Does America Really Welcome Immigrants?

12 08 2011

Heritage’s Erika Anderson says that the country does and makes the case for why. Her post well states some of the reasons why we welcome immigrants. Surprisingly, considering this is Heritage, her post even recognizes that free migration is one of the inherent rights of the individual (although that point is bizarrely undercut by the simultaneous claim that the U.S. can legitimately curtail that right).

There’s a huge problem with the piece though – it’s entirely assumed that America actually does welcome immigrants. The fact is, this country does not welcome immigrants.

The evidence of America’s hostility to immigrants is overwhelming.

There’s the individual examples of course, like Andres Lopez, who was “guided into a wall” of his home by federal immigration officers.

Image of Andres Lopez next to the wall immigration officers slammed him into

And then there’s the case of Air Force Staff Sergeant Luis Magana and his wife Karina, a permanent resident who nearly got deported as a result of her naturalization interview. Apparently she had accidentally misfiled some of the paperwork and the government processed it (knowing it was incorrect) only to accuse her of fraud when she applied to naturalize and become a U.S. citizen. She and her husband (who was about to be deployed when this nightmare began) spent the next 2 years in terror she would be deported because of an innocent mistake and bureaucratic incompetence, but luckily a competent immigration lawyer was able to come to the family’s aid and she has been able to finally resume the naturalization process.

These aren’t just isolated incidents. They’re part of a broad mosaic of hostility and ill-treatment of immigrants in America, an injustice that stems squarely from our byzantine, hopelessly complex web of immigration laws and the mainstreaming of attitudes that immigration is a problem for America and that we are too permissive of immigration and immigrants.

Sure, as Anderson’s post and other (usually) anti-immigrant commentators note, the U.S. accepts more immigrants than any other country in the world. But that doesn’t change the insane and illegitimate barriers we put up to the legal immigration process. It isn’t ok for a man to beat his wife just because all his neighbors break their wives’ legs – being less bad is never a justification for being wrong and it certainly isn’t a goal to strive towards.


Comments : 1 Comment »

Categories : Immigration, Understanding Immigration

Immigration Reform Essential for Economy – an Update from CEI

26 07 2011

I got this press release from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and wanted to pass it on as the points are well worth recognizing – and far too few in government seem to realize that.

Immigration Reform Imperative for Economic Growth

Senate Subcommittee Hearings Confirm Economic Necessity of Immigration Reform

Washington, D.C., July 26, 2011 — The Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security held hearings today highlighting the economic importance of immigration reform. The economic benefits of immigration are underappreciated according to Policy Analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Alex Nowrasteh.

“Removing barriers to legal immigration would be an enormous benefit to our economy,” said Nowrasteh. “Immigrants of all skill levels, from the highly skilled to the lower skilled, create jobs and economic opportunities for Americans.”

In a recent report published by CEI, Nowrasteh highlights the enormous benefits of highly skilled immigrants:

“Highly skilled immigrants and workers are typically well educated, English speaking, and young.  They are well paid, do not take many government benefits, and are not prone to criminality.” “Because the skills of highly skilled foreigners are different from Americans, there is little direct competition between them and natives. In fact, they work well together and increase productivity.”

The hearings today invited experts and industry representatives to testify on the benefits of immigration. “Creating legal pathways to immigration like our ancestors enjoyed would quickly make the unauthorized immigration problem evaporate. The goal of any sensible immigration reform should be to increase legal immigration of non-violent and healthy people. Restrictions should be only limited to accessing the welfare state, legitimate security, and health concerns,” said Nowrasteh.  “Recognizing that immigration is a net economic benefit is the first step toward taking real reform.”

CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government.  For more information about CEI, please visit our website at www.cei.org and blog, Openmarket.org.

I don’t have much to add, but will note this is particularly timely as WordPress ate a post I did over the weekend about the revival of Know Nothing sentiment in the United States. I’ll be attempting to recreate it and post it sometime this week.


Comments : 3 Comments »

Categories : Economics, Immigration, Political News, Politics

Independence Day Thought

4 07 2011

I’d be interested in seeing to what degree people who complain about illegal immigrants breaking the law correlate with people who illegally shoot off fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Also, I think it’s worth linking to my Independence Day post from last year.


Comments : 2 Comments »

Categories : Hypocrisy, Immigration, Liberty, Thoughts

Nobody Wants to be Illegal and the MD DREAM Act Won’t Change That

24 06 2011

Ann Miller recently made the case that the MD DREAM Act encourages legal immigrants to become illegal. While I like Ann and think she generally does a good job with her writing, she’s really missed the mark on this one.

In essence, her argument boils down to the argument that because the MD DREAM Act gives a benefit to illegal immigrants but not to legal immigrants, that creates an incentive for legal immigrants to become illegal immigrants.

All other things being equal, that might be true. The problem is, all other things aren’t equal. To paraphrase the great Frédéric Bastiat, we have to consider both those things which are seen and those which are unseen.

The simple fact is, being an illegal immigrant sucks. It’s a wretched, horrible life that imposes massive burdens, both economic and psychological, even for the luckiest amongst them. No one wants to be an illegal immigrant – they’d just rather be an illegal immigrant than trapped in the hellhole that was their former country.

As an illegal immigrant a person:

  • Lives in constant fear of deportation
  • Cannot participate in the above ground economy
  • Has to be scared of seeking help from law enforcement if they are victimized
  • Are more likely to be targeted by thieves and other criminals because of the (justifiable) reluctance to seek help from law enforcement
  • Possesses a generally lower standard of living than equally poor Americans
  • Is denied access to most welfare programs that benefit the poor
Balance all of the above against the sole benefit of the MD DREAM Act, reduced tutition, with no pathway to citizenship like the federal DREAM Act offered, and I can’t imagine there are any legal immigrants for whom a shift from legal status to illegal status would be beneficial.

Immigrants aren’t stupid, especially ones who are successful at navigating the impossible maze that is our legal immigration system. They know full well what it means to be an illegal immigrant, so does anyone really think they’re going to weigh all the negatives noted above against the meager benefits of the MD DREAM Act and decide to give up their legal status?

Comments : 2 Comments »

Categories : Economics, Immigration, Incentives, Maryland

A Pernicious Lie That Won’t Go Away

18 04 2011

A few months back I explained that Del. Pat McDonough was spreading untrue claims about the legality of illegal immigrants paying taxes.

I’d hoped this nasty and vicious untruth had gone away, but apparently there is someone out there continuing to push it to people who don’t know better, as one of my own state legislators, Del. Mike Smigiel made the exact same claim at a recent legislative wrap-up.

I hate to repeat myself, but this simply is not true:

What’s the real truth? Something far different.

First, illegal immigrants not only can legally pay federal income tax, according to U.S. law they are obliged to. In the case of James v United States the Supreme Court held that illegally earned income is still considered to contribute to an individual’s total gross income and as such the earner owes taxes on it.

Second, it is quite possible for illegal immigrants to pay federal income taxes without resorting to fraud. The IRS issues Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITINs) to persons without Social Security Numbers so that they can pay taxes. In 2008 alone, over 5.5 million tax returns were filed using ITINs. Now, it’s unlikely that all of those were illegal immigrants, but a large number of them undoubtedly were.

As I said with Del. McDonough, I seriously doubt that Del. Smigiel is repeating this falsehood knowingly, and I feel a bit bad about pointing it out, but it’s a big departure from the truth and has the potential to significantly shift the debate on illegal immigration, so I feel duty-bound to set the record straight.

UPDATE: I’ve spoken with Del. Smigiel about this and he indicated he meant to state that illegal immigrants need a SSN to get a job and therefore they cannot work without one.

He also stated that it was his understanding that you cannot pay FICA without an SSN; I would disagree on this point as I would assume an illegal immigrant paid under the table would be required to pay their FICA contribution as self-employment tax rather than the conventional withholding most people use to pay FICA.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Immigration, Taxes, Understanding Immigration

More Proof Immigration Restrictionists Don’t Care About Illegal Immigration

12 04 2011

From Reform Immigration for America:

The restrictionist NumbersUSA has put out their yearly “report card” of lawmakers on the issue of immigration.

Chris Christie is given a nice even “F”; Haley Barbour, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich all earn “D-minus” grades; Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee come in at “D.” Then comes Ron Paul at “C-minus.” At the top of the list are Tim Pawlenty at “C-plus” and Michele Bachmann at “B-minus.” Both the Minnesotans have come out for eliminating birthright citizenship.

Barack Obama, of course, is given an “F-Minus,” a hitherto unknown point of depth in the grading scale.

President Obama receives an F-Minus for deporting immigrants at record levels and increasing spending on border security, and Michele Bachmann only earns a B-Minus for wanting to eliminate birthright citizenship.

What would make NumbersUSA happy?

The answer of course is simple – stopping all migration so that consumers suffer due to uncompetitive workers being secure in their jobs and people like Roy Beck don’t have to deal with people who look or sound different than he does.

But at least they’re mostly up front about that. Normally you’d have to at least work a bit to scratch the surface and see the anti-market sentiment and xenophobia driving the immigration restrictionists. But lately they’ve been doing that themselves. So thanks for that at least.


Comments : 1 Comment »

Categories : Immigration

In Case There Was Any Confusion, the Center for Immigration Studies Doesn’t Actually Care About Illegal Immigration

7 04 2011

How can I say that you ask? Simple, just look at what they themselves are saying.

Why, as recently as today the Center for Immigration Studies came out, again, against doing anything serious to stop illegal immigration.

As noted here in the past, USCIS desperately wants to “streamline” its application processes.

Even if eligibility rules are not changed a bit, modifying an application process to make it faster, or less expensive, or more convenient to the applicant, inevitably makes that process more attractive, and thus it is used more often, and that creates more migration.

A clumsy process, however, tends to discourage marginal applicants.

As I’ve noted before, we’ll never get a handle on illegal immigration without making the immigration process easier, it’s just a matter of basic economics. As CIS recognizes, an inefficient immigration process discourages applicants, but it doesn’t mean people don’t come, it simply means they’re significantly more likely to come illegally.

And contrary to their claims, the so-called strategy of attrition through enforcement that groups like CIS promote certainly isn’t working. Want proof? Just look to Maricopa County, Arizona. If stringent enforcement of immigration law bolstered by highly invasive, anti-free-market programs to make it easier to enforce was enough to stop illegal immigration, then why is Joe Arpaio able to continually discover illegal immigrants?

The answer is that attrition through enforcement doesn’t work and any group that proposes using it and it alone to counter illegal immigration cannot be taken seriously. And that’s even more true when they double down on the lunacy by calling for attrition through enforcement couples with further restrictions on migration – as CIS, NumbersUSA, FAIR, Help Save Maryland and many others do.

Moral of the story? If you think illegal immigration is a problem, stop listening to these groups and start promoting an easing of the immigration process.


Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags:
Categories : Economics, Immigration, Incentives, Understanding Immigration

Roy Beck Continues to Peddle Bizarro Logic

28 01 2011

We’ve known for some time now that NumbersUSA president Roy Beck thinks it isn’t growing government when government has to increase in size to enforce the anti-immigration measures he desires. Now he’s adding to his tragic inability to understand basic logic.

In a recent post he griped that,

To Griswold, it makes no sense to be arresting and deporting illegal foreign workers since those illegal workers obviously wouldn’t be here or be holding jobs if the economy didn’t need them.

It is easy in his ideology to overlook the 24 million “U-6 unemployed” Americans and assume if they had what it takes they would have a job.

But that is not the Democratic ideology. Democrats often call for trade protections for U.S. workers because they don’t believe it fair to force them to give up their standard of living because of a total surrender to globalism.

Do the Democrats who invited their Globalist Libertarian witness really believe that we have 7 million illegal foreign workers in the country because there aren’t 7 million among the 24 million unemployed Americans who would like to have those jobs in construction, service, manufacturing and transportation?

My response to Mr. Griswold is that, “Yes, it IS a matter of supply and demand. With 24 million Americans wanting a full-time job but unable to find one, this country clearly has an OVER-supply of workers and does not need one single illegal alien worker to stay or to import one single additional legal foreign worker.

As I and others have amply demonstrated before, the problem isn’t that employers are choosing to hire immigrants, legal or illegal, over native-born Americans. The problem is that strong incentives make it unlikely Americans will be hired.

To begin with, contrary to Beck’s claims, most unemployed Americans aren’t interested in the jobs being offered. From Mark Perry:

Michigan had the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 14.1 percent in March, and the ranks of the state’s unemployed total more than 682,000. The last time the March jobless rate in Michigan was that high was 27 years ago in 1983, when it reached 16.1 percent.

So you would think it would be easy to hire seasonal workers in Michigan for industries like landscaping, right? Well, you would be wrong this year, because unemployed Michiganders are getting unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks due to all of the federal jobless benefits extensions, and those benefits are creating disincentives for some of the unemployed to go back to work. Here’s the way the math works:

Landscape workers can earn about $12 per hour in Michigan and would make $480 per week before taxes working full-time, or about $350 per week after taxes. In addition, full-time landscape workers would face transportation costs and other work-related expenses. But collecting unemployment benefits and working zero hours per week, many of those unemployed workers can receive $255 per week tax-free for almost two years, which is only $95 less per week than if they worked full-time. For some workers who are getting the maximum of $387 per week in jobless benefits, they can receive even more from collecting benefits than they would get paid going back to work full-time.

And even if Americans were willing to work the jobs, they either wouldn’t be willing to work them at a competitive wage or they wouldn’t legally be able to because of minimum wage laws. Even if businesses increased wages to meet the demands of American workers, it won’t be good for the economy. It’s a point I’ve made before, but I’ll make it again.

  • Employers don’t have an infinite pool of money to pay wages out of. Therefore, if pay goes up in order to attract domestic labor, employers will have to hire fewer workers.
  • Those American workers are going to be at best, as productive as migrant labor. In all likelihood they could well end up being less productive.
  • If fewer workers are producing at even the same level of productivity, then the firms hiring them will be producing less. Magnify that effect if domestic labor proves less productive than migrant labor.
  • As firms pay the same amount to produce less goods, their economic output necessarily goes down.
  • With firms generating weaker economic outputs, the economy as a whole will shrink, likely increasing unemployment and worsening the plight of the American workers Beck claims to care so much about.

Considering that Beck obviously doesn’t get economics, he’d do well to stop trying to use economic arguments when trying to promote his anti-immigration agenda. Of course, that would require him to admit he and his organization are motivated by simple hatred of foreigners.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Economics, Immigration, Incentives, NumbersUSA, Roy Beck

Is the Tea Party Serious About Liberty?

26 01 2011

It’s an important question and the answer isn’t as self-evident as it might seem.

As Salon’s Alex Pareene has noted, there are some disturbing trends when it comes to Tea Party activists taking anti-liberty stances:

Andrew Sullivan documented two examples of Tea Party illiberalism earlier this week. First of all, polling reveals that support for gay marriage is lower among Tea Partyers than among almost any group besides “conservative Republicans.” Fifty-two percent of Tea Partyers don’t support gay marriage or civil unions. That is not really the position of actual libertarian-leaning Republicans, let alone freewheeling libertarians.

But more damningly, various New Mexico Tea Partyers booed one of the movement’s superstars for daring to suggest that a wasteful and — let’s just say it –tyrannical government campaign be ended.

That’s pretty troubling stuff, as is the hostility to free trade and aggressively anti-immigration sentiment coming from some Tea Party activists and attendees.

However the Cato Institute’s David Boaz has a fair counterpoint to Pareene’s:

“The tea party is not a libertarian movement, but (at this point at least) it is a libertarian force in American politics. It’s organizing Americans to come out in the streets, confront politicians, and vote on the issues of spending, deficits, debt, the size and scope of government, and the constitutional limits on government. That’s a good thing. And if many of the tea partiers do hold socially conservative views (not all of them do), then it’s a good thing for the American political system and for American freedom to keep them focused on shrinking the size and cost of the federal government.”

In general I’d say Boaz comes closer to the truth. But then I see things like this and it makes me want to re-consider:

More importantly than being MSOP’s first meeting of the New Year, this meeting will feature Robert Broadus, leader of Protect Marriage Maryland. We will discuss the imminent threats to traditional marriage in Maryland, which have become very legitimate due to November’s elections, and what the average Marylander can do to stop them.

That’s from the website of the Maryland Society of Patriots, one of the two main Tea Party groups in Maryland (the other main group is AFP based). That they are taking this kind of stance is incredibly disturbing.

There simply isn’t anything pro-liberty about using the coercive force of the state to define marriage as exclusively being the province of the combination of one man and one woman. I don’t expect Tea Party groups to go and support the libertarian social policies, but if it wants to be serious about it’s pro-liberty credentials it needs to avoid coming out and endorsing social conservative statism.


Comments : 6 Comments »

Categories : David Boaz, Immigration, Liberty, Maryland, Politics, Tea Party

Quick Note to David Henderson

25 01 2011

EconLog’s David Henderson has asked Bryan Caplan about his support for open borders:

That would effectively double the U.S. population. Now, under my scheme, the U.S. government would couple open borders with a 20-year residency requirement for U.S. citizenship and a requirement that one be a citizen in order to get any kind of welfare, including government schooling. That way, people wouldn’t come here for welfare (I think most of them don’t anyway) and we wouldn’t worry about their voting away the very economic system that made this country attractive to them.

But Bryan and I both know that you can’t always get what you want. The government is not some entity that he and I control. So what if the government did not couple open borders with this 20-year residency requirement or even a 10-year residency requirement? Would Bryan still advocate open borders? And would he worry at all that the new residents would vote away the goose that lays the golden eggs? And if he wouldn’t worry about that, why wouldn’t he worry? Inquiring minds would like to know.

I can’t speak for how that will affect Bryan’s position, but I did want to note that for the vast majority of people there is already a 10 year minimum residency requirement.

In order to qualify for U.S. citizenship you have to have 5 years of residency (3 years if your spouse is a citizen) after obtaining a green card.

Now, if you are lucky enough to have immediate family members you can get a green card immediately. If you aren’t that fortunate but do happen to be a sports superstar or massively wealthy and willing to invest in America you can get a greencard in about a year to a year and a half.

However if you had the ill luck to be one of the many tens of millions of people to not be any of the former you have to legally be in the United States for anywhere from 6 to 10 years before qualifying for a green card.

Now add up all of that and we get that 10 year minimum residency requirement, with the number undoubtedly being higher for many. And that’s without even factoring in the bureaucratic delays that plague the government immigration process.


Comments : 1 Comment »

Categories : Immigration, Understanding Immigration

« Previous Entries


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.