Professor James Hankins has written a sincere but largely misguided piece advocating for what amounts to a national guest worker program with a delayed pathway to citizenship. He proposes, with appropriate modesty, that “The advantages of this [immigration] proposal may not seem obvious at first sight to Republicans.” Let me, with all due humility, suggest that the alleged advantages are not obvious because they are not there. While Hankins’s program has a slightly different taste, it is basically the same old amnesty wine in a new bottle.
His core problem is viewing immigration policy as one issue among many in which any proposed solution should ultimately be subject to a popularity contest. In reality, immigration is an existential issue, and the way we approach it defines what kind of community we will be.
