Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [2]
All of them, however, arrive at the same pessimistic conclusion, which is that immigration on balance is a net negative for the United States. They go to great lengths to demonstrate that today’s new arrivals are different from yesterday’s, that those coming from Latin America are sui generis, uniquely incapable of assimilation. They cite special circumstances that made the past acculturation of European and Asian immigration possible but render it impossible for Latinos. They view these foreigners as a liability rather than an asset. They want an immigration “time-out.”
WHAT WOULD REAGAN DO?
If you’re a free-market conservative in the Ronald Reagan tradition, this debate has been doubly depressing because so much of the bellyaching has originated with the political right, where many people have convinced themselves that scapegoating immigrants for America’s economic and social ills—real and imagined—is a winner at the polls. On the topic of immigration, at least, too many conservatives have pocketed their principles and morphed into reactionary Populists. They claim to be Reaganites, but temperamentally and rhetorically they have more in common with Pat Buchanan, if not Father Coughlin. Their right-wing version of the “angry left” promotes a politics of resentment, frustration, and fear. It stirs up isolationism and xenophobia. And as a political strategy it’s heretofore been a loser, just like Buchanan in his presidential bids.
Besides, the nativist noise that has saturated so much of talk radio, cable news, and conservative print journalism in recent years is about as far from the Gipper’s style as you can get. To Reagan, ever the optimist, America was “a shining city upon a Hill,” in the John Winthrop phrase that he liked to use. Liberal immigration policies were proof that this country remained a land of opportunity, a nation built on the idea of liberty, not the Blut und Boden European doctrine.
Reagan held this view long before he became president, as Lou Cannon, his biographer, has documented. In 1952, when the United States was still under the thumb of highly restrictive immigration quotas enacted in the 1920s, Reagan gave a speech endorsing open borders. In his view, America was “the promised land” for people from “any place in the world.” Reagan said “any person with the courage, with the desire to tear up their roots, to strive for freedom, to attempt and dare to live in a strange land and foreign place, to travel halfway across the world was welcome here.”
In a 1977 radio address, Reagan discussed what he called “the illegal alien fuss. Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won’t do? One thing is certain in this hungry world: No regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters.” The next time you tune into Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, and Dennis Prager, contrast their take on immigration with radio Reagan’s.
Reagan understood that immigrants are coming here to work, not live on the dole. He also grasped that natives and immigrants don’t compete with one another for jobs in a zero-sum labor market and that our policy makers would do better to focus less on protecting U.S. workers from immigrant competition and more on expanding the economic pie. In his November 1979 speech announcing his candidacy for president, Reagan called for free labor flows throughout North America. Reagan knew that immigration, like free trade, which he also supported, benefits everyone in the long run.
Later in the campaign, in December 1979, Reagan responded to criticism from conservative columnist Holmes Alexander. “Please believe me when I tell you the idea of a North American accord has been mine for many, many years,” said the future president. And conservatives calling today for a wall along the entire United States-Mexico