Mass Deportations Are Not Enough

Editor's Note

Donald Trump has won a decisive victory, and Republicans are on track for comfortable majorities in both chambers of Congress. The GOP— especially the New Right — seems to have a mandate to rule.

Engaged in urgent warfare against a deadly enemy, Republican politicians have largely neglected to form around a compelling and comprehensive vision. They have spent the better part of a decade on the defensive. The Republican landslide has opened up a new theater. Operating effectively within that theater will require Trump’s coalition to sort out its internal divisions, to agree upon a common playbook by which to combat the destructive Left. 

At the 2024 National Conservatism conference, Vivek Ramaswamy proposed a framework for understanding these divisions as chiefly between “National Protectionists” — the hard-MAGA position of trade protectionism, immigration restrictionism, and aggressive use of the executive branch — and “National Libertarians” — those in the GOP who have moved beyond the “twentieth-century neoliberal consensus”, but who break from the emerging New Right consensus on issues like trade, immigration, and executive power where the GOP has become increasingly anti-libertarian.

Among the clearest issues on which Trump has been handed a decisive mandate by the American people is immigration, which the president-elect has promised to address with mass deportations. Mark Krikorian, one of the nation’s leading experts on immigration policy, writes that this is not enough: a policy that will satisfy the wishes and serve the interests of the American people must also protect their wages and restore their civic bonds by taking a hard line on legal, as well as illegal, immigration. This is the second in a series of essays on National Protectionism, National Libertarianism, and the path forward for a newly empowered Right.

Donald Trump has been given a mandate by the voters to reverse the disastrous anti-borders policy of the Biden/Bush/Obama/Cheney neoliberal uniparty. Whatever the specifics of the “largest deportation effort in American history,” there’s consensus among conservatives that the gaps – both physical and legal – in our immigration-control system have to be plugged and the millions who’ve wriggled through those gaps made to return home.

But then what?

Fences, detention centers, repatriation flights, worksite raids, etc. are not immigration policy, but merely the means by which we implement and enforce immigration policy. The policy itself must answer the questions of how many foreigners we should let in to live among us, and how to select them.

And here there is no consensus among this month’s winning coalition. If anything, there appears to be the same elite/public gap on immigration in the new Trump coalition as in the bad old days, with the elite favoring continued mass immigration — except that “they have to come legally,” as the president-elect has said on more than one occasion.

Voters in general, and Republican voters in particular, tell pollsters again and again that they want lower levels of immigration, both illegal and legal. This is true when they’re asked generally whether they want more, less, or the same, and also when they’re given the actual level of legal immigration (about 1 million per year) and then presented with alternate levels.

At the same time, many of the leaders of the newly victorious right — most notably President-elect Trump but many others as well — cling to the old GOP immigration cliché of “legal-good/illegal-bad”, with the proviso that they take the “illegal bad” part far more seriously than earlier Republican figures, for whom it was little more than boob bait for Bubba.

Trump, for instance, has told supporters in the tech industry that he wants to give green cards to every foreign student graduating from an American institution, including those receiving associate’s degrees from community colleges. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has said he wants “greatly expanded” legal immigration and Bill Ackman wants to “open the floodgates” to skilled workers.

“National Libertarianism”?

Into this gap steps Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Trump just announced will co-head a “Department of Government Efficiency” with Musk. Earlier this year at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., Ramaswamy presented his notion of “National Libertarianism” as a third way between the neoliberal approach (ironically shared by many MAGA leaders — so long as it’s legal!) and what he called “National Protectionism” — i.e., the rank-and-file conservative consensus that immigration, legal as well as illegal, must be reduced.

This effort suffers fatally from incoherence — arguing against a “National Protectionist” strawman while putting forward a rationale for immigration that could easily justify hugely increased levels in the future.

In his NatCon address, Ramaswamy argued that the two perspectives he opposed were reductively economic, the first based solely on maximizing GDP growth, the second focused only on raising wages for American workers.

Like National Protectionism, he says his National Libertarian perspective “rejects the historical neoliberal consensus too, but on different grounds. The United States is not just an economic zone.” Ramaswamy continues:

To a national libertarian, the top objectives of U.S. immigration policy are to protect U.S. national security, to preserve U.S. national identity, and to promote U.S. economic growth — in that order. That’s different from the myopic neoliberal worldview of yesterday, which promoted economic growth at all costs, even at the expense of national security and even at the expense of national identity

Fair enough. But the next sentence is this:

But it is also different from the national protectionist view, which I believe myopically promotes American worker wage growth even at the expense of these other important national objectives.

What?

There’s no question that part of the objective of immigration restriction is to tighten the labor market, thereby strengthening the bargaining position of American workers slammed by globalization. Immigration policy must necessarily have one of two consequences: Either it imports more people, forcing workers to hustle to find jobs; or it imports fewer, forcing employers to hustle to find workers. After two generations of immigration policy putting a thumb on the employer’s side of the scale, it’s time to ease it off by cutting immigration.

But what Ramaswamy derides as “National Protectionism” has never been exclusively about this. Governments are instituted among men to protect their citizens in their totality — their livelihoods and property, yes, but also their rights, their freedoms, their communities, their very persons — all matters beyond mere hourly wages.

National Cohesion

Ramaswamy differentiates his view from the claimed unidimensional focus on wages of both the neoliberals and the National Protectionists by emphasizing instead the need for an immigration policy that strengthens our national identity and cohesion. 

I agree!

Except that it turns out what he means by that is pure “creedal nation” stuff: “We’re a nation bound by a common set of civic ideals.” This is obviously true as far as it goes, but it’s incomplete, and in this incompleteness lies the germ that could easily be used to smuggle into conservatism the very mass immigration (so long as it’s legal!) that has done so much damage to our society and has helped fuel the public’s discontent with our institutions and leadership class.

Contrast Ramaswamy’s abstract “common set of civic ideals” with this from Vice-President-elect JD Vance’s speech at the Republican convention:

But they love this country, not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it. …

Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

Now, Ramaswamy’s diaphanous conception of American identity doesn’t mean he lacks some useful suggestions. Many of the concrete proposals he offered in his NatCon address are broadly supported by conservatives as well: end dual citizenship; end automatic birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens; formally declare English as our official language; screen prospective immigrants to ensure they share our values.

Who could disagree?

But here’s the thing: Because America is not just a propositional nation, but rather an actual homeland for an actual people, becoming an American entails more than just passing a social studies test.

The late sociologist Lawrence Fuchs described the children of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii in the 1920s reciting speeches about “our Pilgrim forefathers” – not because they were descended from Mayflower passengers (like, say, Barack Obama) but because this was now their homeland and its history was their history, its heroes their heroes.

This kind of emotional assimilation takes time and nurturing and requires the inflow of newcomers who need to undergo it to be small — or at least to take a pause after the admission of tens of millions. All the more so when our assimilating institutions — schools, churches, workplaces — are still in the thrall of our post-American leadership class, regardless of this month’s electoral successes.

To be sure, Ramaswamy denies he’s calling for increased immigration. In fact, he claims that:

With more stringent screening of those immigrants for loyalty, for civic knowledge, confirmation of their ability to make contributions there would almost certainly be far fewer immigrants entering the United States.

He just claims that limiting immigration in this way is “the right and principled way to achieve that objective, rather than arbitrary and sloppy numerical caps”.

But why would his approach reduce the number of newcomers? Ramaswamy says 700 million from abroad would move here if they could, “So the reality is the overwhelming majority of immigrants are going to have to be turned away.” Even if so, that could still mean the admission of a nation-wrecking 10 or 20 million a year. 

What would be the rationale for limiting the numbers? Among those 700 million, and among the 7 billion other foreigners in addition to them, are there not hundreds of millions who are willing to work hard and love the Declaration of Independence, who would pass our screening “for their willingness and readiness to adopt and share American values”?

(Even apart from the numbers, the idea that government — any government — would truly be able to identify which foreigners are likely to become good Americans is preposterous; it’s simply asking too much of government.)

Whatever qualities we would select for, quantity has a quality of its own. As Vice President-elect Vance has said elsewhere, “There’s a difference between having 500,000 or a million newcomers a year or 10 million or 30 million or 50 million a year.” Nothing in Ramaswamy’s National Libertarian perspective on immigration acknowledges this.

The United States now has the largest percentage of foreign-born residents ever recorded, higher even than during the Ellis Island era. Without changes to the immigration statutes, it will keep climbing. The essence of conservatism is prudence, and prudence calls for a lower level of immigration. As Sen. Jeff Sessions wrote in 2015 (well before Trump’s famous escalator ride), “What we need now is immigration moderation: slowing the pace of new arrivals so that wages can rise, welfare rolls can shrink, and the forces of assimilation can knit us all more closely together.”

This year is the centennial of the 1924 immigration law that brought an end to the Ellis Island immigration wave. The means that law employed was national-origins quotas, something we should not repeat. But the resulting four-decade pause in mass immigration had remarkably beneficial effects, allowing the wages of working people to rise while at the same time strengthening the bonds of our Union.

Call it National Protectionism if you want, but it is a necessary condition for national renewal.