Let’s face it; the country is deeply divided on the issue of immigration. The right wants to curb immigration, both legal and illegal, whereas the left wants open borders. Conservatives, who make up the bulk of taxpayers, are deeply concerned about the increasing cost of welfare due to immigration, whereas progressives claim that not only is immigration good for the country, it is also the only morally right thing to do.
The latest from the front is the leftist freelance journalist Jennifer Mendelsohn who is doing “resistance genealogy.” She finds vocal voices against chain immigration and looks at their ancestry and finds some obscure person in the past who was a chain migrant who couldn’t speak English. The message is clear: conservatives who advocate restrictions on immigration are hypocritical.
Mendelsohn has learned the lesson from Hillary-mentor Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals. One of the rules is to use people’s own principles against them. This works on conservatives because they have moral standards. Of course, she conveniently leaves out the fact that the ancestors they dig up from the past didn’t migrate to a welfare state and paid entirely for their stay.
Proving Virtue
But there is a simple way that the left can prove how morally virtuous they are and at the same time achieve a wonderful compromise between the right and the left. The chief battlefront is economic: the right complains that third world immigration is a drag on taxpayers, whereas the left claims it is a boon for the economy. The solution is to let the left put their money where their mouth is with an immigration sponsorship program.
It works like this: the government can create a new third world immigration work visa in which leftists – or anyone else for that matter – can voluntarily sign up as co-sponsors. They then pledge that the will pay for any net public funding costs of their adoptee in full and that they are partly liable for any crime or civil damages that the immigrants impose.
If it is true, as the left says, that the immigrants are a net economic benefit and that they are all just wonderful people, they would agree to this compromise in a heartbeat. In this way, leftists could get the open borders they so desire and at the same time prove how morally virtuous they are.
Open Choice
Of course, the right should demand that the path to citizenship will be long and arduous for immigrants arriving on such a visa because the threat of importing leftist voters is still the greatest long-term threat to national security and American exceptionalism.
If the left is truly honest and virtuous this compromise could make the entire immigration debate end in a peaceful compromise. If, however, leftists are just pro-immigration if they can get conservatives to shoulder the bill, then their outright rejection of this compromise made in good faith would expose them as hypocrites and would strip them of any moral high ground. In both cases, this would be a major win for the right. It’s not that conservatives are against immigrants. They are against immigrants that don’t pay for themselves.