The Mother of Exiles

Clear Eyed Immigration Talk From Someone Who Lived It

Early this morning I was up with one of two newsletters I wanted to write. The first has been dear to my heart and baking in there for weeks now as I listened to the US Commerce Secretary talk about how we will soon all be lucky to have manufacturing jobs we can pass down to our grandchildren and will escape the dystopian 4% unemployment rate the US is experiencing. I could not reject harder the premise that there is something magical or alluring in manufacturing that deserves this administration’s fetishization of it.

Scattered in that essay you’ll find a lot of references to immigration - and this isn’t an accident. If there’s anything as dear to my heart as my belief in the genuineness of the American Dream, it’s that one of the most beautiful parts of America is and always has been what it is on the world stage to immigrants. So I wanted to write about that, too - this is more emotional and less statistical, but I want to dig into something I feel just as sure you can take to the bank: You might have read that piece and thought “I understand manufacturing and its challenges better now”; I hope at the end of this one you’ll feel the same way about immigration. Let’s dive in together.

The Portrait of a Nation

Let’s start with America as a nation. It is conspicuous in the world as a place where there are almost no groups that lay exclusive claim to it: There are no blood and soil nationals here.¹ In Germany there will always be a concern about the population not being sufficiently German, in France or England this will always be a topic of conversation: but in America there is no holy group of near infinite generational “Americans”. Every Fourth of July when I raise my flag, I think about this first and foremost. One of the places I’m emotionally proudest to be an American is that we are a nation of immigrants: tempest tossed out of our old homes and into the bosom of a Mother of Exiles that we collectively have to build an identity for together. Together we are the imprisoned lightning Emma Lazerus writes about, and it’s beautiful to consider.

Yet there’s always a sense in these conversations that because America is a land of opportunity and it is filled with economic promise that if tomorrow we opened our borders and we allowed anyone to join us on a path to citizenship, that we would carry undue risk: That we would reach a Malthusian limit quickly in which we would be flooded with all the people of all the world. “The entire world can’t live in America”, we insist in these situations, as if that were the surest outcome in a world of more accessible immigration. So I want to start this conversation also by putting our minds together in a single space.

I want you to imagine tomorrow that a hypothetical nation called Freelandia exists. In this scenario, Freelandia’s GDP massively outstrips America’s. It’s a land of economic opportunity where you could go and work and take a new job and make more money and live in greater security than you have right now. I want you to ask yourself very seriously in this hypothetical world if you would move. I want you to very seriously think about moving: Empty your house, sell your things, say goodbye to everyone you know, perhaps move to a place you do not speak the dominant language - for economic prospects. You will show up there in a place where the ceiling for success is high, but you have no home, no friends, are not even sure where to buy groceries or how to go about getting approved for a car loan. Would you do this? If, like many people I have asked this to over the years, the answer is no, I can probably guess a great number of reasons:

• You might be very wary to leave your friends and family behind and go somewhere that you know no one.

• You might genuinely love where you live and the country and state you are a part of.

• You might be fairly risk averse and prefer your status quo.

• You might already have a reasonably good life where you are.

I want you to keep these in mind and keep an open mind to the idea that if you opened up the doors to immigration, there’s a good chance you would not end up at a Malthusian trainwreck simply because that is not how humans are wired. The reasons you could come up with to stay where you are usually outweigh the reasons you might leave. You might consider leaving, but actually leaving where you have grown up all your life and putting down roots somewhere completely different takes an extreme strength of character or a very specific and dire set of circumstances.²

I am lucky enough to know several people with this character - through great personal fortune, my wife is one of them. A Canadian woman whose love for me was great enough that she took stock of all the above questions and a thousand more and chose to go somewhere she knew almost no one, to leave a country she loves, to take great personal risk and put her life in someone else’s hands, to leave behind a life that was perfectly serviceable.

She is not alone in this calculus: I have been lucky enough in my life to know a lot of immigrants. In my work I meet many here on Work visas or who came here on them. By pure luck and no design on my part, of my closest friends two of the couples include immigrants from Australia and Estonia.³ I have watched people navigate the legal immigration system countless times, and navigated it myself. I know what it takes to leave everything behind for a person you love, and I know it very often takes great strength of character to be an immigrant.

I also know that our immigration system is designed to torture these people and make it as unattractive as possible.

The Vivisectionist System:

If we’re going to talk the system, I should first express a very clear admission: I do not think the Federal Government is particularly good at managing humanity. I think it is a potentially fantastic tool for organizing the building of roads or the postal service. I think it is very bad at reading the life and necessity of human beings. I think as a practice it often has little choice but to serve this function, but if I were going to design it from the top down, I would (like many Conservatives purport to) attempt to have the federal government touch the sticky matter of who people are and what they are as little as possible.

During an immigration marriage visa, you will be required to do the following:

• Budget about ten thousand dollars for lawyers, processing, and fees

• Set aside a minimum two years of your life in which you will spend much of it apart while the government processes your application at various stages and gives you small windows to progress it - that if you miss will severely set you back

• Require full and legal background checks

• Complete invasive medical history reports

These requirements probably seem necessary, and indeed they likely are: You do not want human trafficking in the form of marriage visas, you want a system that avoids people trying to come to America just to get into hospitals, etc. The price tag on this is prohibitive for what it’s worth: Ten thousand dollars is an extreme amount of money, and that was what it cost me ten years ago.

Here are some other things you will need to agree to do:

• Submit to the federal government full transcripts of all of your text messages with your spouse as proof of the solidity of your relationship

• Submit photos over a prolonged period of a relationship together

• Submit sworn affidavits by dozens of family members and friends attesting at length to the reality of your relationship.

• Supply full legal documentation and access to name changes⁴

This and more is where the system gets sticky. Proving that you love a person to strangers through words on paper is a grisly thing to do. It’s anxiety inducing. I have watched good people lose hair, sleep, and weight trying to navigate this system for decades. It is almost designed to put you under this pressure, too - because the system wants to find the people who would crack and weed them out. I want you to imagine someone designing a system that puts your marriage under intentional pressure to see if it is real. Most marriages do not need outside forces to pressure them into cracking. Somewhere between 30-50% of American marriages end in divorce depending on the polling year, while the percentage is markedly lower (half of that) for immigrant spouses. So maybe the US government puts people through sufficient fire - or maybe it just takes a special kind of relationship to survive what they’re put through. I will let you decide, and try to determine if being separated from your spouse for two years while managing significant financial pressure and having your every act and word to one another monitored is something you would enthusiastically pursue or trust the government to be a skilled technician at managing. ⁵

I have also watched people struggle through the work visa process. It is extremely daunting - chiefly it requires that the person attempting to gain a visa first have a job. This is extremely backwards, even if you can claim to see the logic: It creates the deepest incentives to cheat the system, come here, get a job, and then eventually admit to having committed that crime and risk your new life trying to get the old one legalized. Some administrations, usually Democratic, are very receptive to this. I wonder if you can guess how many undocumented immigrants are seeking legal work visas during the Trump administration.

The Case for Immigrants

I would say that immigrants are a national strength both spiritually and economically. The kind of person who comes to another country, often fleeing war or violence but also often motivated to gain a new life for their family, takes a special sort of character - the kind we outlined above in our first part in this conversation. Not all immigrants are good people, but on average immigrants commit less crime and pay more into the tax system than they take.⁶

This is not some accident of happenstance: it is because the kinds of people who immigrate to a country on behalf of a specific kind of opportunity are themselves a specific kind of person.

Immigrants are also our lifeline in dire economic moments: During the post-COVID boom, why did America grow when other countries shrink, at the same time it gained an “alarming immigration problem”? Because the world wanted to spend money, it wanted to release the bottled economies it had paused during the heavy stimulus survival periods of COVID, but many developed nations had just lost enormous swathes of workforce. America saw a million people die out of its workforce, and even more retire early. In a world where the elderly and older (COVID’s prime targets) usually hold higher paying more skilled positions, there was a wave of mass promotions to counteract the loss in upper level workforce - but you cannot just spawn people. You cannot just create human beings while the market is pulling hard on the chain of growth trying to drag you like a single minded dog toward profits. You have to have workers refill the bottom end of your economy.

Why did America soft-land when others landed harder? It was tied well to its “alarming immigration problem” - while not all of America’s immigration was virtuous during the Biden years, a huge percentage of it gave us the fiscal flexibility to drive our industries forward to growth and success. We became the envy of the post COVID world because we are a nation of immigrants, not because we are a nation of Warren Buffet fiscal geniuses.

This is all just a part of a bigger conversation of course: that immigration is almost intentionally designed to be difficult. The above hurdles are not accidental, they’re intentional products of a system politicians have danced around for ages in the hopes of abating our Malthusian fears of an America so crowded with people that it cannot possibly fit another - despite the fact that this is broadly speaking not true. Our “native” populations are shrinking and if we discount the fairly heavy spectre of racism arguing replacement, we actually need human beings to fill our cities and continue to build in the places where there are none.

There is a sense that the immigration system grew up cruel yesterday - but I want to close on a small and personal horror story. My wife and I had been dating for about four years, when I knew I wanted to ask her to marry me. During that time we had been very careful to make sure that while she came to America and stayed with me, she did not overstay here. On a passport she would stay with me for a good four to five months before returning to Canada and living there with her family for six months. It was difficult being apart, but we made the long distance work - and I was certain I wanted to move on to the next step and I was ready to ask her. I invited her to come to visit me again, I bought a ring, I set up a proposal surprise for her on the date I had picked out, and on a subsequent short trip up to visit her family I asked her father’s permission - I was determined to do things right.

Things do not go right in the American immigration system. Her repeat travels had created a “soft flag” - something our lawyer later told us was entirely discretionary on the part of the border patrol agent: they would be given this “information” and choose to act on it however they saw fit.

Instead of coming to her proposal surprise, she was pulled aside and put into a dark room. Her phone was taken from her and the ICE agents who entered the room told her they had the full legal right to read all her texts and e-mails. They fingerprinted her, took a mugshot, and sent her into an interrogation room despite having committed no crime and having not even left the Toronto Airport. The officer there asked her what she was doing coming to America without a house in her name in her native country. He grilled her and accused her of coming here to rob Americans and leech off her boyfriend⁷. They berated her and picked apart her life to insist to her that she was a villain. They made her cry and then scolded and berated her for crying for hours, associating her tears with clear admissions of guilt. For four hours in a room straight out of a police interrogation room, a Canadian woman who had broken no laws was treated like the worst kind of criminal terrorist and given the full fourth degree before they finally passed judgment: She was not to re-enter the United States until she had stronger ties to Canada.⁸

In the months that followed, we picked up the pieces the government had broken. I flew out to see her, proposed at the airport as soon as I landed, we got married in Canada, we presented our Canadian marriage certificate as Exhibit A to the US Government, and we began a grueling two year crucible in which our modern marriage was forged. We spent two years apart during which time our best connections were when my work permitted me to fly out to her and when we could get together in the evenings to watch Netflix together on webcam calls. I don’t think any pressure we’ll encounter as a couple will put us under more strain than every day wondering if that day would be the day that someone else would tell us we could not live the rest of our lives together - but I cannot see the future.

Here is the thing about the American system you cannot appreciate if you have not navigated it: I know a lot of immigrants very personally, and every single one of them has one of these horror stories. It is a truly cruel creature by design, and it has been long before Donald Trump. Mine happened during the Obama administration. ICE has always been the ICE you see on TV right now. That legal immigration is hard and cruel is not a bug - it’s a feature. Politicians, as Donald Trump is realizing, cannot actually discourage real immigration. They cannot force the kinds of people who want to live here to stop wanting to live here. So they settle for the next best thing on the immigration numbers report: Making legal immigration numbers go down, while claiming they have “Made immigration numbers go down”. The system is a slogging, labyrinthine mess specifically to weed out people coming here legally - so they do what you should expect people do in that scenario: They immigrate illegally instead.

For decades Democrats have insisted that the real solution to the problem of immigration is a sensible path to citizenship. To say that I am a near-single-issue voter on this topic would be an understatement. The team that is willing to say “Immigration is broken not because of how many people we’re letting in but because of how hard we’re making it to get in” is the team that will win my vote on this issue because they are most closely connected with reality.

1. We could talk and should talk more often about the plight of America’s actual Native peoples and how it is we came to possess a piece of land that “no one group owns”, but for the sake of this discussion let’s really zero in on what America is as its post-colonial space - under the sordid horror of how we got here, there is a genuinely beautiful project we need to protect on behalf of all the people who had to suffer to create it.

2. Not for nothing, these circumstances are the kinds of things that programs like USAID, with its extremely small budget relative to the entire US budget, were focused on mitigating. Making people happier to live where they are is the surest method of reducing immigration, but it also requires us to obligate ourselves to others in ways that we struggle to quantify the direct return of.

3. These are not South American refugees or family men from Mexico - they are broadly speaking already empowered in ways those people are not. They know the language, they are both men, they both have income, and they both struggled mightily to come here.

4. I have known several people whose process was delayed by months due to fiascos around name change documentation: despite it being an extremely common thing for a partner to do during marriage, most immigration lawyers now advise you do not touch legal name changes with a twenty foot pole when you get married. My wife still carries her maiden name legally to this day.

5. Fun side story: when I completed our marriage visa, I was shown a folder almost two inches thick that the US government had collected on me. I was twenty five at the time. I cannot imagine what they read - the entire collected works of everything I had said since the time I was eighteen could scarcely have been bigger.

6. “To put their impact in perspective, in 2018, the average per capita fiscal contribution of first-generation immigrants was $16,207. In contrast, the average drain was $11,361, resulting in a net positive fiscal impact of $4,846 per immigrant in 2012 dollars.” That is the Cato institute talking, not a liberal think tank.

7. These were his words - “Leech off your boyfriend” - as if he had any idea who we were or how much we did or did not care about one another.

8. In this case, owning property in her name and holding an “official” job rather than the freelance art she currently makes good money doing.