You will notice that this post is a break from covering our experiences as foreigners living in Taiwan. Living abroad can bring a whole host of positive experiences, and that has undeniably been the case here in Taiwan. Another fantastic benefit to living in other countries is the chance to put your home country in a new light. Given the volatile political climate in the US at the moment, I’ve decided to start a series of posts that aim at discussing how life abroad has influenced my view of life at home. I’ve spent a lot of time recently reflecting on my responsibility as an American living abroad. And I’ve spent a lot of time in recent weeks, reaching out, talking with friends and strangers about the canker sore that is American immigration policy.

Immigration policy from an expat perspective

Before I get too far into what immigration looks like from my perspective, I should quickly identify my own bias before anyone jumps to conclusions. I am not for open borders in the US. There was a time and place for open borders in American history, but that time is long past. At the same time, I am not for immigration policy that only accepts limited numbers of “acceptable” foreigners. What lies down that road is a clear and slippery slope to authoritarian policies similar to those that existed in the former Eastern Bloc. A complete shutdown in immigration except for a chosen few always leads to wielding a slew of authoritarian powers to enforce that policy. I am never going to accept anything that looks like authoritarian norms in the US.

I consider my perspective to be unusual because I have had the fortune to see first hand the effects of a range of immigration policies. Including at the beginning of the reunification of Germany. I was one of the first American exchange students to stay in the former DDR just a few years after reunification, and I was witness to the chaos that resulted in the early to mid 90’s as a result of a change in border policies. My perspective is that of a native born citizen of the US. However, I have also lived over a third of my life as an alien in other countries, and my experiences have been all across the gamut. I lived with a family in high school as an exchange student. I spent time on a student visa in Europe with barely enough money to eat. I had almost a decade in Central America, where I lived and ran a small business in the limbo of not having a clear path to permanent residency. Because of that, I went to great trouble and cost to not overstay my temporary visa there. For the last two years, I have been living on a employee-sponsored work visa in Asia, somewhat similar to someone on a H-2B work visa in the United States.

Perspective from the outside-in

I have been exceedingly fortunate in the opportunities I have been given to travel and see the world from many different perspectives. But my earliest memories, and the core of who I am, comes from living on a small farm in rural America. I can genuinely say that there is nothing like the rural life in the American countryside. For all my good fortune in living abroad, I am extremely thankful that parents gave me the gift of growing up in Smalltown, USA.

My many blessings include a variety of opportunities to live abroad as a non-immigrant resident. I call myself that because, regardless of the laws in place in the various countries I have lived, I had at no time a plan to apply for foreign citizenship. My current situation in Asia does include a clear path to permanent residency, but that was not why I came here. However, living as a foreigner did afford me the chance to get to know a lot of other foreigners from a wide range of countries who did make the choice to expatriate, or immigrate. All of their stories are unique to the circumstances of those individuals and the policies of the various countries. What has not been unique is that in each country I have lived, immigration has been a touchy subject.

Divisiveness is what we have in common

Right now, there are a lot of factors contributing to the divisiveness in the US. At the moment, immigration is one of the foremost. I have seen and heard a lot of different positions, had a lot of conversations, and struggled to find a way to have successful conversations. Immigration is a divisive issue, but there is common ground to be found. People don’t want human trafficking in any form. People want to be safe. People want those that break the law appropriately punished for their crimes. People don’t want bad people entering the country. The problem is that once you get past no human trafficking in any form, everyone has a different perspective of what safety is, the nature of “appropriate,” and what a bad person looks like.

Immigration is not just the hot-button issue of the season. It is a long-standing policy struggle that has gone so many different directions in the US since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The history of the US is a beautiful story of people coming from all the corners of the earth to take part in a democracy and a free society that believes that everyone is born with inalienable rights. It is also a story that includes a few chapters when we have lost sight of those ideals as a country. For example, the “Mexican repatriation,” where politicians used the justification of high rates of unemployment to “repatriate” or deport massive numbers of Mexican-Americans in the 1930s regardless of their immigration status. Even US citizens of Mexican descent were deported or coerced to “repatriate.” Ironically, it may not have had the intended effect of increasing “native” employment. To go deeper, read a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research here.

How to move forward

For the purpose of this discussion, I would like to focus on reasonable proposals to current US Immigration policy. I base sugesstions off of examples I have seen in other areas of the world. Namely, my experiences in Costa Rica, which has one of the highest percentages of immigrants living in a Latin American country, and Taiwan, which has a high population density and a relatively low percentage of immigrants. Both situations have their lessons that I believe we should be looking at in a national discussion on how to fix immigration in the US. I will be posting on what I feel is not only a way to move forward towards reasonable immigration reform, but also lessons on what America should consider of as it strives for a just and beneficial immigration policy.