Do nothing...
In a brief column for NRO, Seth Leibsohn advocates border security and continuation of the status quo as the practical immigration compromise:
Do nothing with the 12-20 million illegals here now. That’s right, no Z-Visa, no mass deportation, no path to citizenship, no rounding up — nothing.Seth invokes the founders' approach to slavery (as characterized by Lincoln):As Andy [McCarthy] wrote, we’ve lived with the illegal population for quite some time now. Whence comes the exigency to do something now?
What we can and should do is encourage their attrition.
Let’s put illegal immigration on the course of ultimate extinction by tolerating no more furtherance, or rewarding, of it — but without taking any drastic measures either.Lincoln asserted that the founders' approach to slavery had been betrayed by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise under the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Dred Scott decision in 1857. How did the founders' themselves think about immigration? In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison remarked that "he wished to maintain the character of liberality which had been professed in all the Constitutions & publications of America. He wished to invite foreigners of merit & republican principles among us." Our current debate about immigration, writes Ed Erler in The Founders on Citizenship & Immigration, "is vitiated by the fact that our policymakers no longer believe that there are regime principles or that questions of merit and character have anything to do with immigration." Professor Erler and his co-authors Thomas West and John Marini seek to recover the thought of the founders on the question of immigration law and policy. Their book fills a striking vacuum in the current debate.
To comment on this post, go here.
