Is There a Right to Immigrate?

I can’t stand it when people on TV proclaim that controlling immigration is “unconstitutional.” If we don’t take certain refugees in, we are somehow going against the Constitution.

I don’t see anything in the Constitution that mandates that we have to allow in the country anybody who wants to settle here. Moreover, the Constitution only applies to people living in the US, not to people who would like to live here.

As a practical matter we can’t absorb the large number of people who want to live here, whether from Mexico, Guatemala, Syria, or any other country. Our economy isn’t generating enough jobs, so many of these immigrants would have to go on welfare, straining an already overloaded system.

Is it wrong to turn away refugees? I don’t think so, because we simply can’t take people from every country having problems. Syria is the worst one right now, but Central America, Somalia, and other parts of Africa are not safe places, particularly if you are a minority tribe or a Christian or the “wrong” kind of Muslim.

While we feel terrible for people suffering in these countries, we are forced to limit the number of refugees we allow into the country. A better solution would be for the United Nations to do something for a change. I’m not sure what the UN could do against the human rights violators in those troubled countries, but the UN should be doing something to mitigate these people’s suffering. Then they wouldn’t have to be uprooted from their homelands and migrate to other countries.