What do we want? Audacity.

As is often the case, it’s easy to know what we don’t want. We don’t want to continue the cycle of on-again-off-again enforcement.

We don’t want another “one time” amnesty with promises of future enforcement.

We don’t want another four years of false debate about whether immigrants or Americans opposed to mass immigration are to be feared or loathed.

What do we want? Audacity.

We want our leaders to have the audacity to say we welcome immigrants in the numbers that we choose. We best honor our immigration tradition when we manage it in the national interest, with no animosity toward immigrants, but generosity toward the national community.

Take it from NumbersUSA’s spiritual godmother:

How many? Which ones?

Answer those two questions correctly and you’ve got yourself a winning immigration policy. Many Americans – including politicians – don’t know this, but policymakers have solved each of those problems before, just never at the same time.

In 1924, Congress (remember: Congress sets immigration limits; the president executes the law) limited immigration to a significant but manageable few hundred thousand people per year.

In 1965, Congress eliminated discrimination based on national origin.

A combination of those two approaches is what Congress promised in 1965, but they broke the promise. Every Congress since has refused to make amends.

George Fishman, who has served in both the Executive and Legislative Branches, likens Congress’ failure to combine the best of 1924 and 1965 to a Greek tragedy. Three excerpts:

Part I:

“Roy Beck, founder of NumbersUSA, recently set forth an audacious hypothesis that the 1924 Act “was the greatest federal action in U.S. history — other than the Civil War Constitutional Amendments — in advancing the economic interests of the descendants of American slavery, and perhaps of all American workers”. The Act led to a tighter labor market, resulting in an openness and even a desire by employers both North and South to recruit Black workers. This, in turn, opened the door for the Great Migration of millions of Blacks out of the South and helped pave the way for the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. And it turned America into a middle-class society for whites and for Blacks. Beck’s hypothesis is not only plausible, it is the most compelling reading of the historical evidence.”

Part II:

“It is uncontestably true that the actual debate over the 1924 Act, in Congress and in the public square, focused to a large extent on often ugly racial rationales for restriction, rather than economic and other factors that had previously played a much more important role.”

Part III:

“In 1965 in the heady days of the civil rights revolution, Congress in its zeal to excise from federal law the demon of national origins quotas restarted mass immigration (most likely unintentionally). Congress could have easily accomplished the former without the latter, but it did not do so. Not only have the results been disastrous for our country, but the civil rights revolution itself was indebted to the very 1924 Act that had made quotas permanent. This all reads like a Greek tragedy. But the really tragic thing is that it actually happened. To us.”

Our story doesn’t have to end in tragedy. The path to redemption was laid by the likes of Barbara Jordan, and lit by the NumbersUSA citizen lobby. Our job is to point policymakers to the “road less traveled,” and assure them that it need not be the “road not taken.”

Adapted from a NumbersUSA newsletter (November 14th, 2024)