A step in the right wrong direction

A couple days ago, the Bush Administration announced that, with immigration reform obviously dead, the administration will begin cracking down on businesses that hire illegal immigrants.

I don't support this policy. I think the right approach for our country is to make illegal immigrants into legal immigrants - through a full amnesty, and through vastly expanded legal immigration quotas. If people want to come to our country and be Americans and add to our economy, I say let them.

That said, if such an open-doors policy isn't in the cards, I can see why many people would be concerned about illegal immigrants. Illegals on average take almost a full generation longer to learn English than legal immigrants, because they are often too afraid to send their kids to English-speaking American schools (amnesty, of course, would be the obvious policy to solve this assimilation problem, but hey). Others complain that illegal immigrants push down wages for poor Americans, though the evidence for this is extremely sparse and patchy.

But in any case, if one wanted to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, building a huge wall on the Mexican border, complete with machine-gun-wielding storm troopers, is just about the worst way you could do it (not least of all because only about half of illegals come from Mexico). The most effective and humanitarian way would be to reduce demand for illegal immigrant labor. By making it hard for illegals to find jobs, the government would simply encourage illegals to go back to their home countries on their own accord, instead of tossing them out by force.

So the new Bush immigration policy is the best of all possible immigration-reduction strategies. And let's give Bush full credit here; amnesty, an even better policy, is what he originally wanted. The best thing about the new policy is that it doesn't involve building a huge scary wall as a concession to nativists. The worst thing about it is that it will probably hurt the economy in the short run, especially in areas that rely heavily on illegal immigrant labor.

In any case, as I often point out, Mexican immigration is a temporary phenomenon in any case. Plunging fertility rates in Mexico mean that the tide of immigrants from the south is already slowing. In another fifteen years this issue will be gone from the public consciousness, and we'll be begging legions of Indians and Vietnamese people to come work here.