In the past month, several thousand Central American immigrants, mostly from Honduras, have been walking across Mexico toward the United States, hoping to gain entry here.  The question is whether we should grant them asylum as refugees fleeing poverty and violence in their home country or prevent them from entering our country.

The ideal solution would be to process each migrant individually as they cross the border, evaluating their personal claim to refugee status. However, given the sheer size of the caravan, with some earlier estimates as high as 14,000, it would seem impossible for U.S. border agents to handle that number of people in any systematic fashion. Thus, the choice is likely to boil down to either allowing them in en masse illegally or using force to block their movement onto U.S. territory.   

However politically incorrect and heartless it may seem, the second option unfortunately would appear the better one. After all, we already have a serious “illegal alien”problem. The usual figure one sees is approximately 11 million illegals, and a recent Yale University study suggested it might well be twice that number. Adding thousands more in one large assemblage, which would encourage similar caravans in the future, would only aggravate the problem. 

Of course, not all Americans consider illegal immigration a problem. Many on the left essentially support an “open door”policy, viewing entry into the United States as a social justice issue. 

For example, the liberal mainstream media have largely been sympathetic to the Central American caravan, presenting images of struggling women and children attempting to survive their hard journey, without addressing the potential implications of waves of foreigners overwhelming Border Patrol officers, crashing through barriers and circulating throughout the countryside.

Indeed, when I tell my liberal friends that I still use the phrase “illegal alien” (as opposed to “undocumented person”) in my international law class to refer to someone who is a foreigner and has unlawfully entered the country, I have often been admonished that it is akin to using the N-word, despite the fact the term has been routinely used in jurisprudence for more than  100 years not as a slur but as a factual descriptor. 

Donald Trump is accused of ignoring facts. Yet the left ignores the following:

• The existence of more than 10 million illegal aliens in the United States makes a mockery of the rule of law upon which constitutional democracy depends. How is the existence of some 500 sanctuary cities in the United States that shield illegal aliens from deportation compatible with the U.S. Constitution’s giving control over immigration to the federal government? How is this fair to those immigrants who waited in line legally to get into the United States or who are still waiting patiently for their turn?  According to the Council on Foreign Relations, “in late 2017, there were more than 4 million applicants on the State Department’s waiting list for immigration visas.”

• There are more than 7 billion people on the planet, a majority of whom live in nondemocratic countries with varying degrees of oppression and human rights atrocities. Fifty countries are defined by the United Nations as “least developed,” with millions of their citizens lacking access to drinkable water, adequate food nutrition and basic living standards. (Honduras is not even one of these.)   Is there not a limit to how many of these folks we can absorb into our society and welfare system, courtesy of the American taxpayer? Asylum traditionally has been given to those fleeing the worst sort of political crimes and persecution, relating to genocide or other group discrimination, not generalized poverty.

• Almost half of the people living in the United States illegally are overstaying their visa. Although the number of people  apprehended at the southwestern border has been declining over time, they still amount to more than 300,000 annually and have started to surge in the past year. The New York Times (Oct. 23) reports that “the Border Patrol apprehended 16,658 people in family units in September – a record figure. … The total number of families that entered the country in the 2018 fiscal year exceeded 100,000 for the first time in recent history.”

• The Center for Immigration Studies reports that over the past 20 years, almost 40 percent of all apprehended aliens who were released and were free pending trial failed to show up for their hearings. Although there is reason to believe that relatively few illegals are members of M-13 or other such gangs or are terrorists, the fact is that we just do not know for sure who many of these individuals are. What we can be assured of is that while many may well become potentially productive members of society, a large number will lack job skills and language proficiency and will become a burden on our schools and health care systems.

• A Forbes article (10/5/16) notes that “roughly one out of every 12 newborns in the United States can be classified as a so-called ‘anchor baby’ [born to illegals, who can then become a source of  so-called chain migration in sponsoring relatives for green cards and ultimately citizenship]. Pew research shows that some 295,000 children were born to undocumented immigrants in 2013. … Who is paying for the costs involved?” 

None of this is to deny the benefits that immigration has contributed to our country. One study (Scheve and Slaughter, “How To Save Globalization,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2018) says, for example, that “immigrants, only 13 percent of all U.S. residents today, made up 39 percent of the U.S.-resident Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, medicine and physics over the past 20 years … [and along with their children] had founded 43 percent of Fortune 500 companies.” 

The problem here is not unfounded xenophobia and fear of foreigners, but legitimate concern about illegal immigration.

What is obviously needed is comprehensive immigration reform that is both generous and welcoming to immigrants and recognizes the contribution they have made to America, yet also sets sensible and realistic parameters given the fact no country can afford boundless compassion for noncitizens.  

We should: 

• Continue to admit roughly a million legal immigrants a year, but in the national interest privilege high-skill workers more than the low-skilled;

• Develop a guest-worker program that provides temporary residence in the United States and humanely treats low-skilled workers in agriculture and other fields where there are labor shortages;

• Strengthen enforcement of laws against employers who hire illegals;

• Improve the bureaucratic capacity to monitor overstayed visas as well as process asylum seekers;

• Expand the size of the border patrol and construct added barriers where necessary and possible; 

• Follow the lead of Britain and other countries that have tightened requirements for foreigners claiming citizenship based on the jus soli (law of the soil, or birthright citizenship) principle, so as to address the abuses of anchor babies along with so-called “birth tourism”

• And provide a clear but lengthy path to citizenship for undocumented people who have been in the country for at least 10 years, have no criminal record and are willing to pay a fine. 

We should also review our foreign aid programs to countries such as Honduras to ensure the money is being well spent and is not supporting corrupt governments whose treatment of their people is likely to produce caravans heading North.