Nikki Haley Is Right on Immigration
By VAHAKEN MOURADIAN
November 17, 2023 5:36 PM
Between her feuding with Ron DeSantis and the despotic pomposities about online noms de plume that she recently broadcast, Nikki Haley made some worthwhile comments on immigration during her campaign stop this month in Londonderry — in New Hampshire, that is, where one expects the matter of cross-border movement to be less charged than it once would’ve been in Northern Ireland, and where she did the refreshing and the unthinkable by choosing not to “read” the room as those who think of politics as a pageant insist one should.
“The debate is on the number,” Haley told an unmoved audience, and that’s “the wrong way to look at it.” Instead, “we need to do it based on merit: We need to go to our industries and say, ‘What do you need that you don’t have?’” In particular: “Think agriculture, think tourism, think tech — we want the talent that’s going to make us better.”
All right, some numbers matter. If, as Oxford economist Paul Collier hypothesizes, the rate at which diasporas grow is higher than the rate at which assimilated migrants exit them, national culture could dissolve in auto-segregated “parallel societies,” a term whose currency since it was coined in the Nineties (not at Oxford but at Bielefeld, Germany) has dramatically risen. And in the past year we’ve seen starkly 2.4 million reasons for national embarrassment under the harsh southwestern sun, a total from which a large number of deportations can and must be calculated. But Haley’s right in that there’s nothing mathematically precise or deliberate about, say, the 140,000 employment-based permanent residencies or 85,000 temporary specialized-worker visas allotted each fiscal year. Unrevised for a generation or more, the only thing these numbers tell is that the U.S. immigration system is directionless.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/nikki-haley-is-right-on-immigration/
