America’s Future Is Either Mass Immigration Or Mass Deportations

The midterm election cycle has confirmed that Democrats are committed to mass immigration and open borders whenever they regain the White House. That, along with non-enforcement and a halt to deportations and interior immigration enforcement, is going to be their de facto standing immigration policy moving forward. Where the right stands on immigration is much less clear. To its credit, the American right has never been as uniform or politically disciplined as the left, in part because it’s not motivated by revolutionary fervor. But that lack of uniformity has left Republicans less capable of responding to Democrats’ radical immigration agenda — and less certain of what degree of restrictionist policies they will actually support. The ongoing GOP civil war Donald Trump inaugurated a decade ago to a large extent hinges on this question of immigration. The pre-Trump Republican establishment would very much like to go back to how things were before Trump, when the bipartisan Washington consensus was that immigration should supply big business with cheap labor and Democrats with future voters. That’s one reason they’re so eager to attack and undermine Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump’s likely successor. Trump’s America First base will never accept a return to the pre-Trump status quo on immigration. But the right will need more than that base to keep Democrats out of power. While it’s true that the GOP establishment in Washington has no real constituency on immigration except the special interests that benefit from cheap foreign labor, it’s unclear whether Republican voters are ready to support a dramatically restrictionist immigration policy. In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, former ICE Chief of Staff Jason Killmeyer succinctly captured the strategic state of play, saying we are either going to have mass immigration or mass deportations, depending on which party is in power. That’s certainly where we’re headed, but the question is whether Republican voters realize it. As Jesse Kelly and others on the right have argued, Americans probably don’t have the stomach for mass deportations. It’s unclear if even Trump has the stomach for it, after he backed off immigration enforcement in Minneapolis and other major cities in the face of leftist and media resistance. This week we got another glimpse into this dynamic with the saga of a man named Samuel Sey. For those not following along online, Sey is a Ghanaian national who apparently overstayed his visa by more than four years, was recently arrested by ICE, and is now set to be deported. He also happens to be a conservative Christian writer and teacher who, amazingly, appears to have been picked up by ICE en route to an appearance on Jeremy Boreing’s podcast. When news broke of his arrest, a cadre of very-online evangelicals and Christian Zionists, who previously had been quite vocal and unapologetic about their hawkish immigration views (including support for mass deportations), noticeably shifted their tune. Joel Berry, a writer and producer on Boreing’s podcast, has been posting all week about Sey’s plight, raising money for his family and characterizing his arrest as a clerical error. According to Berry, Sey made a “good faith effort to file the right paperwork and comply with the law.” He added that Sey would “make an excellent American citizen,” and, “I hope he can become one someday.” Setting aside the many unanswered questions about Sey’s particular case — like how did he not know he had been living for years in the United States illegally? — the reaction of self-styled conservatives like Berry, Boreing, and others reveals a squishiness about mass deportations that their tough immigration rhetoric had previously hidden. The prominent conservatives that have come forward to express sympathy for Sey’s plight, as if this is a misfortune that has befallen him through no fault of his own, is telling. Their strong implication is that somehow an injustice has been done to the man, rather than justice having been served through the broad enforcement of our immigration laws — even towards people who might otherwise be cultural and political allies. If Sey knowingly overstayed his visa— for four years — and continued living and working illegally in the U.S., then yes, he should be deported. It’s not a complicated or difficult case — unless you’re not really on board with mass deportations and other restrictionist policies because you have a fundamentally liberal view of American identity and nationhood. And that’s really the heart of the difference between the Berry/Boreing camp and the America Firsters. The former adhere to a propositional view of the nation, the idea that anyone from anywhere can become an American simply by moving here and espousing agreement with a set of philosophical ideas contained in the Declaration and Constitution. That’s why Berry, for example, says that Sey, a man from Ghana who only recently came to this country and has already managed to run afoul of our immigration laws, would make “an excellent American citizen.” For Berry, being an American has little or nothing to do with where one is from, or one’s cultural practices and priorities. For him, American identity is “creedal,” an idea espoused by many on the right, including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who argued explicitly for such an understanding of Americanness earlier this year. Now, it might be the case that a man like Sey could one day become an American. He married an American and started a family, and by all accounts seems to love this country. But — and this is where true restrictionists depart from Sey’s supporters on the right — he has no right to become an American. No foreigner does. Not even conservative Christians, from Africa or wherever else. If we are going to take people in from Ghana, we need to be persuaded that it benefits America and not just the individual who wishes to live here. The onus is on those who bring people in, not on those who would keep them out, to make that case. Because the reality is that under the current circumstances, after decades of effectively open border and mass immigration, both legal and illegal (with massive fraud in our “legal” immigration regime), it’s reasonable to conclude what earlier generations of Americans concluded: that what we need is a near-moratorium on immigration, together with mass deportations and a closed border. In 1924 we effectively ended immigration for 40 years, to allow time for the waves of southern and eastern Europeans who had emigrated en masse in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to assimilate and acculturate. We obviously need something like that again. Our immigration system is massively corrupt and an objective failure. It’s not too much to say that it is destroying the country. If what Killmeyer says is true, and that we are facing a future either of mass immigration or mass deportations, then that means conservatives will need to get comfortable with strict enforcement of our laws — even on matters like visa overstays. They will have to get comfortable with more than that, in fact, because part of what such a future means is not just deporting visa overstays but refusing to issue these visas in the first place, regardless of a would-be immigrant’s religion or politics. And that in turn means they will need to re-think their entire concept of American identity. They will need to realize that it isn’t a garment that can be donned by anyone from anywhere in the world. It’s not an ideology that, once adopted, changes a foreigner into an American. Rather it is something forged only across generations, with much effort, and, crucially, only under conditions of minimal immigration. Until the right reaches a consensus on this question of American identity, it will not be able to offer a coherent case against the left’s dream of mass immigration and open borders. That’s one thing Sey’s case, and the controversy around it, have made abundantly clear. John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson. American identityBiden border crisiscreedalismJeremy Boreingmass deportationsmass immigration