The Free Thinker

Steve Chapman wants to "Legalize Immigration":

But the legislation assumes that tougher enforcement at the border and within the state will magically banish these problems. In fact, those options have already been tried, and all they have done is make things worse.

The supporters of the law, meanwhile, overlook the obvious. There is a simple way to stop the lawless stream, protect Americans living on the border, improve adherence to law and reduce the costs of accommodating people who have no right to be here.

The solution? Stop focusing on trying to keep illegal immigrants out and start focusing on letting legal immigrants in.

Enforcement-only advocates often say they are not opposed to foreigners coming here as long as they follow the rules and obey the law. They should take a number and wait their turn, we are told, like the teeming masses of yore. It makes perfect sense until you discover that for most of those who want to come, legal admission is just about impossible.

"A peaceful, hardworking 24-year-old in Mexico or Central America who knows of a job in the United States for which no Americans are available simply has no legal means of entering the United States," writes policy analyst Daniel Griswold of the libertarian Cato Institute.

Foreigners with in-demand skills, like computer scientists, may get work visas. Close relatives of legal immigrants can also be admitted, though they often have to wait years. But if you don't fit in one of those slots -- well, how do you say "fugheddaboutit" in Spanish?

Griswold suggests a big boost in the number of temporary worker visas, which would mean Mexicans and Nicaraguans would no longer have to undertake a death-defying trek across the Sonoran Desert, or squeeze into the trunk of a smuggler's car, for the privilege of working at a sweaty, low-wage job.

They wouldn't need to swipe Social Security numbers to get counterfeit documents. They would be far more likely to work on the books and pay taxes. They would come under the cover of federal and state labor regulations, so they would no longer undercut native employees.

They would stop enriching Mexican criminal organizations that make a business of human trafficking. They would gain more of a stake in participating in and preserving our way of life.

Xenophobes might fear that expanding legal immigration would produce a big jump in the foreign-born population. That's unlikely, because in this realm, the paradoxical often prevails.

Bravo to Steve Chapman for making the argument.  Yet it's an indication of how low the level of public discourse on immigration is in the United States that there are so many readers out there who need to be told that "for most of those who want to come, legal admission is just about impossible."  That fact is so basic that no one who is so ignorant as not to be aware of it, namely most native-born Americans, should have any say in immigration policy.  Native-born Americans are ignorant of the law because they are not subject to it; they don't need to find out about it so as to obey it.  That's why I support illegal immigration more strongly than legal immigration.  Illegal immigration takes authority over migration over the people who shouldn't have it.

"Unfounded fear of immigrant crime grips Arizona" (Daniel Griswold, Washington Times):

Fears about an illegal-immigrant crime wave helped propel passage of Arizona's tough new law that makes it a crime to be present in the state without legal documents. Like the law itself, those fears are based more on perception than reality...

One big problem in the Arizona debate is that the perceptions about immigrants and crime do not square with the most basic data. After years of witnessing a rise in the number of illegal immigrants in their state, the people of Arizona are in reality less likely to be victims of crime than at any time in the past four decades.

According to the most recent figures from the U.S. Department of Justice, the violent crime rate in Arizona in 2008 was the lowest it has been since 1971; the property crime rate fell to its lowest point since 1966. In the past decade, as illegal immigrants were drawn in record numbers by the housing boom, the rate of violent crimes in Phoenix and the entire state fell by more than 20 percent, a steeper drop than in the overall U.S. crime rate.

Arizona suffers from its share of crime, but it is not out of proportion for a large city. Among similar-sized metro areas, such as Boston, Dallas, Detroit, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., Phoenix had the lowest violent crime rate in 2008. In Detroit, which is not known as a magnet for illegal Hispanic immigrants, the rate was three times that of Phoenix.

The story is much the same in communities along Arizona's long border with Mexico. Crime rates there are stable and, if anything, lower than in the rest of the state.

According to a story in the Arizona Republic this month, the assistant police chief in Nogales, Roy Bermudez, "shakes his head and smiles when he hears politicians and pundits declaring that Mexican cartel violence is overrunning his Arizona border town. 'We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico,' Chief Bermudez says emphatically. 'You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America.'"

In post-apartheid South Africa, crime is a serious and intractable problem. That doesn't justify retrospectively the advocates of apartheid, but at least it's a mitigating circumstance. Meanwhile, Arizona has no excuse.

I Agree with Reagan

From the Washington Times:

The latest to use the concept [of America as the "city on a hill"], if not the slogan itself, was Ronald Reagan, who in his 1989 farewell speech explained:

"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still."

"The doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get there." In other words: a right to migrate.

Open borders is the stone without which the edifice of American ideals falls down.

From ABC News, here's someone willing to defend the indefensible:

"When you break the law as a parent, you're assuming a certain amount of risk, and frequently your children are affected by that," said Dan Stein, president of Federation for American Immigration Reform. "That's what happened in this case: The parents assumed a certain amount of risk on behalf of the kids, some of the kids have done well in school, but unless there's a humanitarian basis or extraordinary circumstance, why wouldn't it be in the best interest of the sending country to take talent and capable people to work at building their own countries?"

Stein's reasoning is invalid because there is such a thing as human rights, but if it were valid, it would apply equally to native-born Americans. Wouldn't it be in the best interests of developing countries to draft randomly-selected American college students and deport them to countries with a shortage of educated people?

The idea that one may justly deport someone who came here at three months old, but not someone who was born here, is apparently so absurd that Stein doesn't even bother to argue it, preferring to use an argument that would serve quite nicely to justify Joseph Stalin's policy of shipping nationalities all over the Soviet empire at random.

By the way, if we're deporting the children of immigrants, why not imprison the children of murderers? It would probably be a fairly effective deterrent.

The Comforting Lies of the Migration Restricters

One reason that I'm in favor of immigrants, legal and illegal, and against critics of immigration and enforcers of border controls, is that border controls exist for the sole purpose (because of course if national security were their motive they would look totally different) of violating justice and human dignity. But if that weren't enough, a secondary reason would be that the rationalizations of critics of immigration, when they try to make themselves sound like decent people, involve such egregious falsehoods as are rarely heard in American public discourse when any other subject is at issue, and which puts the audience in the painful dilemma of imputing to the speaker a degree of ignorance which it is really alarming to suspect in one's fellow-citizens, or else making the accusation of a conscious and deliberate lie. Thus, consider what is written by one Mary Kate Cary in US News and World Report:

I was traveling this weekend to a family reunion and got seated on the plane between two beefy guys, who were on a business trip with some similarly beefy colleagues in the next row. When I asked where they were headed, they replied, “To a mock riot.” Huh? It turns out they were all prison guards (“Call us corrections officers, please!”) going for annual training in how to suppress an inmate uprising... [We] started talking about the controversial new immigration law in Arizona...

We soon realized that all three of us seated in the same row were either first- or second-generation descendants of immigrants. Our parents or grandparents all came to this country legally, and at considerable delay and difficulty. My grandparents already spoke English, but theirs did not and they had to learn the language before they could become citizens--something that has become controversial these days. “They had to go to some trouble to become citizens, and that’s all we’re asking now,” said one guy. “Just put forth some effort, and come in legally, like our families did. That’s all we’re asking.”

Maybe a mainstream consensus is emerging from the debate over this unreasonable law in Arizona: that securing our border has to come first--and then fair, reasonable but well-enforced immigration rules should follow. It’s like he said: “That’s all we’re asking.”

All of this would make a good sense and possibly not even be unreasonable or unjust if a certain state of the world obtained. That state of the world is one in which anyone who wants to could immigrate to America if they followed certain procedures. They could "wait in line," it would be a process, a hassle, but sooner or later, anyone-- or, let's say, anyone without terrorist connections or a criminal record-- could get in. In this world there would be a right to migrate, subject to some difficulties and sacrifices perhaps, slow, difficult, but sure. In such a world, it would be reasonable to say that "all we're asking" is to "put forth some effort, and come in legally." In that case, it would be at least arguable that opponents of immigration had justice on their side.

That we do not live in that world is a fact, a fact so obvious, so indisputable, so important, so central, so fundamental to the whole question that it is rather shocking and disgraceful even that the prison guards-- along with most of the rest of the public-- did not know it. But it almost beggars belief-- or it should, if we hadn't become miserably accustomed to it-- that someone who is writing professionally about immigration, in a major national publication, appears to be completely ignorant of this fact. Most of mankind is excluded permanently from America, by our laws, enforced by men with guns, from the moment of their birth. One cannot necessarily say in advance which ones, but given that the issuing of visas is discretionary and a tiny fraction of demand, and decisions are made in a way that favor the privileged, e.g., people from rich countries, people with access to education, etc., it is a fact that most people, no matter how much effort they devoted to it, could never get in.

So it's a lie to say that "all we're asking" is that immigrants follow the rules. A truthful immigration critic-- Mickey Kaus might do it-- ought to say, "Yes, I support apartheid. I think shutting most of the world's population out of America permanently makes life more comfortable for the little fraction of humanity that happens to be American-born, and I don't care to think about the ethical issues any further than that." But immigration critics are rarely honest, or at least, rarely honest and well-informed. Usually they are like Mary Kate Cary and her interlocutors, masking their guilt by the threadbare rationalizations which can't stand up for one second to a glance at the facts.

Fear God, Welcome the Stranger

This is me at the immigration protest in Lafayette Park this afternoon:

Wow.

How exciting, how grand, how glorious it was to be there. It took several hours afterwards for the sense of triumph, of heroism, to sink in. This may be as close as most people can come to the feelings of the First Crusaders, victoriously capturing Jerusalem, or the Athenians at Marathon. Of course, the cause isn't won. But the feeling of solidarity, of unity in purpose, and of having captured, at least, the moral high ground, felt like victory.

For the past year I've been growing ever more disdainful of the Democratic ruling class and its desperate dash to rob future generations blind. But I've come to admire the Republicans for their steadfast defiance, and to look to the wise paranoia of the Tea Party as a source of hope. Logically, the Tea Party's libertarian streak should have made them as suspicious of the government hunting down immigrants as of the government forcing people to buy health care, and if it wasn't clear that this logic held, it did seem possible that good leaders could turn the Tea Party's enthusiasm in an immigration-friendly direction, or if not that, at least tolerate non-evil views and policies on immigration. But the Arizona law changed that. There was no time to wait for enlightened Republican leaders to shepherd the Tea Party in the right direction. Fascism was on the march, and Obama, exhibiting the same disdain for freedom that he exhibited in his health care reform and in his foreign policy, seemed ready to cave in to it.

I don't argue politics with people too often, but in a couple of conversations I have had, I've noticed that liberals' only move nowadays seems to be to change the subject to immigration. Health care reform is indefensible. It's too obvious that the whole sales pitch for it was a lie, that it will raise costs, impair the efficiency of the insurance industry, probably increase the number of uninsured, and worsen the deficit even as it raises taxes. Of course, it will probably also provide health insurance for some people who don't have it, but nobody argues that because the response, "But we can't afford it," is so obvious and so devastating. No, they change to subject to immigration. They say the Tea Party isn't really motivated by fiscal conservatism, but by bigotry against illegal immigrants. It's a despairing argument-- yeah, our side sucks, but the other guys are even worse-- but an effective one. And now the Republicans have walked into the trap.

It still looks like there will be no pro-freedom candidates in 2010. It's a choice between fascists and socialists. (Of course the historical analogies aren't literal-- both parties are more democratic than Lenin or Hitler-- but they are apt.) It still looks like Republican nativist stupidity and thuggishness is going to prevent 2010 from being the referendum on Big Government that the country so desperately needs, and voters whose consciences forbid them to support the party of Jan Brewer are doomed to be interpreted as favoring regulatory takeovers of health care and Wall Street and who knows what else in the years to come. That doesn't seem as bad as it did. Western European social democracy, with its sad stagnation, is a bleak prospect, but after the police state future of which Arizona has made itself the symbol, to be France or Germany suddenly seems a very tolerable fate.

Anyway, such is the dismal state of the political class, and the protests don't change it. And yet to see those people. To listen to the children tell their stories, to see the dignity with which they face the dignity of deportation. To hear illegal immigrants speak openly on the platform, declaring their willingness to "fill the jails until they're sick of it," emulating the civil disobedience of Martin Luther King. To sing and shout together. The people united will never be defeated. Obama, escucha, estamos en la lucha... There was a wiry, irrepressible old man in the crowd near me, hardly the image of the professional agitator, seemingly a laborer of well over 50, short, and oddly inattentive in a way, yet I noticed how the enthusiasm of the day throbbed in him, and that he kept starting slogans that would be picked up by others. There was a certain dignity about him. Maybe that's the word to summarize the day. Dignity. Standing up for human dignity in the face of "papers please" tyrants out of tsarist Russia. To stand together, to know what we want, to know what we believe in, to know that we are in the right and that the world, uncomfortably shuffling and looking askance and hemming and hawing and rationalizing, knows it too-- that fills the spirit with faith, with hope, that dispels pessimism. I think there was a Greek philosopher held-- and of course the Christians believe it, too, in the end-- that a good man cannot be harmed. Win or lose, he who is in the right is glorious; win or lose, the unjust, the oppressor's lot is shame.

This blog post by Roger Simon struck me for its honesty, in contrast to the cowardly evasions of Peggy Noonan:

These past weeks, I’ve had to deal with a couple of large dying acacias in my backyard that were threatening to tumble onto my neighbor’s roof on the downhill side.  Not good.

I called my regular gardening service and they wanted $1900 to pull out the two trees.  Again not good.  I tried another service.  They wanted $1700.  Ditto. Then I crossed my fingers and tried the phone number from one of those smudgy business cards that pop up in your mailbox.   A guy came over, Hispanic, in his fifties.  I had no idea whether he was illegal or not and certainly didn’t ask.  His English was pretty good.  Good enough to quote me five hundred dollars, which I accepted.  A crew showed up a few days later and did the job just fine in four hours.  Some of them spoke English, some only Spanish.  I doubt they were citizens, but again I didn’t ask.  They were nice guys and I was happy.  I had saved myself 1200 bucks.

So I’m a hypocrite if I support the Arizona legislation, so I won’t formally, although I sympathize with it.  We’re all in a puddle of goo when it comes to immigration, especially all of us here in the Southwest. And we’re all poseurs.

But no, not all of us. I know the way out of the "puddle of goo." Do what the Bible and the Statue of Liberty and your conscience says. Welcome the stranger. How to do so is a bit complex, but it doesn't seem so hard once you've made up to do the right thing, whatever the cost. I don't judge Roger Simon and others who are still stuck in the swamps of cognitive dissonance. I just feel gratitude to have found the way out of them.