Free Republic

The facile nature of the immigration debate within this country can be infuriating to those of us who’ve invested time and effort into gaining a fuller understanding of this complex, interconnected series of issues. It often seems like we’ve living in the dystopian future outlined in the Neil Postman classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death. A world where linear thinking and the gathering of empirical evidence in order to buttress your argument are considered inconsequential, if not a hindrance, while the refraction of charged images and exploitation of emotional triggers are paramount. In that sense, the photo of Aylan Kurdi’s corpse...

At current levels of around one million immigrants per year, immigration makes the U.S. economy (GDP) significantly larger, with almost all of this increase in GDP accruing to the immigrants themselves as a payment for their labor services. For American workers, immigration is primarily a redistributive policy. Economic theory predicts that immigration will redistribute income by lowering the wages of competing American workers and increasing the wages of complementary American workers as well as profits for business owners and other “users” of immigrant labor. Although the overall net impact on the native-born is small, the loss or gain for particular...

Legend has long held that illegal aliens give American citizens cheap lettuce and cheap child care. Excepting for agribusiness and the upper classes, that legend is, in reality, a nightmare, in which the American middle and working classes pay and pay and pay for illegal immigration, and get nothing but grief in return. In states with heavy illegal alien populations, the budget of a middle-class family is full of hidden illegal alien surcharges. As a result, today’s middle-class American family with two full-time working parents has less discretionary income than its traditional forebear, in which the father alone was...