Last week Arnold Schwarzenegger uttered favorable words about the “Minuteman Project”, private citizens – President Bush calls them “vigilantes” – who have begun patrolling the California-Mexico border to turn back illegal entrants. It is a sign of the oddities of the immigration issue that libertarian Glenn Reynolds reacted positively to those remarks and traditionalist Stephen Bainbridge negatively.
Governor Schwarzenegger isn’t a “close the borders” nativist of the Mark Krikorian stamp. He advocates enactment of a guest-worker program along the lines that the President has proposed. That nuance is unlikely to get much notice, especially within a Republican Party where arguments about immigration are growing steadily shriller and less analytical.
Not ignored in the turmoil, but strangely misperceived, is the question that ought to be of central importance in the middle of the War on Terror: What immigration regime will do the best job of keeping enemies out of our country and of limiting their effectiveness if they do slip it? The anti-immigration faction has seized on national security as if it self-evidently mandated restricting the number of people coming into the U.S. That is, I think, almost opposite to the reality. Properly implemented, an “open door” policy will make us more secure than thousands more Border Patrol agents and a hundred Minuteman Projects.
At the present time, it is relatively easy for ill-intentioned foreigners to enter the United States and remain here undetected. What makes it easy is the existence of a major support network for illegal aliens, enterprises that supply clandestine transportation, phony identification documents and advice on eluding the clutches of the INS. This infrastructure wasn’t built to support terrorism, but it can be adapted to that role. Tearing it down through police methods would be extremely difficult. Not only is it firmly established, but it provides services that are useful to American employers as well as to would-be employees. As experience with “alien roundups” has demonstrated, public support for harsh measures to stem illegal entrants is largely theoretical. In practice, hardly anybody wants the aliens in his own neighborhood deported, just those who work across town.
Let’s imagine an alternative to the current system. Suppose that anyone who wished to enter the U.S. could obtain an identity card from the nearest American consulate. Applicants would be fingerprinted, have DNA samples taken and be checked against a database of undesirables. They would also be warned that their ID’s carry no eligibility for welfare benefits. Holders would, however, be allowed to apply for state driver’s licenses and to work for anyone who would hire them. If they became destitute, the U.S. government would give them a free meal, a change of clothing and transportation back home.
That is a better deal than alien smugglers can offer. Their industry would wither in a trice, with no clientele but people on the “undesirables” list. The Border Patrol would have a real chance of seriously hampering their operations. Meanwhile, the government would know the identities of, and possess fingerprint and DNA data for, virtually every non-citizen within our borders. That is clearly not an attractive scenario for aliens who wish to carry out mischief.
While it wouldn’t be a guaranteed preventative, this form of “open borders” is less risky than trying to turn back the tide of willing workers seeking willing employers. And because reducing terrorist risks ought to be a high priority right now, it would be a desirable policy even if an influx of newcomers from Mexico and other lands had economic or cultural drawbacks. Sacrificing a small quantity of opulence for the sake of a large increment in safety isn’t a bad bargain, and I worry more about another 9/11 than about whether Spanish will become the official language of Arizona several decades from now.
Not that I believe that either of those hypotheticals will come to pass. Freeing up markets never damaged an economy yet, and why do we fear that immigrants’ children will stick to Spanish when all the rest of the world is learning to speak English? If we were to give freedom a chance in the realm of immigration, we would almost certainly discover that the elaborate apparatus of control makes no one better off and that its perpetuation from generation to generation is more a matter of superstition than expediency.
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