An Obligation to Allow Immigrants?

To the Editor: 
From the fact that Trump lost the Iowa caucus, it doesn’t mean that voters are not concerned with the issue of immigration. More probably, it means that most people had the good sense to reject his particularly stupid, offensive, inflammatory, impractical and highly expensive set of solutions. Immigration still remains an issue, and those who are against some aspects of our present immigration have good reason to be.
Most of our values and laws concerning immigration were formed years ago for an entirely different world. Most of the various U.S. immigration laws over the last two centuries were slanted against one ethnic, racial or national group or another, and most set some sort of numerical limits but at their heart they said, “come on in.”
Consider the famous words at the base of the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to be free…” We carried that torch because we had only 50 million people, lots of land, because manual labor was a vital part of our economy, and because that was how we saw ourselves, as the champion of freedom and democracy, a leader of the world into a new century and a shining vision.
None of those conditions hold now. The U.S. has 320 million people, a six-fold increase since Ms. Lazarus wrote those words. Manual labor has been mostly replaced by machines. In fact, we have around 30 million able-bodied adults in the U.S. who aren’t employed. Furthermore, in 1880 the world population  was 1.5 billion. Today it is 7.5 billion, a five-fold increase.
Today, there are many other democracies and advanced nations. The path to democracy and economic development is no longer a mystery. The only trick is to walk the path. Many nations and people have. Many haven’t. In fact, a few billion people haven’t.
Should we, who have been responsible for the literally hundreds of millions and probably a billion or so who haven’t? They would love to migrate here because of the conditions in their own countries. Should we accept them? That’s the issue.
That is not the same as questioning whether we should help them. We can help them in many ways, principally by offering economic and scientific assistance. But it doesn’t mean that we have to open our doors to them any more than helping the homeless means letting them sleep in your bedroom.
Simply using immigration as a safety valve for other countries’ dysfunction is an old way of approaching the problem. Old ideas and old laws aren’t a particularly effective way of solving new problems.
So, let’s retreat a bit on the immigrant question and ask first if we have any obligation to help others by allowing immigration.
Let’s proceed from there. If we decide to increase our population by immigration, by how much and whom? That’s a question to be decided by us individually and collectively. Personally, I think that we already have too many people, but  whatever our opinions, by all means let us not engage in phony discussions about  whether we need migrants for various reasons, or family reunion or whether they constitute a terrorist or criminal threat. Let’s stick with the facts and face the issues and relevant laws squarely, because there is no use pretending the immigration issue is going to go away any time soon.
After that, we can address the issue of those who are already here, but for both, new thinking and fresh ideas are the key.
It’s a new world.