Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Jose Antonio Vargas' moving story revealing his status as an undocumented immigrant has provoked a lot of debate about American immigration policy. Vargas was brought to the United States from the Philippines when he was twelve, and only discovered he wasn't a citizen when he went for a driver's license. The rest of his life has been spent looking over his shoulder, worrying he might someday be forced to leave the country he calls home.
Daniel Foster implicitly criticizes Vargas for, essentially, not colluding in his own deportation, before writing about the unfairness of giving someone like him a pass:
Punishing a minor by removing him from the culture he's adopted as his own, for the crimes of his parents, does strike me as fundamentally unfair. But what liberals leave out of this story, time and again, is a competing — and in my view overriding — unfairness. Reihan has argued repeatedly, and effectively, that we should treat access to the U.S. economy, not to mention its extensive welfare state, as a scarce resource. We can debate and debate the best way of distributing this resource– from “not at all” to “come one, come all” and everywhere in between. But distributing it based on who manages most successfully to violate the law, at the expense of would-be immigrants who are honoring the process, is surely not a valid option.
I would encourage Foster to imagine what he would have done in Vargas' position--trapped between a life of deception that would allow him to remain in the only home he really knows, or willingly offering himself to the authorities to be removed to a society he barely remembers. It really defies common sense to think that anyone in Vargas' position would have acted differently. Perhaps Ned Stark.
Foster's concern about fairness is aimed in the wrong direction. Undocumented immigrants aren't being unfair to those who try to navigate America's baroque, outdated, and inefficient immigration system, that system is unfair to the people who try to follow the rules, because the system itself is dysfunctional.
Moreover, supporting some version of the status quo or merely allocation of more resources towards enforcement entrenches that unfairness as well as the kind of unfairness Foster is concerned about. It is precisely because our current immigration system is so poorly designed that we are "distributing this resource" based on "who manages most successfully to violate the law." Preventing that from happening means constructing a system that's responsive to the economic realities of the labor market, rather than one so complex and restrictive that it incentivizes people trying to work around it.
The other problem with Foster's argument is that it views immigration as essentially a one-sided deal in which immigrants get access to the U.S. economy and Americans get to feel magnanimous. But part of what's so compelling about Vargas' story is how much he's contributed to American society, as an example of how much other immigrants are prepared to contribute to their adopted home, not just socially or culturally, but everything from increasing economic growth to reducing the deficit. If the U.S. economy is a "scarce resource," it's odd to argue that we should be getting rid of people who would make it stronger.
