Thread: Libertarian Party: Immigration Law Should Reflect Our Dynamic Labor Market

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Immigration Law Should Reflect Our Dynamic Labor Market

By Daniel T. Griswold
Among its many virtues, America is a nation where laws are generally reasonable, respected and impartially enforced. A glaring exception is immigration.

Today an estimated 12 million people live in the U.S. without authorization, 1.6 million in Texas alone, and that number grows every year. Many Americans understandably want the rule of law restored to a system where law-breaking has become the norm.

The fundamental choice before us is whether we redouble our efforts to enforce existing immigration law, whatever the cost, or whether we change the law to match the reality of a dynamic society and labor market.

Low-skilled immigrants cross the Mexican border illegally or overstay their visas for a simple reason: There are jobs waiting here for them to fill, especially in Texas and other, faster growing states. Each year our economy creates hundreds of thousands of net new jobs — in such sectors as retail, cleaning, food preparation, construction and tourism — that require only short-term, on-the-job training.

At the same time, the supply of Americans who have traditionally filled many of those jobs — those without a high school diploma — continues to shrink. Their numbers have declined by 4.6 million in the past decade, as the typical American worker becomes older and better educated.

Yet our system offers no legal channel for anywhere near a sufficient number of peaceful, hardworking immigrants to legally enter the United States even temporarily to fill this growing gap. The predictable result is illegal immigration.

In response, we can spend billions more to beef up border patrols. We can erect hundreds of miles of ugly fence slicing through private property along the Rio Grande. We can raid more discount stores and chicken-processing plants from coast to coast. We can require all Americans to carry a national ID card and seek approval from a government computer before starting a new job.

Or we can change our immigration law to more closely conform to how millions of normal people actually live.

Crossing an international border to support your family and pursue dreams of a better life is not an inherently criminal act like rape or robbery. If it were, then most of us descend from criminals. As the people of Texas know well, the large majority of illegal immigrants are not bad people. They are people who value family, faith and hard work trying to live within a bad system.

When large numbers of otherwise decent people routinely violate a law, the law itself is probably the problem. To argue that illegal immigration is bad merely because it is illegal avoids the threshold question of whether we should prohibit this kind of immigration in the first place.

We've faced this choice on immigration before. In the early 1950s, federal agents were making a million arrests a year along the Mexican border. In response, Congress ramped up enforcement, but it also dramatically increased the number of visas available through the Bracero guest worker program. As a result, apprehensions at the border dropped 95 percent. By changing the law, we transformed an illegal inflow of workers into a legal flow.

For those workers already in the United States illegally, we can avoid "amnesty" and still offer a pathway out of the underground economy. Newly legalized workers can be assessed fines and back taxes and serve probation befitting the misdemeanor they've committed. They can be required to take their place at the back of the line should they eventually apply for permanent residency.

The fatal flaw of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was not that it offered legal status to workers already here but that it made no provision for future workers to enter legally.

Immigration is not the only area of American life where a misguided law has collided with reality. In the 1920s and '30s, Prohibition turned millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans into lawbreakers and spawned an underworld of moon-shining, boot-legging and related criminal activity. (Sound familiar?) We eventually made the right choice to tax and regulate alcohol rather than prohibit it.

In the 19th century, America's frontier was settled largely by illegal squatters. In his influential book on property rights, The Mystery of Capital, economist Hernando de Soto describes how these so-called extralegals began to farm, mine and otherwise improve land to which they did not have strict legal title. After failed attempts by the authorities to destroy their cabins and evict them, federal and state officials finally recognized reality, changed the laws, declared amnesty and issued legal documents conferring title to the land the settlers had improved.

As Mr. de Soto wisely concluded: "The law must be compatible with how people actually arrange their lives." That must be a guiding principle when Congress returns to the important task of fixing our immigration laws.
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http://www.lp.org/issues/immigration

Quote from article below: “For those workers already in the United States illegally, we can avoid "amnesty" and still offer a pathway out of the underground economy. Newly legalized workers can be assessed fines and back taxes and serve probation befitting the misdemeanor they've committed. They can be required to take their place at the back of the line should they eventually apply for permanent residency.”

Are these people kidding us or are they just so damn determined not be “conservatives”that they run back and forth between good economic policies to bad liberal social policies? They obviously have learned nothing from 1986 amnesty and the years since then. 1986 was supposed to be a ONE TIME ONLY AMNESTY. IT ALSO PROMISED STRICT PRECONDITIONS AND STRICT CONTROLLS. None of this happened of course. They ignore the disastrous welfare cost from massive fraud and gaming the system by illegal aliens; it will only become worse if they are given legal status.

For God sake about one million foreigners are granted permanent legal residency very year (that does not include various “guest workers”). How many does it take to satisfy the maybe-someday labor requirements?

Instead of seeking to flood this country with hoards of foreigners to supply workers for a maybe-some day labor shortage, why do they not fight to reform a disastrous welfare system that encourages Americans not to work? And why do they not fight for laws requiring healthy people on welfare to work? You would think the first priority of a true libertarian would be on those critical issues.

Part of the reason it has been so hard to stop the drive for amnesty is because libertarians who should be fighting with us are working at cross purposes to us with their delusions about concocting a “good amnesty” a.k.a. “legal status.”

P.S. Being in the United States illegally is a misdemeanor, but ILLEGALLY SNEAKING ACROSS THE BORDER IS A FELONY. Thus 60% of illegal aliens are guilty of a major criminal act, as it should be. The article is not an argument for a sensible immigration policy, it is an argument for open borders. No borders, no country.

Originally Posted by csarbww

The article is not an argument for a sensible immigration policy, it is an argument for open borders. No borders, no country.

Plus a large dose of complete disregard for Americans.

IMO our current policy is to pay illegals to colonize us, even tho we don't really need them. I guess someone forgot to tell the Libertarians that when Chipotle was busted for hiring illegals, they held a job fair. They had to shut it down after only one day, because so many people applied. Of course, if the geniuses behind the Libertarian nonsense had to acknowledge that, their idiocy would be plain for all to see.
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade

Excellent and cogent post. I truly fear that libertarians, as products of our Marxist university system, are so psychotic about not being racists that they distort philosophical honesty to make it compatible open borders ideology (Marxists ideology), just to prove they are not racists. Read Ayn Rand and you will find none of the minority pandering that is so prevalent in contemporary libertarian writings.

Part of the reason it has been so hard to stop the drive for amnesty is because libertarians who should be fighting with us are working at cross purposes to us with their delusions about concocting a “good amnesty” a.k.a. “legal status.”

PLEASE don't refer to the Libertarian Party with a lower case L libertarian!! There IS a difference!! The Libertarian Party people are a little nuts, but there are lower case L libertarians who lean very conservative republican. In NC, MANY of these people oppose abortion and illegal immigration which sets them apart from the Libertarian Party.

Thanks!!

RELATED

http://www.alipac.us/f9/rand-paul%92...ictory-298863/

We've faced this choice on immigration before. In the early 1950s, federal agents were making a million arrests a year along the Mexican border. In response, Congress ramped up enforcement, but it also dramatically increased the number of visas available through the Bracero guest worker program. As a result, apprehensions at the border dropped 95 percent. By changing the law, we transformed an illegal inflow of workers into a legal flow.

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A 3rd grader is able to do the math and come up with the solution that the Bracero approach is the ONLY solution remaining, other than all out MERGING MEXICO INTO THE UNITED STATES (which is an eventuality anyway).

There are not even ten good men in the congress and senate combined willing to admit it.

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

RELATED

http://www.alipac.us/f9/rand-paul%92...ictory-298863/

This does NOT refer to the Libertarian Party, it refers to the conservative libertarian leaning segment of the GOP. Also called the Liberty wing or LiberTEA wing of the GOP here in NC. They are NOT the same as the Libertarian Party!

Braceros were the last wave of immigrant farm workers who had no other US job option except working in the fields.

In the spring of 1942, California farmers predicted that there would be labor shortages for the fall harvest because of conscription for World War II, and asked the US and Mexican governments to allow Mexicans to work seasonally on US farms.

Despite protests from US farm labor reformers that there was no shortage of workers, only a shortage of decent wages and working conditions, the US and Mexican governments signed a bilateral agreement in 1942 that allowed the entry of “native-born residents of North America, South America, and Central America, and the islands adjacent thereto, desiring to perform agricultural labor in the United States.”

Between 1942 and 1964, some 4.6 million Mexicans were admitted (legally) to do farm work; many Mexicans returned year after year, but 1 to 2 million gained legal U.S. work experience. The Bracero program was small during the war years. Admissions peaked at 62,000 in 1944, meaning that less than 2 percent of the 4 million U.S. hired workers were Braceros.

- See more at: http://hnn.us/article/27336#sthash.nmCo6Qck.dpuf