The paper’s editorial board grudgingly acknowledges certain realities about the immigration crisis but still can’t reckon with the full extent of the problem. 

The recent immigration manifesto from the New York Times editorial board demonstrates that some progressive institutions have begun to take account of their failed policy paradigm on immigration — but it also reveals how incomplete that accounting remains.

The Gray Lady admits that the immigration system has descended into “chaos” over the past four years, though it is rather oblique in attributing responsibility for this chaos. (Joe Biden is not named once.) The editorial board proposes a three-part plan for addressing immigration: Improve enforcement and reform the asylum system, expand legal immigration, and grant a mass amnesty. The first part does represent some kind of evolution on the left. The Times supports worker verification (which would be a significant accomplishment for immigration enforcement), and reforming the asylum system is indeed part of addressing the border crisis.

The other two proposals might, however, be more of the same. The combination of “expand enforcement and legal immigration” is not a novel blend. In fact, that precisely was George H. W. Bush’s argument in signing the Immigration Act of 1990, which dramatically expanded legal immigration: the United States, he said, was closing the “back door” of illegal immigration, so it needed to “open the front door to increased legal immigration.” Needless to say, illegal immigration exploded during the 1990s.

The 1986 amnesty offered an incredible reward for breaking immigration law, and there was limited political will to maintain a credible enforcement infrastructure. Many identity-politics activists remain inveterately opposed to immigration enforcement, and the Biden administration has shown that those activists retain a decisive veto within the national Democratic Party. Is there any reason to believe that a sweeping amnesty proposal of the kind the New York Times proposes now would not repeat the dynamic of the 1990s? The amnesty would likely be significantly bigger than the 11 million that the Times proposes, too. The idea that there are around 11 million “undocumented immigrants” in the United States has been floating around for many, many years — long before the Biden border crisis.

The current political travails of Canada might suggest another counterargument against this proposed grand bargain on immigration. The Times claims that cratering American birthrates demand that the United States expand legal immigration. Yet this was precisely the approach of Canada during the Justin Trudeau years. Canadian policymakers argued that our northern neighbor had to increase immigration rates in order to compensate for lower birthrates and an aging population. Immigration to Canada exploded. Last year, Canada took in about 1 percent of its entire population as permanent-resident immigrants, which is equivalent to the United States taking in the “few million immigrants” a year that the Times recommends. The result of this policy has not been a political nirvana but instead a cost-of-living crisis. Even Trudeau has pledged to cut immigration rates in the future. The Times seems to admit that Canada’s policy has failed. It warns that “high rates of immigration across Europe and North America have not led to more tolerance of newcomers but instead have led to a resurgence of nativist political movements.” But it then counsels that the United States follow in its footsteps.

While it does have some policy nudges, this New York Times proposal still seems to buy into the civically attenuated psychology that has haunted the American elite and set it up for a populist reckoning. Instead of viewing declining birthrates as a siren for a renewed focus on rebuilding American families, the Times proposes just “importing” (its word — not mine) more people from abroad to paper over those deeper social challenges.

Echoing the “jobs Americans won’t do” canard of the 2000s, the Times claims that “immigrants are now the dirty-work doers” — the people who watch children, do construction, clean houses, and mow lawns. I have friends and family members who are immigrants, so I know very well how much they contribute to American society and how lucky we are to have them. But I also have native-born friends and family who do those “dirty-work” jobs that the Times assigns to immigrants. A 2018 report from the Center for Immigration Studies found that immigrant workers were the majority of workers in only a handful of professions, and the native-born had a significant representation in even those professions. Instead of signing onto the consumerist model of the nation in which an elite native-born caste relies on immigrants as “dirty-work doers,” we should instead subscribe to a vision of robust opportunity and dignity for all Americans.