This archive report was first published on 7 July 2019.
As the southwest US border crisis intensifies, it's essential to assess the root causes of the problem and the disastrous cycle of immigration policy that has led to it.
The cycle began with a gap between the elite consensus on immigration, which is largely in favor, and the public's more conflicted attitudes, which differ depending on the day's headlines and polling questions.
Over the past 15 years, numerous attempts to impose the elite consensus have led to backlash, populism, and ultimately, the Trump administration's restrictive immigration policies.
Unfortunately, the backlash did not just give us a more restrictionist president; it also gave us a president who mixes ineffectiveness in legislating, incompetence in administration, and an impulse toward 'toughness' as the response to every challenge.
As a result, the Trump administration's response to the wave of family migration has been marked by formal inhumanity, such as the child separation policy, and informal inhumanity, such as an overwhelmed detainment system.
Many liberals, including the Democratic Party's would-be nominees for president, have repudiated not only the specific evils of Trump's approach but also the entire architecture of immigration enforcement as implemented by the last Democratic president.
However, these policies are far more reckless than the old path-to-citizenship, more-guest-workers elite consensus, because they learn exactly the wrong lessons from the last five years of turbulence.
For this cycle to break, fraternal correction is needed within both the right-wing and left-wing coalitions.
On the American right, religious conservatives and their representatives should intervene and apply moral pressure to prove that immigration restrictions can be implemented in accord with basic Christian principles.
On the Democratic side, the party's moderates, including House and Senate leaders, and Joe Biden, the would-be moderate trying to win the party's nomination, should halt the march of folly and work towards a more balanced immigration policy.
