: it is a demand for comprehensive action. It is also, in a democracy, all the justification for restriction that is necessary—the more so because Americans do indeed have their practical and moral reasons to resist immigration, and eminently sensible ones at that.
Much to his credit, Trump has shifted the 'Overton Window' moving the debate not only away from the constraints imposed by the progressive left, but back to where the fundamental immigration question is front and center.
Williamson observes that the argument that America does not need more immigration is disturbing to many Americans today, yet that was a commonly held belief in the early days of the Republic. He presents an excellent synopsis of America's immigration history in his article, along with political rationale for changes in immigration policy over time.
Williamson remarks in his article that:
The ideological nature of the immigration debate, and my belief that immigration never has been necessary to America’s prosperity and success, and that since 1965 it has been positively harmful to our national well-being, explain my lack of interest in the current “policy” discussions that are a part of it. Advocacy of a particular policy implies that its supporters believe in its efficiency in addressing some aspect or another of a single broader policy, or disposition to action. Being convinced that American immigration policy overall in the past half century—which has been to tolerate virtually open borders and mass immigration, legal and illegal, from anywhere—has been profoundly ideological, I view every policy subordinate to the general one (“micro” versus “macro,” I suppose) as irrelevant in the practical sense.
Williamson points out that the immigration debate has been that of an ideological nature, based upon ideological premises, yet one ideological policy cannot be expected to correct another. He observs that "George Bernanos said that the most corrupting lies are problems falsely stated, and such has been true in regard to the immigration question." Williamson elucidates several ideological pillars of the immigrationist position:
America is the exceptional nation and therefore immune to the historical laws, demographic and otherwise, that have limited and constrained every nation in history. For immigrationists, the historical fact that other nations have been destroyed by immigration amounting actually to invasion (which is what we are experiencing) gives us no good reason to suppose that America, too, is susceptible to similar destructive forces. The perennial slogan of the dedicated immigrationist is “Immigration Now, Immigration Forever!” Because immigration did not destroy the country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it won’t now and in the future. This is not rational thinking, or critical thinking, or historical thinking; it is ideological thinking—or no thinking at all.
Exclusion on nearly any ground is unfair, unequal, and discriminatory in the case of individuals, as well as groups. In the context of immigration, the liberal argument from rights and fairness emphasizes the ideological concern for individual immigrants, while overlooking the communitarian interest of the native population...
America is “the permanently unfinished country,” as Nathan Glazer once said...
And Richard Lamm, a former governor of Colorado, argued thirty years ago that “immigration reform is not the death of the American Dream. . . . It is the necessary precondition for the preservation of the dream.”
America is not a nation in the sense that all other nations are and have been nations, but a “proposition country,” having no history and no identity apart from certain eighteenth-century political notions embodied in its Constitution and common law...
The quickest and surest way to destroy the American nation is to treat it as something other than the historical nation it really is...
Whoever claims to act from “conscience” in supporting immigration proves his moral bona fides. But “conscience” is best thought of as a phrase fragment. There are bad consciences as well as good ones, and societies, like individuals, are bound in duty to distinguish between them...
Immigration promotes multiculturalism and diversity, and “diversity is our strength.”...
One need only recall John Lukacs’s wisdom in pointing out that people use “multicultural” when what they really mean is “multicivilizational,” and that the multicivilizational nation is a contradiction in terms...
Christian doctrine requires acquiescence in mass immigration. “You shall welcome the stranger as your own.” ...
America (like the other countries of the West) needs sustained and permanent immigration on a mass scale to maintain its economic standing and progress. The economic argument on behalf of immigration has, indeed, always been the principal one made. It is also the most compelling—though not compelling enough when weighed against the many strong arguments that have been made from the standpoint of the many other considerations involved...
Williamson observes that:
The late Julian Simon, who believed in the benefits of virtually unlimited immigration to America (and elsewhere), conceded in his book The Ultimate Resource, “I don’t claim that [immigration] is necessary; we can live quite nicely without it.”
That pretty much summarizes the answer to the fundamental question on immigration if we were to ask it. The solution is obvious.