Column: Border security doesn’t mean separating families or shutting out the world

Immigrants crying on buses and in detention centers, their immigrant parents wondering where their children are and whether they’ll ever find them again. This is what enforcing a zero tolerance immigration policy looks like in the United States. But where does this policy fit into the shape-shifting history of immigration in this country, a history where migration, legal and illegal, has been affected by everything from the labor market to political persecution to natural disasters?

President Trump -- son and grandson and husband of immigrants -- thrills his audience when he rails against immigrants “infesting” the country. But he’s given mixed signals to Congress and his own administration about what he wants; this week, he told members of Congress that the nation’s complex immigration laws should be boiled down to, “I’m sorry, you can’t come in.”

Doris Meissner has a matchless vantage point in all of this. She directs the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute.

And before that, she served presidential administrations from Nixon to Clinton. In the 1980s, she was acting commissioner of what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and she became the official INS commissioner during the Clinton presidency.

Where will all of this upheaval in immigration policy take us? And how can it change the nation’s character and its reputation?

How did a nice country like us wind up in a mess like this?

Migration and immigration dilemmas that we're dealing with as a country have been around for a long time. But now we have a leadership that has come into office putting this at the top of the agenda and basically saying that the country has suffered from lax enforcement in the past, that that needs to change, and that people who are foreign-born and who come to the country illegally are a danger to us now.

It certainly is true that we need border security. It's certainly true that border security is legitimate. But the crisis that's now unfolded with family separation is just an incredibly vivid example of what it means to deal with immigration issues if you're not careful and thoughtful, being abrupt and very dogmatic about the law enforcement that is involved in immigration.

The family separation matter is not a new problem. What's new is how the administration chooses to deal with this.

That's right. The family separation is a function of or a result of a very dramatic change in policy to call for zero tolerance at the border, which means prosecuting everybody who crosses the border between ports of entry illegally.

That may seem very appealing on the face of it, but there are many different circumstances behind the people who are crossing. And so to go to zero tolerance, 100% prosecution for everybody, means that their children then need to be taken away from them.

That’s because we have court rulings and other requirements in place that make it not possible to hold children in detention for the long period of times that are required if you're going to have zero tolerance and full-scale prosecution.

Prior to this executive order [allowing parents and children to be detained together], the administration has said, ‘Well, we're not calling for a policy of separating families.’ Technically that's true.

But they are calling for a policy of 100% prosecution of adults, which immediately and automatically lead to taking the children and therefore separation of families.

Are the demographics of illegal immigration across the southern border different now?

The flows have changed in recent years; that picture of people coming largely from Mexico for economic reasons -- that has changed. There are now more people who return to Mexico from the United States than come in illegally.

Today, and for the last four or five years, the flow has been predominantly people from Central America, predominantly people who are families, sometimes unaccompanied young people on their own.

And that has humanitarian cases as well as economic migration cases. You need to give those people an opportunity to tell you their story. If they want to file a claim for asylum in the United States, they need to be permitted to do so.

And that's what's now really been upended with this change to a zero-tolerance idea. It has really made it exceptionally difficult for those who are coming for humanitarian reasons to actually have their cases be recognized.

Several things can be true at once. For example completely opening our borders would create problems, but completely closing our borders would create problems. What are our impediments to getting this right?

In its own way, the idea that this administration has talked about – trying to stop people coming illegally between the ports of entry, crossing the border where you're not supposed to – and that if people would come to the ports of entry if they had an asylum claim that they wanted to file, that they would be permitted to do so -- that's actually a defensible idea.

The difficulty, of course, is that they did not make preparations for that. The ports of entry are not set up to do that work, in their infrastructure, physical space, assignment of personnel.

If you were trying to get it right with that idea, then you would take some time to actually build up the capability to do so.

We hear so much about guest worker programs. What about creating one that doesn't exploit workers, that offers a path to legalization, that formalizes the revolving door? Or is the nature of immigration now no longer as much about work, as you pointed out, as it is about fleeing violence and economic problems in Central America?

Fleeing violence and the conditions in Central America -- that is certainly the more prominent pattern that we now see at the southwest border. Now, many of those people are also in desperate economic situations.

But the difficulty with simply allowing people to come into the United States to work and then become eligible to stay here – there need to be better answers than that, because there certainly is much more pressure to come to the United States than the kind of numbers and workers that we would need.

And what we really have to look at is a much more updated immigration system overall. We need to re-examine our visa categories. We need to have a better sense of where immigrants fit into the labor force, what our labor force legitimately needs.

As a very wealthy country with neighbors in the region that have much more dire living circumstances, we are going to continue to be a magnet no matter what.

But this is ultimately a regional situation. For many years, it was the one between the United States and Mexico. But the situation in Mexico has changed dramatically. Mexico has been a growing economy. Mexico has begun to be able to offer hope and opportunities for its own population. The fertility rates in Mexico have plunged so that they're basically on a fertility rate that is close to that of the United States.

So there is no longer the same kind of pressure for large-scale illegal migration from Mexico.

What we really need to be about is how to help, and what our role is in changing the conditions that are pushing these people from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to be coming to the United States. That's of course a longer-term agenda.

With Mexico, that shift began with our agreeing to signing on to NAFTA in 1993. That’s now 25 years ago. That may seem like a long period of time when you're starting it out, but it happens.

So I would argue that, in addition to dealing with immediate needs, we need to be quite more engaged in supporting ways for the region to be more prosperous, because that's ultimately very much in our national interest.

It doesn't sound like something this administration would be much interested in pursuing.

And that's one of the reasons that what we're seeing now is so short-sighted. It’s not only creating chaos within the United States, it is precluding opportunities to take a more systematic approach and make the case to the American people why we need to do things differently.

The Trump administration has also said that it would like to cut legal immigration quotas in half. What would be the practical impact of this, as well as the optics of it, for the whole world?

The practical impact of it would be that we would have less growth in our economy. Lots of sectors of the society would be less able to function.

For instance, our colleges and universities are the envy of the world, and part of that is reflected in foreign students who come here to learn, and some, many of them stay and really contribute to the United States. Our high-tech sector is heavily the beneficiary of international talent and of the ability to come to the United States through our immigration laws.

So this idea of cutting immigration in half or more has very wide-ranging implications for the United States and for our own prosperity and well-being.

As far as the world is concerned, we have always been a leader around the world in projecting our values. Our values include openness and diversity and the willingness to listen to different points of view. Those values are heavily projected through immigration and through our immigration system. We would really be losing in a significant way that degree of what's often known as “soft power” – the power of our ideas, the power of our example.

That has already become frayed in this administration just within the year and several months since the inauguration, by one of the first things that the president did, which was to sign the travel ban, and make it very clear that many people were not welcome, particularly Muslims.

A good deal of the damage in the eyes of the world has already been done simply by the aggressive pursuit of that approach, which is entirely different from the way the United States has approached its issues of values and projecting leadership around the world in the past.

A Gallup poll says that the number of Americans who say immigration is a good thing is 75% -- 64% of Republicans, 85% of Democrats -- and that legal immigration is a good thing, 80% of Republicans, 92% of Democrats. Is it the idea of immigration that people think is terrific, but when you get down in the weeds, they say maybe not so much?

Those poll numbers have held for many years. But that doesn't mean that there hasn't been a real fruitful atmosphere politically for the kind of message and the kind of resentment that Trump as a candidate and those who voted for Trump feel. Often people say that that kind of support for immigration is a mile wide but an inch deep.

Will people actually act on it? Is it something that they feel about strongly enough about that they would actually vote accordingly?

It seems to be the case that they will vote accordingly when they have negative views but not necessarily so when there are those positive views of those in the 65% or in the 85%.

You worked on immigration issues and justice issues under Republican and Democratic administrations. How did the amnesty under Ronald Reagan change the nature of immigration -- how it's enforced, its role, the perception of it -- in this country?

That was part of the 1986 Immigration Reform Act and that was the classic example in the modern era of immigration. When I say modern era, I mean really since about 1965, when our current set of laws were enacted.

That legalization -- the word “amnesty” is often used as a derisive word by those who have opposed it -- was the high point of bipartisanship immigration. And that’s a very important concept because there are not any immigration bills that have passed in recent memory that did not require bipartisanship.

Immigration is a sufficiently controversial issue; it’s probably not been at the fever pitch that we've seen in the last couple of months, or even since this last presidential election. But nonetheless it's been very controversial throughout history.

So there are parts of both political parties, edges on the side of each political party, that have opposed immigration measures, which then has meant that we have been able to have a stronger center that could agree across the aisle in moving immigration agendas forward. The 1986 act was the classic example of that.

Those things have all disappeared from our legislating and from our political landscape. And they are even more absent as the days go by.

Since Donald Trump was sworn in and started enforcing immigration policy, he said to kick out the “bad hombres,” some of the people who have been booted out have been here 15, 20, 30 years. Members of a church have been kicked out over misdemeanor offenses. A restaurant owner. A teenager about to graduate from a high school in Iowa who came here at 3 years old was sent back to Mexico and had his throat cut. And some people are saying, “Well, we didn't mean those people. We didn't want you to deport those people.”

That's exactly right. It's one thing to objectify and identify the “they” when it comes down to any particular case – “but that’s a perfectly good person.” However, this administration has been able to stoke those flames, and it's only when it becomes clear at the individual level – that, oh, that’s what they really meant -- that people begin to think a little bit more carefully.

My favorite example has always been when I was in government, having often been called to testify before a congressional committee, and typically some member would be very, very angry that the government was unable to control illegal immigration, and these people all need to be deported.

And I would get back to my office, and more than once, I would have a phone message from that same member's office about some particular case of a person in their district that was a very sympathetic case, and what could we do to be sure that that person would be permitted to stay in the country even though they didn't have any legal status?

At one level you can say that it is an incredible degree of hypocrisy; it certainly is. At another level, you can say that until something becomes real and has an actual human face, it's very easy to just ignore it and think that it doesn't have anything to do with you.

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Patt Morrison’s newest book is “Don’t Stop the Presses! Truth, Justice and the American Newspaper.”