Between her feuding with Ron DeSantis and the despotic pomposities about online noms de plume that she recently broadcast, Nikki Haley made some worthwhile comments on immigration during her campaign stop this month in Londonderry — in New Hampshire, that is, where one expects the matter of cross-border movement to be less charged than it once would’ve been in Northern Ireland, and where she did the refreshing and the unthinkable by choosing not to “read” the room as those who think of politics as a pageant insist one should.
“The debate is on the number,” Haley told an unmoved audience, and that’s “the wrong way to look at it.” Instead, “we need to do it based on merit: We need to go to our industries and say, ‘What do you need that you don’t have?’” In particular: “Think agriculture, think tourism, think tech — we want the talent that’s going to make us better.”
All right, some numbers matter. If, as Oxford economist Paul Collier hypothesizes, the rate at which diasporas grow is higher than the rate at which assimilated migrants exit them, national culture could dissolve in auto-segregated “parallel societies,” a term whose currency since it was coined in the Nineties (not at Oxford but at Bielefeld, Germany) has dramatically risen. And in the past year we’ve seen starkly 2.4 million reasons for national embarrassment under the harsh southwestern sun, a total from which a large number of deportations can and must be calculated. But Haley’s right in that there’s nothing mathematically precise or deliberate about, say, the 140,000 employment-based permanent residencies or 85,000 temporary specialized-worker visas allotted each fiscal year. Unrevised for a generation or more, the only thing these numbers tell is that the U.S. immigration system is directionless.
Assuming there is some optimum, nonzero number of immigrants the United States should be accepting is a fine place to begin. (Political communities are organic things, and insular societies, cut off from the global ecosphere, are always withered or withering.) But to fix any criteria by which immigrants might be chosen requires that U.S. immigration policy have an explicit purpose. Control of the country’s territorial and maritime borders is imperative but not enough; merely reacting habitually to a reliable caravan of crises won’t do. We wouldn’t even joke about doing away with, for instance, our foreign-policy objectives and improvising instead whenever an eruption of events abroad forced us to. Why continue to tolerate a purposeless immigration regime?
Haley is acquainted with the long shadow of national insecurity in the south and prepared to banish it. But she also appears resistant to the common hallucination that, because the border demands attention, we must let go of all other levers of statecraft. (Haley’s desire to orient the immigration system towards “merit” and buttress American industry is not too dissimilar from one expressed by Donald Trump during his 2015–16 campaign, later forgotten by much of the Right and never quite taken seriously by the Left.) Threats don’t take turns, and global economic competition, in which immigration is an underused tactic, is a game played for keeps.
The government’s trying to get any number “right” is futile; central planners have a centuried history of failure in the planning department. But if Congress is to make immigration policy, as it is solely within its authority to do, and since all knowledge (like all consequence) is local, the input of states and towns and businesses can narrow the inexactness of the government’s output. Nikki Haley is right: Keep an eye stateside and on the future, even as you reassume a grip on the perimeter in the present.
Nikki Haley Is Right on Immigration
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18.11.2023
Between her feuding with Ron DeSantis and the despotic pomposities about online noms de plume that she recently broadcast, Nikki Haley made some worthwhile comments on immigration during her campaign stop this month in Londonderry — in New Hampshire, that is, where one expects the matter of cross-border movement to be less charged than it once would’ve been in Northern Ireland, and where she did the refreshing and the unthinkable by choosing not to “read” the room as those who think of politics as a pageant insist one should.
“The debate is on the number,” Haley told an unmoved audience, and that’s “the wrong way to look at it.” Instead, “we need to do it based on merit: We need to go to our industries and say, ‘What do you need that you don’t have?’” In particular: “Think agriculture, think tourism, think tech — we want the talent that’s going to make us better.”
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