Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [4]
Elite thinkers today continue to insist that U.S. culture is slouching toward Guatemala. In his 2004 book Who Are We? Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington writes that “contemporary immigration is unprecedented in American history” and that “the experience and lessons of past immigration have little relevance to understanding its dynamics and consequences.” As far as Huntington is concerned, the historical record should have little bearing on immigration public policy decisions going forward. Curious notion, that.
The immigration issue is the fool’s gold of American politics. Voters like to sound off to pollsters about it, yet they inevitably pull the lever on Election Day with other matters foremost in mind. Elections seldom if ever turn on immigration, and the GOP restrictionist message so adored by talk radio, cable news, and the blogosphere once again failed to deliver the goods in 2006, when Republicans lost control of the House and Senate.
Worse, the GOP had made “securing the border” a loud national theme in the run-up to the 2006 election, only to do nothing about it save for approving a few hundred miles of fence along a two-thousand-mile border. Republicans thus managed to highlight either their fecklessness in failing to do something about an allegedly urgent problem or their cynicism in raising the issue at all.
The GOP has a long history of fumbling immigration. And President George W. Bush, a former border-state governor who knows the issue well, has tried to steer conservatism and Republicanism away from repeating those mistakes with Hispanics, who are the country’s fastest-growing voting bloc. Mr. Bush doesn’t want his party to lose Latinos the way its xenophobic message in the early twentieth century turned away Irish, Italian, and Asian voters for decades.
But this isn’t just about identity politics, which conservatives by and large are happy to leave to the political left. It’s also about America playing to its strengths. Like Reagan before him, Bush understands that immigrants help the United States stay atop the global marketplace. A liberal immigration policy has served the country quite well over the past two centuries, and the numbers coming today are hardly extraordinary. Since the government began keeping count in 1820, the United States has absorbed a world-leading 60 million immigrants from some 170 nations. The latest census data puts our foreign-born population at 33.5 million, which is roughly the population of Canada. In terms of absolute numbers, that’s a record. But as a percentage of the total U.S. population, it’s still well below the historic highs reached in 1890 and 1910.
Immigrants prefer America because it remains the world’s foremost tribune to freedom and opportunity. Its magnetism is a testament to the country’s global standing. Even better, it’s an indication that America is still winning the international battle for talent and human capital that will keep it competitive for generations to come.
RICHER AND SAFER
This book expounds on two general themes. The first is that, contrary to received wisdom, today’s Latino immigrants aren’t “different,” just newer. The second is that an open immigration policy is compatible with free-market conservatism and homeland security. I explain, from a conservative perspective, why the pessimists who say otherwise are mistaken. I argue that immigrants, including low-skill immigrants, are an asset to the United States, not a liability. Immigrants help keep our workforce younger and stronger than Asia’s and Europe’s. As entrepreneurs, they create jobs. As consumers, they generate economic activity that results in more overall economic growth. By taking jobs that overqualified Americans spurn, they fill niches in the workforce that make our economy more efficient and allow for the upward mobility of the native population.
An immigration policy that acknowledges these economic realities would provide more, not fewer, legal ways