It is characteristic of rationalism, I think, that the most earnest and carefully crafted rationales are prepared in service of hot-blooded prejudice.
So it is with current discussions--on-line and elsewhere--of immigration and immigrants.
Two examples on the flip.
The first rationale is this one:
Immigration, by increasing the supply of labor, in turn drives down its price.
Now, this sort of "common sense" is all too common. When challenged, it holds up poorly. Far from a general, universal law, price elasticity of demand influences prices only marginally, and has diminished effect when prices are pushed down near the cost of production. After decades of wage declines, and with working class people suffering and in debt, it hardly makes sense to blame immigration for continued low wages.
Even if one were a true believer in price theory, it would make more sense to pin the blame for low wages on increased productivity, which has had much more effect in diminishing the demand for low-skilled labor than immigration could possibly have on the supply side. A more subtle and realistic view is that the diminished political and organizational might of labor unions is the primary cause of low wages.
Here's the second example of a rationale based in hot-blooded prejudice: Illegal immigrants are breaking the law of the land, and lawbreaking is not to be rewarded.
This is also "common sense," and it is also thin and weak. The historical record is full of bad laws with respect to the rights of persons, laws which have demanded not only noncompliance, but open defiance. The Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision comes to mind.
Everyone knows immigration law is a mess; that it is selectively enforced and imposes a senseless bureaucracy; that it forces illegality on people doing no harm. If your friend or ally cannot get straight with the INS, that is a symptom of incompetent and oppressive government. Only when immigration law is applied to strangers does it take on a sense of absolute virtue.
When argued, these two rationalizations simply illustrate underlying prejudicial sentiments.
But what's more, they reveal a fundamental misapprehension of what democracy is all about.
Anti-immigrant sentiment stems, in part, from a view of democracy as comprising a sum of individual rights and entitlements. Government, in this view, exists to arbitrate the rights and entitlements to be afforded among individuals and groups. Democracy becomes, in essence, only a form of government by which such decisions are made.
John Dewey, in his essay The Ethics of Democracy (1888) offers a different view.
Democracy, Dewey argues, represents the spirit and will of society as a whole, of a whole organism. In so far as society has a common purpose and spirit, to that extent each individual is not representative of a certain proportionate share of the total will, but "is its vital embodiment."
What is that whole organism? And what is its purpose and spirit?
No one can deny the American organism includes, as an essential part, undocumented immigrants who-- regardless of individual status--share America's streets and houses and workplaces. They are as much a part of our society as any other part. We are bound not only by a common border, but by a common history and economy.
As to purpose and spirit: I believe that is fundamentally a matter of being true to what is--to respect fact and reality. As Dewey put it:
A national consciousness which does not give itself to outward reality, which does not objectify itself, is like any other consciousness in similar plight--simply non-existent.
This is a fundamental characteristic of the anti-immigrant crowd. They know the borders cannot be closed. They know that 12 million fathers and mothers and children cannot be deported. They know that in any American city, on any day of the week, the undocumented live as part of our nation, indivisible.
But rather than respect that fact and reality, the immigrant-bashers choose instead to craft misleading rationales based on abstract economic theory and legalisms.
The argument I have with the immigrant-bashers--including those who hide behind legalistic distinctions and phony economics--is not just because I revile their passionately racist sentiments.
I also object to their dismissal of the reality of democracy itself--their denial of the social organism and the spirit of e pluribis unum.