Portraits of the Undocumented Immigrant: A Dialogue

Abstract

Few subjects can match the pure polarizing power of illegal immigration. Yet the scholarly literature has made surprisingly little effort even to identify, much less evaluate, the critical philosophical and empirical assumptions that have driven either the perceptions or the policy prescriptions of the opposing camps. This article seeks to fill that gap. Through a spirited dialogue between two fictional professors with sharply differing views, it paints contrasting portraits of undocumented immigrants. Two patterns emerge. First, the more restrictive positions invariably reflect what this article calls “aggregation” – a tendency to visualize undocumented immigrants en masse and to emphasize their collective impact on the host society. The less restrictive position, on the other hand, starts with a mental picture of the individual undocumented immigrant and thus emphasizes the impact of proposed policies on that individual. Second, the stricter view almost always emphasizes the lawbreaker component of undocumented immigrants’ identities, while the more lenient view almost always emphasizes the resident component. Because these differing depictions are necessary predicates for the opposing arguments, the article draws on the social science literature to test their empirical validity. While the impact of illegal immigration on the larger society cannot be reliably described as either a net positive or a net negative, the effects of the various policy proposals on the immigrants’ individual interests tend to be more clearly positive or negative. The data also reveal that undocumented immigrants behave far more like other residents than like other lawbreakers. The article uses these findings to offer a normative case for leniency.

Keywords: Immigration, Illegal Immigration, Undocumented Immigrants, Aliens, Citizenship