It appears that the media’s recent focus on immigration issues is moving public opinion a bit.
Seventeen percent of people in the United States say immigration is the nation’s top problem, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday.
That’s up from 5 percent in June, and is the highest number Gallup has registered for immigration since 2006, when 15 percent said it was the nation’s most pressing problem.
Gallup’s new survey found immigration is virtually tied with “dissatisfaction with government” as the nation’s top problem.
It’s moved my opinion a bit, too. Ordinarily, I simply do not care about immigration issues. I’m welcoming to virtually anyone who wants to come to America to work, and I don’t mind very much if people circumvent our ridiculous immigration policies to get here. Insofar as I care about immigration issues at all, I wish that we were willing to admit that we need unskilled laborers to do some of our agricultural work and had provisions to accommodate them without treating them as lawbreakers.
But the latest development of unaccompanied minors flooding our borders concerns me from a humanitarian point of view. I don’t think we can adopt a policy of open borders and I do think we need to find a way to disincentivize parents from sending their kids here both because the kids aren’t safe during their voyage and because we can’t deal with them in a rational and humane way.
Of course, it’s hard to get Congress to do anything in a sensible way, so that compounds the problem from a pragmatic and a political point of view. What I think ought to be done is that the State Department should engage with Central American governments to create an information campaign that discourages people from sending their kids to the border. Along with that, some funds should be set aside to help those governments improve their law enforcement. I don’t know if this will work very well but it will at least send a message that we recognize that there are problems with public safety that are causing people to flee. There are probably some issues that are specific to individual countries and governments that need to be addressed, too, but that is beyond my scope here.
If we determine that conditions are so bad in some countries that people should be granted refugee status, then we need to make provisions for that. Doing it on a case by case basis is too inefficient. But, even if we do determine that there are legitimate refugees, we ought to have a plan for changing that circumstance, most likely though foreign aid rather than covert action.
