Newsletter #446 — April 16, 2026

Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess

Claude's Answers to Questions 2-6 on Immigration: What Are the Disagreements, and How Can They Best Be Addressed?

Note: Question 1 asked "on what issues, sub-issues, and facts is there broad agreement?" Claude's answer to that was shared in Newsletter 444.

Question 2: On what issues, sub-issues, and facts is there clear and strong disagreement?

Immigration disagreements are both factual and deep, touching fundamental questions about national identity, sovereignty, economic justice, and humanitarian obligation.

The sharpest disagreements:

• What the right level of legal immigration should be. The far right favors sharp reductions; much of the right favors some reductions and a shift in composition; the center generally favors maintaining or modestly adjusting current levels; the left and far left often favor expansion. These reflect fundamentally different views of what immigration policy should accomplish.
• How to prioritize among immigration categories: family reunification, skills- and employment-based immigration, diversity visas, and humanitarian admissions. Each reflects different values — family loyalty, economic self-interest, pluralism, and humanitarian obligation.
• What to do with the estimated ten to twelve million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. Options range from mass deportation to a path to citizenship, with various intermediate positions. This is probably the most consequential specific policy disagreement in the immigration debate.
• Whether sanctuary city and county policies are appropriate or represent dangerous defiance of federal law. This disagreement reflects both different views on federalism and different empirical assessments of whether cooperation between local police and immigration enforcement makes communities safer or less safe.
• The role of physical barriers at the southern border. Whether border walls and barriers are effective, worth their cost, and the right symbolic statement about American values is deeply contested.
• How to reform the asylum system. Nearly everyone agrees the current system is badly broken. But the proposed reforms differ sharply: some emphasize adding resources and legal pathways; others emphasize raising the evidentiary bar for claims and accelerating removal.
• The actual economic impacts of immigration. Does immigration at current levels raise or lower wages for low-skill native-born workers? What are the net fiscal impacts of undocumented immigration? These are empirical questions with contested answers in the economics literature.
• Whether current levels of immigration are changing American culture in ways that warrant policy response. This is the most culturally sensitive disagreement: whether concerns about the pace of cultural change and the preservation of national identity are legitimate policy considerations or thinly veiled ethnic prejudice.
• What obligations the US has to address the root causes of migration — poverty, violence, climate disruption, and failed governance in sending countries. The left tends to see this as essential to a humane immigration policy; the right generally prefers to focus on border enforcement and legal pathway management.

Question 3: Which disagreements are about facts, and which are about values?

Immigration debates combine empirical disputes — about economic impacts, crime rates, and integration outcomes — with deeply held value conflicts about national identity, sovereignty, and humanitarian obligation. Both dimensions are real, and conflating them makes the conversation worse.

Disagreements with significant factual content:

• The net fiscal impact of different categories of immigration. The fiscal calculus differs significantly depending on whether immigrants are high-skilled or low-skilled, legal or undocumented, and how long the time horizon used. This is resolvable through better and more transparent economic modeling.
• The effect of low-skill immigration on wages of native-born low-skill workers. This is genuinely contested in labor economics. Some studies find modest wage suppression in affected occupations; others find minimal effects or even complementarities. The answer matters a great deal for evaluating the fairness of current immigration levels to low-income Americans.
• Crime rates among immigrant populations. The preponderance of evidence shows that immigrants — both documented and undocumented — commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. But specific high-profile cases generate intense political attention, and the question of whether specific enforcement gaps have allowed specific crimes is partly answerable with data.
• The administrative capacity of immigration courts and border processing facilities. How much capacity is required to manage the current volume of asylum claims fairly and promptly is an operational question with empirical answers.
• Whether specific border security measures actually reduce illegal crossings. What effect did various enforcement measures in various periods have on crossing rates? This is an empirical question that can be studied.

Disagreements that are fundamentally about values:

• What obligations the United States owes to non-citizens seeking entry. Some believe national citizenship creates near-exclusive moral priority; others believe shared humanity creates significant obligations regardless of national boundaries. Data cannot settle this.
• Whether national sovereignty gives the government essentially unlimited discretion in who it admits. Some hold that a nation’s right to control its borders is nearly absolute. Others hold that this right is constrained by humanitarian obligations under international law and basic moral requirements.
• How much weight to give to cultural continuity and national cohesion as immigration policy considerations. Is it legitimate to consider the pace of cultural change in setting immigration levels? Reasonable people deeply disagree about this as a matter of values.
• Whether people who violated immigration law by entering illegally should be treated differently from those who followed legal processes. This involves genuine questions about the moral significance of legal status when people have built lives and raised children in the US.
• What balance to strike between the interests of potential immigrants and the interests of current low-wage American workers. When these interests conflict, whose interests should take priority is a question of distributive justice, not economics.

Question 4: For factual disagreements — what joint fact-finding process might help?

Several of the most consequential immigration disagreements have significant factual dimensions that better shared inquiry could address — if the process is designed to be genuinely credible across the political spectrum.

Productive areas for joint fact-finding:

• Comprehensive, transparent economic modeling of immigration’s fiscal and labor market impacts. A cross-ideological economic commission — including economists with different priors about immigration’s effects — could agree on shared methods for calculating costs and benefits of different immigrant categories, with explicit assumptions stated and results broken out by category, time horizon, and geography. The goal would be not a single definitive number but a shared framework for evaluating competing claims.
• Systematic evaluation of what border security measures actually work. A rigorous, cross-partisan review of the evidence on the effectiveness of various border security investments — physical barriers, technology, personnel, legal pathway expansion — in different geographic and policy contexts would help move beyond symbolic debates about walls to evidence-based discussion.
• Transparent data on asylum claim outcomes by nationality, claim type, and adjudicator. More systematic and publicly available data on what happens to asylum claims — how long they take, what the approval rates are, and what happens to people whose claims are denied — would inform both reform proposals and public debate.
• Longitudinal research on integration outcomes for different immigrant populations. How do immigrants and their children fare economically, civically, and socially over time? What factors predict successful integration? This is empirically researchable and policy-relevant.
• Crime data disaggregated by immigration status, collected with consistent methodology across jurisdictions. This would reduce the ability of specific high-profile cases to distort the broader picture in either direction.

A note on credibility: Immigration research faces a credibility problem on the right: many of the institutions that produce it are seen as having a stake in the answers. Joint fact-finding processes in this area will need to explicitly include researchers and institutions credible to skeptics of current immigration levels, not just advocates for them.

Question 5: For value disagreements — which differences fall within the limits of mutual tolerance, and which need to be actively opposed?

Immigration is an area where genuine value disagreements — about sovereignty, obligation, national identity, and fairness — coexist with rhetoric and conduct that crosses clear moral lines. Distinguishing between them is essential.

Differences that fall within the limits of mutual tolerance:

• Disagreements about the appropriate level of legal immigration — more, less, or the same. This is a legitimate policy debate in which good-faith people with genuine values reach different conclusions. Wanting fewer immigrants does not make someone a bigot; wanting more does not make someone naïve about national interest.
• Debates over whether family reunification or skills-based criteria should receive priority. Both positions reflect genuine values — family loyalty and social capital versus economic dynamism and labor market needs — and neither is morally disqualifying.
• Disagreements about what to do with long-established undocumented residents, including whether and what kind of path to legal status is appropriate. The moral considerations on multiple sides are genuine.
• The appropriate level of border enforcement and what enforcement measures are cost-effective and appropriate.
• Sanctuary city policies. Reasonable people disagree, in good faith, about both the empirical effects and the appropriate relationship between local and federal authority in immigration enforcement.
• The weight to give to cultural cohesion and pace of demographic change in setting immigration levels — as long as the concern is genuinely about social cohesion and not a proxy for ethnic exclusion.

Positions that need to be actively opposed:

• Dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants — describing them collectively as animals, vermin, an infestation, or invaders. This is not a policy position but a denial of the basic humanity of a category of people, and it has historically been a precursor to violence.
• Policies designed to cause cruelty as a deterrent. The deliberate separation of children from parents without adequate systems for reunification crossed a line that most Americans — including many supporters of strict enforcement — recognized as morally unacceptable. Using human suffering instrumentally as a tool of policy warrants active opposition.
• Violence or intimidation targeting immigrant communities. Whether by individuals or institutions, conduct that uses fear and physical threat to enforce immigration preferences is not political speech but a violation of persons.
• Ethnic scapegoating — attributing crime, economic problems, or cultural decline to immigrants as a group without evidentiary support. This is distinct from a policy argument about specific enforcement gaps; it is a collective attribution of blame that assigns guilt by national origin or ethnicity.
• Exploitation of undocumented workers by employers. Knowingly employing people in conditions that exploit their legal vulnerability — wage theft, dangerous conditions, intimidation using immigration status — is a serious violation of persons that warrants active opposition regardless of one’s overall immigration views.

Question 6: For beliefs that need to be actively opposed — how can opposition be most constructive?

• Legal challenges to policies that violate constitutional rights, statutory law, or international obligations. Immigration enforcement operates within a legal framework, and policies that violate that framework can be challenged in court. Legal defense organizations, civil liberties groups, and international human rights mechanisms all provide legitimate avenues for opposing specific unlawful practices.
• Consistent, specific, and carefully documented reporting. Dehumanizing rhetoric and inhumane policy are most effectively opposed not through counter-rhetoric but through specific, humanizing, carefully reported accounts of what is actually happening to actual people. Journalism that puts faces and stories to the abstract debate has historically been among the most effective tools for changing public opinion.
• Cross-partisan coalition building around enforcement of labor law. The exploitation of undocumented workers is an issue on which immigration advocates and labor rights advocates — including those who favor more restrictive immigration levels — can find genuine common cause.
• Elevating voices from within conservative and religious communities that oppose dehumanization. The most effective opposition to dehumanizing rhetoric within communities that are receptive to restriction arguments is not from outside those communities but from within them — from faith leaders, veterans, farmers, and others who share cultural identity with their audiences but draw a firm moral line at treating human beings as less than human.
• Political and electoral engagement. Immigration policy is ultimately set through democratic processes, and political advocacy, voter registration, and electoral engagement by affected communities and their allies are fundamental democratic tools.
• Community accompaniment and direct support. Whatever the legal and political battles, people currently navigating a broken system without legal help benefit from direct community support — legal representation, community accompaniment programs, know-your-rights training — that is not contingent on winning the larger political argument.
• Addressing the economic anxieties that make scapegoating effective. The most durable counter to ethnic scapegoating of immigrants is not moral instruction but economic conditions: when working-class Americans feel their economic situation is secure and improving, they are less susceptible to arguments that attribute their struggles to immigrants. Economic policies that genuinely address wage and economic security concerns reduce the audience for scapegoating arguments more effectively than direct counter-messaging.

Heidi and Guy's Concluding Thoughts

While the areas of commonality that Claude identified were to some degree surprising, the areas of disagreement were less so — meaning that they seemed accurate to us. We also agree with Claude's assertion that it is important to separate out the factual issues from the value issues, although that is a distinction that is often ignored. (It is often tempting, for instance, to bolster one's moral arguments by cherry-picking supportive data and disregarding data that supports the other side.) 

Claude noted for all three topics that factual issues and value issues tend to be intertwined, sometimes making the distinction difficult.  But in all three cases, it was able to suggest topics that could be investigated and potentially resolved with some kind of joint fact-finding initiative. And, for cases where that's not feasible, it was also able to suggest areas where disagreements might be accommodated in the spirit of coexistence. It also identified a few cases in which it thought that active opposition was indicated and how to constructively do that. 

Joint Fact-Finding

The key to effective joint fact-finding is to do the investigation in a way that constituents on all sides of the debate will trust. If the fact-finding process is seen as biased, it will do nothing to turn down the heat. If it is trusted, while it won't solve all the contested issues, one or two of those issues might become less contested, making finding a policy agreement on the other issues a bit more feasible. Yet, Claude was certainly correct when it said that "Immigration research faces a credibility problem on the right: many of the institutions that produce it are seen as having a stake in the answers. Joint fact-finding processes in this area will need to explicitly include researchers and institutions credible to skeptics of current immigration levels, not just advocates for them."

Joint fact-finding efforts were much more common in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. For example, early in our careers, we helped staff a major (and we think largely successful) effort to resolve questions about the risks associated with the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant just south of Boulder, Colorado, as well as a number of other similar efforts related to energy and water facilities siting which were extremely controversial at the time.

To give you a bit more of an idea of the potential of this way of approaching factual disputes, we asked Claude to generate this report on successful joint fact-finding efforts. 

Value Disagreements

As we looked at Claude's answers to the question, "For value disagreements — which differences fall within the limits of mutual tolerance, and which need to be actively opposed?" we realized that we should have asked how the differences that fall within limits of mutual tolerance might best be addressed.  

Here, we think that it would be useful to make a distinction between personal moral beliefs and public policies based on those moral issues — a distinction that we didn't make in the exercise, but should add. 

At the personal level, Claude's assessment suggests that there is broad support for giving people the freedom to advocate for or against particular immigration policies and, by implication, the inclusion of particular groups within US society. It was also clear that this freedom did not extend to dehumanizing rhetoric, ethnic scapegoating, intimidation, violence, or exploitation. 

At the level of public policy, there was an implicit recognition that the government must use a rule-of-law-based process to make decisions regarding controversial issues and that, in a democracy, we agree to abide by those decisions. This, of course, comes with the proviso that, in future elections and policy-making processes, we have the opportunity to petition the government to reverse those decisions. 

This way of thinking about things obviously raises difficult questions in cases where individual communities, such as sanctuary cities, attempt to prevent the enforcement of controversial federal government policies. Here we enter into one of the most powerful and constructive forms of social disagreement — nonviolent protest and civil disobedience.

Democracy Should Be an Effective Dispute-Handling System

As we observed in earlier writing, a well-functioning democracy is a dispute-handling system. Our legislative system should, if it were working well, be able to weigh the input it gets from the various interest and constituency groups, and balance out those interests in ways that are seen as wise, equitable, and legitimate by most everyone.  This process is not working right now at the federal level, but a variety of models are being developed and tested at the local and state levels, such as citizen's assemblies and other deliberative forums. (And others, such as joint fact-finding, can be rediscovered from earlier eras when the United States' civil society was more functional.) 

We need to create and participate in more and more of such processes, and demand that they — or similar processes — be tested for use at the federal level on societal-level conflicts (such as immigration) as well.  Here we are not suggesting that citizens' assemblies replace Congress, but rather be used as an advisory bodies, much as special commissions have been used in the past. If, for instance, all fifty states held citizen's assemblies on immigration, and then representatives of each of those assemblies came together for one or more national assemblies, such groups could likely come up with a credible set of recommendations about how to move forward on immigration that would have wide legitimacy, and, hopefully, be more likely to be enacted by Congress.

Looking at the suggestions Claude came up with for handling disagreements that are beyond the level of tolerance — things that need to be actively opposed — Claude is essentially saying "utilize the system" to fight these battles: legal challenges, carefully documented reporting, coalition building, political and electoral engagement. This is good advice — to the extent that it works. As suggested above, we would add using nonviolent direct action, such as the kind that occurred in Minneapolis in January 2026 in response to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation there.  When "the system" is broken, as ours now is in so many ways, it is necessary to create new, more effective systems for handling both "tolerable differences" and "intolerable differences." We will be discussing possible processes and systems a lot more in future newsletters — that is beyond the scope of what we can do here.

A Way Out

What we think is particularly interesting about Claude's take on both the commonalities and the differences is that it shows that there really are constructive things that can be done to address issues as controversial as these.  As Bill Zartman wrote years ago, in reference to "ripeness" that in order to promote ripeness (i.e., a good time to negotiate a solution to a long-running conflict), the parties must realize first, that they are in a hurting stalemate. In other words, they must agree that all parties are getting hurt more than they are benefiting from a situation, yet they cannot win the conflict outright. But that, in itself, is not enough to make a conflict ripe for resolution. The parties must also be able to see a "way out."  Clearly, immigration is at the hurting stalemate stage, and has been there for quite some time. Claude's observations suggest a scaffolding of a variety of ways out.  It hardly offers "an answer" or "the answer," but it does give us a good list of things that need to be addressed. In our minds, it was weaker on the "how," but that's our job for coming days.  

Again, to read Claude’s answers to the same questions, but focused on climate and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs,

Read Claude's Full Response

Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!

In order to prevent bots, spammers, and other malicious content, we are asking contributors to send their contributions to us directly. If your idea is short, with simple formatting, you can put it directly in the contact box. However, the contact form does not allow attachments.  So if you are contributing a longer article, with formatting beyond simple paragraphs, just send us a note using the contact box, and we'll respond via an email to which you can reply with your attachment.  This is a bit of a hassle, we know, but it has kept our site (and our inbox) clean. And if you are wondering, we do publish essays that disagree with or are critical of us. We want a robust exchange of views.

Contact Us

About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam).  Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us. 

If you like what you read here, please ....

Subscribe to the Newsletter