Nearly everyone acknowledges that immigration everywhere is a mess and no one wants to resolve it. Problems are not confined to the United States. Partly, that is because too much ideology is intertwined with immigration issues. They are thorny issues that ideology does not help in solving. Particularly when ideologues like Steve Miller in the US, get involved things just get worse.
One person who does understood the issues and is not an ideologue, is CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who is himself a proud immigrant to the United States. He looks at immigration with empathy and without ideological blinders, ignoring ideologues on both the left and right.
First of all, Zakaria acknowledges, unlike some liberals, that there is a problem at the American border. As he said in 2023,
“It is no longer just a partisan talking point, or a hyperbolic claim on Fox News. The country has been facing a surge of migration the likes of which has never been seen. A Record 2.4 million migrants were apprehended at the border last fiscal year [2022]. That shattered the record made the previous year, and nearly equaled the population of Chicago. Hundreds have been arriving each day at some border cities. Sometimes tens of thousands of migrants in a single month. Homeless shelters have been overwhelmed. Families have been sleeping on the streets. These borders are no strangers to big migrations, but they have never gone through anything like this. Numbers went down in recent weeks after new restrictive measures were introduced, but the numbers still very uncertain.”
It is not enough to say, as some liberals do, that we are a nation of immigrants. It is not enough to say, as Donald Trump said, “our country is full.” Particularly when a country is not full and actually needs immigrants for its economy and to fill jobs that are unfilled to the dismay of employers, statements like Trump’s must be based on ideology, not facts. At the same time when Biden seemed to invite the entire world to America that was also a huge mistake.
Immigration is a wicked problem, and not just in the US or Canada. Immigration is a problem around the world. But it requires critical thinking to tackle it, not just blind ideology.
As Fareed Zakaria asked,
“Why is this happening now? It is a unique moment in the history of the hemisphere. The pandemic and climate change with its brutal storms, droughts, and disease led to economic meltdowns, political unrest, and a perfect storm of migration. Cuban migration to the United States rose nearly 500% in a single year. Columbian migration rose over 1,100%! Over 7 million people have fled Venezuela to the US and other countries. That is close to the exodus from war torn Ukraine.”
As Rachel Self, immigration attorney, said, “It’s a perfect storm in a system that is ultimately breaking. These are all people who had families, had lives, had jobs, and then their countries fell apart and then they take the journey and the journey itself is a life or death experience. As David Frum, a thinking person’s conservative, pointed out, “more people than ever before moving to more places in the history of the world. And that creates wicked problems everywhere.