Getting a passport is hardly an inconvenience.
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Posted on 12/01/2003 11:28:35 PM PST by farmfriend
Immigration: A Better Way
By Arnold Kling
"I have met wealthy elites, academics and journalists from Mexico City who privately laugh that they are exporting their Indians and Mestizos, their unwanted, into the United States. Their smile disappears when I reply that we instead figure what they suppose to be riffraff are the real cream of Mexican society...who in fact are superior people to those who oppress them at home."
-- Victor Davis Hanson, Mexifornia, p. 31
Hanson's book is passionate, hot-headed, disjointed, and self-contradictory -- much like our immigration policy. In this essay, I do not propose a way to make immigration policy perfect. However, I have some suggestions to make it better.
Minimum Requirements
I have two issues on which I feel strongly. One is that this country must continue to be a haven for the oppressed. The other is that we should not rely on unenforceable laws.
My ancestors were driven from Europe by ethnic violence. Today, there is ethnic violence in Africa and elsewhere. If victims in those countries can escape, and they choose to come to America to make a new life, then I feel that they should have such an opportunity.
People who come to this country to escape oppression should desire assimilation. They should embrace our language, our values, and our democratic principles. We should not go out of the way to make it easy to speak a foreign language in the United States, or to remain in a separate culture within the United States. People should be sufficiently grateful to be living here that they adapt to our ways. In the process, the United States can absorb elements of other cultures, without breaking into separate tribes.
My other big issue is to get rid of what I have called legamorons, meaning any law that could not stand up under widespread enforcement. As it stands, our immigration laws are not going to be enforced. Keeping them on the books is hypocritical and only serves to keep us in a state of denial and evasion over the fact that we need to re-think immigration policy.
Guest Workers
The immigrants that I want in this country are people who would be tortured or killed if they remained in their native lands. Simply wanting to improve your economic opportunities does not entitle you to become a U.S. citizen, in my way of thinking.
However, there is nothing wrong with someone wanting to improve their economic lot in life. I think that we can accommodate guest workers on a win-win basis.
What I propose is that we have a guest worker program with the following characteristics.
1) Anyone who is not a terror suspect or criminal is eligible.
2) All guest workers must register with a private employment agency. That employment agency must provide health care coverage and ensure that all necessary regulations are followed and taxes are paid. Private employment agencies that engage in tax evasion or other regulatory violations will be prosecuted.
3) Taxes will include a payroll tax of about 20 to 25 percent, which will be collected by the employment agency and remitted to the government. This will cover contributions to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds (even though guest workers will not be eligible for benefits under those programs), as well as cost of providing government services at the Federal, State, and Local levels.
4) Families of guest workers will not be eligible for health care or education, unless they purchase insurance coverage for the former or tuition for the latter.
5) Households and businesses must hire workers who are either U.S. citizens or legal guest workers, meaning that they are registered with private employment agencies. Hiring a non-citizen "under the table" will be a violation of the law.
The key to the guest worker proposal is the last point. If the households and businesses that hire illegal immigrants do so in order to save the cost of paying taxes, and they will not pay the taxes even when an employment agency handles all of the paperwork for them, then what we have is more than an immigration problem -- we have a tax rebellion. It may take some education and persuasion to overcome this tax rebellion, but we need to face that issue if we are going to have a sensible immigration policy.
A formal guest worker program would have two effects on the cost of a foreigner working in the United States. Those costs would be increased by the taxes collected and the fees paid to employment agencies. Other costs would go down. These would include the cost of evading border patrols to enter the country, the cost of living underground, and the cost of having only a limited set of employers willing to hire illegal immigrants.
Tariffs vs. Quotas
In economic terms, replacing a law against foreign workers with a guest worker program in which guest workers are taxed is the equivalent of replacing a quota with a tariff. A quota system restricts supply by putting up regulatory barriers. A tariff system restricts supply by raising the price. Tariffs are generally more efficient than quotas.
Just as laws against recreational drugs create business opportunities for criminal enterprises, laws against immigrant workers create business opportunities for criminals who traffic in illegal workers. They also create profit opportunities for households and businesses willing to exploit the foreign workers. Quotas always create such narrow groups of beneficiaries.
For citizens competing against illegal immigrants for jobs, the playing field might be more level with a tariff (guest workers paying taxes) than with a quota (laws that deter some foreign workers but not all). Today, citizens subsidize immigrant workers by paying taxes for government services that benefit the immigrant. With a guest worker program, immigrant workers would pay their fair share.
The tax rate for guest workers would provide a means with which to fine tune the competition between domestic and foreign workers. If we believe that foreign workers are driving domestic wages too low, we can raise the tax on foreign workers. On the other hand, if the economy is at full employment and we want continued expansion without inflationary pressure, we could lower the tax on foreign workers.
The Enemy of the Good
There is a saying that "the best is the enemy of the good." The truth in that saying is that people will let a problem fester while fighting over what is the ideal solution.
A guest worker program with taxes is probably no one's ideal solution to the immigration issue. However, until the ideal solution lands in our laps, my contention is that it would make things better
Bill Clinton called. He wants you to return his dictionary.
KA-POW! Congratulations, you knocked that one out of the park, sir.
Since you've just admitted that your National ID Card program won't accomplish its ostensible purpose, why are you wasting your time on it, unless you get some sort of pleasure at being told that you'd be more at home on DU than on FR?
Getting a passport is hardly an inconvenience.
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Yeah, that's what he said.
as in, ANY difference in genetic heritage would have prevented western civilization from coming about?
He did not say "any difference." That's you putting words into his mouth.
"Without the genetic heritage" means that if the genetic heritage were dramatically different, Western Civlization would not have come about. Put it another way, if Europeans had the genetic heritage of Africans or Asians, Western Civilization as we know it would not have come about. There probably would have been some other civilization, but it would have been very different. Would it have been worse? I don't know, it may even have been better, but it would not be what we know of as Western.
DNA affects, but does not equal, destiny.
I'm sick of this discussion. Frankly, I don't have time for people whose radical universal humanist dogma blinds them to scientific facts.
You people are the geocentrists of the 21st century.
If you make people pay SI taxes, I think we have to give them the benefits that come with them.
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No, it means that ANY change from THE (singular) genetic heritage of Europeans would have aborted Western Civilization.
Words mean things. Deal with it.
Put it another way, if Europeans had the genetic heritage of Africans or Asians, Western Civilization as we know it would not have come about.
Congratulations. You just said that environment doesn't mean squat.
I suppose that whether or not "intelligence", "creativity", and "talent" imply "superiority" depends on what the definition of "is" is....
If the test is crap, it would not predict income or intellectual success very well.
There are other things besides genetics that determine IQ, but genetics are at least 50% of it.
Your score keeps going up because you are becoming more and more familiar with the test and the types of questions it asks. Retaking a test tends to bias the score upwards, as anyone familiar with inteligence testing statistics knows.
Puh-leeze. You are using clintonspeak to evade the obvious fact that Mr. Francis' statement is a thinly veiled assertion that non-whites are genetically incapable of developing or maintaining a proper civilization.
How did this discussion get to social darwinism? Where did I mention social darwinism? I'm talking about mainstream genetics.
I agree with you that Christianity is a wonderful civilizing force, but it is not a necessary ingredient for civilization. There were civilizations on Earth 6000 years before Christianity was founded.
Mr. Francis never said that. Why does everyone insist on putting words into his mouth?
Nonsense. Federal immigration laws have been enforced for decades without doing any such thing.
All it takes is spot-checking known suspicious employers often enough, and setting the fines high enough, so that the "expected value" (the amount of the fine multiplied by the probability of getting caught) of the penalities exceeds the savings from hiring illegal aliens instead of citizens. That's Statistics 101.
This solution is far better than others I have seen. If you don't like it, that's your perogative, but I have no problem with this. I certainly consider it a better alternative than the present situation.
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As explained in my previous message, your proposal is not necessary. Inasmuch as your proposal directs its burden at citizens rather than at illegal aliens, it is not proper.
Back to the drawing board for you, I'm afraid....
No, it does not mean any change. There is a good deal of variation within the genetic heritage of Europeans, so having a differnt genetic heritage would require a substantial difference in genetic patterns.
Congratulations. You just said that environment doesn't mean squat.
Where did I say that? Now you're putting words into my mouth.
You've just implied that Genetics don't mean squat and that the environment means everything, an assertion that flies in the face of all scientific data.
All I'm saying is that genetics are important. They are not everything. Environment is also important. But Genetics are important as well. They're both important.
If Europeans had the genetic heritage of Asians, they would not have developed a civilization very different from Asian civilization because of environmental differences. They would have developed a civilization different from Western Civilization because of genetic differences.
Why is it so hard for you to grasp that many factors, including genetics, environment, effort, and chance all matter?
If someone can improve their score by multiple standard deviations, what it says is that any genetic (in the broader sense of "genetic" -- of or relating to origins -- as opposed to DNA alone) component is incapable of reliable measurement.
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