The New American Dream: A Sensible Proposal for Immigration, Part II (click here for Part I)

M. Harrison

As anyone with a television knows, America is facing quite an immigration crisis. Currently, our immigration policy restricts efficient legal immigration in an astounding variety of ways, even by our federal government's general standard of incompetence. Thanks to Ted Kennedy's 1965 immigration bill (yes, he's that old) and its progeny, American policy has imported millions of immigrants, many of whom we can't even find anymore. Yet at the same time, businessmen, economists and academics are all united in the belief that the country needs more immigrants, especially of the highly skilled, educated variety. Meanwhile, the government lacks even the ability to track many of the immigrants already in the country, yielding little adequate data from which to ascertain even how many illegal immigrants there are, or whether they're working, collecting welfare, committing crime, or anything else, before we ever decide what exactly to do with them.

Because it's hard to know facts about people your government can't find (e.g. illegal immigrants, recreational drug users, Osama bin Laden) no one knows really much about the illegal immigration issue. Most of the immigration controversy ends up being over whether illegal immigrants are mostly of the Wall Street Journal editorial page vision (i.e. hard-working, often seeking only temporary labor and then returning to their homeland, and providing services Americans don't want to do), or of the Peter Brimelow vision (i.e. looking to live off of welfare while creating social disorder and racial unrest, and possibly committing sundry violent crimes).

As usual, rational solutions to the immigration crisis remain scarce, and most pundits would just rather smugly assail whatever present proposal is before Congress (e.g. Kennedy-McCain) instead of coming up with anything helpful on their own. Beyond that, they usually adhere to one of two polar opposite positions that are equally unhelpful: aggressive deportation or quasi-open-borders amnesty.

Both "solutions" end up doing nothing to solve a problem that desperately needs solving. Mass deportation, like most police state measures, will end up doing much more harm than good. The visible illegal immigrants mostly likely to be caught in any Wetback Raid '07 (e.g. your local garbage man) are often going to be the ones most helpful to the economy. Thus, they are the ones we probably should be keeping around. But the illegals we definitely should be deporting (e.g. criminals and potential terrorists) are the ones we probably won't find, simply because they are the most skilled at evading capture and operating underground.

Well, why don't we have a rational immigration policy that efficiently separates the workers from the criminals and vagrants? It makes too much sense, I know. Here are the four steps to make it happen.

1. Let them in through Supply and Demand, not Washington politics

American immigration should provide for the swift and well-documented entry of any foreign citizen having a verified offer of employment from a legitimate American employer. The implementation of this policy would be rather simple regarding the millions of illegal immigrants already in the country. Those who can obtain employment and register with the authorities can stay. Those who can't, within a reasonable time frame, will be deported. Both entry and exit should be streamlined so that the labor market remains dynamic, and so that even if a worker leaves, he can come back as soon as he finds a new job.

Job-based immigration has several advantages. First, it provides needed low-skilled labor competition to create an incentive for native-born Americans to pursue higher-skilled careers. Second, by efficiently registering all workers, the system helps ensure that immigrants are here to make an honest living, and not for other more subversive purposes. The system also avoids much political complication by letting the market, instead of Congress, decide which countries happen to provide the most desirable immigrant labor. Finally, family ties, the policy darling of the American Left, can still be preserved. As long as the guest worker is financially capable of watering his own family tree, he should be able to bring in whoever he is willing and able to support.

With this system, there is also a strong incentive for employers to actively recruit the most highly-skilled, and thus the most profitable foreign workers. As a result, the policy will create a market-based solution for America to retain its competitive advantage in the search for global talent.

2. The new American Citizenship, with meaning this time

A central problem in the immigration debate is the debate over citizenship. After five years of residence, immigrants are eligible to become citizens. But America's citizenship laws badly need reform.

The current American citizenship "test" is basically a joke, asking for the name of the man who uttered "Give me liberty or give me death" without any reference to its meaning or purpose; asking for the number of U.S. Congressmen, as if knowledge of that number means you are any more of an American; claiming that the "right to vote" is the most important American freedom, which is highly debatable; and a host of other embarrassing features that serve to diminish the value of American citizenship and the intelligence of those who have it. Additionally, the lack of a national language inhibits effective communication and wastes valuable state resources. For good reason, citizenship issues are always at the heart of any immigration debate.

America, the only free country in the world built solely on a creed, needs to stand up for its true values, and make sure all individuals understand them before they become citizens. The inalienable, color-blind, Creator-given rights of every individual to live his life as he sees fit, enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and expanded through Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, are the true American principles. It should be the sworn adherence to these true national values, not the memorization of worthless statistics, that should define what it means to be American.

See: The Prometheus Institute's proposed New American Citizenship Exam.

3. Welfare benefits for citizens only

American citizenship should be the prerequisite to receipt of any welfare benefit. This policy would do much to alleviate the very legitimate concern over mass immigrant entry in order to gain government handouts. Guest workers should have no claim to public benefits, with the obvious exception of emergency medical care. Education is a slightly more complicated matter. Children who become American citizens by birthright are and should be provided American education to provide for their assimilation into American society.

Other public benefits, like Social Security, suffer from poor design and should be generally reformed. New Deal government "innovations" like the FICA tax and other collectivist financing schemes create the very sort of special interest factionalism that J. Madison warned about in Federalist Paper #10, in addition to enhancing the fiscal crisis of immigration. Once they are effectively reformed, immigrants can benefit from them without being a collective drain on public dollars. For example, despite not being eligible for welfare, immigrants would be eligible for two of this organization's innovative personal account proposals, for health care and retirement. These policies reflect the real American ideas - individual choice and market innovation, not collectivism.

4. Secure the Intelligent System

A secure border, preferably achieved by a physical barrier and increased border enforcement, is an absolute necessity for an effective immigration policy. However, America's border patrol should be stepped up only if our immigration policies are also comprehensively reformed. Militarizing a broken immigration system is a lot like our government's prosecution of the Drug War; with enough manpower, you can fill prisons with lots of poor people, but you do nothing to dent the massive black market that creates the true problem.

But under an economically-intelligent immigration system, the controversial nature of border security will evaporate. When anyone looking to make a living in America can enter and leave without a problem, honest family men won't be the ones wading the Rio Grande. Thus, the Border Patrol (and the Minutemen) will have the task of patrolling a much-smaller stream of illegal immigrant traffic, and can more effectively weed out the true criminals. It's a much better idea than simply criminalizing the universal desire to live the American Dream.

The above work is the opinion of the author, and not necessarily that of the Prometheus Institute.

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