You think America has an immigration problem? Spend some time in Europe. Visit the “dish cities” that ring French, Belgian, Dutch and Swedish towns, named for the satellite dishes that connect their inhabitants to ancestral countries. Meet the unassimilated, marginalized, bitter youngsters penned into tower-blocks.
French politicians euphemize immigration as “le problème des banlieues”, the suburb problem. Well, I’d gladly swap our problèmes for yours; our banlieues, too, come to that. The United States has been stunningly successful at making newcomers want to belong. “Every immigrant makes America more American,” said Ronald Reagan, in a characteristically upbeat phrase. And if you’re going to take immigrants from somewhere, you could do a lot worse than Latin America.
I know some of you will disagree. But every generation of Americans has taken the same line, namely that past immigration was fine and dandy, but future immigration will be disastrous. The notional reason has altered over time. First it was that settlers were no longer English-speaking, then that they were no longer Protestant, then that they were no longer European. But the underlying argument never changed: “This time it’s different!”
Well, this time it is different, but only in one sense. It’s not that illegal immigration is new. It’s not that linguistic ghettos are new: Precisely the same concerns used to be voiced about kids growing up speaking Polish or Yiddish or Italian. It’s not even that amnesties are new.
No, what is unprecedented is the manner in which this amnesty has been granted, the cavalier sweeping aside of the legislature. Immigration is not some technical side issue; it’s integral to what a nation is and does. Citizenship is the key attribute that connects people to governments. If it can be dished out by executive decree, there is no meaningful balance of power. If a president can enact a change of this magnitude without the legal sanction of Congress, what can’t he do?
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote in this space about Magna Carta, whose 800th anniversary we celebrate in June. One of the grievances laid against King John was that he had admitted foreigners without the consent of his countrymen: southern Frenchmen from the lands he had inherited from his mother. Magna Carta was designed precisely to stop such things happening. It established the principle that the law stood above the king, and that someone other than the king got to determine what the law was.
Americans used to revere that precept. The Founders took up arms in its defense. The Republic was designed to secure it. As President Obama said last year, when explaining why he wouldn’t do what he has just done: “I’m not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute laws that are passed, and Congress has not changed what I consider to be a broken immigration system.”
No doubt he does consider it broken. I’m sure that he’s acting in what he sincerely believes to be the national interest. That’s what makes him so dangerous. A president who believes that he has a monopoly on principle, that his opponents are either shysters or idiots, is a frightening prospect. Acting from the best of intentions, he will distend the constitution in ways that a worldlier president — an LBJ or a Nixon or a Clinton — wouldn’t dream of.
As C.S. Lewis put it, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”
Omnipotent, at any rate, in Washington. President Obama doesn’t feel the need to get tough with, say, Vladimir Putin or Bashir Assad — or even with the looters in Ferguson, whose violence he keeps trying to contextualize. But when it comes to congressional Republicans, he’s determined to show ’em who’s boss.
The president is right about one thing: The current immigration system is broken. It needs reform, and not all his ideas are bad. There may even be a place, as part of an overall package, for an element of contingent amnesty. But any such amnesty should be the product of debate, deliberation and consensus. It must command a broad measure of support.
When people see their leaders bestrewing nationality without due process, a nationality that everyone else had to queue up for patiently, they lose faith in the system. Believe me: I’ve watched the same thing happen all over Europe as well as in my own country. It hasn’t just hardened attitudes against immigration; it has turned people off the entire political process.
America, more than any other country, is the realization of an ideal. That ideal was well expressed by John Adams: “A government of laws, not of men”. Give up on that ideal, and you cease to be, in any meaningful sense, Americans.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
