Invasion of the Immigrants - Part 2

 

      In Part 1, I briefly summarized the history of immigration into the American continent, and debunked the objection that immigrants are bad people.  Now allow me to address some of the other - rather dubious - "justifications" why we European descendants feel justified in slamming the immigration door shut:

Did someone steal my job?

      Jobs.   Immigrants will steal our jobs, or so the conventional wisdom says.  Baloney!!  Immigrants are consumers as well as producers.  Like all other consumers, they "demand" (to use the economic term) resources such as food, housing, clothing, transportation, health care, entertainment, phones, TVs, beer, etc., etc., and that demand creates more jobs.  From an economic point-of-view, immigration is just an increase in the size of the market.  If job-stealing was a valid reason for banning or limiting immigration, then we should also ban or limit having babies, because babies grow up and then steal our jobs.

      But don't immigrants, who will generally work for less, depress wages?  Well yes, but that also depresses PRICES.  Many goods and services we consumers take for granted are very affordable because much of the manual labor is done by immigrants.

Socialism: never works as planned

     Taxpayers should not have to take care of them.   I agree.  This is definitely a valid argument.  HOWEVER, please note that this is not an immigration problem, but rather, is a socialism problem.  It is somewhat out of the scope of this article to get too deep into the free-enterprise versus socialized services debate, but suffice it to say that one of the many problems with having government provide things at taxpayer expense is figuring out who is - and who is not - eligible to receive them.  "Everybody" is not a good answer because some of those recipients (such as immigrants) have not paid anything into the system.  The solution here is to consider free-market alternatives for things presently provided by government, and that includes education and transportation.

Government-mandated translation

     Immigrants don't assimilate into society.   Possibly true - but the government is not helping with legislation and taxpayer funding for translating everything under the sun into foreign languages.  Here in Texas, the list includes ballots, countless government forms, and voice-mail systems, for gosh sakes.  They all must, BY LAW, be available in Spanish, at taxpayer expense.

      

America beckons

      In all the heated emotion, rhetoric, and arguing over immigration, the one topic that never gets discussed is:  why?  Why are so many people risking their lives, uprooting their families, leaving their homes and everything behind, and going to such extreme lengths to come to America?  Why?  The anti-immigration crowd is so quick to berate, castigate, denigrate, and send in troops by the thousands to stop the invasion - but I never hear a peep about addressing the underlying cause of it all.  Instead of villainizing the immigrants, U.S. leaders need to be pointing the finger of blame at the governments of their native countries.  It is their incompetence and unwillingness to solve the serious problems that are forcing so many of their people away.

     Clearly, the United States must be doing something right, and the other countries must be doing something terribly wrong.  It's like a form of flattery, if you think about it.  Why are our political leaders not exploiting this fact?  No, this is not a problem to be solved by sending in the military - a "solution" that clearly has not worked anyplace else where the U.S. has tried that approach.  But if the entire world, including the United States, scolded and scorned these evil, corrupt, incompetent governments, rather than the people trying to flee from them, then there's a reasonable chance that something would change.  And then we would not need to have this debate.