Right Versus Right: Immigration and Refugee Policy in the Unted States

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There is now a growing realization that immigration and refugee issues may prove to be among the most important and troubling world problems of the next decade. The recent large flows of refugees or expellees from Indochina, Afghanistan and Cuba, all typically treated as short-term crises, instead may be harbingers of long-term trends of profound proportions. The same may be said for the accelerating trend of international migration, both legal and illegal.

Control over entry by non-citizens is generally considered one of the two or three universal attributes of national sovereignty; no government has ever explicitly abrogated this sovereign right, although on occasion a state has asserted the right of its citizens to enter another. Hence it is evident that problems of international migration, which are already large and of increasing magnitude, go to the heart of our collective definition of modern nation-states and of relations among them.

Immigration and refugee policy is of special and rapidly growing political importance in the United States. The debate is an increasingly unpleasant one, with anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiments apparently strong and growing. The most recent national poll on the subject of refugees showed only 19 percent supporting President Carter's decision to double the admission of Indochinese refugees to 168,000 each year, while 46 percent actually wanted a reduction from the previous level of 84,000 per year. In a later poll, 91 percent of the sample supported "an all-out effort to stop the illegal entry into the United States of 11/2 million foreigners who don't have entry visas" and 80 percent wanted to "reduce the quotas of the number of legal immigrants who can enter the U.S. each year."1 In 1977, the Carter Administration made a set of limited proposals that promptly dropped out of sight in the Congress. Now a national commission chaired by Theodore Hesburgh and including strong congressional representation is scheduled to come up with a new analysis and recommendations in early 1981. The problems can hardly fail to be faced in some fashion early in the next Administration.