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and low unemployment rate in recent years. These foreigners are helping to expand our economy by filling (and creating) jobs, not pinching them from natives. They’re working hard, starting businesses, marrying, having children, and assimilating. If their presence here is a problem, then it is a self-correcting one. In time, they will grow old and pass on with the rest of us. Policy makers would do better to focus less on whether to amnesty or deport them and more on how to stop feeding their numbers going forward. And history, in addition to economics, suggests that the best way to do that is by providing more legal ways for foreign workers to come.

We know from past experience that Mexican migrants coming here to feed their families will use the front door if it’s available to them. Crazy as it sounds, they prefer to live here legally rather than in the shadows, enriching human smugglers and document forgers. Nearly seven decades ago, the United States faced labor shortages in agriculture stemming from World War II, and growers turned to the Roosevelt administration for help. The result was the Bracero Program, which allowed hundreds of thousands of Mexican farm workers to enter the country legally as seasonal laborers. In place from 1942 to 1964, the program was jointly operated by the Departments of State, Labor, and Justice, and administered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. And it provides strong evidence that the economic law of supply and demand doesn’t stop at the Rio Grande.

Stuart Anderson, a former INS official who has studied the Bracero period, found a direct trade-off between the number of visas made available and the number of illegal entries, which the government measures by tallying border apprehensions. As the program was expanded in the post-WWII years to meet the labor needs of a booming U.S. economy, illegal border crossings fell off a cliff. Between 1953 and 1959, they dropped by some 95 percent. A 1980 Congressional Research Service report concluded that, “without question,” the Bracero Program was “instrumental in ending the illegal alien problem of the mid-1940s and 1950s.”

Beginning in 1960, the program was phased out after opposition from unions. And since nothing comparable emerged to replace it, illegal entries began to rise again. The point isn’t that we need to resurrect the Bracero Program, or that a guest-worker program alone will stop illegal immigration from Mexico. But there’s no reason we can’t put a Bracero-like program in place with the proper worker protections and get a similar result. The program worked because it acknowledged human nature and economic reality. Current policy, with its lopsided emphasis on enforcement, ignores both. The problem with the 1986 act is not that it included an amnesty provision but that it didn’t include something along the lines of a Bracero Program. George W. Bush and the comprehensive reformers didn’t want to make the same mistake.

CHAPTER SIX

HOMELAND SECURITY: FORTRESS AMERICA?

In the summer of 2006, Reason magazine, the libertarian monthly, devoted an issue to America’s immigrant past. Restrictionists tend to have selective memories, and the essays inside provided historical context for the various political, economic, and social arguments informing the current debate. But what really recommends the issue are the half-dozen vintage late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century illustrations that accompany the text. The images, culled from long-forgotten periodicals like Judge and The Wasp, are vivid reminders of the unoriginality of today’s immigrant bashers.

One drawing, from 1901 depicts the United States as a giant magnet attracting “Oriental diseases,” “Dago criminals, ” and other people with distinct simian features who are labeled simply “filth” or “dirt.” The caption beneath reads: “The only bad feature of our prosperity.”

A 1903 Judge print, “The High Tide of Immigration— a National Menace,” depicts immigrants as riffraff washing ashore, where Uncle Sam stands clinging to a boulder that reads, “Danger to American