March 29, 2006
Immigrant Economics
Thomas Sowell, a perennial Threesources favorite asks, "Guests or Gate Crashers?"
- 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.
It starts with a refusal to call illegal aliens "illegal aliens" and ends with asking for "guest worker" status for people who are not guests but gate crashers. As for the substantive arguments, they are as phony as the verbal evasions.
What about all those illegal workers that we "need"? Many of the illegals are working in agriculture, producing crops that have been in chronic surplus for decades. These surplus crops are costing the American taxpayers billions of dollars in government storage costs and in the inflated prices created by deliberately keeping much of this agricultural output off the market.
Do we "need" illegal workers to produce bigger surpluses?
He then lashes out on sugar surpluses and our domestic subsidies of it.
He ends...
- One of the most bogus of all the bogus arguments for a "guest worker" program is that it is impossible to find all the millions of illegal aliens in the country, so it is impossible to deport them.
If tomorrow someone came up with some brilliant way to identify every illegal alien in the country, it would not make the slightest difference. Right now, those who are identified as illegal, whether at the border, in prisons, at traffic stops or in any of our institutions, face no penalty whatsoever.
Identification is not the problem. Doing nothing is the problem.
It hurts to not see eye-to-eye with someone I respect as much as Dr. Sowell -- or Victor Davis Hanson on the same topic.
Reading the two installments to date, our agreements are greater than our disagreements. Sowell is dead on about agricultural subsidies, and I cannot disagree with those who are infuriated by the law-and-order implications of illegal immigration.
And we must have a real, not demagogic discussion. That includes not only saying "illegal alien," but also includes not referring to any guest worker program as "amnesty." Sowell does not exactly break this rule, but his gate-crasher comment misses the point of creating a future legal method of allowing workers.
I hope he might address the economic arguments in his third installment. We will be far wealthier with a sizable immigrant workforce -- why can we not choose that wealth and provide a legal framework to establish orderly borders and knowledge of who's here?
Posted by: jk at March 29, 2006 2:30 PMWe have a trifecta! JK, George Will, and the NY Times are in agreement! (George Will column "Guard the Borders -- And Face Facts, Too" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/29/AR2006032902004.html, NY Times editorial "It Isn't Amnesty" http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/opinion/29wed1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) I also agree that while we need to secure our borders as a basic national security issue, we also need a solution to the illegal immigration problem that acknowledges the facts on the ground and looks to harness this tremendous resource. I'm unclear what we gain by rounding up and deporting 12 million people. I may disagree on the specifics, but I think Bush is on the right side of this issue. (Would someone please check and make sure that JK didn't hit his head on the floor when he fainted?)
Posted by: LatteSipper at March 30, 2006 1:41 PMGeorge Will has definitely spent too much time with George Stephanopolous and the rest of the progressives at ABC News. He's also come out with "the war in Iraq was a failure because Arabs can't handle democracy." His explanation is that no middle eastern country has a Washington or Adams or Jefferson. But then, neither did Japan.
Posted by: johngalt at April 4, 2006 3:01 PM | What do you think? [3]