Mexican Immigration: Yes, please

Protesters marched in LA yesterday to protest "Plan Z," Bush's proposal to give illegal immigrants amnesty as long as they leave and reenter the country and pay a $10,000 fine.

$10,000? That's insane! What illegal farm worker can spare $10,000? And more to the point, who should have to?

Illegal immigration should have been a much bigger issue in the 90s than now, but it's now that real wages are stagnating, so of course immigrants have taken part of the blame. We've recently been bombarded with hysteria about America losing its cultural identity (from Samuel Huntington, the genius who brought you the "Clash of Civilizations"). Tom Tancredo is even running as a one-issue candidate vowing to crush illegal immigration.

I am strongly pro-immigration, but even I recognize that, managed improperly, immigration can be dangerous. We don't want to end up with ghettos chock-full of angry, unemployed, car-burning minorities like France, and we definitely don't want to end up with a region that wants to secede from the Union because of linguistic differences, like Canada's Quebec.

But I don't think America is even close to either of those outcomes, and I think the data back me up.

First, there's this study. The authors found - not to my surprise, but possibly to Samuel Huntington's - that almost zero third-generation Mexican immigrants, and less than 10-percent of the second generation, list Spanish as their primary language. That rate of language assimilation is actually better than for other immigrant groups. Furthermore, most Mexican immigrants of all generations are strongly patriotic and identify themselves as Americans first.

There will be no Spanish-speaking Quebec in the American Southwest.

The second reason not to worry about Mexican immigration is that it will soon be slowing. Mexico's total fertility rate has dropped to just over the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, and the country now adds half the number of people to its labor force each year that it did in the 90s. That number will continue to go down. And since very few people immigrate to Mexico, this means that Mexico is going to have a labor shortage very soon. Anyone who wants a job there will be able to get one, meaning fewer people who need to cross the border for work.

Basically, this means that all the furor over illegal immigration is ridiculously overblown. It's not just overblown, it's counterproductive, since keeping Mexican immigrants illegal means it takes longer for their children to learn English and raise their incomes.

The right policy is not Bush's insulting $10,000 fine, but a general amnesty for Mexican illegals who have lived here a certain number of years. Will that raise Mexican immigration levels for a while? Sure. But only for a while. And those immigrants will assimilate quickly.

There will come a time when Mexican-Americans are thought of no differently than Italian-Americans. Why try to keep that day far away? Amnesty is the only reasonable immigration policy for America.


Bonus Reading Guide
1. I'm in complete agreement with this TPMCafe post about education policy. No Child Left Behind is decent policy, but barely begins to address America's massive structural education problems.

2. Here's an eye-opening story at Slate about how the Bush administration appoints lots of lawyers from Pat Robertson's "Christian" law school, who then predictably become complete political hacks.

3. The real reason airlines won't let you use your cell phone on a plane.