Juniorbird.com

Watching the talking heads on TV, it seems like everyone’s spouting off about keeping the borders secure, about not rewarding immigrants who have come to the US illegally, and about how much it costs to pay for illegal immigrants here in the US. Well, I’ve got bad news for you all, but those are exactly the wrong questions to be asking here. In fact, these questions are wrong in two ways: there is a better question to ask, and these questions distract from the real issues.
First, how much does it cost to pay for illegal immigrants? Some people throw around big numbers, ten billion or more, but it’s more complicated than that. It’s not true that, if we kicked out the illegal aliens, we’d suddenly save $10B; instead, prices for many of the things that we buy would go up. Further, much of this spending is for things that benefit us indirectly, such as treatment of diseases that are a public health concern and education for the children of immigrants, which provides said children with the opportunity to be successful in their lives (that I consider these things indirect benefits to me probably just proves that I’m a bleeding-heart lefty). At any rate, it’s not a simple kick-the-immigrants-out-save-billions issue.
One of the major things that people seem to agree on is question number two, keeping the borders secure (yes, I’m aware I’m working out of order here). It seems like a good idea to secure our borders, and there may be good national security reasons to do so, but border security won’t help with immigration. First of all, let’s just think this thing through: so we build a fence along the whole border. OK, then some clever Mexican comes up with — get this — wire-cutters, and makes a hole in the fence. Then they walk through that hole. So, now pick one:
* Let the Mexican come across and illegally clean your house
* Shoot the Mexican for wanting to clean your house
A bit trite, you say? Well then, let’s look at history. The last time we tightened up the borders, we actually ended up spending more to support illegal immigrants (see point above). Why? Well, a lot of migrant workers had come up for grape-picking season every year and then returned to their homes and families in Latin America during the off-season. Now, with the tighter border, these migrant workers instead decided to stay in the US, where the jobs were, and brought up their families too.
The real solution to border security is a market-based solution: make it easier to get across the border legally than to go illegally, and easier for companies to hire legal immigrants than illegal ones. Of course, this means that both legal entry and hiring migrant workers, legally, need to be absurdly easy. But, otherwise, it will continue to be a sounder economic decision for people to behave illegally than legally.
And then there’s the question of rewarding immigrants who’ve come to the US illegally, by giving them citizenship. This is a good entree into the real solution, which is: we need to ask where we want to be, not get obsessed with where we are. Thinking about how people got here is focusing on things in the past that cannot be changed; there is no way that someone who came illegally can change that fact, even if they’ve stayed in the US legally for 20 years. They’re here, and we’ve got to deal with that. Can we make something positive of their presence in this country, rather than something negative? On one occasion, an immigrant made the decision to come legally or not, Every day, they make the decision to behave legally or not, to work hard or not, to be a good parent or friend or family member or community resident or not. Should we ignore all of the other good choices they’ve made and deny them citizenship? And is citizenship a reward, a responsibility, or both? Do we profit more from giving an immigrant citizenship than we give up, or is it a bigger benefit to them than it is to us? We need to decide these things before we can even begin to tackle the citizenship question.
The present Congressional leadership wants to rush an immigration bill through; we really need to consider all of these issues and many more. The real questions are:
* What kind of a United States do we want to build?
* How do we compete with up-and-coming countries like India and China in the 21st century?
* What are our real national security requirements, and what are we doing to fulfill them? Where will we cut corners and where will we execute fully?
If we don’t consider these serious questions, any solution we adopt is, at best, a band-aid. Let’s not make this an issue we revisit every couple of years, let’s have a serious national conversation and adopt an approach that can last us for the next half century or more.

Since all the kids these days are taking a position on immigration, I guess I’d better throw in my two cents. Goodness knows, I’m sure to have either an exciting, progressive position or a fantastically racist. Or, more likely, both, since I’m both a raving liberal and a white American. If I were in charge, I would fix it all by:
Well, not by starting some dodgy guest-worker program, that’s for sure. America needs a lot of seasonal temporary labor, that’s for sure, but we shouldn’t get it at the same high price at which Europe has acquired their low-cost workers over the last 40 years. The guest worker programs from across the pond have brought in workers but intentionally not integrated them with the society of their host country. The result is millions of essentially stateless individuals, people who have spent their entire working lives in, say, Germany, who speak the language, who have families and children in their host country, but who have no path to citizenship or prospects should they return to their countries of origin. (Often, these immigrants are inconveniently Muslim, as well.)
Politicians in our country seem to be proposing a similar system, with much of the argument taking place over whether or not we “reward” those who enter the country illegally by somehow putting those immigrants on the road to citizenship. America’s competitive advantage has long been our ability to lure the brightest, hardest-working people away from other countries and integrate them into our society. In today’s context, with increasing competition from India and China, we can hardly afford to toss aside such an advantage. Any solution to our problems needs to focus not on bringing in temporary, low-cost work, but on building a better American melting pot.
As an aside, it’s important to remember that, in a free market, a lot of the low-paying jobs that require migrant labor would themselves migrate to other, lower-cost countries. Around the world, emerging economies are held back because the activites at which they could be most economically competitive, activities such as farming and garment fabrication, are instead carried out by subsidized American companies. When we provide these subsidies, either through active government funding or lax immigration enforcement, we take jobs away from countries in Africa and Latin America, and encourage the tide of immigration to our shores. A more, dare I say, _Republican_ economic policy would help other countries develop and limit immigration.
But nothing well ever end immigration, because the US will always offer jobs — and probably even offer good jobs in the parts of the clothing industry and farming at which we can be competitive without corporate welfare. So how do we handle this immigration? I guess I’m not qualified to run for king of the world, because I really don’t know. What I do know is that we need to encourage the best and brightest to come over here, because that’s how we’ll all thrive in the end. We don’t need to worry about locking immigrants out of social services, because so few come to the US for food stamps or free public education (if people really immigrated for government cheese, you’d see a lot more Mexicans in welfare states like Sweden; instead, you tend to find the Mexicans outside Home Depot, looking for a job). We do need to worry about whether or not the children of immigrants have the opportunities that will make them successful members of society, or if they’re underserved and pushed aside and, thus, forced into marginal social niches with marginal opportunities and high incentives to opt out of the workforce or into criminal behavior. We do need to worry about ensuring that immigrants get fair wages and safe working conditions and the opportunities that will make them homeowning, taxpaying members of society. We do need to worry about immigrants taking away Americans’ jobs, but the best solution to that is to give Americans the opportunity and education to keep ahead of the curve, not lock people out so that Americans can stay behind the curve. We do need to worry about control the borders but that means finding a balance between military-style enforcement and sound economic incentives, not simply cracking down on everyone who’s brown. We do need to worry about people staying in America after they immigrate for a temporary job, not because we want them to go home but because we want to know why hard-working people have suddenly stopped wanting to move to America. And do we really want to have a system that involves giving everyone a national ID card and the police the right to stop you and check that ID card at any time?
I’m excited that there have been marches around the country, demanding immigrant rights. I’m excited that there’s a discussion in Congress, and on the TV -yell- talk shows. Heck, I’m even excited that our tremendously distinguished President has gotten this issue onto our collective plates. But let’s not just make some quick dollars-focused decision that makes the big raspberry-growing conglomerates happy because they get the labor they need at the price that they want; let’s make a decision that helps America be the country that we want it to be for the next 100 years. I know that’s super-dramatic, but we have just such an opportunity, let’s not Homeland Security it up.