We are supposed to have freedom to choose the place where we're going to live. ... In a different world, a world deserving to be what the world wanted to be when it was a different world, a world deserving to be what the world wanted to be when it was not yet born. Any newborn person should be welcomed. Welcomed! Say, "Come in! Come in boy or girl! The entire earth will be your kingdom and your legs will be your passport, forever valid."
The above words of Eduardo Galeano, a giant of Latin American literature and politics who died last month, are a vivid expression of the sensibility of those who favor unrestricted immigration. They hold what conservative American writer Thomas Sowell has called the "unconstrained vision". As Sowell wrote, "In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment."
Sowell said practitioners of the unconstrained vision of life, which is sometimes called the utopian vision, contrast with those who embrace the constrained vision, which is sometimes called the tragic vision. I like Steven Pinker's statement that the tragic vision proposes that: "We are fortunate enough to live in a society that more or less works, and our first priority should be not to screw it up" by imposing sweeping transformations on societies that have established patterns of life worked out over decades or centuries.
I think Galeano's vision of immigration, while lyrical in its expression, would be reckless in its effects. But I recently came across a practitioner of the constrained vision of immigration who I think also took a good idea to a bad extreme. That was Francis Walter, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania who for most of the period between 1949 and his death in 1963 was chairman of the immigration subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee.
Walter was driven by his conviction that communists were determined to use our immigration system to enter the United States in large numbers and subvert our democracy. He proposed tight restrictions as a response to what he called "a world-wide communist conspiracy, hostile to the United States and to the free world."
Acting on that concern, Walter sought to maintain the national origins quota system for immigrant visas that Congress adopted in 1924 to restrict severely the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans. Moreover, he blasted those who disagreed with him as "soft on Communism".
Pinker offers a fine description of the ongoing dynamic that these two visions bring to much of our civic life, and certainly to the immigration debate: "Those with the Tragic Vision see judicial activism as an invitation to egotism and caprice and as unfair to those who have played by the rules as they were publicly stated. Those with the Utopian Vision see judicial restraint as the mindless preservation of arbitrary injustice."