Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [16]
As my Wall Street Journal colleague Steve Moore has written, “We 300 million Americans are on balance healthier and wealthier and freer than any population ever: We breathe cleaner air, drink cleaner water, earn higher incomes, have more leisure time, and live in less crowded housing. Every natural resource we depend on—water, food, copper and, yes, even oil—is far more abundant today measured by affordability than when our population was 100 million or even 30 million.” There’s room for improvement, of course, but the notion that immigrants and U.S. population growth are destroying nature is nothing more than a pernicious myth perpetrated by environmentalists and their media enablers.
Moore’s optimism is well founded. Each year Dan Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, assembles an “Environmental Performance Index” for the august World Economic Forum. The 2006 edition ranks 133 countries on sixteen indicators tracked in six policy categories—environmental health, air quality, water resources, biodiversity and habitat, productive natural resources, and sustainable energy. Esty writes that, “Wealth and a country’s level of economic development emerge as significant determinants of environmental outcomes,” and even the most cursory glance at his results bears this out. The world’s richest countries tend to receive the highest rankings, while developing nations are concentrated at the bottom. According to Esty, the five most environmentally unfriendly countries on earth are also among the very poorest—Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Chad, and Niger.
In his introduction to an excellent collection of essays on the environment, You Have to Admit It’s Getting Better, Terry Anderson says that economic growth “is not the antithesis of environmental quality: rather, the two go hand in hand—if the incentives are right.” Anderson, who heads the Property and Environment Research Center, stresses that the right incentives are by-products of the right institutions— property rights, the rule of law, free trade. Those are the prerequisites for creating the wealth that in turn will lead to a cleaner environment, as it has in America and Europe. To the extent that immigrants facilitate U.S. population growth and wealth creation, they are part of the solution, not the problem.
CHAPTER TWO
ECONOMICS: HELP WANTED
Republicans in Congress spent the summer of 2006 trying to whip the nation into a frenzy over immigration. The war in Iraq was going south, along with the president’s approval rating. More than two out of three voters disapproved of George W. Bush’s job performance, and the November midterm elections were a short way off. The GOP needed an issue to excite its base of supporters—economic and social conservatives who were despondent over ethics scandals and Congress’s free-spending ways—and the leadership settled on the illegal immigrant “crisis.”
As an issue for Republicans, immigration had potential. It could allow the party to separate itself from an unpopular president, since Bush’s position on immigration was closer to the Democrats’. It could also divert attention from the Republican-controlled Congress’s own legislative shortcomings and excesses. In late 2005, the House had passed immigration legislation that, among other things, expanded physical barriers along the Mexican border, made unlawful presence in the United States a felony, and increased sanctions on businesses who hire illegal workers. The following spring, the Senate passed its own bill, which was more to Bush’s liking because it included not only more enforcement measures but also a guest-worker program for future cross-border labor flows. In addition, the Senate bill allowed illegal aliens in the United States to earn legal status without first returning to their home countries if they met certain requirements—a provision that got the entire Senate bill denounced by opponents as an offer of “amnesty.”
Normally, the next step would have been a House- Senate conference to hash