[Soulflytribe]

I've found this very interesting article at the Cato Institute website, it changed my mind about immigration in the US.
Feel free to say if you agree or not.

Thanks,



http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13976



GOP Candidates Betray the Spirit of Reagan on Immigration

by Daniel Griswold


This article appeared on National Review (Online) on January 3, 2012.


Immigration has loomed larger as an issue in the Republican presidential debates than it does in the minds of most voters. Driven by a minority of activists in their party, the candidates have been drawn into an unhealthy competition to see who can sound the harshest in cracking down on low-skilled illegal immigrants from Latin America.

So far the biggest loser in the competition is the Republican party.

The party is losing out because the rhetoric brings us no closer to actually solving the problem, while driving away voters crucial to the party's long-term success.

In recent debates, the candidates have argued over who will build the longest and most secure fence along our border with Mexico. Mitt Romney wants it to cover all 2,000 miles, no matter what the terrain or the cost. Michele Bachmann wants to double down by making the fence two-tiered. Before he suspended his campaign, Herman Cain called for the fence to be lethally electrified. Any candidate who expresses any sympathy for immigrants or their children is quickly denounced as favoring "amnesty."

Conservatives should be friendly to immigration, and the first to seek expanded opportunities for legal immigration.
Conservatives should be friendly to immigration, and the first to seek expanded opportunities for legal immigration. Immigration has been integral to America's free and open economy. Immigrants embody the American spirit. They are self-starters seeking opportunity to support themselves and their families in the private sector.

Current immigration is driven largely by demand and supply. Immigrants come when there are jobs available that not enough Americans are able and willing to fill. That's why immigration rates, legal and illegal, tend to fall when the economy is struggling, and to pick up as the economy grows. Immigrants stimulate job creation for natives by promoting investment, creating new products and services, and increasing demand for housing and other goods. Immigration keeps America demographically healthy while other, less open Western nations struggle with declining workforces.

Study after study confirms that immigrants help to boost the productivity and incomes of native-born Americans. A 2009 Cato Institute study by Peter Dixon and Maureen Rimmer calculated that legalizing low-skilled immigration would boost the collective income of U.S. households by $180 billion per year. A new American Enterprise Institute study by Madeline Zavodny finds that an increase in visas for both high-skilled and less-skilled foreign-born workers actually creates a net increase in jobs for native-born workers.

Contrary to fears stoked by talk radio, immigrants do not fuel an increase in crime. In fact, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than their native counterparts. They are too busy working and don't want to jeopardize their residency in the United States by getting into trouble with law enforcement. That helps to explain why crime rates have been dropping for two decades in Arizona and across the country even as immigration rates have been rising.

If legal immigration were expanded, the kind of workers now sneaking across the border illegally would instead enter legally through established ports of entry. We know from the Bracero program in the 1950s that an increase in guest-worker visas led to a sharp drop in illegal traffic across the border. With far fewer workers entering illegally, the Border Patrol and local law-enforcement officers could concentrate their resources on apprehending real criminals.

Immigrants come to America to work, not to live off the welfare state. Their labor-force participation rates exceed those of native-born Americans. U.S. law bars immigrants from collecting welfare for at least five years after they arrive.

Critics of immigration routinely exaggerate the cost of emergency-room care and public education for immigrants and their families. The cost of government services used by illegal immigrants is a small fraction of what government spends on middle-class entitlement programs, corporate welfare, and farm subsidies. If conservatives are worried about social spending on immigrants, their aim should be to wall off the welfare state, not our country.

Immigrants do not undermine American culture, they enrich it. Immigrants come because they appreciate the freedom and economic opportunity that has traditionally defined our country. Like waves of immigrants in the past, today's Hispanic and Asian immigrants are learning English, and their children and grandchildren are overwhelmingly fluent.

In April 1980, when Ronald Reagan was competing in the presidential primaries, he rejected the building of a wall between the United States and Mexico: "Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems? Make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit — and then while they're working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they want to go back, they can go back. And open the border both ways by understanding their problems."

Daniel Griswold is director of the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.

More by Daniel Griswold
If a Republican presidential candidate said such a thing today, he or she would suffer withering criticism for being soft on illegal immigration. Instead, we hear Reagan's successors talk about implementing national ID cards, imposing intrusive regulations on the labor market, raiding farms, factories, and restaurants, and harassing small-business owners trying to survive in this tough economy, all in the name of chasing away hard-working immigrants.

In the past two decades, spending on border enforcement has skyrocketed more than six-fold, and personnel at the border five-fold. Yet the mantra of many Republicans has been to throw more money at the problem while rejecting any fundamental reform of the immigration system itself.

The predominant GOP view on immigration is not only bad policy but also bad politics. Hispanics are now the largest minority group and the fastest-growing voting bloc. Ronald Reagan understood, as did George W. Bush, that millions of Hispanics are friendly to the Republican message of entrepreneurship, opportunity, and family values. The demeaning rhetoric about unauthorized immigrant workers that emanates from the right is interpreted by many Hispanic citizens as a putdown of their culture. Republicans thus risk alienating potential Hispanic supporters, as well as more moderate non-Hispanic voters. With the long-term demographic changes already in motion, an anti-immigration Republican party will find it more and more difficult to win elections.

Spending billions more each year to enforce a fundamentally unenforceable law is not the conservative answer to illegal immigration. Immigration law needs to be changed in a way that better serves our economic needs, protects our security, and affirms our best values as a nation.

[Rei Murasame]

I knew they'd come out and actually admit to it one day. They won't have to wait long to get their wish, since the GOP establishment is actually aware and in agreement with the substance of that article, they just can't tell their voting base about that yet.

The CATO institute and NR on this issue effectively speak on behalf of the financial interests that will predetermine the amount of latitude any GOP government will have when it comes to limiting immigration, so the GOP could conceivably collect votes from anti-immigrant voters by making anti-immigrant noises, and then continue to carry on not really restricting immigration at all.

To address some sections of this article:

Immigration keeps America demographically healthy while other, less open Western nations struggle with declining workforces.

Griswold doesn't understand - or is pretending not to understand - that a tight labour market (what he calls 'a declining workforce') actually provides incentives for R&D to be carried out and for new technologies to be developed that help people to be more productive with less staff, and that spurs long term productive growth.

Hispanics are now the largest minority group and the fastest-growing voting bloc. Ronald Reagan understood, as did George W. Bush, that millions of Hispanics are friendly to the Republican message of entrepreneurship, opportunity, and family values.

That's precisely why they've been letting them in.

With the long-term demographic changes already in motion, an anti-immigration Republican party will find it more and more difficult to win elections.

Oh, he means the demographic changes that the GOP helped bring about? Those changes? What a completely unmitigated disaster the USA is facing.

[Daktoria]

This is one of the splits between economic and social liberty which really turned me off from libertarianism. The economy doesn't mean shit if it doesn't stand for the original people who inhabit it.

That said, we have to keep in mind that a deliberately stupid native working class is not something worth respecting either. It makes savings, investment, research, and development a pain in the ass. Until the working class stops being so hypercompetitively pragmatic and starts thinking before it acts, what's the point?

Furthermore, this line especially stands out:

Ronald Reagan understood, as did George W. Bush, that millions of Hispanics are friendly to the Republican message of entrepreneurship, opportunity, and family values. The demeaning rhetoric about unauthorized immigrant workers that emanates from the right is interpreted by many Hispanic citizens as a putdown of their culture.

[Far-Right Sage]

That said, we have to keep in mind that a deliberately stupid native working class is not something worth respecting either. It makes savings, investment, research, and development a pain in the ass. Until the working class stops being so hypercompetitively pragmatic and starts thinking before it acts, what's the point?

The point is that your people are your people, regardless. The market and the economy aren't abstract beings the masses must please, but rather, exist to serve the masses and in the confines of the society they choose to create and protect. This is a basic principle both of statehood and mankind. When those who controlled the levers of power allowed themselves to become willing pawns and free agents of those who are supposed to be ruled down below, despite their net worth or global marking competitiveness, that is when something went terribly wrong.

And the entire Hispanic invasion is a direct and intended consequence of it.

[Social_Critic]

I'm an immigrant, later became a US citizen, and I got an observation to make: There is a tendency by many to mix up legal and illegal immigration. I think legal immigration is fine - and I don't care to discuss what's the right mix or quantity. Legal immigration can be debated, argued about, and legislated. What I don't get is why anybody would support illegal immigration - unless they do so because they realize they can't get it done legally, and they benefit somehow from illegal immigration.

As far as I'm concerned, if we need a fence to stop illegal immigration, then that's fine. Republicans and the Cato Institute support illegal immigration, or want to allow tons of cheap labor in because this benefits the upper castes. The Democrats are just seeking voting support from Mexicans, I suppose. But Mexicans who are in the US legally ought to understand that bringing in lots of cheap labor is just lowering their wages and their standard of living. The main reason why the lower end of the wage scale can't get ahead in the US is the illegal laborer, which is allowed to flow in and over-supply the market, dropping wages and causing more unemployment.

And if you want to argue who will pick the strawberries, I don't care if anybody picks strawberries or not. If the landowner who wants his strawberries picked can't make a profit paying the market wage to legal residents, then he can buy a robot strawberry picker, or change his crop. And when the price of strawberries goes up, then he'll be able to pay the market wage without importing illegal workers.

[Mbaker73]

Conservatives in America do support LEGAL immigration. There are fundamental reason why illegal immigration should not be acceptable, and they are economic, but not necessarily coming from a selfish point of view.

1. American Liberals argue for equal treatment under the law for minorities, and deporting illegal immigrants for violating the law would be just that, wouldn't it? Liberals in America often demagogue the issue to make it racial, and that is why American conservatives are highly resentful of American liberals.

2. It isn't just good for the United States of America if they came legally, and the United States does have the right to regulate how many immigrants it allows in the country.
a. There are more than 13 million Americans who are unemployed, and that is not good for the United States of America. The argument is that the Americans won't do the work the illegals do, which is only true when the sentence is completed to state, "Americans won't do the work the illegals do for $7.25 per hour". Do you think that if the illegal immigrants were legal immigrants they would do it for $7.25 an hour? Its exploitation that is no more dangerous than the slave trade was.
b. To put more emphasis on the previous point, if illegals could make $15 an hour for the work they currently do for $7.25/hour, they most certainly would do it. They can't demand more if they're illegal, can they? In that sense, it is the illegal immigrant's fault for the gap between the hourly pay among whites, legal immigrants, and Hispanics who are in the United States illegal. Legal immigrants of the Hispanic ethnicity experience great success in the United States, and they are able to because they aren't always trying to hide their identities from the law. Illegal immigration is flat out illegal, and respect of the law is not something the United States should compromise on.

3. If the United States had what is referred to full employment, economically speaking, prosperity would be at it's maximum. If prosperity were at it's maximum, the number of immigrants that would be allowed into the country from other parts of the world would be increased to fulfill valuable roles in manufacturing or any other sector of the economy under the same laws that American Citizens and legal residents must abide by.