One of the most persistent divides between traditional conservatives and their libertarian/anarcho-capitalist counterparts involves a fundamental philosophical disagreement about immigration. While most conservatives view immigration primarily through the lens of preserving American culture by only accepting those immigrants who are assimilable and will tangibly benefit our society in the future, a view expressed repeatedly during debates over illegal immigration in this country, many libertarians view the subject in an altogether different light. For them, the question is not so much whether a particular cohort of immigrants will be an asset to the United States but whether we have any right to prevent them from settling in this country in the first place, which many answer in the negative.

Libertarians extol the primacy of individual rights, which in this case entails the right to emigrate from your country of birth whenever you so desire-something that I don’t think any conservative would take issue with-and to immigrate to whatever country you want to live and/or work in for an extended period of time, which is where the divide between the two camps emerges. Libertarians view the issue as one of freedom of association-and by extension, contract-wherein willing employers, such as large agribusinesses and meatpacking plants, seek out willing employees coming from nations with under-performing economies that can’t meet the personal and financial needs of their citizens. They believe that the nexus between trade and unfettered migration is inextricable, if not completely self-evident, and that the two can not be severed if a nation hopes to grow its economy. While this may well be true as a matter of law, there are numerous holes in this thesis intellectually, which opponents of open borders-even anarcho-capitalists such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe-have exposed through well-researched arguments of their own.

However, underlying the debate over whether immigration and settlement is a natural right is the assumption that all libertarians/anarcho-capitalists agree on the immigration issue, which is not as much of  a given as it would seem on the surface of things. One of the things that I’ve attempted to do with American Rattlesnake is debunk commonly held assumptions about immigration issues, and the assumption that libertarians all subscribe to Gary Johnson’s point of view is one that needs to be reexamined. There are many libertarians and  anarcho-capitalists who recognize both the practical difficulties and existential problems inherent in society based upon unfettered immigration, especially one with the vast social welfare apparatus of the United States. One of the chief exponents of the view that welfare programs need to be curtailed in order to solve the immigration problem is Gary Johnson’s opponent in the Republican presidential race, Congressman Ron Paul. Paul has repeatedly emphasized the need to do away with the generous, taxpayer subsidized social welfare programs that-while not serving as the initial magnet-provide incentives for illegal aliens to extend their stay in this country indefinitely. The population density of legal immigrants is also heavily correlated with the availability of welfare benefits. Even acclaimed economist Milton Friedman, who held a rather benign view of immigration in general, emphasized the incompatibility of a welfare state with unfettered immigration.

The same opinion is held by many libertarians today, including self-professed constitutionalist Andrew Napolitano, who views Arizona’s landmark immigration law primarily through the prism of the Constitution’s supremacy clause and potential violations of the 4th Amendment via racial or ethnic profiling by law enforcement officers. I’m not sure that the Constitutional objection to statewide laws is dispositive, because-as Andrew McCarthy has pointed out repeatedly in National Review-there is no precedent for prohibiting states from enforcing laws that are consistent with federal statutes. Furthermore, if we look to the broader issue of legal immigration, there’s nothing to suggest that the men who drafted the United States Constitution supported the sort of unfettered immigration we have endured since passage of the Hart-Celler Act fundamentally altered this nation’s demographic destiny. This is a concept that is seldom grasped by arm-chair commentators on immigration these days, whose default option is to repeat the platitudinous-not to mention, factually incorrect-bromide that we are a “nation of immigrants.” What they neglect to mention is that most this nation’s founding fathers would have been implacably opposed to the present lassez-faire system of immigration, a fact that Thomas Woods-as anti-statist an individual as you’ll find among academics-expertly limns in this Human Events column published during the height of the amnesty debate in Washington D.C.

Yet, even if we were to concede that there’s no firm historical or Constitutional foundation for this nation’s current open borders policies, can it not be argued that there is a compelling moral case for the views espoused by those at the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Cato Institute, Reasonoids, and other trendy, beltway cosmotarians? You would definitely think so if you took their arguments at face value. The notion that we have no moral basis for barring certain immigrants from entry into the United States is certainly widespread in certain libertarian circles, but I don’t believe that makes the idea, ipso facto, libertarian. Julian Simon, in a 1998 essay published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, articulated the perspective felt by many that individual autonomy takes precedence over other “public” goods, including our national borders. In an anarcho-capitalist reality, nation-states would not exist, therefore deciding who should or should not be admitted to your nation would be a moot point.

But while it might seem logical that freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of contract-and at its most essential level, the individual him or herself-are all prioritized over the wishes and feelings of citizens who have a vested interested in preserving the character of their nation, there are those that don’t think these competing values are necessarily mutually exclusive. In a persuasive essay written for Lew Rockwell several years ago, N. Stephan Kinsella made a very compelling argument that while the disposition of property in our society is unjust-insofar as the state has no right to expropriate land that rightfully belongs to individuals-so long as that property is entrusted to the state it has a responsibility to act as caretaker for the rightful owners. In this case, it has the responsibility to prevent the ingress of people that citizens do not want to welcome into their country. While those who are opposed to communitarianism in even its most minimal form might reject Kinsella’s public pool analogy, I think he makes a convincing case that some prophylactic measures need to be enforced to prevent the exploitation of your property-even if it’s already been subjected to theft by the state.

There are many cogent arguments against the current trendy libertarian support for open borders, several of them outlined by the first presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party, John Hospers, in paper published by the Journal of Libertarian Studies over a decade ago entitled A Libertarian Argument Against Open Borders. The concluding paragraph of the essay is especially perceptive in its analysis of the problem:

Occasionally, we hear the phrase “limousine liberals” used to describe the members of the liberal establishment who send their children to expensive private schools while consigning all the others to the public school system, which educates these children so little that by the time they finish the eighth grade they can barely read and write or do simple arithmetic, or make correct change in a drug store. It would be equally appropriate, however, to describe some other people as ”limousine libertarians” —those who pontificate about open borders while remaining detached from the scenes that their “idealism” generates. They would do well to reflect, in their ivory towers, on whether the freedom they profess for those who are immigrants, if it occurs at all, is to be brought about at the expense of the freedom of those who are not.

This passage describes, in a nut shell, the quintessence of cosmotarianism, and why most Americans-and even some in the libertarian movement-continue to reject it. I could post the most meticulously researched George Borjas journal article, the most statistically devastating backgrounder from the Center for Immigration Studies, or the most irrefutable essay by Mahattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald. And although all of these sources are invaluable in the fight to define the terms of this debate, they wouldn’t hold a candle to the self-evident fact that none of the greatest exponents and defenders of open borders, be it Tamar Jacoby, or Jason Riley, or Nick Gillespie, abide by their own exhortations. None of these individuals partake of the glorious mosaic which their unyielding ideology has done so much to create.

You won’t find many Reason Magazine editors or Cato Institute scholars living in Bergenfield, New Jersey, Maywood, California, or Eagle Pass, Texas. Why, you might ask? Because they would rather pass off the tremendous costs of their bankrupt philosophy onto ordinary Americans than to admit that they might just be wrong. These people are insulated from unfettered immigration’s worst effects, including chronic unemployment, violent crime, and environmentally devasting pollution from Arizona to California and throughout the country. They have the luxury of ignoring the impact of this country’s changing demographic profile while promoting the patently absurd notion that our open borders are a boon to all but the small percentage of high school dropouts.

What’s more, they make the equally ludicrous assertion-outlined in the Caplan speech above-that importing millions of unskilled, uneducated immigrants, who will be dependent upon costly government services, from quasi-socialist nations will expand this nation’s economic liberty. Forget the fact that we now enjoy less economic freedom than our northern neighbors, a development concurrent with the greatest expansion of immigration in this country’s history, the entire premise underlying this concept is flawed. You do not build a prosperous, 21st century, post-industrial society around foreigners from countries with low human capital. And the amount of time, energy and economic resources that need to be shifted in order to improve the educational prospects and earning potential of these immigrants, e.g. the billions funneled into ESL programs each year, is so cost prohibitive that it outweighs whatever benefits can be gleaned from such an arrangement.

Another seeming inconsistency in the archetypal libertarian solution to our immigration problem is the reluctance of most libertarians to support any sort of relief for American taxpayers who are tasked with paying for millions of illegal aliens and immigrants who are dependent upon costly social services. Particularly, public schooling and emergency health care. Invoking Friedman’s argument once again, we find that while many libertarians will concede that dependency upon welfare programs is a bad thing they will do nothing to limit access to these programs by illegal aliens or permanent residents. To the contrary, if any such bill-which is immigration neutral-is proffered, they will stalwartly oppose it. Just ask new Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who supports the DREAM Act, despite the fact that taxpayers would be subsidizing the in-state tuition discounts of its recipients. Paleolibertarian writer Ilana Mercer deftly skewers  purported libertarians who routinely call for the abolition of the welfare state while adding a proviso that excludes immigrants and illegal aliens from the fiscal demands of their libertopia.

True believers in liberty, like Mercer and the late Murray N. Rothbard, recognize the inherent contradiction in persuading your fellow Americans to reject the embrace of the state while simultaneously welcoming millions of non-Americans into the country who prefer a larger and more intrusive government in almost every respect into our society. They realize that the banal platitudes used to support unfettered immigration are grossly inaccurate, if not transparent lies. They also realize that the interests of the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, the Farm Bureau, and the hospitality industry do not necessarily coincide with the interests of the free market, and that to a large extent our current immigration policy is another form of corporate welfare, which putative libertarians would be quick to denounce in any other context. The time-saving, productivity-increasing technological innovations that would normally be welcomed by these same individuals are rejected by those who apparently think pre-industrial stoop labor is the best method of improving  our agricultural production. Finally, they recognize that the  utopian, globalist conception of freedom-where people living in Gabon or the Hadhramaut have just as much say in how we are governed as American citizens living in New York-contravenes the distinctively American, Constitutional, federalist, representative republic designed by this nation’s founding fathers.

In short, the issue before the house is not whether it is an abandonment of principle for libertarians to embrace sensible immigration restrictions, it’s why institutional libertarians representing organizations like the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation have stifled an honest, open intellectual debate about this subject. Even as the negative repercussions of our government’s devotion to open borders become harder to ignore for all but the most oblivious, the gatekeepers of respectable opinion on this subject continue to narrow the parameters of discussion to their own narrow, ahistorical perspective. I don’t expect that to change any time in the near future, but those of us who want an intellectually honest debate about the most important issue of our time can at least begin to clarify its terms, if for no other reason than to educate those novices interested in how mass immigration has impacted our society who are asking themselves how they should view these changes from a liberty-oriented perspective.

Our last Rattle of 2011 runs the gamut, all the way from an immigration enforcement success in Pennsylvania to a disappointing judicial setback in South Carolina. However, we begin the final roundup of the year with a must-read essay in The American Conservative by W. James Antle III. It looks at the immigration scorecard in a sober, realistic analysis that takes into account the substantive victories of immigration reformers-such as continued nationwide support for SB 1070 and its clones-to the unquestionable failures, including a seismic change in the language of the immigration debate, which has turned the phrase “immigration reform” into a synonym for wholesale amnesty. It’s a piece that anyone who is concerned about this subject-as I know most of you are-should read in its entirety. 

We continue by highlighting a great post over at the American Thinker that poses several questions that Newt Gingrich has yet to satisfactorily answer about his dubious proposal to create a tiered system of permanent non-citizen workers out of the pool of 11-20 million illegal aliens currently living here. Be John Galt  expresses some other concerns that have yet to be addressed by Newt while emphasizing the points made by Mickey Kaus in his own analysis of Newt’s plan. Something that conservatives supporting Gingrich-but who are ostensibly opposed to amnesty-need to answer is why they’re backing a candidate whose immigration platform mirrors the one put forward by open borders, libertarian economist Bryan Caplan.

Staying in the field of presidential politicking, American Rattlesnake wholeheartedly endorses the statements of Mitt Romney, vis-a-vis President Obama’s illegal alien uncle, Onyango Obama. For those of you who might not recall, Omar Onyango Obama is not only residing in this country illegally-much like the President’s beloved Aunt Zeituni-but is the owner and operator of a liquor store in Boston, despite his recent DUI conviction.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney’s opponent Rick Perry continued his tough on the border pantomime in Iowa, decrying the inability of the federal government to control our southern border with Mexico, as well as declaring that he would withdraw the Justice Department’s lawsuits against states like Arizona and Alabama. The pull quote from this article is “the border has to be shut down for the future of the United States of America.” One wonders what he would do with the estimated forty percent of illegal aliens who overstay their visas. I suppose we’ll just have to wait ans see how serious Governor Perry is about his newfound posture of immigration hawk.

It does seem that the current crop of presidential candidates is being forced to address the concerns of Republican voters, however reluctantly and haltingly. That said, VDare has a fascinating piece exploring the damage that refugee resettlement has caused in Manchester, New Hampshire, and why the national GOP has been completely AWOL on this issue, despite its ritualistic paeans to the role of New Hampshire as the first state in the nation to hold its presidential primary. The politically courageous current mayor of Manchester is standing up for his constituents, even if the federal government and parasitical members of the refugee resettlement industry won’t. Perhaps the boldness of Ted Gatsas will serve as an example for his timorous counterparts in the national GOP to emulate. We can all hope.

The internal strife caused by the U.S. State Department in Maine is mirrored in Florence, Italy, where the tragic deaths of two Senegalese street merchants is being exploited by media organs to condemn the “racism” of ordinary Italians. Sadly, the exploitation of tragedies like this for political purposes is nothing new to the multicultural zealots spearheading the militant, Gramscian left. Nor is the equation of patriotic, reasonable opposition to mass immigration to racism an anomaly, unfortunately. It seems like these sorts of ad hominem attacks come with the territory, as Peter Brimelow pointed out in yesterday’s post.

Heading down to Washington D.C., we find that the usual rogue’s gallery of open borders demagogues is trying once again to foist amnesty upon an American public, and a Congress, that has consistently rejected it since it was first introduced over a decade ago.  The tireless efforts of Dick Durbin to give the bird to American taxpayers and hard-working students wouldn’t be newsworthy in itself, if not for the fact that a Philippine newspaper is now leading the charge to see the enactment of the DREAM Act. Media bias in reporting of immigration issues is nothing new, especially from foreign newspapers who hold no reverence for American law. However, the fact that a member of the United States Senate is cribbing notes from a newspaper overseas in order to undermine the country he’s ostensibly representing is a sad commentary on the state of politics in America in 2011.

Taking a short jaunt to Baltimore, we say farewell to WBAL institution Ron Smith. Before being struck down by cancer at the age of 70, Smith was a resonant voice of reason and integrity in a world where too may fall prey to the lure of the D.C. cocktail circuit. Gregory Kane has a fitting tribute to him in the Washington Examiner. Michelle Malkin testifies to the humanity of Ron on her website as well. Like the late, great Terry Anderson-another immigration patriot who died last year-Ron Smith will be missed by many people across the country, most of whom never knew him personally. Rest in Peace, Ron.

In slightly cheerier news, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives has approved a bill that would penalize employers who hire illegal workers. Fox News Latino has the entire story, which touches upon similar bills that were eventually enacted in states like Alabama and Arizona. On the other hand, the drive for immigration enforcement suffered a blow in South Carolina, where a federal judge has enjoined a law that cracked down on human smuggling and gave law enforcement officers the opportunity to detain those arrested for unrelated crimes if they were illegal aliens. As Governor Nikki Haley’s spokesman has said, the ultimate resolution of this case rests in the hands of the Supreme Court.

Our neighbor to the north is having its own immigration problems, which  have been amply documented by American Rattlesnake in previous updates. Canada’s capable Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is tackling them in stride, initiating the largest crackdown on citizenship fraud in recent memory. Of course, his proactive initiatives-including an innovative tip line ordinary Canadians can use to report cases of immigration fraud-have earned scorn from the usual suspects. Notwithstanding the carping from bottom-feeding immigration attorneys and radical, open borders socialists, Kenney has earned respect from the public and his adversaries across the aisle, as this National Post article demonstrates.

If only our president had cabinet members willing to stand up for their fellow countrymen. Instead, we have Hilda Solis, the U.S. Secretary of Labor, doing everything in her capacity to empower illegal aliens instead of the Americans who are struggling beneath a crushing unemployment rate and prolonged recession. Even as the unemployment rate plummets in the Yellowhammer State because of HB 56, Solis tries to find ways to double down on the failure of the Obama administration to provide economic opportunities for American citizens. Combined with the administration’s decision to remove the last remaining National Guard troops from our southern border, Barack Obama has demonstrated his disdain for the concerns of the American electorate.

In other administration news, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Alan Bersin, has resigned from his post. An unconfirmed recess appointment by President Obama, Bersin will be replaced by David V. Aguilar. But don’t worry open borders enthusiasts, Mr. Aguilar is four square in favor of amnesty, although he prefers to call it something else.

Finally, the ongoing congressional investigations into Operation Fast and Furious and this administration’s persistent coverup continue apace. We now have Senator Joseph Lieberman, previously known for his atrocious record on immigration issues, directing the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, which he currently chairs, to investigate the interagency “miscommunication” that lies at the heart of the Fast and Furious debacle. Let’s hope that he and Senator Grassley can elicit a more responsive reaction by administration officials than we’ve seen in the past. What is certain is that the men and woman who were killed, including Agent Jaime Zapata, as a result of the Justice Department’s and ATF’s negligence will never return to the warm embrace of their loved ones. If nothing else, let’s push for some measure of justice and accountability for those still alive.

Hat Tips: The Tea Party Immigration Coalition NCFreedom and NAFBPO

We were reminded by The Politico this weekend of why it is always a bad idea to elect an immigration attorney to Congress. Aside from the inherent conflict of interest present in electing an individual who will be able to craft laws that directly benefit his bottom line, there are broader issues at stake.

The Politico article sketches out Representative Labrador’s philosophy on immigration reform, which seems to be “a pox on both their houses.” He draws a false equivalence between those that want to see immigration laws already on the books enforced rigorously, and those who want to grant citizenship to nearly 20 million people living in this country illegally. 

While the golden mean is a desirable objective in many cases, the idea that you should seek to  compromise the essential principles of this country is misguided in the extreme. Labrador’s support for a guest-worker program is simply another form of corporate welfare that will weaken American laborers and entrepreneurs who are trying to abide by the law and compete in what should be a free market. It establishes a permanent class of non-citizens who are perpetually behind their American peers in both salary and benefits, and who will act as a source of unfettered chain migration in the future. Professor Borjas has delineated all of the problems inherent in guest worker programs for many years, but an argument even more relevant to this discussion is the opposition this proposed program would generate among Republican lawmakers. 

The entire premise of the Politico piece, i.e. that Rep. Labrador is in a perfect position to forge a consensus on immigration reform, is flawed because it doesn’t take into account growing Republican reservations over such a bill. Just a few days ago the Utah State Republican Convention supported a resolution that called on its state legislature to repeal HB 116, a law establishing a statewide guest worker program with the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon. The notion that this proposal will be adopted by Congress, or supported by Democrats once it’s decoupled from a broader amnesty plan-as Raul Labrador has promised-is absurd.

The only people interested in perpetuating this fiction are media outlets such as Politico, which refuse to accept the concept that Americans fundamentally disagree with their ideas about what constitutes a functional immigration system in this country. If Representative Labrador is attempting to win the media primary, he’s well on his way to achieving that goal. However, the notion that his “compromise” is a workable solution to the problem of illegal immigration is foolhardy, at best.

First of all, let me apologize for being derelict in addressing  Will Wilkinson’s  series of columns for The Economist. I had wanted to to respond to these short polemics, written as an ongoing dialogue between he and David Frum during the height of the DREAM Act’s legislative push during a lame duck session of Congress, earlier but multiple factors prevented me from doing so.

Since the focus of this site at the time was on preventing passage of DREAM, I felt that our resources could be better utilized by conveying information that you could use in persuading key senators to vote against this piecemeal amnesty, rather than rehashing the pros and cons of the bill itself.

I had intended on going back and delineating my philosophical objections to Will Wilkinson’s approach to immigration this January, but was prevented from doing so by a persistent flu bug. Now that I’m better able to marshal my arguments, I’m going to try and explain not the devastating consequences that would result from the enactment of his ideas-something that I’ve addressed at length on this site-but why those ideas are completely and utterly fraudulent. At least, when espoused by a purported “libertarian.”

Now, let me begin by giving credit to those open borders enthusiasts from the ostensible right, usually those working for corporate entitities heavily dependent upon low-skilled, inexpensive labor imported from abroad, who defend their stance in purely economic terms. Even though they are not forthright enough to admit that they want unfettered immigration because it will lower their labor costs by slashing the wages commanded by prospective American employees, they do not mask their their support for open borders through pseudo-intellectual posturing and logically inconsistent arguments masquerading as Hayekian dogma.

The truth is that there’s nothing libertarian in nature about demanding the importation of millions of low-skilled, poorly educated immigrants who will artificially reshape the labor market while saddling taxpaying Americans with a perpetual unfunded mandate in order to maintain their standard of living. This is not an expression of our compassion as a nation, nor a bold experiment demonstrating the infallibility of an unhindered free market. It is corporate welfare, which amnesty opponents who have studied this issue are more thank eager to point out.

Therefore, what prods ostensibly libertarian, or at least, libertarianish, pundits like Mr. Wilkinson to embrace such a top-down, tax-eating government policy? I think the answer lies in a column he penned several years ago for The Economist, which claims to explore the the psycho-genetic basis for all of those nasty, “xenophobic” and “restrictionist” feelings that Wilkinson’s political opponents harbor. Although, what actually is revealed in this post is the psychology of Will Wilkinson himself, which is a lot more illuminating than the purportedly irrational basis of the American public’s reluctance to admit an unlimited number of refugees from every corner of the globe.

But the modern nation state is a new idea: there were no nation states in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. And the modern nation state is vastly larger than the cooperative coalitions for which we are likely evolutionarily adapted. There is something distinctly unnatural about nation-level coalitions. The interesting question to me is how it is that we have come to see the co-members of our nation states as members of the relevant in-group. Iowans don’t get testy when Minnestotans move in, but Texans get cranky about Mexicans? Why is that? People in Delaware don’t fret a lot about their jobs being outsourced to South Dakota.Why not?

I think the paragraph excerpted above is the quintessence of  Will Wilkinson’s political philosophy.  As far as our national sovereignty is concerned, he does not believe it exists. The Constitutionally enshrined role of our federal government to protect and maintain our nation’s territorial integrity is nothing more than a pernicious psychological quirk that has no application in the real world. If this sounds familiar, it should. It is the same utopian fantasy propagated by radical Marxists, who also-not surprisingly-believe that there should be no impediments to unfettered immigration. At least, immigration into the wealthy, predominately capitalist nations of Western Europe and North America.

Here we have laid bare the true agenda of open borders libertarians, which is nothing more than the complete eradication of national borders in order to transform our society. It’s the antithesis of libertarian philosophy, which claims to disdain overarching, government plans that do not take into account the feelings of individuals, or the numerous unquantifiable factors that can not be accounted for by an existing government bureaucracy. A philosophy that incorporates Misesian skepticism about the ability to establish fixed prices and the corresponding subjective theory of value is transformed into a dogma that demands we allow and any all foreigners who wish to come here a free pass, and that this will always have a positive correlative effect on economic growth.

In short, the proposals of Wilkinson and other “liberaltarians” have absolutely no bearing on the functions of a free market, or the desirability of free trade, but are indeed utopian fantasies that are not substantively any different from the materialism of Marxist philosophy they routinely excoriate. So while Will Wilkinson might like to think of himself as something of an intellectual renegade, he’s nothing more than yet another ideologue committed to exacerbating a difficult problem that could be resolved, if not for the continued circulation of bad ideas among our nation’s governing class.

I’m always sceptical of open-borders politicians who suddenly have epiphanies related to immigration the minute their careers are imperiled. Such is the case with Senator John McCain, who’s decided to call out President Obama for his administration’s indifference to border issues.

As absurd as it may seem for someone who was the chief co-sponsor of the last major effort to enact amnesty to damn anyone for being insufficiently tough on border issues,  Senator McCain does deserve, at the very least, a golf clap for his efforts. Call me cynical, but something tells me that this hawkishness on the border will evaporate once he is comfortably re-elected. However, if he does decide to stick to his newly acquired convictions-again, an unlikely proposition-he wouldn’t be the first person to have changed course in recent years.

Bill Kristol-a man rightly criticized for his open borders stance in the past-has opposed recent attempts at enacting amnesty by men like Senator McCain, and has even gone so far as to endorse SB 1070 publicly.  Bill Bennett, one of the leading opponents of Proposition 187, has blurbed a brilliant book written by Mark Krikorian, the head of the Center of Immigration Studies, something that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.

I think the salient point here is that people can and do change their previously held positions on hotly contested issues-such as mass immigration and securing our borders-even if doing so lends itself to charges of hypocrisy or political opportunism. In Senator McCain’s case, I do think his recent reversals on immigration are due almost exclusively to the recent electoral scare he has experienced. That being said, we should be willing to embrace anyone who sincerely reconsiders his or her open borders opinions.

One mile to the border in Fort Hancock, Texas, USA - picture by Robert Thompson

Today’s edition of the Dallas Morning News carries a fascinating story about a survey just released by the Pew Hispanic Center, which documents two seemingly parallel trends. Namely, a decrease in the number of foreigners entering the United States illegally, and an increase in the percentage of illegal aliens living in the state of Texas.

There are a number of interesting observations to be made about this report, but we’ll  focus today on the alleged connection between the decreased entry of foreign nationals-mostly, although not exclusively, those of Mexican origin-into the country at the same time that the number of illegal aliens living in Texas has increased. This is attributed to the (relatively) vibrant Texas economy, which draws in people from Mexico who are searching for work.

If true, this would reinforce the open borders argument made primarily by libertarians, i.e. that immigration and the flow of illegal labor is driven exclusively by the laws of supply and demand. We would have to accept their premise that the glut of illegal aliens and unskilled immigrants in this country is attributable solely to economic self-interest, and not due to decisions made by the federal government, re: immigration. The truth is that the exact opposite is the case, and the broken border and massive influx of immigrants, facilitated by the government, drastically alters the wage scale in the United States, as Professor Borjas outlines in this policy paper.  

Although the decline in the number of Mexican nationals coming here illegally might be partially explained by the extended recession America’s experienced over the past two years, the impact of government policy in their decisions shouldn’t be diminished. Illustrating that point, the Pew Hispanic Center report points to the steepest declines in the presence of illegals, which occurred in the Southwest, e.g. Arizona, a state that has been tackling the problem of illegal aliens for the past four years.

It would be absurd to ignore the economic incentives that drive people to come here illegally, but it would be even more absurd to deny that the situation as it exists now-open borders, millions of illegal aliens, unfettered mass immigration from developing countries-wasn’t caused by government indifference and intentional disregard for the will of the people. We didn’t get here because employers are looking for cheap labor or unskilled workers are looking for higher wages. We arrived at this state because the people we entrusted with power decided to subsidize those looking to exploit cheap labor while ignoring the views of American citizens.