The Immigration Madness

I have been a bit busy lately and my blogging frequency has suffered. It is my hope to remedy that posthaste. I have yet to publicly write about the immigration issue, and so that is what today's post will be about.

Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-MS) complained this week that "Talk Radio is running America," in reference to the public uproar against the immigration reform bill that was proceeding through Congress. I'm not sure that Lott helped himself by bashing the people who control the hearts and minds of the so-called "conservative base," but he has something of a point. Last week when accused of being in favor of amnesty,

John McCain quipped something to the effect of "if by amnesty you mean anything short of departing 20 Million people from this country, then yes I am for amnesty." Therein lies the trouble with the more hardcore conservative position on the subject of immigration: it's simply impracticable. The racist xenophobes that are fomenting hatred of immigrants are now the driving political force in this country. It seems that even the venom that engulfed the Left over the Iraq War has been eclipsed by the anti-immigrant feelings of the Right.

This issue has been simmering for the better part of the Post-9/11 Era, but has reached a boiling point. It is a virtual impossibility that the Right's fever will be alleviated. There is almost no conceivable way that this country could deport 10-20 Million people who are here illegally. The pure logistics of actually deporting tens of millions of people ignores whether this is even a desirable method for handling the problem. The shock to the U.S. Economy, which has already assimilated these immigrants, is almost incalculable. There are certain statistics, that if I had more time I could source, that estimate that deportation would result in a doubling of labor costs in U.S. Agriculture, pushing the already heavily subsidized industry over the brink, massively increasing Americans' cost for food, and worse, increasing our reliance on foreign agriculture, which exacerbates our thirst for already-expensive oil to transport such goods to the North American continent.

The inflationary impact alone is staggering, not to mention that there will likely be an outright shortage of labor in the service industries. For two hundred years, immigrants have dutifully filled the entry level jobs in order to begin the process of building a new life for their descendants. Irish immigrants filled the factories of the Northeast, helping fuel the Second Industrial Revolution. German immigrants filled the fields of the Great Plains, keeping our supermarkets full of victuals throughout two World Wars. Chinese immigrants built the railroads that connected the Atlantic to the Pacific, making possible the economic wonder that is the state of California. The Hispanic population that comprises most of today's immigrants ensures that the economy can continue to thrive by occupying the service industry and the agricultural labor pool.

With America's birthrate hovering around 2.1 children per couple, which is precisely the "rate of replacement" or "break even point" with respect to population growth, and with the growing imbalance between working and retired persons in this country (a problem that is on the verge of becoming crisis in 2011 when the baby boomers begin to retire), immigrants, if properly assimilated into the formal economy, will at least buy the country a little more time to deal with the impending balance of payments crisis that lurks amongst the shadows of the mammoth Medicare and Social Security accounts. This is why legalizing the immigrant population, and making them pay the same taxes all other Americans pay is an essential part of immigration reform.

All of these realities do not necessitate that we have a "free immigration" policy moving forward. Instead, we should actively work to enforce certain regulations that constrain people intending to relocate to America. One way of doing this is to grant automatic citizenship to anybody who serves in the uniformed services of the U.S. military for five years. If one of the major complaints from the Right about immigration is that they do not assimilate into American culture, and do not speak English, few things could substitute for engendering patriotic affection and a knowledge of the language than service in the U.S. military.

There should obviously be other avenues available for immigration into the United States, and we should harness technology to match employers who would be willing to hire immigrants with those people in other countries who are looking to move to the U.S. Ultimately, by assimilating those who are already here, and creating a more efficient mechanism for people to come here legally, we can solve the current immigration crisis as we did all of the ones that have come before. What we cannot do is revert to isolationist and xenophobic tendencies that further degrade America's credibility as the global hegemon, and damage our image abroad. Moreover, we cannot afford to decimate the U.S. economy by depriving it of an important source of human capital that is necessary to sustain longterm economic growth. While the bill currently before Congress is not a final answer to the problem, it is at least a first step toward reconciling the circumstances that are so unpalatable to millions of Americans, and millions of immigrants.