The Free Market and U.S. Immigration Policy

Ira Mehlman
Friday, June 20, 2008

People don’t have much faith in government, especially the federal government…and who can blame them? The public looks to Washington and sees neither competence nor integrity in the people and institutions who are determining their fate.

Into the vacuum have stepped the evangelists for a new god: the free market. In his new book, Let Them In:The Case for Open Borders, Wall Street Journal editorial board member, Jason Riley, argues that immigration policy ought to be set not by legislators and bureaucrats in Washington, but by the demands of the free market.

Americans have been raised to believe that free market capitalism has been the source of our abundance – and there is certainly much truth in that belief, especially when you compare it to the economic disasters created by centralized command economies. But any virtue taken to an extreme ultimately becomes destructive.

The free market, unregulated, unbridled, and divorced from any notion of public interest, is nothing more than the law of the jungle. At its best, American capitalism has never been a truly free market. Rather, the system has produced the greatest and most equitable prosperity when it has operated with the minimum regulation necessary to prevent it from devolving into an exercise in survival of the fittest.

An immigration policy dictated solely by market forces, as Riley and the Wall Street Journal advocate, is a surrender of our right as free people to choose our own destiny. Rather than determining our own future through our elected representatives (no matter how poorly they represent us), Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders suggests that we cede that prerogative to some amorphous entity known as the free market.

Under the Riley/Wall Street Journal plan, the free market will decide when we’ve had enough immigration. Citing the example of the cessation of large-scale migration from Puerto Rico in the early 1960s, when average wages in the territory reached a mere 35 percent of what they were in the U.S., Riley predicts that today’s flow, principally from Mexico, will abate once a magic “tipping pointâ€