Empathy, But Also Realism, are Necessary in Facing Immigration

I am an immigrant — a legal one. Over a period of 16 years, I’ve gone through a succession of work visas, acquired a green card, married an American citizen (herself an immigrant), passed the citizenship test, and in just 17 days will take the naturalization oath, accompanied by my wife and our two American-born sons.

Since 2002, I and members of my family have entered the United States umpteen times. At times, those crossings have been fraught. Once, before she got her green card, my British-born daughter was held up by immigration officers who doubted her story that she was visiting her father. Those were agonizing hours.

So I can well understand the great wave of moral outrage that swept the United States and world last week at the separation of asylum-seeking parents from their children at the US-Mexican border.

I can sympathize, too, with the parents, most of whom are from poor and violent Central American countries. My wife was once an asylum seeker from a poor and violent country. Her main motive for leaving Somalia for the Netherlands was to avoid an arranged marriage to a man she scarcely knew. Knowing that this was not a sufficient reason to be granted asylum, she emphasized the civil war in her country. In the same way, whatever their true motivations, today’s asylum-seekers from Honduras and Guatemala know to talk about the violence they are fleeing. This has become easier since 2009, when a court ruled that victims of domestic violence were entitled to asylum.

To those of you contentedly living in the country where you were born, I address a plea for empathy and also realism. A world without cross-border migration would be a poorer world in multiple ways. The question is not whether to stop migration but how to manage it. But from those of you who regard any regulation of immigration as somehow unjust — who want illegal immigrants to be treated the same as those who follow the rules — I plead for rationality. Wholly open borders are not a sane option for any country. And comparing today’s US government with the Nazis — who systematically persecuted native-born German Jews by depriving them of their citizenship, then their rights, then their property, and finally their lives — is preposterous.