Immigration Reform
If you believe in freedom and free markets, then regulating the free movement of people runs counter to your belief system. The questions that we face over immigration are simple. Do you still believe in freedom and do you still have the courage to trust freedom? In this fight, and for this cause, too many are losing their faith. Before we lose anymore believers, it’s time to make the case that Freedom, not fear, must win the day.
Just as our American ancestors had, and contrary to what you may have been told, the overwhelming majority of today’s immigrants, papers or not, have a deep love and respect for freedom. And it remains true that what it means to be American often has little to do with where you were born. To be American has meaning. And the word American is most commonly associated with the value of freedom. It’s hard to separate the two. So regardless of where someone is from, or how recently they have arrived, or how they have arrived, if they value freedom, they are our compatriots.
You read and you decide. Do you trust freedom? Or is getting rid of the “others” your higher calling?
While there are plenty of pragmatic and economic reasons to advocate for immigration reform, the missing arguments, the more important arguments, are the moral and philosophical. If we desire to preserve Liberty and the American way of life, we must resist the snake oil sold by political profiteers and understand why our immigration system must be returned to the free market principles our country was founded upon.
The first argument for fixing our broken immigration system: The immigration debate itself is eroding American Principle:
American Sovereignty: A nation’s sovereignty is undoubtedly important, but America’s Sovereignty is different than other nations. The anti-immigrant crowd says we must defend our nation’s sovereignty. They are correct, we must. That borders must mean something. Again, correct, they must. However, their argument is often couched in a broader argument that includes sacrificing our principles for security, our freedoms for safety. The sovereignty they speak of is not American sovereignty. The sovereignty they speak of is the sovereignty of a mother land. America was not built on the notion of a mother land or race. America was built on the notion that we concern ourselves with the sovereignty of our values, values that can bind all humans, principles that make America great, not a mother land. Our United States military men and women are one of the first and only militaries in the world to swear an oath to an idea, to our values written on paper, the Constitution, NOT to a motherland, king or emperor. Forsaking the sovereignty of the principles of our constitution should be our greatest concern and it’s the constitution’s sovereignty we must worry about. If there is a wall to be built, build it around the constitution first. The sovereignty of our land matters but if we give up on freedom in the process, it will no longer be American Sovereignty we are protecting. That’s a motherland.
Inalienable Rights: Over 200 years ago, the founders established an idea so important it radically changed the world. The notion of inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, given to us by our Creator and not to be taken away by state or man. If given to us by our Creator, if inalienable, then these are rights due every human, not just citizens. Americans are known and admired throughout the world for not only protecting these rights for themselves but defending these “human” rights across the globe. This great American example has changed the world for the better. Who are we to deny our fellow man’s God given inalienable rights. That no man or government should have the right to take away.
Rule of Law: Of course, it’s important to maintain the rule of law and our laws should be respected. Sometimes, however, the threat to the rule of law is the law itself. Passing meaningless, unenforceable, or immoral laws that attack markets and freedom cause the erosion of the rule of law not strengthen it. Suppose the government were to suddenly rule it illegal to attend church services on Sunday, would we cry foul when people attend mass? No! Because the affront to the rule of law here is the law itself. That is exactly the case when it comes to restricting the free movement of people. How does a government expect to maintain the rule of law when it’s in the business of deciding whether or not you get to see your kids, how long you can visit your cousin, or who you can or cannot work for? We cannot blame a free people trying to support their families for the breakdown of the rule of law, it’s the freedom limiting laws themselves that pose this threat.
Taxation without representation: Undocumented immigrants, working under false identification or with a tax id number, have paid billions in taxes, including into benefit programs like our Social Security Trust Fund, a benefit they have no ability to receive. Should we forget that no taxation without representation is an American principle? Have we forgotten why those Bostonians threw tea in a harbor? Unfortunately, like King George, we are now the beneficiaries of taxation without representation. As long as the government continues to over regulate the free movement of people there will be people in an undocumented status and thus unrepresented.
American Style Freedom: Is a freedom men and women die to protect and pursue. How is it to be preserved if sacrificed to a government so intrusive it decides, which family members can or cannot be together, where you can work, if you can work, or who you can work for. There is likely nothing more totalitarian than forcibly removing someone that has committed no crime from their family. Just as there likely can be no greater affront to freedom than a government deciding where humans can “be”. This is not the course of freedom. Implementing strike and deportation forces, or making life so difficult as to cause self-deportation, represent the erosion of American freedom, not the furtherance.
These uniquely American principles, are eroding. Arguably nowhere faster than over the issue of immigration. There are millions of people in our country today that are not free, they live in fear. Unfortunately, the solutions proposed are not designed to fix our immigration system or secure our border. Whether well intentioned or not, whether you are the snake oil salesmen or their unwitting customer, it must be exposed that these anti-immigrant policies are designed to further erode everyone’s freedom, not just those of immigrants.
The pragmatic: The status quo is harming economic growth and stunting job creation:
Zero Sum Games: We’ve heard people say “immigrants are stealing American jobs, are a drain on our social welfare systems, over crowd our schools and hospitals…”. Sadly, these notions have crept into the American lexicon. But these are not the arguments of Locke or Jefferson. These are the arguments of Marx and the belief in a zero-sum game. These arguments do not descend from the American belief in human potential. Americans do not believe human beings are simply liabilities. They believe they are also assets. They are not just workers. They are also consumers. They are not just benefit recipients. They are also tax payers. These arguments are not new but their increased prevalence is. These arguments require you to believe a coin only has one side. That a child born today is taking away a job from another. The notion that there is a finite number of jobs, and, for each human added to the mix it necessarily means another human must lose a job. This belief system was not only rejected by the philosophy of freedom but proven wrong by the practice of freedom. There is not a finite limited number of jobs. In a free society for every consumer there is a job and for every worker there is a consumer.
Jobs: They ignore the inextricable connection between capital and labor. If you want to build a building and you have capital, you can buy bricks but without anyone to put them together the capital becomes worthless, and if you have labor without capital there are no bricks so the labor is worthless. Labor and capital are often financial equivalents. You can’t have one without the other. It doesn’t matter how much you pay one person it still won’t be enough bodies to complete the construction. We must not let the Politicians turn us against each other. Immigrants do NOT depress American wages; they keep American jobs here in America. The choice we are being fed is a false choice, the choice is not “low wages vs. higher wages”. We will not improve American wages by restricting the free movement of people. The choice is “more jobs vs. fewer jobs, more businesses vs. fewer businesses”. Restricting or slowing the free movement of people restricts their ability to produce. Like forcing the world’s most productive to stand in line instead of get on the ride. We need to reduce the lines and let free humans produce. The more we restrict the free movement of people the more we slow our economy and prevent both job retention and job creation.
Interior Enforcement: Our government performs hundreds sometimes thousands of government worksite audits or raids every year. These audits or raids are designed to remove undocumented workers from employment. Sometimes hundreds of business owners and CEOs are arrested and even imprisoned as a result of these audits. Imagine the scene. “What are you in for? Murder. What are you in for? Rape. What are you in for? I gave someone a job.” Our government has resorted to destroying businesses even jailing the owners or CEO’s running those businesses all for “employing the wrong people”. How did employment become a crime? Criminalizing employment even if it’s just for the “others” is absolutely incompatible with a free society and deleterious to a productive job environment. Who hires faster when it comes with a potential jail term? Instead, employers particularly small ones, go off the grid, slow the hiring process, or choose off the books 1099 hiring over the risk of w2 hiring.
National Debt: Now over 18 trillion dollars and growing. When faced with a heavy burden, would you rather pay it down alone or would you prefer help? We need more people grabbing a rope to help pull the wagon not less. Expanding our tax base is the equivalent of having MORE people help pay down our debt. Where everyone can pay less rather than fewer people paying more.
We must reject the notion that human beings are nothing but liabilities. That human beings take jobs instead of create them. These beliefs require you to lose faith in the dynamism of the human spirit, the creativity generated by competition, and the enabling power of freedom.
The negative effects of Bad Policy: Addressing the symptoms and not the disease:
Unfortunately, the politicians are treating the symptoms instead of the disease and the treatments are killing the patient. New laws, new enforcement measures, e-verify, multibillion dollar walls, sanctuary cities, new bureaucracies, raiding and regulating businesses, imprisoning American workers and entrepreneurs are all prescriptions designed to treat the symptoms while ignoring the cause of the disease itself. More laws and additional enforcement will not fix the problem. We should be better students of history. Governments do not collapse because they don’t pass enough laws, however they can collapse because they pass too many and lose control.
e-verify: e-verify maybe one of the worst among these bad policies creating negative effects. What its proponents are not telling you is that it is not a database of immigrants, but rather a database of citizens. Its strongest proponents regularly lecture us on governments inabilities and ineffectiveness. Yet, they suddenly have faith that this same government can manage a database of 300 million people that changes every minute of every day? Tell us how the government will know the difference between an American having two, three, or four jobs vs a person using a false identity? The only way e-verify can be effective is the slow migration to a government so intrusive that our children and grandchildren will need to get permission from the government to gain employment. A government where picking up a side job could be a violation of law. And, as that same government continues to become more and more intrusive, all in the name of solving the problem, the underground economy flourishes as citizens find it more productive to skirt the laws than to follow them.
Market Forces: Historically Americans understood fighting market forces is futile. Americans, intrinsically know, mankind’s desire for freedom is a market force that cannot be stopped. A force so strong that no government can or should even try to contain it. When governments try they only serve to drive that market underground or become so totalitarian, so powerful, that the very way of life you were intending to protect becomes exactly the one you were trying to prevent. So, what happens when the wall is built and those seeking freedom, simply circumvent it? What happens when more and more simply come from the sea? Will we build walls along our oceans? There is only one way to stop the human pursuit of freedom, and unfortunately that requires us to destroy the very freedom they seek. Certainly, stopping immigrants is not a higher calling than freedom itself. A smarter approach would be to keep our freedoms and embrace the immigrants, help them assimilate, and enjoy the benefits a free and diverse nation can bestow upon all of us.
Sanctuary cities: Railed against as cities are left with the difficult decision of having to decide whether to look the other way, to maintain a relationship with their residents, or enforce federal laws and risk losing the cooperation they require to keep their communities safe. Like the business owner it is not the city’s fault that the federal government has not done its job. Blaming the cities for their legitimate fear of breaking the bond between police and community if they implement policies that prevent large blocks of their residents from calling the police, is not a solution to the problem. It may serve pundits, federal politicians and their personal self-interest to deflect blame and divide us but it’s not a solution. Cities can’t solve this. Federal politicians can. Forcing police departments to become immigration agents is not the solution. Yes, there are indeed bad people mixed into the immigrant communities and they give all immigrants an undeserved bad name. But the problem is not the sanctuary policy itself, the problem is the status quo at the federal level which makes the job of law enforcement more difficult not less. Solve immigration and there won’t be any sanctuary cities.
Spending: There are forces at work whose only interest is profiting from our fears. The media profits off the current hysteria while the politicians reward lobbyists with contracts. In fact, the more they can fan the flames of fear the more they make. We are now spending over 18 billion per year on immigration enforcement with most presidential and congressional candidates calling for more. For perspective that is more than we spend on the FBI. Make no mistake, it is not about security or stopping terrorism. Its crony capitalism and corporate welfare. The politicians scare us into spending more so they have more to dole out to their friends. Perhaps we should consider the size of the problem before fashioning such expensive solutions. Consider, we have 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, which occurred over the last 30 years. When you average it out over those 30 years, it’s a little over 365,000 undocumented immigrants per year. While it may seem like a large number at first. Out of 300 million Americans that is only .12% of our population on an annual basis. Less than one percent. So why do the politicians tell us we are being invaded and over run? If, as they say, it has been an invasion, 11 million over 30 years in a country of 300 million people, it has been the most peaceful and prosperous invasion in history. Is it really worthy of the word “invasion”, worth giving up any freedom to prevent? Worth indenturing America’s future generations to more debt for?
The reality is the real problems are the regulations themselves. Our government has so mismanaged, so over restricted and so over regulated immigration that the system is unsurprisingly broken. This is always “over regulation’s” expected result. Government tries to over regulate a market, in its effort it creates underground markets, underground markets that go untaxed, underground markets where organized crime and human trafficking flourish, and when the over regulation fails, the politicians make new promises, offering ever increasingly elaborate solutions and voters continue to enable them to further regulate the unsolvable problem the government created in the first place. New industries become dependent on the new government endeavors and have a financial incentive to keep the problem. They never gain control because government never could stop market forces. Even totalitarianism fails on that front. This is what the American experiment was all about, allowing the market to work. To trust a free people to manage their own affairs. We can't fall for the trap that a government can control everything or that politicians always have the solutions. When we do we risk losing control of everything and doing nothing well. The further we continue down this road the more we put our Democracy, our Republic, at risk. The more we pass laws trying to regulate the unregulatable the more we grow the underground economy. The more enforcement is needed, the more we lose control. We are not saying the government should not play a role. Our government does have an appropriate role and it should work to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with the police, the courts, and the military. Then trust the markets with the rest. There is no amount of additional law, additional bureaucracies, or additional regulation that will cure all our problems, these paths always and only lead to less freedom.
How many more ineffective laws will be passed? How much more of our treasury will be wasted? How many more bureaucracies created? How many more families torn apart? How many more CEO’s imprisoned? Businesses destroyed? How many more freedoms will be eroded before we actually solve the problem. All that is needed is to get back to the market based system this country was founded on in the first place.
How to Secure our Borders, Improve Our Economy, and Preserve Freedom:
Step 1: Security: Our government does have a responsibility to keep us safe, as such we must first, continue to fund the border patrol (ICE) but if we are serious about security, better fund and staff the FBI. Their appropriate roles should be to screen all new entry immigrants and to prevent unwanted entries. Building a wall on our Southern border alone will not solve the problem. Today’s entries come from the north, south, east, and west, air, land and sea. We must have an agency that can verify that everyone entering the US enters with good and peaceful intentions. Second, violent criminals must be imprisoned not deported. Too often we hear in the news a violent criminal is deported only to re-enter and commit the crime again. Deportation should not and cannot be a get out of jail free card. If someone has committed a violent crime, they must be prosecuted and imprisoned not set free, regardless of their status.
Step 2: Workforce protection: Create a payroll tax incentive to hire American Citizens first. While it would be preferable in our view to eliminate payroll taxes Citizens are suspicious that corporations will just hire foreign workers and leave American Citizens unemployed. That suspicion can be eliminated by simply making it more expensive to hire a foreign worker. Create a higher payroll tax for foreign workers. This incentivizes the hiring of American Citizens first and when businesses do hire foreign workers increases revenues to the government to cover the costs associated with managing a more dynamic immigration system.
Step 3: Quota Adjustments: This is the most important change. Give quota authority to the executive branch. Que the chant; “Give it to the X”. While it would be preferable to return to the days of no immigration quotas, to the extent they will continue to exist, we must give the authority to adjust immigration quotas to the executive branch. This authority can no longer reside with the “committee of 535” (Congress). We do not need to create any more nonsensible guest worker programs or invent any new visas. We just need the existing system to be adjusted dynamically. The reality is immigration is a naturally occurring force. It’s the free movement of people. And as long as Congress has been trying to micromanage and politicize the free movement of people, the system has been broken. It’s the very reason the founding fathers didn’t think they should micromanage our economy in the first place. In fact, for most of the first 200 years of this great Nation there were virtually no limits on immigration at all. Since then Congress has so over regulated migration that the numbers are often laughable. One might imagine the quotas are based on a percentage of economic growth, or a percentage of the native population, or that legitimate refugees and asylum seekers escaping evil could get in. In fact, it’s none of those. Immigration quotas are often stagnant numbers that require an act of congress to change. The “committee of 535” was not designed to be a dynamic fast acting body. It’s not equipped to regularly adjust quotas for fluctuations in our economy including agriculture, technology, construction, health care, service industry needs and more? Does it even make sense to think they should? Do you really think it’s appropriate or possible for Congress to decide how many nurses are needed, how many construction workers, tourists, visitors or business people should be let in? How many hearings do you think it will take? How many master planners are required to control the uncontrollable? It simply can NOT be micromanaged by the “Committee of 535”. A committee that has not meaningfully updated the system for 30 years. No reasonable free market believer can conclude that the committee of 535 is dynamic enough to come together and regularly adjust the immigration quotas to meet the market and familial needs of the most dynamic economy on the planet? The inescapable truth is there simply was not a problem until Congress got involved and the system needs to be returned to the market based system we had before Congress instituted these quotas. A system that can keep up with a diverse people and rapidly changing economy. If we cannot eliminate the quotas then the only place this can occur is the executive branch.
Conclusion:
We are a nation of immigrants and a nation of immigrants cannot turn its back on one of its greatest legacies. Our parents and grandparents have proven that free people of different heritage can cooperate, assimilate, and self-govern. They built a country so unique that no matter where you were from you were able to become an American. And, since our nation’s inception, America has benefitted from its freedoms and its people, the bravest of the brave. Our immigrant grandparents and great grandparents were largely people that had never been on a boat in their lives. Yet they chose to get on a wooden boat with sails and cross an ocean with strangers, headed for a new and free land. They didn’t call ahead for permission. They just came! They weren’t given temporary access, they stayed! Often, they were told by their communities not to go, that America may dangerous or they may die on the journey. I submit that a person willing to take such great risks for their families, for freedom, is exactly what being American is all about. Today’s incarnation of our ancestors often come through legal means, but some feel compelled to cross deserts by foot, oceans by raft, or lock themselves in containers by sea. It is not welfare they seek. They are fleeing some of the largest socialized welfare countries in the world.
There are also thousands of immigrants in our armed forces. A human’s pursuit of freedom often transcends into a desire to defend freedom. Just as American Citizens have, immigrants documented and undocumented have served with valor. I was proud to serve next to the bravest Americans I’ll ever know, be they immigrants, or native born. We learned from each other and benefited from each other’s experiences. My immigrant brothers and sisters in arms often got the stakes of what it meant to be free in a way I couldn’t. They often had first-hand knowledge of the poverty, tyranny, and oppression their families escaped. From one of the first deaths in Iraq, Sgt. Rafael Peralta, a young man who originally entered the country illegally to the late Silvestre Herrera, a fellow Arizonan who entered the Army as an illegal immigrant, earning the Medal of Honor for saving his platoon in WWII, they are all Americans. They’ve helped secure our freedom. Will we help them secure theirs?
We must not let those that would forsake freedom win, and we must not allow ourselves to be fooled by the politics of deceit. We live in the greatest country on earth and benefit from an economy that is the envy of the world. Over regulating immigration has hurt our economy not helped it. In times past our economy has grown so quickly, had we continued at an accelerated pace, we could END the worst forms of poverty on our continent and in our lifetime. The kind of poverty where people live in cardboard shacks and kids beg on the streets. In those free and open markets, freedom seeking human beings were grabbing onto the first rung of the economic ladder and dragging themselves out. This is exactly the type of economic growth a free market can provide. We should celebrate this growth not starve our economy and keep the poverty. We cannot allow this to be the path we choose.
This minute there are immigrants waiting with baited breath for an answer to their application, or in our deserts and oceans hoping to share in the America’s dream. At this very moment, somewhere, immigrants, “tired, poor, huddled masses”, are fighting for their lives in search of their promised land. A land known as the world’s refuge from tyranny and poverty, a place where when they arrive, they stop, drop to their knees, tears swelling in their eyes, kiss the ground, look to the sky and thank their God they have arrived. Regardless of their color, their language, their religion, their poverty, or their education, they are Americans. Everyone who loves freedom is.
America’s revolution was a gift of freedom to the world. We must not be the generation that lost hope and closed the door. We must not hoard this gift. We must, as generations before us, be compelled to share it. So, when politicians exploit our fears, tell them, we do not fear freedom, that we can only grow the cause and movement of freedom with courage and principled leadership. We must remind ourselves, even from the floors of the legislatures, of our Armed Service Members, when faced with the choice of going forward or backward, certainly had a moment of fear, perhaps even had a moment of considering self-survival at the expense of their platoons. But they choose courage. Unfortunately, politicians sometimes face a similar question but too often choose self-protection at the expense of what they know to be right. We can no longer hope our leaders will do the right thing, we must demand it. Its time to choose courage, to face down the bullies, and take back our Country from those that would trade liberty for security. And like those Service Members, we must shout from the hilltops, with at least half their courage; “We are many and they are few and WE CHOOSE FREEDOM!”
May we beware of those that tempt us into losing our faith in freedom, and may God give us all, again, the courage, to trust freedom.