Ross Douthat Channels Kaus’s Theory of the Inbound Rush for the Border

By Steve Sailer

06/23/2014

Immigration Reform’s Open Invitation to Children JUNE 21, 2014

FOR years now, one side of the immigration debate — the side of billionaires, professional bipartisans, and all the great and good — has argued that an amnesty of some kind for illegal immigrants isn’t just a sensible policy choice but a crushingly obvious one: self-evidently wise, morally farseeing and a win for almost everyone, from corporations to labor unions to Republican politicians to the immigrants themselves.

Nested inside that debate has been a smaller one, over the Dream Act, a measure opening a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who arrived as minors. If comprehensive reform has been cast as a no-brainer, the Dream Act has been portrayed as a test of basic moral fitness: To oppose welcoming these young men and women is to oppose all that’s decent, humanitarian and just.

Now we’re getting a lesson in why reality is never quite so black and white. Over the last two years, a crisis has developed on our Southern border: a children’s migration of increasing scale, in which thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America have made the dangerous journey to the U.S.-Mexico border, many apparently motivated by the belief that some sort of legal status awaits them.

… The young migrants are not, obviously, deeply familiar with the ins and outs of U.S. politics; they’re following smuggler-spread rumors, for the most part. But the rumors exist for a reason: They’re fueled by a sense that “if you want to get into the U.S., now is the time,” a scholar of Latin America told The Washington Post. And the Obama White House has conceded that a “misperception of U.S. immigration policy” is playing a role — one significant enough to dispatch Vice President Joe Biden to Central America to clarify that we are not actually opening our borders to any minor who reaches them..

Yes, the young migrants are not simply deceived. …

And if they do, they will have a good chance of eventually receiving the amnesty that smugglers have promised them. If an immigration reform eventually passes under a President Hillary Clinton, today’s young border-crossers will no longer be new arrivals: They’ll have been here for several years, they’ll be sympathetic figures embedded in communities, and there will be strong, understandable pressure to allow them onto any path to citizenship.

And even if they aren’t deemed eligible — well, they can look at America’s political landscape and reasonably assume that if they remain in the shadows, eventually another push to regularize their status will come along.

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