Dispatch Symposium on Immigration and the Election

The Dispatch asked four immigration policy specialists (including myself) to write pieces on the pros and cons of the presidential candidates' immigration policies.

Yesterday, the Dispatch published a symposium on the pros and cons of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris's immigration policies. The participants were David Bier (Cato Institute), Mark Krikorian (Center for Immigration Studies), Alex Nowrasteh (Cato) and myself. Alex, David, and I are obviously strongly pro-immigration, whereas Krikorian is a pretty hard-core restrictionist.

This may be the first time three different Cato-affiliated analysts participated in the same immigration symposium. For what it's worth, I did not know ahead of time that Alex and David were also participating, and we did not coordinate our contributions in any way.

Here's an excerpt from my piece:

For people who value free markets and limited government, this presidential election is a choice of evils—but one of the evils is much greater than the other. Trump's terrible immigration policies are massive. And, unlike Kamala Harris' worst policies, they can largely be implemented through executive power alone….

Trump's mass deportation proposal would cause immense damage to both immigrants and U.S. citizens. It would create disruption, increase prices, and cause shortages. It also destroys more American jobs than it creates… Drastic cuts in legal immigration would exacerbate the economic damage. Cutting migration would also worsen the federal government's dire fiscal situation.

Harris does have some flawed immigration policies of her own, such as her endorsement of President Joe Biden's badly flawed Trump-lite asylum restrictions. She would do better to emphasize the expansion of options for legal migration. But Trump's immigration plans are vastly worse…..

In their contributions (which I largely agree with), David Bier and Alex Nowrasteh both emphasize the dangers of Trump's plans to greatly reduce legal migration. This aspect of his agenda hasn't gotten as much attention as it deserves, even though—as Alex and David note—the president has vast discretion in this field.

For his part, Mark Krikorian fears that Trump might actually expand legal migration. I wish he were right. But that goes against both Trump's stated plans now, and his first-term record, when he massively cut legal migration, far more than the illegal kind.