Something recently reminded me of a few thoughts I had about this subject a while back, and I thought I’d briefly run through them again.
As I noted on this blog’s very first day, there are powerful reasons to care deeply about whom we’re letting into the country, and to exclude people who would do us and our institutions harm. More broadly, while I generally support a fairly open immigration policy, I think there are strong arguments on the other side, and they need to be seriously confronted.
Nonetheless, while unlimited immigration can hurt national security, unduly limited immigration can hurt it, too. There’s an old joke about who was the greatest German general of World War II; the answer is Dwight Eisenhower. Likewise, many of the scientists on the Manhattan Project were immigrants — Einstein (who didn’t work on the Project but whose letter to Roosevelt helped prompt the American nuclear program), Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, and many more were the obvious names, but there were many others, too.
Our post-war military success was also notoriously helped by foreign-born scientists (e.g., Werner von Braun). But while that was good tactics on our part, our broader relatively open policy on immigration was also good strategy. No-one knew that Eisenhower’s ancestors would have a great general as a descendant. My understanding is that many European scientists were let into the U.S. before World War II without specific concern for their military utility. Likewise, when the U.S. let in Albert Wass de Czege, who had fought in the Hungarian Army on the side of the Nazis, it didn’t know that his then ten-year-old son Huba would become a general in the U.S. Army, and apparently a gifted military thinker whose work has been of great value to us.
So when we refuse to let some people come here, or refuse to let them stay, we might be protecting our national security. But we might also be hurting our national security, by denying us the services of someone who may one day greatly help our nation — or, worse yet, by letting some enemy country or movement take advantage of his services. And the same can happen even if we alienate the prospective immigrants in other ways, by making the immigration process too much of a hassle, by making it too hard to come to the country to study or to temporarily work, by questioning visitors or restricting them in ways that make them feel insulted, or by generally getting a reputation as a country that’s unpleasant to foreigners.
Again, this is hardly an open-and-shut argument for open borders; and I hope that there’s some optimal mechanism that will screen out as many bad immigrants or visitors as possible, while at the same time deterring as few good ones as possible. But it’s always important to remember that there are national security costs to tight immigration policies as well as national security benefits.
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