The ongoing crisis at the U.S.–Mexican border has one distinct virtue. It presents Americans with the opportunity to clarify various misconceptions about what is not merely the largest wave of migrants in our history, but also the most disorderly and disruptive. These misconceptions have distorted our rightful understanding of ourselves as the world’s preeminent nation of immigrants. And after more than five decades of evasion and outright policy failures, immigration is now at the core of the profound disaffection so many Americans express toward our elites and mainstream institutions. It therefore behooves us to stop and scrutinize the ill-founded assumptions on which various positions and policies — whether “pro-” or “anti-immigration” — have become not just based but entrenched.
But a funny thing happened on the way to this crisis. The size, relative suddenness, and sustained nature of the mass of humanity arriving at our southern border has rendered dramatically less salient what had long been the dominant frame of the ongoing national debate: the line between legal and illegal immigration. Our decades-long national preoccupation with illegal immigration has — at least for now — been eclipsed by the more pressing concern, among elected officials and citizens alike, of addressing the chaos not only along our southern border but also in our major metropolitan areas. Legality has been superseded by reality.
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