America's Immigration Challenge

...However one assesses that chain and its consequences, it seems clear that the large majority of legal immigrants choose to come—or, more exactly, are chosen by their relatives—for their own reasons. They are not selected by the United States to advance some national interest... That explains why, for example, Christian Syrians make up only about 3 percent of the refugees admitted to the United States, despite accounting for 10 percent of the country’s population: Fearing violence from Sunni Muslims, they apparently hesitate to enter UN camps in the first place.

Since 1991, the United States has accepted more than 100,000 Somali refugees. Britain accepted 100,000 as well. Some 50,000 Somali refugees were resettled in Canada; some 40,000 in Sweden; smaller communities were settled in the United Kingdom, Norway, and Denmark.

How’s that going?

• Minnesota is home to America’s largest Somali community, 33,000 people. The unemployment rate for Somali Minnesotans in 2015 was triple the state average, 21 percent. As of 2014, about 5,950 of the state’s Somali population received cash assistance; 17,000 receive food assistance as of 2014.
• A close study of Somali refugees by the government of Maine (home to the nation’s second-largest Somali community) found that fewer than half of the working-age population had worked at any time in the five years from 2001 through 2006.
• The U.S. unemployment rate of 20+ percent still represents a huge improvement over rates in Europe. Only about 40 percent of working-age Somali men in Norway are employed. In the Swedish city of Malmo, home to one of the largest Somali communities in Europe, only 20 percent work...
• Struggling with the transition from semi-nomadic-herder society to postindustrial urban life, young Somalis in the West are tempted by criminal activity. Danish Somalis are 10 times more likely to be committed of a serious offense than native-born Danes...

The distinction between migration and asylum-seeking is grounded less in differences of motive, and more in an artifact of international law. Shamed by the exclusion of German and Austrian Jews in the 1930s, the post-World War II democracies signed treaties and conventions that conferred rights of asylum on persecuted people. If a person who wishes to resettle in one country can gain recognition as an asylum-seeker, he cannot easily be removed. Virtually all of the 51,000 Central Americans who jumped the border in 2014 still remain in the United States. The tens of thousands of Mediterranean crossers who falsely claimed to be refugees when they disembarked in Italy likewise mostly remain in Europe...

... immigrants to the United States are dividing into two streams. One arrives educated and assimilates “up”; the other, larger stream, arrives poorly educated and unskilled and assimilates “down.”...

How did this happen? Almost perfectly unintentionally, suggests Margaret Sands Orchowski in her new history, The Law That Changed the Face of America. The Immigration Act of 1965 did two things, one well understood, one not: It abolished national quotas that effectively disfavored non-European immigration—and it established family reunification as the supreme consideration of U.S. immigration law. That second element has surprisingly proven even more important than the first. A migrant could arrive illegally, regularize his status somewhere along the way—for example, by the immigration amnesty of 1986—and then call his family from home into the United States after him. The 1965 act widened the flow of post-1970 low-skilled illegal immigration into a secondary and tertiary surge of further rounds of low-skilled immigration that continues to this day...

Until this very year, Trump’s few sparse comments on immigration fell neatly within the elite consensus...

What seems to have changed Trump’s mind is a book: Adios America by Ann Coulter. The phrase “political book of the year” is a usually an empty compliment, but if the phrase ever described any book, Adios America is it...

Everywhere in the Western world there is a fast-growing constituency for new kinds of immigration and refugee policies. If anything is shameful, it is the shabby, thoughtless, and arrogant elite consensus that has to date denied that constituency a responsible political leadership...