Stromata Blog

The Followership Gap

George W. Bush has accomplished an amazing feat that will go into the history books. He is the first President ever to see his approval rating plummet into the low 30’s without the burden of a recession, a major scandal or an unsuccessful war. The economy, with economic growth last quarter in the five percent range, unemployment at 4.7 percent and the Dow not far from an all-time high, is in a state that would ordinarily be called “booming”. Scandal is at the kerfuffle level, roughly comparable to the Eisenhower Administration (which did have Sherman Adams but isn’t remembered for a “culture of corruption”). The war in Iraq has devolved into skirmishes against urban terrorists – unpleasant but with few casualties and no defeats. Compared to the Korean War, not to mention Vietnam, it is peacetime. (For a statistical picture, showing both good and bad, vide the liberal Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, highlights of which are summarized by All Things Conservative.)

Had anyone painted this scenario a year ago, the unanimous expectation would have been that the White House’s approval rating would be in the upper 50’s, at worst, and that the Republican Party would be cruising toward expanded Congressional majorities in November. What accounts for the wide divergence between rational expectations and reality?

It’s easy to blame (or credit, depending on one’s POV) the incessantly negative news media, to whom all events favorable to the Administration are not worth mentioning. For instance, over the three weeks ended last Friday, CBS, NBC and ABC carried a total of six stories about the economic growth and unemployment rates, compared to 183 on the high price of gasoline. Still, it’s hard to believe that the Old Media are that influential. How have they been able to do now what they couldn’t accomplish in the run-up to the 2004 election?

In any event, documenting media bias leads nowhere. Its practitioners will not be coaxed, cajoled or embarrassed into acting differently. It’s clear, to take an egregious example, that the New York Times favors an “insurgent” victory in Iraq. Its rush to defend Abu Musab al-Zarqawi against ridicule is the final proof of that. Can journalists with such a mindset be persuaded to give fair treatment to men whom they regard as warmongers, torturers and tyrants (that is, to people like you, me and George W. Bush)? Not too likely.

The dimming of the President’s standing with the public stems, I think, not from the ferocity of the attacks on him, which hasn’t increased markedly since he took office, but from the sudden absence of defenders. It used to be that conservative pundits – not an inconsiderable force in the aggregate – refuted leftist slurs and publicized the positive accomplishments of the Administration. Now they ignore all that in favor of a steady assault of their own.

Here we are, in the middle of a war against a foe as barbarous as Hitler or Stalin, and right-wing blogs whine on and on about – immigration and earmarks. Those are not trivial issues, but their urgency is dubious. For decades, the U.S. has lacked a coherent immigration policy. Having one would be nice (albeit my vision of an intelligent policy is quite a bit different from that of the “wall off the border” crowd), but it is a nice thing that can wait. The money and troops that we spend sealing off a border that has experienced no major terrorist penetration in the past four years are resources that won’t be available for combating the Islamofascists in their lairs.

The propensity of Republican Congressmen to forget fiscal responsibility in the face of the temptation to build local roads, bridges, museums and monuments is annoying. I would be more sympathetic to Porkbusters, though, if its members had shown more enthusiasm for the President’s effort to gin up backing for Social Security reform. Pork is a minor component of the budget. Social Security is a huge social conflict waiting to trouble the next couple of generations. If we are going to address either one in wartime (and doing so at least won’t be a material diversion, unlike succumbing to anti-immigration mania), why not concentrate on the tyrannosaur in the living room rather than the mouse?

A Republican defeat in the coming elections won’t be a literal disaster, but it will mean two years or more of turmoil, during which Islamofascism will grow in strength and confidence. The investigations that Speaker-to-be Pelosi promises will absorb the time and energy of the officials who ought to be directing our military efforts and defenses against domestic terrorism. They also will undoubtedly expose so much of our covert anti-terrorist strategies that the entire enterprise will have to begin all over again. Meanwhile, Democratic majorities will do their best to cripple the Iraqi campaign financially and make sure that Iran, Syria and North Korea are left unmolested. If we’re lucky, they might approve doing something about Darfur.

President Bush is not a conservative par excellence, but how often have I heard conservatives say that they would for the time being sink their differences with Al Gore or John Kerry or Hillary Clinton, if only he (or she) were serious about winning the War on Terror? How is it that the same indulgence is not extended to a Republican President of no worse than moderately right-wing leanings? The country needs good leadership, but it’s time for the Right to offer good followership, too.

The Immigration Petard

In the teeth of unmitigated economic good news, the Dow lost nearly 100 points today, and the S&P 500 was down over one percent. The explanation put forward by conventional market watchers is that investors fear the Fed will raise interest rates more than expected to counteract the inflationary pressures of a tight labor market. That might make sense if the prices of gold and oil hadn’t both dropped. Long-term bond rates continued to edge up, but that is to be expected during an expansion. If they were flat or falling, we’d be hearing doom and gloom, as we did just a couple of months ago, about the inversion of the yield curve.

No, I suspect that the real cause of the market’s moodiness was a piece of economic news not reflected in statistics: The decline began at just about the moment when it became clear that the only immigration bills with a chance in Congress are the enforcement-only, close-the-borders-and-expel-the-illegals variety.

The restrictionists are unlikely to pass anything that will reduce the current illegal population by a large percentage, but the momentum is running their way. What that means is that we are on the road to a voluntary reduction in the size of the domestic work force and therefore of the U.S. economy. Cutting the number of workers will not make us richer. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, there are not enough employable, non-working legal residents to replace more than a fraction of the entire illegal work force. That means that the economy will lose the goods and services that the lost workers now produce. A small number of workers will benefit as labor scarcity drives up wages, but that is redistribution, not economic growth. The rest of us will be poorer.

It hardly need be said the our present immigration policy is a shambles. One might almost think that its goal was to harass anyone foolish enough to try to obey the law. Still, I’m bemused that immigration has suddenly leaped upward in the roster of Big Issues, with the effect of either splitting the Republican Party disastrously (according to David Frum) or giving it a trump card issue in November (per Mickey Kaus). Prosperity and low unemployment don’t naturally prompt worries about cheap labor taking away jobs. Nor can the development be credibly linked to post-9/11 national security concerns. There’s a natural worry about terrorists crossing the border from Mexico, but why would suicide bombers choose that difficult and somewhat dangerous route when they can walk across a wholly unpoliced 3,000 mile border with Canada?

President Bush’s motive for seeking a guest worker program is, at least, discernible. Aside from his general free trade convictions, he would like to give the National Action Party a visible political success to boost its candidates in this year’s Mexican elections. PAN is a pretty decent friend of the United States, while the other two major Mexican parties represent Castroism and corruption. Giving voters a reason to like it seems like a sensible realpolitik idea, and the proposed program is very modest in scope. It ought not really to be controversial.

But it is, especially among a large segment of conservative Republicans, including many, such as the editors of National Review who can’t be dismissed out of hand as nativists or protectionists. It’s astonishing to hear populist rhetoric in a quasi-socialist vein from such quarters, chiding “corporate interests” for seeking “cheap labor”. Will they next demand that Wal-Mart unionize or praise municipal “living wage” mandates?

It’s strange, too, that supporters of liberalization in the Third World are oblivious to the impact of American restrictionist measures on the Mexican economy. A sharp reduction in remittances from the U.S., now estimated at three percent of the Mexican GDP, would almost certainly reverse the economic growth of the past six years. Will that inspire Mexicans to rally behind President Fox’s real, albeit limited, steps toward a freer economy? Or will the Castroite Left use the ensuing recession as a springboard to power? Decide for yourself which is the more likely scenario.

In the long run, Mexico needs a large dose of free enterprise, but a mauled economy will remain stuck in short-run thinking. At the moment, several million Mexicans are pursuing the economically rational course of selling their labor where it will command the highest price. The best outcome will be for them to accumulate capital, go home to start their own businesses and spread the economic and political ideas that they have picked up north of the border. Mexico can hasten the evolution by becoming friendlier to business. America can stop it by expelling the capitalist leaven.

Many conservative restrictionists have, I realize, motives for their position that go beyond economics. They are repelled by the racism of groups like La Raza that hoist the “pro-immigration” banner. Rallies of illegal aliens waving Mexican flags, smarmy psuedo-piety from modernist Christian liberals and the bien-pensant habit of treating immigration laws as unworthy of obedience are not the way to win popularity with a right-of-center (or center-of-center) audience. But irritation is not a sound basis for policy making. Every cause has its unattractive fringe. (The restrictionist camp has its anti-Catholic and openly racist elements, but it wouldn’t be fair to call David Frum a bigot just because Donald Collins is.)

The other non-economic bugbear is multiculturalism, for which I have as little patience as any man. It does seem to me, though, that anyone who fears that an influx of Mexican dishwashers, cabbage pickers and textile workers will greatly alter the American way of life has missed the predominant cultural trend of the last hundred years, which has been the overwhelming of local traditions and folkways by American wares. Mexico is becoming Americanized a lot faster than the U.S. is turning into Mexico.

There is a genuine threat to our culture, but that is the threat from within, from all of the native-born Americans who hare after post-modernism, New Ageism, feminism, Marxism and similar anti-civilization ideologies. Lower class Mexicans, to the extent that they are a factor in the greater cultural war, are more for us than against. They haven’t yet grown sophisticated enough to toss aside the last 3,000 years and seek the victory of barbarism in one generation.

Having said all that, it’s hard to mourn the Rube Goldberg-ish “reform” bill that died in the Senate, which, on first impression, lives down to all the canards about designing horses by committee. I’d like to offer my own proposal:

1. Stop worrying about guest workers, visa limitations, etc. Let anyone who wishes go to an American consulate and, for a small fee to cover the cost of a background check, obtain a U.S. “foreign national identity card” (as high-tech and forgery-proof as technology makes possible). Getting the card would require giving fingerprints and DNA samples. It would be denied to applicants with serious disqualifications (major criminal violations, ties to terrorist organizations, untreated infectious diseases and the like). Those whose ambition of finding work in America was obviously a pipe dream would be tactfully counseled to seek opportunities elsewhere (and warned that the card comes with no welfare entitlements attached).

2. Holders of an FNID could enter the U.S., work here and obtain driver’s licenses (clearly marked with their foreign status). They could not vote, hold government jobs, or receive welfare benefits. (Cardinal Mahoney could feed them if he wanted to.) If they became destitute, they would have the right to a free meal, a change of clothes and transportation back home.

3. Wages earned by an FNID holder would be subject to Social Security and Medicare tax, but they would not be covered by those programs. Instead, their taxes would be set aside in individual accounts for their benefit, which they could draw on after reaching age 62 or to pay medical expenses.

4. FNID holders would be required to report their current addresses to Homeland Security and make occasional personal appearances at DHS offices. Failure to report or commission of a crime would be grounds for revocation of the card and immediate expulsion from the country (tempered by leniency for reasonable cause).

5. Persons currently living illegally in the U.S. would be eligible to obtain FNID’s upon payment of a moderately higher fee. To the extent that they had traceable FICA/HI payments, those amounts would be transferred to individual retirement/medical accounts, from which the extra fee could be deducted.

6. Legal immigrants, who have been playing by the rules and often suffering great annoyance as a consequence, would be rewarded by accelerated eligibility for citizenship and other incentives (which I haven’t yet figured out).

7. Conditions for obtaining citizenship would not change. For instance, time in the country as a FNID holder would not count toward the residency requirement.

Though refinements are doubtless needed, a system like this seems to me to combine economic rationality, enforceability and attention to national security needs. It wouldn’t solve all problems or satisfy those who simply want a smaller, whiter America (not, I emphasize, a group that includes a majority of restrictionists). It would be a lot more reasonable than the current shambles and would ameliorate what threatens to become an intractable controversy of the kind that we do not need in the middle of a war.

Addendum: One detail of this proposal that needs work is what to do about people who repeatedly come into the country, can’t find jobs and then take advantage of the free meal, clothes and transportation that I’ve suggested. I was going to say, after three or four times they should be shipped to Guantanamo Bay – except that that might prove to be an incentive.

Clouds of Immigration

Thinking about immigration seems to cloud many minds. Certainly it clouded those of the organizers of last weekend’s protests against immigration restrictions. Televised images of massed Mexican flags did more for the nativist cause than a hundred speeches by Tom Tancredo, as witness libertarian Instapundit’s reaction: “I’ve generally favored open immigration, but I find myself feeling less and less that way in the face of mass rallies by illegal immigrants like this one. . . . I think that these marches just made passage of strict immigration laws much more likely.”

It’s quite possible, of course, that the self-anointed leaders of the “Latino movement” wouldn’t mind getting the opposite of what they say they want. Their political power would melt away if their “constituents” assimilated, and a harsh U.S. crackdown on immigration would do much to hinder assimilation.

Also doing the pro-immigration cause no good are spokesmen who try to turn the issue into a religious question. I noted a particularly absurd example a while ago. Now Hillary Clinton echoes it, declaring that a House-passed border enforcement bill “would literally criminalize the Good Samaritan and probably even Jesus himself”. That kind of pseudo-pious rhetoric may appeal to New Age syncretists but can only irritate Christians who take the Bible seriously and prefer not to see it trivialized for political purposes.

Well, I’m not much bothered when leftists act counterproductively. Alas, the immigration cloud also overshadows minds on the Right. It is more than a little startling to see Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, quoting favorably this passage from Loony Left former economist Paul Krugman:

Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.

That's why it’s intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants do “jobs that Americans will not do.” The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays – and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants.

But Krugman is the one who is “intellectually dishonest” here – “dishonest”, because he is certainly in possession of all of the pertinent facts and enough economic knowledge to analyze them. The President, if he were wrong, would merely be mistaken, not dishonest. And he is not mistaken.

According to the figure most widely tossed about by restrictionists, about 11 million illegal aliens live in the United States. I’ve seen no statistics on how many hold jobs, but their circumstances are such that nonworking relatives and the unemployed are likely to be a small minority of the total. Let’s estimate that 8 million of them work. If they vanished, what would happen to their positions?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were, as of February 2006, 7.2 million unemployed Americans. The vast majority are frictionally unemployed and will, within a relatively short period, be hired for existing jobs. A better measure of how many could replace illegal workers is the number of long-term unemployed (over 26 weeks), which is 1.4 million (some of whom are simply unemployable owing to personal habits or complete lack of useful skills). Another possible source of additional labor is “discouraged workers”, estimated at c. 400,000. Higher wages could also attract some nonworkers into the labor force or encourage current jobholders to moonlight. All in all, though, finding 8 million new job holders looks like an insuperable challenge at any price.

Nor would any price be paid. A great many low-skill jobs exist solely because inexpensive labor can be found. Rather than increase wages, employers will do without. Beyond a certain point, they must do without if they are going to earn a profit.

Hence, if immigrant laborers vanished, 8 million natives would not spring up to harvest crops, roof houses, cook hamburgers, rake leaves, watch babies, clean homes, etc. Rather, many of those jobs would disappear, and the remainder would cost more. Both of those results would leave the country poorer. We would lose several million workers’ worth of goods and services, and all of us except the lucky beneficiaries of a tighter labor market would suffer a diminution of purchasing power.

One can imagine circumstances in which a sacrifice of national wealth would be worth it. Many restrictionists argue that American culture is imperiled by the alien influx. I don’t believe that – not when these aliens are, in an overwhelming majority, Christians sharing the heritage of the West and already half-Americanized by Yankee television – but am willing to listen to rational argument. They don’t strengthen their case, though, by offering semi-socialist analyses of the economic effect of their proposed policies. Governmental interference with free markets is never painless. I hope that, in their less clouded moments, conservative restrictionists are able to recognize that truth and take it into account.

Return of the Nativist

The two groups that the pre-Civil War “Know-Nothings” most hated were immigrants and Roman Catholics. Not all contemporary immigration restrictionists continue that tradition. There are reasonable men in their ranks who make rational (albeit IMHO mistaken) arguments for closing the U.S. to most newcomers. Then there are those like Donald Collins, a board member of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (“reform” here being a synonym for abolition), writing in the Pittsburgh Tribune:

Despite the new pope’s encyclical disclaimer about trying to influence public policy, Rome and these bishops have been hard at work trying to shape U.S. public policy for decades. And, to a large degree, they have succeeded. Let me illustrate.

We now have five male Catholic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Most Catholics, particularly women, with whom I talk are highly displeased with this concentration of power and the likely rightward course of women's rights under the new alignment. . . .

Those who occupy chairs in the citadels of religiosity are naturally covetous [sic] of the “true faith” they embrace – not because it represents the truth but because it represents temporal power of the most useful kind. That, for example, the world’s richest institution, the combined resources and property of the Catholic Church, exposes the obvious basis for its biases on contraception, abortion and male-only priests as a means of flock control – particularly over women but also in a much broader sense over the American body politic. [Try diagramming that last sentence.]

The one question that was not raised at the Alito hearings was whether he felt that the activities of his church were legal under current statutes.

On Nov. 20, 1975, the American Catholic bishops issued their Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities. This plan is a superbly detailed blueprint of the bishops’ strategy for infiltrating and manipulating the American democratic process at national, state and local levels. It called for the creation of a national political machine controlled by the bishops. In large measure, this machine has, dragging along its unwitting evangelical brethren, taken over the Republican Party.

Colgate University political science professor Timothy Byrnes calls it the most “focused and aggressive political leadership” ever exerted by the American Catholic hierarchy. So much for respect for the American constitutional principle of separation of church and state. [emphasis added]

Mr. Collins’s innuendos are slightly quaint, rather like reading a less literate Paul Blanshard. As John J. Miller observes,

Infiltrating and manipulating? Because Catholics have decided to promote pro-life causes through conventional politics? I don’t particularly care for the agenda of the Collins’s Federation for American Immigration Reform, but I wouldn’t accuse it of trying to subvert our country’s democracy because it pursues a political agenda in Washington. But I might accuse its leaders of coming dangerously close to trafficking in anti-Catholic bigotry.

Is Immigration Policy in the Bible?

Now and then modernist Christians drag the Bible into political debates. I’m not sure why they expect anybody to be impressed by the opinions of dead, white advocates of patriarchy. Certainly, they don’t turn to such sources for religious enlightenment. They seem to have the peculiar idea that, while the evangelists knew nothing worth knowing about God, they can furnish useful guidance on, say, immigration policy.

We learn from Dave Kopel, that a Presbyterian Church (USA) spokesman recently declared that her denominational hierarchy’s opposition to strict immigration enforcement “is based on the scripture passage Matthew 25, verses 31-46, which talks about nations being judged, in part, by how they treat strangers”. She added,

Joseph and Mary had to flee persecution. Jesus was not born in his home community. Jesus and his family perhaps would have been locked up with a strict border approach to immigration.

I’m no immigration restrictionist, but this line of argument suggests that the Presbyterian spokeswoman, the delightfully named Elenora Giddings-Ivory, hasn’t done a lot of Bible reading lately.

Matthew 25:31–46 is Christ’s well known parable of His separation of the sheep from the goats at the Last Judgement, a text that all Christians should ponder frequently but not one that “talks about nations being judged”. The Judgement is individual and moral, not collective and political. The sheep placed on Our Lord’s right hand are commended for welcoming strangers, among other good deeds. It is a long stretch to infer that God condemns the enforcement of rules for crossing international boundaries.

The parallel between Christ’s parents and illegal aliens is downright silly. Mr. Kopel points out that Mary and Joseph weren’t trying to sneak into another country in violation of the law. Rather, they were exemplars of civil obedience:

Why were they traveling? Not so that Joseph could live someplace illegally as an “undocumented worker,” but for the opposite reason. They were going to Bethlehem to comply with the Empire-wide tax and census decree issued by Augustus Caesar. Joseph, being from the House of David, had to go to David’s city because “everyone went to his own town to register.” . . .

[O]ne of the symbolic points made by the story is that Joseph and his very pregnant spouse went far out of the way (literally) to comply with a government tax and census law. . . . Whatever you want to say about Joseph the carpenter, you have to admit that he did everything possible to make sure that he was not an “undocumented worker.”

The flight into Egypt came later, and refugees in analogous circumstances are not “locked up” under American law.

Under current U.S. immigration law, the Joseph/Mary/Jesus family would have been entitled to asylum in the United States because they would have been able to prove that they could not return to their home country “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” 8 U.S.C.§1101(a)(42)(A). (U.S. immigration officers and the reviewing court might not have credited Joseph’s fear of persecution, which was based on a dream. But hypothetically, the family could have called the Magi as witnesses, who could attest to Herod’s obsession with Jesus, and called other witnesses who could have testified about the Massacre of the Innocents that Herod had perpetrated in Israel.)

Miss Gidding-Ivory’s misreadings presumably spring largely from ignorance. Perhaps she has glanced through the Cliff’s Notes on Matthew and Luke. But they also hint at the frivolity of the modernist approach to Scripture. Like some of the less reasonable fundamentalists, her ilk sees the Bible as a collage of “proof texts”, ready to be snipped from their context and applied to support the user’s favored positions. The difference, of course, is that the fundies believe that they are quoting God’s veritable Word. What’s an up-to-date Presbyterian’s excuse?

Addendum: Let me elevate the following, attributed by the commenter to SF fan Taras Wolansky, to the main text of this post:

It occurs to me that liberals are to the Constitution what an ivory hunter is to a jungle god, in one of those old stories: he doesn’t believe in the god himself, but the natives do, and so he hides behind the statue of the god and gives the natives orders through a speaking trumpet.

Illegal Aliens of a Different Breed

A hidden premise of almost all discussion of immigration policy is that illegal immigrants come from the south-of-the-border underclass, an uneducated, shiftless proletariat whose preference for living in squalor enables it to underbid American workers. Maybe there is a scintilla of truth in that picture, but, as Fay Crevoshay, a Mexican citizen living legally in San Diego, observes, there are immigration scofflaws from the middle and upper classes, too (via Nixatron Blog-Times).

Since 2001, a wave of Mexican illegal immigrants with light skin, who drive Mercedes and Navigators, buy homes in Coronado, La Jolla and Del Mar, has been steadily arriving. They don’t come for vacations, like they used to. Instead, they come to stay, looking for security and peace of mind.

“We all have family or close friends that have been kidnapped, we waited to see if police could do something, but they themselves are part of the problem, so we left,” says Pepe, who arrived here two years ago with his wife and three children ages 5 to 11.

The older generation stays behind in Mexico, tending to the family business, but sends the kids to safety.

“It’s very hard to move, we were happy in Mexico, but it’s impossible to have peace of mind there today. You need to hire bodyguards; restaurants have security men with watchdogs at the entrance. You are afraid to take the kids to the park. How can one live like that? We are prisoners in our own city … very sad,” says Angelica, who arrived four years ago with husband and kids. . . .

These immigrants send their children to private schools and use private doctors. They are educated people, they bring in capital and are patrons of the arts. They spend lavishly at restaurants, theaters and the ballet.

I doubt that even the screechiest closed-border restrictionist can come up with a plausible objection to these interlopers, who place no burden on the American welfare system, are unlikely to fall into lives of crime, and have no interest in influencing U.S. politics. Why should the Immigration and Naturalization Service devote resources to tracking them down?

This is far from the only instance of immigration restrictions that comport with no rational policy that I can discern. Last month the Wall Street Journal ran an enlightening piece, “Rules Restricting Canadian Loggers Backfire on Maine” (4/25/05, p. A1; link for subscribers only), describing how the arbitrary cap on seasonal work visas “has led to a shortage of loggers, a supply crisis at sawmills and a profit squeeze at pulp mills as printers shop for lower-cost paper on other continents”

Between the deep north woods and Fenway Park, Maine’s timber industry creates work for at least 25,000 Americans. A mere 760 Canadians fell a third of its trees. When Canadian loggers were banished from the woods a year ago, the impact was immediate and measurable: The price of wood went up. In 2002, a cord of Maine pulpwood – the equivalent of 128 square feet – cost $57. In 2004, the same cord cost $78.

“That’s the highest price we’ve seen in a decade,” says Peter Barynin, an economist with Resource Information Systems Inc., a forest-products consulting firm based in Bedford, Mass. Other causes contributed: higher demand, environmental issues, wet weather. But in 2004, Mr. Barynin says, the chief cause of high prices was “a labor shortage.”

Perhaps restrictionists regard such consequences as forgivable side effects of a policy with logical underpinnings. I find it hard, however, to see what that logic might be.

Open Borders Are Safe Borders

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.

Free Markets = Corporate Welfare?

It goes without saying that anti-immigration shrillmonger Mark Krikorian would dislike today’s Wall Street Journal article [link for on-line subscribers only] on the dependence of Arizona lettuce growers on Mexican labor. In the Journal’s words,

The fieldworkers – virtually all of them Mexican – are the backbone of the region’s largest industry. It pumps $1.5 billion annually into the Yuma County economy and accounts for a third of Arizona’s agricultural revenue, according to state agriculture department statistics. Between November and March, 90% of the leafy vegetables produced in the U.S., including broccoli and cauliflower, originate here, giving Yuma the nickname of the nation’s “winter salad bowl.”

Most of the production is packed at local salad-processing plants and shipped to major supermarket and fast-food chains, like Safeway and McDonald’s Corp. Each year, Yuma throws a weekend celebration called “Lettuce Days” to mark its agricultural prowess and showcase its products.

This year, Antonio Oseguera isn’t celebrating. He needs about 350 workers, 40 tractors and a fleet of trucks to harvest lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower from 3,000 acres of land he controls around the area. He says he’s had to scrounge for workers like never before in his two decades in the business. “The lettuce has to be picked; that’s the cry of the land,” he says. “But there aren’t enough workers.” He has lost $1 million in potential sales this season alone, he says. His business is operating $250,000 in the red.

Mr. Oseguera used to be able to find plenty of green-card holders to do the work. But these legal immigrants are aging – their bodies injured or too worn out by the backbreaking work to keep it up. The old timers’ offspring, born and raised in America, are educated enough to seek better opportunities. Those willing to do physical labor prefer construction or factory work, which offer higher pay and year-round income.

“So, who’s going to do the work?” asks Mr. Oseguera, though he knows the answer all too well. Ahead of the harvest, he took out ads in the local papers for fieldworkers. The grower got one reply, he says – from a mechanic. He didn’t get the job.

Arizona officials also concede that growers have trouble filling field jobs with legal employees. Janine Duron, a senior official at the employment agency meant to match workers with jobs, says she gets requests all the time for fieldworkers, but she rarely fills them. She estimates seven out of 10 farm workers in Yuma are illegal.

The moral of the story is not that illegal immigration is a good thing but that a system for employing Mexicans legally, such as President Bush’s proposed guest worker program, is needed to provide a reliable supply of lechugeros. Mr. Krikorian, however, is a bitter opponent of the Bush proposal, which he has frequently equated with allowing unlimited illegal immigration. Today he adds a revealing twist: “Illegal immigration is simply another form of corporate welfare for agribusiness.”

This formulation more than hints at Mr. Krikorian’s fundamental economic beliefs. Restrictions on cross-border movement, whatever their noneconomic merits or faults, overtly interfere with the free play of market forces. To call it “corporate welfare” when a willing employer hires a willing worker at a mutually agreeable wage is to turn the concept of “welfare” on its head. By that light, lowering tariffs, abolishing wage-price controls, cutting taxes and deregulating industries are all “corporate welfare” measures. Why do they deserve that name? Presumably because they can lead to more profitable businesses (along with the weeding out of the inefficient resource wasters). Those who regard that prospect as undesirable and prefer that the government regulate markets are not usually thought of as conservatives.

Having read many, many Krikorian posts in the NRO Corner, I doubt that he is in fact a conservative in any meaningful sense. He seems, rather, to be a single-issue zealot with a basically left-wing economic outlook who tries to “pass” as a rightist for tactical reasons. I don’t, mind you, think that there is anything dishonest or dishonorable about that tactic. It displays a certain cleverness on the anti-immigrationists’ part. Some of them write for labor union and old-line liberal publications, others for National Review. Advocates of other causes tend to cluster on one side of the political spectrum, making the opposite half leery of listening to them. It’s far more adroit to infiltrate both.

It would be more adroit yet for the infiltrators to adopt the principles of the camp that have nominally joined. That is, however, a challenge when, like Mark Krikorian, one is trying to sell a Big Government cause to the party of Liberty. Now and then one’s bedrock opinions peek out from beneath the ideological astroturf.

The Anti-Immigration Zany

I’m beginning to suspect that Mark Krikorian, anti-immigration zealot par excellence, is really an Open Borders plant (another of Karl Rove’s intricate and insidious schemes, perhaps?) whose secret goal is to bring down ridicule on his nominal point of view. Not along ago he was complaining that hard working foreigners are snatching summer jobs away from lazy American teenagers. Today, in the NRO Corner, he is distressed at the prospect of voting by Mexicans. If he were lambasting many states’ failure to keep non-citizens from registering and casting ballots illegally (Mohammed Atta registered in Virginia, courtesy of the Motor Voter Law), I would agree with him. But the target of his objection is Mexican participation in Mexican elections.

The Mexican House of Representatives has just approved legislation to allow Mexicans living abroad to vote in their country’s presidential election. Mexico is one of the very few democracies that doesn’t let expatriates vote. During the long PRI ascendancy, they were regarded, I believe, as too difficult to manipulate and too prone to be influenced by the ideology of the foreigners (i. e., gringos) among whom they lived. President Fox’s reformist government has no reason to continue this exclusion, and his advocacy shamed the opposition into going along.

But Mr. Krikorian thinks that the corrupt machine that ruled Mexico for decades had the right idea. To his mind, giving the Mexican franchise to Mexicans who live in the United States –

will promote the president’s [not clear whether he means Fox or Bush or both] implicit goal of blurring the distinction between the United States and Mexico: there will be extensive campaigning on this side of the border, with mass rallies and ads in print, radio, and even TV; hundreds of thousands of people are likely to line up at consulates to vote, with employers pressured not to punish absent workers and the Border Patrol prohibited from enforcing immigration laws, which would have a “chilling effect” on turnout; and thousands of dual citizens will make a mockery of their oaths of allegiance to the United States by voting in a foreign election.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis, many of them dual citizens, lined up to vote last month, and America somehow survived. Nor, I am confident, will Spanish language campaign commercials in Texas and California succeed in “blurring the distinction between the United States and Mexico”. The most likely major consequence will be a net pickup of votes for the PAN candidate, and, while President Fox hasn’t been the keen supporter of freedom that he once seemed, he and any likely PAN successor are vastly better than what the Mexican Left will offer as an alternative.

Whatever the pros and cons of the various sides of the immigration debate, Mr. Krikorian is fast emerging as the clown prince of the restrictionists. He would do his own cause, if it really is his cause, more good by keeping silent.

Safety, Opulence and Immigration

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.