Editors at National Review Online respond to President Trump’s latest comments about immigration.
President Trump has lit up Truth Social in the wake of the National Guard shooting in Washington, D.C., promising to cut off immigration from third world countries and extolling “REVERSE MIGRATION.”
Trump’s reaction is typically over the top, but a recalibration of U.S. legal immigration policy is badly overdue.
For too long, the default Republican position on immigration has been that illegal immigration is bad and legal immigration is good. The former proposition is solid, but the latter depends on what sort of legal immigration we are talking about — specifically, the numbers and the criteria involved. And it obviously matters who the immigrants are.
In general, our policy has not been choosy enough and has operated on the assumption that the higher the number, the better — and that we have no right to prefer some immigrants to others. Our approach has tilted too far toward the interests of the immigrants — for whom entry into the United States is usually a boon — rather than a cold-eyed calculation of our national interest. At times, it has also privileged the interests of employers without asking whether those are the same as the interests of the nation.
There should always be some humanitarian element to our system, and the impulse, as a matter of honor, to get our Afghan allies out of the country as the Taliban swept to power was a correct one. We must realize, though, that refugees — who have immediate access to U.S. welfare programs and generally low levels of education attainment — are very expensive. They also typically have trouble assimilating into the radically different culture of the United States, in which dependence can easily curdle into resentment. Even if Rahmanullah Lakanwal didn’t commit his act of infamy, it was going to be a rough road for him and his family after getting plucked from Kandahar and dropped into Bellingham, Wash., near the Canadian border.
