Real Kato Blog: Immigration

... makes for strange bedfellows.

It's been interesting to see the schism in the Republican party over this whole immigration thing.

On the one hand, you have the pro-business Republicans who see immigrant workers as a source of cheap and plentiful labor. They'll work for less money, and since they're illegal, you can avoid all sorts of stuff like, say, OSHA laws and unemployment taxes.

On the other hand, you have the conservative nationalistic Republicans, who say "keep them Mexicans outta my country".

I thought there'd be a corresponding rift among the Democrats. We see plenty of the "compassionate" Democrats who think all immigrants should be given a shot at fair wages and governments benefits, even if they're ~~illegal~~ "undocumented". And these Democrats are horrified to find themselves agreeing with Bush.

I also thought we'd hear from the protectionist and pro-union Democrats, who would decry illegal immigrants as a threat to the American working class. But that latter group has been silent.

Probably, all Democrats see illegal immigrants as a pool of potential new Democratic voters, if they get the chance to become citizens someday. And Republicans are probably wary of that threat, but they're also afraid of being seen as anti-Hispanic. So Democrats are being politically savvy by keeping their mouths shut, and Republicans are in a quandary because this issue cuts right through the middle of their party... in an election year.

Personally, I'm not quite sure how I feel about it all. Clearly, illegal immigration isn't something we should just tolerate. The question is, what is the better solution? Should we spend a bunch of money trying to deport 11 million people from this country and seal up our borders, or should we try to turn illegal immigrants into legal immigrants? The latter would require that we relax some of the restrictions on legal immigration that we now have... and that might end up causing an influx of even more people into the U.S. from Mexico. And while there may be a bunch of people who worry about that for cultural and racial reasons, I'm more worried about the economic impact of that... effectively, we'd be diluting the powerful U.S. economy with Mexico's much weaker one. (Mexico has 1/10th the per-capita GDP of the United States.)

The real solution, as many people have figured out, is to strengthen the Mexican economy so that people don't want to immigrate. That would probably require pouring billions of dollars in aid and development into Mexico. This solution has worked for various countries in Europe several times. But here in the U.S. right now, I'm not sure you'd find a politician in either party that would be willing to try it. Damn federal budget deficit, it's biting us in the ass again.

Permalink 1 Comment