Xenophobia? Immigration?

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I recently took a cross-country road trip. At the interstate rest areas and in the gas stations and fast-food restaurants at the exits I couldn’t help noticing the high percentage of people who were either rather senior or struggling with health or mobility challenges. My strongest reaction was, “Thank goodness for immigrants!” What could be better than a fresh influx of young, energetic, healthy people who want to work hard?

Population decline is no joke. In Japan there are already houses standing empty because there is no one to live in them.

America’s big comparative advantage is that people want to come here more than anywhere else. With immigration so important to our future, how can we stay tied up in such knots about it?

The answer is our human nature. The !Kung hunter-gatherers in the remote Kalahari desert are a classic example: They use a word for each other meaning “good, honest, clean people.” They call most outsiders “bad, strange, harmful people.”

The 10 Iñupiat groups in the Arctic illustrate how far this sentiment can go. They traditionally killed every trespasser, even unlucky seal hunters from other tribes who happened to drift back to shore on a broken piece of ice shelf.

The sad truth is that, to some extent, we are all historically, instinctively and understandably xenophobic. Like bees drawn to bright flowers, our minds naturally flit to stereotypes: “drug smugglers,” “diseased,” “terrorists.”

So saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” taps a deep well. The political value of demonization is so great that it easily swept aside the recent immigration reform bill produced by months of bipartisan negotiation.

Stimulating xenophobia in America is ironic for two reasons. The first is that most immigrant groups that moved here experienced it. Both of my grandfathers were Swedish, which is not usually thought of as a heritage subject to abuse (well, except for Ole and Lena jokes). Yet when I was born in the 1950s, my parents gave me the innocuous middle name “Alan,” because they thought someday I might want to drop the dubious label “Peterson.”

After my new wife and I moved back to Minnesota in the 1980s, my naïve East Coast spouse made what she thought was common cause with a Norwegian neighbor by cheerfully saying she had married into a Swedish Minnesota family. The response was chilly silence.

The second irony is that recent immigrants are the opposite of poison. Contrary to the rhetoric of demonization, immigrants are much less likely to be incarcerated — 60% less — than native-born Americans. They are much more likely to be employed, married and in good health than native-born Americans with similar education levels.

Hard workers? Have you seen a roofing crew or the night shift at a nursing home lately? The latest research shows that immigrants, including high school dropouts, refugees and asylees, provide large net benefits to government coffers.

Are migrants drug smugglers? In 2021, of 1.8 million migrants arrested at the southern border, just 279 (0.02%) possessed any fentanyl whatsoever.

Terrorists? The fact-checking organization PolitiFact called Trump’s claim that Hamas militants are “pouring” across the border a “pants on fire” lie.

Political advancement consists of better controlling our damaging impulses. The 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention was a shining example of the world’s determination to rise above xenophobia. It provided uniform standards for accommodating the millions of people displaced by World War II. The U.S. finally adopted it through the more expansive 1967 Protocol, which was codified into domestic law in the 1980 Refugee Act.

These laws obligate us to harbor migrants with a reasonable fear of persecution in their home countries, including people who enter illegally but promptly present themselves. But our compliance with this international obligation can only be called begrudging.

We rely on stopgap tactics like expelling migrants who crossed between ports of entry under the now-expired Title 42 protocol, which caused many of them to keep coming back, some dozens of times. Now we require migrants to make appointments through the CBP One app, which is so overwhelmed that many give up and cross on their own. Both are probably downright illegal.

Our vastly underfunded asylum adjudication system results in at least half of asylum-seekers being released into the U.S. to await a final determination. The backlog is now 3 million, and the wait times for the two different processing systems average three and 10 years. By broadcasting the message around the world that if you can just get here you can stay for years, it has also backfired.

The complexity of our immigration system has been compared to the Internal Revenue Code. It provides no realistic pathway to “wait their turn in line” for the growing number of climate refugees or those who are simply poor. The Senate bill was a valid attempt to adapt this system to modern migration patterns, where people seek asylum rather than sneaking in to work.

But it, too, continues our tradition of stinginess. The bill’s signature provision is to close the border when encounters reach a threshold. If I read the numbers right, the border will be closed a lot — which is confirmed by the bill’s limitation of closures to 270 days in a year!

I am not advocating for open borders. A smart guy once said that we would always have the poor with us. Likewise, unless you believe our country could absorb the hundreds of millions of foreigners who have heart-rending stories, we will have to establish limits.

In 2023, the Border Patrol encountered a record high 2.5 million individuals at the southern border. Only a small percentage qualify for asylum. We need the infrastructure — and the stomach — to turn a lot of people away.

My grandfathers acted on the universal and honorable aspiration of people to better themselves. Even if circumstances do not permit most current migrants to be accommodated like my forebears were, they are just as deserving of respect.

Let’s fund, operate and talk about our immigration system like we mean that.

Bruce Peterson is a senior district judge and teaches a class on lawyers as peacemakers at the University of Minnesota Law School.