“Andy crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can't even imagine, or maybe I just don't want to.” -Red, in The Shawshank Redemption
Imagine the story of The Shawshank Redemption taking a different trajectory. Imagine instead there being a person at the end of the sewage pipe blocking the way, telling Andy that he has go back into the prison with the corrupt warden and his murderous lieutenant, that freedom isn’t his, that there is no future and no hope for him.
That’s basically what we’re doing when we reject refugees seeking asylum.
The Beijing Winter Olympics start in less than a week and a lot of attention will be on the Chinese government’s appalling human rights record, particularly with regards to Hong Kong and Xinjiang. In 2017, the government of Myanmar ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Rohingya. Many thousands are, to this day, stuck in squalid camps in Bangladesh. There have been widespread human rights abuses recently in Venezuela, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan among other places. We could invite them to come here. There is no iron law of nature that prevents us from the being the beacon of freedom that we say we are.
There are a number of studies showing the economic benefits that immigrants bring to the United States. I won’t belabor all the details, but if you want to review them, Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell’s Wretched Refuse? is a good place to start. There are all kinds of patriotic, ‘make America a demographic and cultural behemoth’ arguments for immigration. I won’t belabor those details either, but if you want review them, Matt Yglesias’ One Billion Americans, and especially chapter 5, is a good place to start.
There is a distinct case to be made for refugees though. There, the heart of the case is not the economic benefits of increasing immigration, nor the historical ‘America is a land of immigrants’ case nor the more prosaic ‘diversity is our strength’ case for immigration, as sound as all of those arguments are. It is a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ argument.
The location of one’s birth is obviously not earned and yet it has an enormous impact on one’s life trajectory. If you were born in the United States, you won a birth lottery. Most people weren’t so lucky, and some won a demonic kind of lottery in which their ‘prize’ was to be born into a situation awash in all manner of adversities. Some of those situations are so desperate that the humans enduring them stuff themselves into tiny barely seaworthy boats. They wade through rivers. They crawl toward freedom.
We all pursue happiness; it is one of our inalienable rights. And we all will fight fiercely for our children’s pursuit of their own happiness. There are enormous differences of belief that separate me from a populist Republican like Marco Rubio, but we both have children and we’d both crawl through sewage pipes for them if necessary. Immigrants are no different and whatever we do, we should not sneer at them for it nor portray them as dregs or mooches or jobs thieves or infected Skittles or whatever other demeaning, nonsense epithet becomes in vogue tomorrow among nativists.
Reasonable, equally kind people can disagree on exactly how many immigrants of exactly which type to admit in any given year. I happen to think, unsurprisingly, that we ought to admit a lot more immigrants of most types in most years. But regardless of the numbers, it would be humane of us all, decent of us all, to think about immigrants as if we were them, as if we were born and raised in dire straits in Laos or Ethiopia, without much hope for a better future locally but a lot of hope for a better future somewhere and believing the very best of somewhere to be the United States of America. We all care about our sons and daughters. We all want them to grow up in safe places where they can flourish, where- when we tell them that they can be anything they want- we aren’t lying. We should treat these humans crawling toward freedom first and foremost as co-members of Team Human and only secondarily, if at all, as outsiders from elsewhere.
When we see these immigrants struggling to find their way, each of us should think ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ and so root for them very hard. We should be proud of them for taking the risks necessary to come. When immigrants become American citizens, they should make us all prouder of America. Immigration ceremonies are deep, powerful, sacred rituals of civic faith in America. We should be honored, truly honored, to share a country with these people.
When we see Americans who despise and resent the immigrants among us, what we ought to see are people standing at the exit of the sewage pipe telling Andy Dufresne that he has go back into the prison, that freedom isn’t his, that there is no future and no hope for him.
And so with the start of the Beijing Winter Olympics, we should establish a new policy similar to what we’ve had for Cubans for many years. Any Hong Konger or Uighur who can make it out and make it to the United States gets asylum automatically with ‘credible fear’ being presumed from the outset. Seeing as they’ll be staying permanently, we should also create a path to citizenship. Then we should extend similar policies to the Rohingya and any other groups clearly facing persecution. When the real-world Andy Dufresne’s emerge from foul circumstance into freedom, we should welcome them and help them. Emerging from hardship into freedom- that is as American as America gets. We may not be able to prevent persecution everywhere but wherever a human is facing persecution, we want them to have a hope that if they can get out, if they can crawl through the metaphorical drainage pipe, we’ll be waiting with open arms.