Immigration policy should prioritize American interests

Part nine of the Common Sense manifesto

I care about my family and my friends and my community and my country. But I also believe our moral circles should encompass those outside of these groups, and I try to ensure that my actions reflect that belief. Years ago, I was convinced by the founders of GiveWell that we can do the most good with our charitable giving by prioritizing people who live in very poor countries. The problems they experience are more severe and resources are scarcer, and it’s much more likely that something very important will go unfunded. And, in part because the people in poor countries are poor, it’s generally cheaper to do things there. For these reasons, we give money every month to GiveWell and do annual fundraisers for GiveDirectly, another organization focused on supporting people in the poorest countries in the world.

These are principles that I hold dear, and I think it’s rational to hang on to and advance them, even without going all-in on strict neutral universalism — we can reject the notion that you need to either believe that spending money on your kid’s birthday party instead of malaria prevention in Africa is equivalent to murder, or else that there’s no good reason to care about malaria prevention in Africa.

And this, of course, is also relevant to immigration debates. The opportunity to immigrate to the United States was extremely valuable to my great-grandparents and their descendants, and it remains valuable today. These benefits to immigrants matter in the cosmic scheme of things.

One reason that I feel strongly about charitable giving that focuses on the objectively neediest cases is that I don’t think it’s plausible to expect democratic politics to deliver on these issues. There’s a view which holds that all philanthropy is, at best, a kind of policy failure, and that the real solution to everything is higher taxes. But I don’t think it’s realistic to expect voters to want politicians to make significant sacrifices for the sake of people outside of the social circles they hold most dear. Which is all just to say that point nine on the Common Sense Manifesto is last, even though it’s probably the most directly relevant to the 2024 election, because I don’t like it — I just think it’s true:

All people have equal moral worth, but democratic self-government requires the American government to prioritize the interests of American citizens.

A big part of what went wrong for Democrats during the Biden years was that a righteous backlash to the cruelty of Trump’s rhetoric led Democrats to start writing conceptual checks on immigration policy that they just couldn’t cash. This was costly politically, and it now has the country on a substantively bad course that ignores the massive upsides of smart immigration policy.

An immigration problem, not an aid problem

Foreign aid is in the news right now because of Elon Musk’s splashy attacks on USAID. We’ll have an article on that tomorrow, taking the case for USAID reform seriously but also standing up for the important concept of an agency that tries to promote well-being abroad.

But what I want to say about it today is that apart from this current bit of political theater, foreign aid is not a particularly serious political issue. Up until five minutes ago, American national security hawks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio believed that spending a modest sum of money on aid was a good idea “because it furthers our national interest” and is a tool to “counter the Chinese Communist Party’s expanding global influence.”