From First Things
For much of my life, I believed in open borders. Aside from violent criminals, I could think of no person who had entered this country illegally or overstayed a visa who deserved to be sent away. But in fact, I had thought little about the matter. I simply meant well, and I knew that all well-meaning people believed in welcoming migrants. Only the uncouth disagreed.
In the summers during college, I worked construction—wiring hog houses, running pipe, digging trench. When another man on the crew complained about “illegals” taking American jobs, I knew that he was a bigot. I tried not to judge him for it, just as I did not judge him for dipping tobacco. But I instinctively felt that these things (like my nonjudgmental stance itself) separated me from him. When my cousin, the only non-Guatemalan on his landscaping crew, began picking up Spanish, I was heartened: His experience was being enriched.
At the end of each summer I returned to college, where everyone agreed with me. We stood on one side of a great divide in public opinion, a divide that pits elites against workers, those who benefit from immigration against those who do not. George Borjas, professor of economics at Harvard, has argued that increased immigration has immediate financial benefits for elites but provides little or no benefit to the working class. But the divide is cultural as much as economic: In both Europe and America, one side prizes national identity and citizenship; the other, mobility and openness.
A 2016 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 67 percent of Republicans think the arrival of large numbers of immigrants and refugees is a critical threat to the U.S. Only 16 percent of Republican leaders think so. A similar, but smaller, divide exists on the Democratic side, where only 4 percent of Democratic leaders view current immigration levels as a critical threat, compared to 27 percent of their public. Nor is the divide limited to any one race. In 2018, the Pew Research Center found that “Latinos with lower levels of education are more likely than those with at least some college education to say too many immigrants are living in the country today.”
Continue reading here.