Actual rational thought about illegal immigration.

Impossible, you say. Well, take a gander at this:


From Thomas Sowell:

Guests or gate crashers
Immigration is yet another issue which we seem unable to discuss rationally -- in part because words have been twisted beyond recognition in political rhetoric...

Most of the arguments for not enforcing our immigration laws are exercises in frivolous rhetoric and slippery sophistry, rather than serious arguments that will stand up under scrutiny.

How often have we heard that illegal immigrants "take jobs that Americans will not do"? What is missing in this argument is what is crucial in any economic argument: price.

Americans will not take many jobs at their current pay levels -- and those pay levels will not rise so long as poverty-stricken immigrants are willing to take those jobs.

If Mexican journalists were flooding into the United States and taking jobs as reporters and editors at half the pay being earned by American reporters and editors, maybe people in the media would understand why the argument about "taking jobs that Americans don't want" is such nonsense.

Another variation on the same theme is that we "need" the millions of illegal aliens already in the United States. "Need" is another word that blithely ignores prices.

If jet planes were on sale for a thousand dollars each, I would probably "need" a couple of them -- an extra one to fly when the first one needed repair or maintenance. But since these planes cost millions of dollars, I don't even "need" one.

There is no fixed amount of "need," independently of prices, whether with planes or workers...


Guests or gate crashers? Part II
Bogus arguments are a tip-off that you wouldn't buy the real reasons for what someone is doing. Phony arguments and phony words are the norm in discussions of immigration policy...

In California, surplus crops grown and harvested by illegal immigrants are often also subsidized by federal water projects which charge the farmers in dry California valleys far less than the cost to the government of providing that water -- and a fraction of what people in Los Angeles or San Francisco pay for the same amount of water.

Surplus crops grown with water supplied at the taxpayers' expense and raised by illegal workers can be grown elsewhere with water provided free of charge from the clouds and raised by American workers paid American wages.

Naturally, when the real costs of those crops have to be paid by the farmers who raise them, less will be grown -- that is, there will not be as much of a surplus going to waste in government-rented storage bins.

With some crops, we don't really "need" any of it. If the United States had not produced a single grain of sugar in the past 50 years, Americans could have gotten all the sugar they wanted and at lower prices, simply by buying it on the world market for half or less of what domestic sugar costs.

Sugar has been in chronic surplus on the world market for generations. It can be grown in the tropics far cheaper than it can be grown in the United States. All the land, labor, and capital that has been spent growing sugar here has been one huge waste.

We don't "need" to grow sugar, with or without illegal workers...



From Rich Lowry:

Forget the long-running bipartisan concern about creating an educated, highly skilled workforce. What the U.S. economy desperately needs is more high-school dropouts — so desperately that we should import them hand over fist.

Such is the logic of the contention by advocates of lax immigration that the flow of illegal labor from south of the border is a boon to our economy. But it doesn't make intuitive sense that importing the poor of Latin America would benefit us. If low-skill workers were key to economic growth, Mexico would be an economic powerhouse, and impoverished Americans would be slipping south over the Rio Grande.

The National Research Council reports that an immigrant to the U.S. without a high-school diploma — whether legal or illegal — consumes $89,000 more in governmental services than he pays in taxes during his lifetime. An immigrant with only a high-school diploma is a net cost of $31,000. Eighty percent of illegal immigrants have no more than a high-school degree, and 60 percent have less than a high-school degree.

Steve Camarota of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies estimates that illegal immigrants cost the federal government $10 billion a year. State and local governments lose even more. Illegals pay some taxes, but not enough to cover governmental expenses like Medicaid and treatment for the uninsured.

According to Camarota, if illegal immigrants were legalized, their net annual cost to the federal government would only increase, tripling to $30 billion a year. Immigrant workers don't earn enough to pay much in taxes, while they qualify for all sorts of governmental assistance. As they become legal, they will get even more assistance — the benefits that they get from the Earned Income Tax Credit, for instance, would increase by a factor of 10.

Whatever benefit illegals provide to the economy in general must be minuscule. All workers without a high-school education — illegal and otherwise — account for only 3 percent of economic output. Even if illegal immigrants were dominant in low-skill industries, their broader impact would be small. But they aren't dominant, and that includes job categories associated with immigrants. Nearly 60 percent of cabdrivers are native-born. In only four of 473 job classifications are immigrants a majority of the workers...



From Herbert E. Meyer:

...But the millions of Hispanics who have come to our country in the last several decades – and it’s the Hispanics we’re talking about in this debate, not those from other cultures—are, in fact, two distinct groups. The first group is comprised of “immigrants” just like all the others, who have put the old country behind them and want only to be Americans. They aren’t the problem. Indeed, most Americans welcome them among us, as we have welcomed so many other cultures.

The problem is the second group of Hispanics. They aren’t immigrants – which is what neither the Democratic or Republican leadership seems to understand, or wants to acknowledge. They have come here solely for jobs, which isn’t the same thing at all. (And many of them have come here illegally.) Whether they remain in the U.S. for one year, or ten years – or for the rest of their lives – they don’t conduct themselves like immigrants. Yes, they work hard to put roofs above their heads and food on their tables – and for this we respect them. But they have little interest in learning English themselves, and instead demand that we make it possible for them to function here in Spanish. They put their children in our schools, but don’t always demand as much from them as previous groups demanded of their kids. They don’t always pay their taxes – or insure their cars.

In short, they aren’t playing by the rules that our families played by when they immigrated to this country. And to ordinary Americans this behavior is deeply – very deeply – offensive. We see it unfolding every day in our communities, and we don’t like it. This is what none of our politicians either understands, or dares to say aloud. Instead, they blather on – and on – about “amnesty” and “border security” without ever coming to grips with what is so visible, and so offensive, to so many of us – namely, all these foreigners among us who aren’t behaving like immigrants.

The phrase we use to describe foreigners who come here not as “immigrants” but merely for jobs is “guest workers.” And we are told – incessantly – that we need these “guest workers” because they take jobs that Americans don’t want and won’t take themselves. This is true, but it’s also disingenuous. Throughout our country’s history, immigrants have always taken jobs that Americans don’t want and won’t take themselves. For crying out loud, no foreigner has ever come to our country out of a blazing ambition to dig ditches, mow lawns, bag groceries, sew clothing or clean other people’s houses. If we hadn’t always had a huge number of these miserable jobs available that none of “us” would do – there wouldn’t have been a way for immigrants throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to step off the boat and find work.

A willingness by “immigrants” to start at the bottom – so they can move up the economic ladder or at least give their kids a shot at the higher rungs – is precisely how the system is supposed to work. And it always has. (My own family is one of the tens of millions that did precisely this. My grandfather came from Poland and found work as a pocket-maker in New York’s garment district. The pay was low, the hours were long, and when the old man finally retired he could hardly move his fingers or see without thick glasses. Yet one of his sons, my uncle, became a lawyer with a fancy practice on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His kids did even better; his son wound up chairman of Stanford University’s history department, and his daughter became a famous art critic, moved to London, and married an Englishman who became a member of the House of Lords. What is astonishing about this story is that – it isn’t astonishing. It’s the sort of thing that happens all the time, and it’s why ordinary Americans don’t want to change the system that made it possible.)

Blame the Birth Rate

One fact that hasn’t been part of the immigration debate is this: During the past two decades our national birth rate has dropped to just below the 2.1 births-per-woman replacement rate. So we really do need to “import” people because – to put it bluntly – we haven’t bred enough of them ourselves to do all the work that needs to be done in an affluent, ageing society like ours. But then, we’ve always needed “more” people to do the work we want done. And we’ve always brought them in from elsewhere – as immigrants.

Yet today we have millions of foreigners among us who have come here to work, but not to immigrate. Our politicians tell us that we must accept this because – for the first time in our history—we’ve reached that point when we need “guest workers” who aren’t immigrants to keep our economy growing. If this is true—and isn’t it odd that no one has troubled to explain why it’s true – then we must find some way to distinguish between “immigrants” and “guest workers” so that they aren’t treated the same just because they both are here. And if it isn’t true that our continued economic growth requires “guest workers” who aren’t immigrants—then the entire concept of “guest workers” that lies at the core of virtually every proposal now before Congress, including amnesty for those who are here illegally, must be abandoned in favor of something that makes sense...



From Wes Pruden:

The "debate" over illegal immigration has become a contest to see who can hurl the most emotional taunts. This is the "civil" debate George W. Bush asked for.

The illegal-immigration lobby has cast the argument as between the friends of the working poor, the sick, the halt, the lame and cherubic little children on one side, with Tiny Tim lifting his little voice (in Spanish, of course) with the invocation that "God bless us every one," and on the other side, Scrooge and his crabby malcontents, eager to consign the poor, sick, halt, etc., back to the hell whence they came.

The U.S. Senate's Amnesty Caucus, the sob-sister chorus, is winning this match. Whether they can preserve the chaos on the border is something else.

Their guest-worker bill, designed by Rube Goldberg & Associates, is a "solution" not intended to actually solve very much, but to preserve abuses valuable to that small corporate sliver of the gringo majority. This legislation provides a "path to citizenship" only via a convoluted formula requiring the 10 million or 12 million illegal aliens -- nobody actually knows how many because it's not nice to ask -- to learn English, show "good character," study American history (maybe even write a term paper about the Boston Tea Party) and pay a $2,000 fine.

It's not clear how a poor illegal, who typically works at pickup jobs at a wage as close to the legal minimum as big-hearted Corporate Republican employers can get away with, will be able to scratch up the $2,000. Since such an illegal is illegal already, why should he turn himself in just to avoid being illegal? He knows that a government that enacts laws with a wink to the cops and a nudge to the courts won't ever send him home. These hard-working folk are illegal, but not dumb...