Mexico’s foreign minister scored an “own goal”, as they say in metric football, when he declared that his country might seek redress for Arizona’s Proposition 200 through an international human rights tribunal. This invocation of alleged treaty rights was scarcely necessary – American courts are notably solicitous of the rights of aliens – and his words provoked Rush Limbaugh to weigh in on the side of the nativist forces. Rush has hitherto been an economic libertarian, who has emphatically not added his voice to calls for a restrictionist immigration policy. His change of front made shriller-than-thou Mark Krikorian giddy with delight and worried “open borders” advocate John Fund.
Mr. Krikorian was particularly pleased with a few of Rush’s remarks that could be construed as lending credence to the quasi-socialist opinion that immigrants depress wages and are bad for the economy. That was doubtless an aberration. The main Limbaugh concern was national security, and the burden of his argument was that any economic benefits of immigration are too dearly bought if a porous border facilitates the atrocities of terrorists. As Adam Smith said, safety takes precedence over opulence.
That concern is legitimate, which is why it is vital not to let it become a hook for measures that are antithetical to both opulence and safety. Anti-terrorism is a handy cloak for opponents of President Bush’s immigration reform proposals, but their arguments on this point, where not disingenuous, are poorly thought-out. Documented aliens working openly and legally in this country are far less dangerous than vast numbers of people slipping in secretly and hiding in the shadows.
A policy of forcibly keeping willing workers away from employers who wish to hire them has bred alien smuggling, document forging, identity theft and other industries that smooth the route not just for prospective agricultural workers and housemaids but also for anyone who wishes to come into the United States for malign purposes. We can try to stanch the inflow by expanding the Border Patrol and laying 2,000 miles of barbed wire and high-tech sensors. It might be more efficacious, however, to take the profit out of arranging clandestine crossings. If Mexicans could enter the U.S. legally under a reasonable guest worker program, the infrastructure on which terrorist entrants rely would decay. The effect would be the same as adding thousands of border guards, with the fillip that the government would make money from more vigorous economic activity instead of spending it on a more bloated bureaucracy.
Supporters of a more rational immigration regime would do well, I think, to emphasize the security advantages of legal over illegal labor and of utilizing the Border Patrol to watch for Islamic radicals rather than Roman Catholic farm hands. Such considerations should be persuasive to those restrictionists whose primary motive is the prevention of terrorism. Turning the debate in that direction will also show up the Krikorian-style restrictionists for what they are: economic leftists who think that it is a good idea to drive up wages through artificial constraints on the supply of labor. Their policies may make a few lucky workers rich, but they leave the country as a whole poorer.
As a revealing illustration of restrictionist logic, look at Mr. Krikorian’s lament that hard working immigrants compete for summer jobs, compelling “American teenagers” to work harder for their pay. He doesn’t pause to ask whether consumers are better off when entry-level jobs serve as adolescent sinecures or how useful it is to anyone if they instill the lesson that “work” need not be laborious.
The fundamental question in the immigration debate is, Should the government maintain an immense apparatus aimed at preventing voluntary, intrinsically beneficial economic relationships, one that has little prospect of accomplishing its objectives and that creates an underworld in which unsavory characters can move freely, or should it favor freedom and the profit motive? President Bush’s answer, not Mark Krikorian’s, is the conservative one.
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