The ugly words and horrific events of the summer of 2019 underscore that this nation of immigrants is simply not handling the challenge created by immigration. It’s a challenge that must be addressed—for the good of immigrants, Americans-in-the-making and American citizens alike. Failure to do so is poisoning our politics, undermining the rule of law, endangering lives and threatening the nation’s security.

Problems

It’s been said that admitting you have a problem is the first step to fixing it. What’s true in 12-step programs is true in public policy. These are today’s immigration numbers:

• In June, US Department of Homeland Security officials informed Congress that in a 40-day span, DHS took into custody 60,000 immigrant children, many of them unaccompanied. In May, a record 144,000 people crossed the border illegally; on a single day in May, 5,800 crossed the border illegally.
• There were 240,930 border apprehensions in 2017.
• DHSestimates 12 million immigrants are living in the US illegally—up from around 8 million in 2010. A Heritage Foundation study concludes that undocumented immigrants “impose a net fiscal burden of around $54.5 billion per year.”

We can quibble over whether all of this adds up to a crisis. But with government agencies overwhelmed and overstretched, with the law unenforced, with innocent children in danger, illegal immigration is undeniably a problem.

Read that again: illegal immigration is the problem—not immigration. Ours is a nation of immigrants—each new cohort of immigrants serving as a wellspring for our country, a reminder of our roots, a surge of growth and dynamism. All told, America’s foreign-born population stands at 44.4 million—13.5 percent of the overall population. To put that in perspective, immigrants represented 14.8 percent of the population in 1890; 13.5 percent in 1900. In other words, today’s numbers may sound high, but the percentage is below the historic highs.

What’s different today is that only 44 percent of the foreign-born population are naturalized US citizens, down from 78 percent in 1950. As historian Alan Brinkley writes in The Unfinished Nation, many immigrant arrivals since the 1960s were “less willing to accept the standards of the larger society,” “more likely to demand recognition of their own ethnic identity,” “challenged the assimilationist idea,” and “advocated instead a culturally pluralist society.”

This insistence among large segments of today’s foreign-born population to remain separate from the American Experiment—this refusal to become American—is not healthy for a nation founded on an idea, rather than blood or birthplace, race or religion.

Indeed, far from promoting the vile racialism embraced by the El Paso murderer, an immigration system premised on naturalization has nothing to do with externalities or superficial characteristics, but instead focuses on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. It’s all there in the citizenship oath and naturalization process—fidelity to the US, support for the Constitution, respect for the country’s laws, renouncement of allegiance to foreign powers, an “understanding of the fundamentals of the history, and of the principles and form of government, of the United States,” a willingness to defend the US from enemies. Someone living here illegally has neither taken this oath nor learned these lessons of naturalization.

Threats

Those who justify illegal immigration tell us “no human being is illegal,” and they’re correct about this. Words matter; to attach the adjective “illegal” to a person can have the effect of dehumanizing him or her. No child of God is “illegal.”

However, we do illegal things at times. Entering the United States illegally, by definition, is illegal. No matter how hard-working he is, an immigrant who enters this country outside the avenues prescribed by the law is breaking the law. If the law means anything, if there is to be justice for those who enter the country legally, there must be a penalty for entering illegally. If there isn’t, it breeds contempt for the law—whether in the policies adopted by America’s neighbors (see here and here), or organized waves of illegal crossings, or human-trafficking networks, or the sort of violence we witnessed in El Paso.

Where those who justify illegal immigration are wrong is in advocating open borders. The US government has the right and the responsibility to determine who enters this country—and how they enter. That’s part of sovereignty. In fact, a nation-state that cannot control its borders isn’t really sovereign—which is to say, not self-governing, not in control.

“People should have to ring the doorbell before they enter my house or my country,” as columnist Tom Friedman puts it. Why is that? Why do we expect people to ring the doorbell before entering our house? One of the main reasons is security and self-protection. An open border, just like an open front door, represents a threat to our security. But don’t take my word for it.

In July, the US attorney in Los Angeles released an indictment related to a string of brutal murders in southern California. As the Los Angeles Timesreports, “Nineteen of the 22 defendants charged in the indictment had entered the country illegally.”

Noting that 100 people from the Caribbean and South America had joined the Islamic State, US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) warned in 2015 that human-smuggling networks are “so efficient that if a terrorist or almost anyone wants to get into our country, they just pay the fare.” (Before dismissing that number as insignificant, recall that just 19 al-Qaeda operatives maimed Manhattan.) SOUTHCOM’s 2019 posture statement echoes what was said in 2015: “Established drug-trafficking routes and techniques provide opportunities for the illegal movement of other commodities and people—including terrorists,” it reads, adding that ISIS “could leverage established trafficking networks to make their way to our border.”

Islands

One gets the sense that El Paso will serve as a turning point for this nation of immigrants: toward an even more-open border and less-sovereign United States, or toward a new consensus on sensible immigration-and-naturalization policy. We should aim, hope, and pray for the latter—and learn from what worked in the past.

From 1892 to 1954, 12 million people entered America through Ellis Island. Thomas Pitkin writes that when Frederic Howe became commissioner of Ellis Island, his goal was “to have immigrants well started on their way to becoming good American citizens before they left the island.” Toward that end, Howe forged partnerships with local schools to teach immigrants English, provided “a beginner’s class in American citizenship,” endeavored to “Americanize the immigrant” and transformed Ellis Island into “a comfortable waiting room” for future Americans.

In Howe’s day, that was considered the progressive position. And it served America well.

Wouldn’t it make sense to divert some of the $54.5 billion we spend supporting immigrants who are here illegally into long-term solutions that bring them out of the shadows and put them on a path to citizenship? Might we spend those resources converting unusedfederal facilities—especially in Texas, California, and Florida, where 47 percent of undocumented migrants reside—into centers that provide immigrants with proper housing, medical care, instruction in English and civics, and connections to job opportunities?

These modern-day Ellis Islands wouldn’t be cheap. But by promoting legal immigration and encouraging naturalization, they would be an investment in our future. And by focusing on assimilating immigrants, they would free up law enforcement agencies to do what they’re trained to do.

Experiments

In wrestling with the challenges created by illegal immigration, too many Christians project what Christ expects of his followers onto government—forgetting that governments are held to a different standard than individuals. As such, governments are expected to do certain things individuals aren’t expected to do—and shouldn’t do certain things individuals should do. For instance, Jesus calls on individuals to turn the other cheek, “put away the sword,” and forgive enemies “seventy times seven” times. Scripture challenges God’s people to keep no record of wrongs, to stop worrying about tomorrow, and to “show hospitality to strangers.”

Such behavior is next to godliness for individuals, but such behavior is next to suicidal for nation-states. A government that turned the other cheek, “put away the sword,” forgave its enemies “seventy times seven” times, kept no record of wrongs, didn’t “worry about tomorrow” and all the dangers it holds, and welcomed strangers without question or qualification would expose its citizens to enormous risk—and wouldn’t be living up to its obligations.

Yet just as we should expect our government to enforce laws and maintain order, we should expect our government to treat the immigrant with dignity and compassion—remembering that we ourselves are considered “strangers,” “aliens,” “foreigners” in this world. Paul describes us as “Christ’s ambassadors” and citizens of another land. To extend the metaphor, this country is our diplomatic posting. This piece of earth matters enough to heaven that God has posted us here to represent him, share our blessings, do justice and show mercy, and care about the here-and-now, even as we focus our hearts on the hereafter.

In this regard, we might be inspired and even surprised by the words of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, who was called to his eternal home in 2009. “When I meet God,” he wrote, “I expect to meet him as an American. Admittedly, that is a statement that can easily be misunderstood. It is not intended as a boast or as a claim on God’s favorable judgment. It is a simple statement of fact. Among all the things I am or have been or hope to be, I am undeniably an American. It is not the most important thing, but it is an inescapable thing.”

Neuhaus recognized, as his biographer has written, that “every Christian is first and always a citizen of what Augustine called the heavenly and eternal City of God … that this citizenship informs how he lives in this fallen, mortal world, the City of Man” and that “God is not indifferent to the American Experiment.”

If well-meaning Christians continue to confuse the responsibilities of the state with the responsibilities of discipleship, illegal immigration—immigration without naturalization—will transform America in profound ways. And the American Experiment could fail.