Posted on 07/21/2010 4:35:21 AM PDT by Kaslin
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I'm confused about immigration.
We libertarians believe in free trade. That includes trade in labor, too. New people bring us not just labor, but also good new ideas. Open immigration during America's first hundred years helped make America rich.
Open immigration is dangerous today, however, because some immigrants want to murder us. And now that America is a welfare state, some want to come here just to freeload. That great champion of freedom Milton Friedman said Mexican immigration is a good thing -- but only so long as it's illegal. "Why? Because as long as it's illegal for people to come, they don't qualify for welfare and Social Security. So they migrate to jobs."
But closing our eyes to illegal immigration cannot be good policy. So what should American do?
I sat down with Heather MacDonald of the conservative Manhattan Institute, author of "The Immigration Solution," and Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, author of "Let Them In." I respect them both. But they radically disagree on immigration policy.
"The case for open borders is a case for letting the law of supply and demand, the free market, determine the level of immigration," Riley said. "Right now, that determination is being made by politicians and public policy makers. ... And like all exercises in Soviet-style central planning, it's been a complete disaster. We have thriving markets in document fraud ... and 12 million-plus illegal aliens. ... (W)e would do better to move to a system that allowed the free market to determine the level of immigration. And that's the case for open borders." Riley proposes a guest-worker program. "That is the way to reduce illegal immigration."
Heather MacDonald retorts: "A country is not a firm. And it is absolutely the prerogative of a nation and its people to decide its immigration policy. ... We should have an immigration policy that accentuates our natural economic advantage in the 21st century, which is as a high-tech, high-science economy. ... (T)he overwhelming number of immigrants that are coming in largely illegally are extremely low skilled."
MacDonald worries that "we're facing, for the first time in this country's history ... the first decrease in national literacy and numeracy ... . "
She wants to copy Australia's and Canada's policy: "high skills, English language and education. ... We should be looking out for our own economic self-interest." Riley disagreed with MacDonald's claim that Mexican immigrants don't fit America's modern economy.
"(T)oday's immigrants coming here are not different in terms of their behavior patterns, in terms of their assimilation levels. They are simply newer."
"Immigrants increase crime!" is another charge hurled at illegals, but the data don't bear that out. There has been a surge in immigration over recent years, but crime has been dropping. Crime has dropped in the border areas of Arizona and California, too.
MacDonald said crime was high during immigration surges in the 1970s and '80s, and attributed the recent drop to higher incarceration rates. But Riley noted, "Incarceration reports from the Justice Department ... show that the native-born are five times more likely than the immigrant population to be arrested and incarcerated ... ."
But if today's illegals are not eligible for welfare, less likely to commit crimes and eager to work, why are people in the border states so ticked off?
"Why wouldn't they be?" Riley said. "It's chaos down there. There's trespassing. There are people breaking the law. We're a nation of laws. It's out of control. The question is how to fix it. And I don't think sealing off the border is the best way to fix it. I think regulating the flow is the best way to fix it."
It would be easier to "regulate the flow" if America made it easier for people to work here legally. State Department data show that a British Ph.D. in bioengineering must wait about six months to get a green card. A South African computer programmer, six years. An Indian computer programmer, 35 years.
A Mexican with a high school diploma must wait a theoretical 131 years! No wonder people sneak into America.
Black markets make problems worse. America should let more people come here legally
Illegals undercut the 18-24 workforce, and they get benefits. Just walk into any emergency room. Using false ID they get welfare etc. Stossel is an idiot. Writes like a 10th grader too.
99% Of the problem is Mexico. Shut THAT down, and the rest of it becomes manageable.
He talks about us being a welfare state, pretends illegals can’t take advantage of the handouts, then ignores the whole problem and says it’s better than the black market.
Terrible logic in this piece by stossel.
Illegals receive plenty of benefits. And when they have children born in America, they hit the welfare jackpot.
Obviously, Stossel is not conservative.
Shut down much of the government handouts that are doled out to all Americans, allow more people to come to this country legally [having them pay for the cost of their own paperwork, health screenings, and background checks], and I don’t see what the problem of immigrants would be thereafter.
99% of the problem is certainly cause by illegals from Third World countries...Mexico being the biggest (but not the *only*) offender.
*ALL* illegals must be expelled..regardless of race,gender,age,country of citizenship,etc.Illegal Canadians,Brits,Irishmen,Italians,Russians,Nigerians,Kenyans,Brazilians,Aussies and Mexicans *MUST* go...along with all the rest.
But they do get welfare benefits - either by crossing the border to have their “anchor babies” or by i.d. fraud or by just showing up at any e.r. demanding services because our laws say no one gets turned away then not paying the bill.
I used to be a Libertarian. But I got better.
Free trade is a recipe for US strategic decline. If the world operates free trade then my first sentence is wrong. But the world does not. They operate to preserve their own tech advantage and jobs. Ala Japan, EU and China. To charge into the world with free trade is like the Brits during the American Revolution who refuses to shoot enemy officers with sharpshooters and prefer to fight like men in the open against an adversary who would shoot the British officers and fire from cover at the redcoats lined up in parade formations on the open field. Free traders go to the manufacturing centers of the US and see your empty factories as monuments to such foolishness and the offshoring of IT jobs to China and India, and the transfer of American high tech inventions overseas in order to pad more profits thru cheap manufacturing costs and with it tech transfers to China and India. To add pain to injury the same free trading freepers decry that China somehow got technology to upgrade their military. Guess whose trade philosophy gave them the knowledge to do that??!!!
That would be fine if we can ever shut off those handouts!
Changes need to be made to disfavor family reunification in favor of self sufficient, English speaking, educated immigrants as well.
The article is rambling and incoherent. What is never explain is how we keep the poor immigrants and their children from sucking up tax dollars, while paying little in taxes,then getting a vote to Democrat for more. If they all paid the upper tax bracket like the (’rich’) people democrats demonize, that would be one thing. But our legal immigration does the opposite now, brings in the families and puts them on some sort of welfare.
Legal immigration = good
Illegal immigration = bad
Any questions?
Why have borders if you aren’t going to defend them? Should Mexicans be able to flow in to this country, as they wish, simply because of their location?
There are more positive things to say about immigrants than there are negative. There are few good things to say about illegal aliens.
Fact is, we need the workers to some degree, but not in the current numbers nor in the way they are making it here.
Illegals have done a lot of serious damage and are costing us some serious money... all with practically zero return. Almost all of the money is pumped into the Mexican economy and minimal amounts are spent here in the US... no more than they absolutely have to.
There IS a compromise to be had and we are going to have to get there. It's surely not right down he middle either.
By far, these are good folks who have been taught that US immigration rules are nothing more than a technicality.. a game to be played. They are ENCOURAGED to sneak into the US and send their money back home. A lot of these people are eating dirt back home so I can't hardly blame them to taking advantage of the weak US position.. it's a low to moderate risk venture for them and they payoff is huge on their scale.
When I was a kid, a huge farmer in our area employed mexicans during the summer here in Indiana, hundreds of them. He had housing for them and everything. They had their own villages and their own social enforcement. They were very good people, very clean and very hard working. If one got out of line and caused any sort of trouble in the area, the were gone the next day, never to return. They did a lot of good for the area and we actually had a lot of respect for them.
That was 30 and 40 years ago. Today, they are empowered by the left to fight our system and rape it for everything they can. They don't leave in the winter, they stay here and clean out the church food pantrys, they sell drugs and burglarize homes and businesses. The local community is screaming loudly about the invasion and nothing is being done.
One could say that's what we get for allowing them in the first place. But, it can also be said that a controlled guest worker program can be managed and it can work in a positive manner. I've personally seen it work before if managed well.
What an idiot. He lacks the common sense to realize that living on the streets in America is preferable to anything available to hundreds of millions of people around the world. The immigration level would not be determined by supply and demand, or the free market, but by individual comparisons of the extreme poverty in many parts of the world to the 'poverty' in America. Many more millions would opt for America if they could, and it'd be a long, long time before any supply and demand situation stopped the flow.
And those programs are in place, and have been as long as most Americans can remember, but it's much simpler and cheaper to ignore those programs and just do it all illegally, from both the worker and employer's point of view.
And illegals are working in far, far more than seasonal farm jobs.
He both an idiot and being deceptive. Only an idiot would lie about this.
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