Politics And Immigration

 Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
—Verse engraved on the base of the statue of liberty

Readers of my blog know that I am overall very pro-immigration. I have a strong belief that immigrants are a net plus, both for this country and for the immigrants themselves. In economics, there are hardly ever such win-win situations as there are with immigration and our country.

One of my biggest pet peeves is, when discussing politics and my views on immigration, for someone to automatically refer to my immigration views as ‘liberal’, or to imply that I am not conservative on immigration issues. The reason this bothers me so much is because immigration is much more complicated than simply reducing it to a liberal/conservative or Democrat/Republican issue, and frankly, I don’t think a pro-immigration view is a liberal tenet, rather it’s more of a conservative tenet. I have refrained from discussing this topic before because it is one of those topics where it is very difficult to explain and the likelihood that someone will read into my posts what I did not mean is high. So up until now, this has been a conversation I usually only bring up over a few beers with friends. However, because of the rise of the minutemen and President Bush’s immigration plan, I have decided to write on this and explain exactly why I think immigration is more a conservative issue.

Before I do this, I must explain what makes a conservative a conservative and a liberal a liberal, specifically in those areas related to immigration.

CONSERVATIVES

Pro-Economic Growth

If there is one unifying economic theme that unites all conservatives, it is the belief that economic growth should be high on the list of economic goals. Economic growth is what drives conservatives to oppose everything from tax hikes to foreign aid, from welfare to government waste, and from the Kyoto treaty to all other inefficient environmental solutions. It is why conservatives are for free trade, why they tend to be against regulations, and the reason they support laissez-faire.

How does immigration fit into the whole scheme of economic growth? It is an undeniable fact of economics that cheap labor increases economic growth. In other words, the cheaper the labor, the higher the economic growth. It is almost a one to one correlation. This is why you have libertarians, who are commonly referred to as ‘extreme conservatives’ when it comes to economics, constantly fighting for immigration, illegal or not. This is why organizations like free trade.org (a part of Cato), The Cato Institute, and the Wall Street Journal come out so strongly in favor of immigration.

In fact, the more to the right on economics you go, the more likely the person will be pro-immigration. For example, there is a group of capitalists referred to as anarcho-capitalists (also radical capitalists) who believe in such a limited form of government that even some conservatives don’t take them seriously. Yet in his book titled ‘The Machinery of Freedom,’ David Friedman, often referred to as the father of anarcho-capitalists, writes this in a chapter titled “Open The Gates”:

In my opinion, the restriction on immigration is a mistake: we should abolish it tomorrow and reopen the most successful attack on poverty the world has ever seen….

Unrestricted immigration would make us richer, as it has in the past. Our wealth is in people, not things; America is not Kuwait. If a working wife can hire an Indian maid, who earned a few hundred dollars a year in India, to work for her at six thousand dollars a year, and so spend her own time on a 30 thousand a year job, who is worse off?

As long as the immigrants pay for what they use, they do not make the rest of society poorer…
A policy of unrestricted immigration would bring us more than cheap unskilled labor. It would bring a flood of new skills, not least among them the entrepreneurial ability that has made Indian and Chinese emigrants the merchant classes of Asia and Africa….

It is a shame that the argument must be put in terms of the economic or psychological ‘interest’ of the present generation of Americans. It is simpler than that. There are people, probably many millions, who would like to come here, live here, work here, raise their children here, die here. There are people who would like to become Americans, as our parents and grandparents did.

If we want to be honest, we can ship the Statue of Liberty back to France or replace the outdated verse with the new lines, ‘America the closed preserve/That dirty foreigners don’t deserve’. Or we can open the gates again.

To some, David Friedman goes too far, since he is essentially arguing for open borders. My point here is not in the merits of his argument, but to point out that on economic terms, and especially if you rate economic growth as a high priority on your list, a pro-immigration attitude is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

So, if all what I say is true, than why are there some conservatives who seem to have it out for immigrants? Well that is where the next part comes in, the rub in this whole immigration issue.

A Strong Respect For Hard Work And The Rule Of Law

To help explain this better, I’d like to use the example of my father. My father (illegally) immigrated to this country about 30 years ago from a small pueblo in Guerrero, Mexico. When he came to this country, he had no education at all, not even the ability to write his own name. However, while my dad was not educated at all, there is an area of North American virtues that he (and I would say Mexicans in general) was very familiar with, hard work. To this day I still consider my family one of the hardest workers I know, in fact, I still have uncles that work two or three different jobs, and some even continue to do gardening work for a living, long after they have reached middle class.

Because of my father’s very strong work ethic he has a very difficult time understanding how someone can get money yet not work. While I believe in a very limited level of welfare, my father, on the other hand, does not. He thinks that one’s pay should have a direct relationship to one’s work, and if you happen to put yourself in a circumstance where you need welfare, tough luck for you- you should bear the brunt of that, and not the country as a whole. In addition to a strong work ethic, my father also has a strong moral ethic. He strongly dislikes gangsters, taggers, and all other types of criminals that are in high percentages in Los Angeles, the area of California where my father lives. In fact, my father often says that if he were president of the United States, he would kill all Mexican gangsters, starting with his children if any of us were gangsters. The reason he says this is not because he hates Mexicans, but because he hates gangsters, and when Mexicans associate ourselves with gangsters, we give Mexicans a bad name.

The reason I bring this up is because, while you may agree or disagree with my father’s views, you at least respect them. My father may be extreme in his views, but they are born out of a virtue that everybody should have, to some degree. And it is this virtue that I see very strongly in conservatives, a strong dislike of pay without work, and a strong dislike of criminal acts that destroy the United States of America.

So how does this relate to immigration? It relates in the sense that, regardless of your views on immigration, it is an undeniable fact that there is a percentage of immigrants that are bad for this country. Whether it is the welfare state, criminal activity, or gang violence, some immigrants do come and cause harm, rather than good, to this country (they also bring down economic growth, another thing that pisses conservatives off). To deny this fact is to deny the obvious. In fact, I would say that the problem is worse in states where conservatives have the biggest problem with immigrants, California and Arizona.

Does this mean that immigrants are a net negative to this country? Of course not. Out of all the immigrants I knew growing up in Compton (and there were A LOT), I would put the number at 1-5% that were involved in gang or criminal activity. The vast majority of immigrants, even in the worse areas of the United States (I would expect the 1-5% number to significantly drop with regard to immigrants that live in less crime infested areas), are here to earn an honest living and be an overall plus to this country.

My point in this is not to say that immigrants are bad, but to show that a person with a strong work ethic, a person with a strong love for right and wrong, has some justification for worrying about undocumented immigrants.

This is why I don’t get worked up when a conservative says this and that about undocumented immigrants; I respect where s/he is coming from. Is immigration a net bad for this country if you factor in the amount of undocumented immigrants committing crime? Is immigration a net bad for this country if you factor in the backbone immigration gives to some of the most gruesome gangs in LA? What level of immigration can a country take in before the culture starts to become negatively affected, before you start to create pockets of areas that don’t assimilate as much as they should and start to create a divisive environment? These are all questions that are being debated and should be debated. I happen to fall on the pro-immigrant side on all of them, but I don’t automatically assume that because someone falls on the anti-immigrant side that that automatically makes them a racist, or in anyway anti-Mexican.

In fact, I find it quite respectful that conservatives take this issue seriously. In addition to having virtues that I respect (mentioned above, work ethic, right and wrong ethic), there is another good thing about this side of conservatives, and that is that whether they are for immigrants or not, they are at least holding us to the same standards as everyone else. In other words, it is immigrants and non-immigrants alike that should not abuse of welfare programs, it is immigrants and non-immigrants alike that should avoid criminal behavior, and it is immigrants and non-immigrants alike that should be hard workers. Whenever someone crosses these lines, immigrant or non-immigrant, they will get the wrath of the conservative mindset.

With all of that said, I am not making excuses for some conservatives that take this too far and constantly talk about the undocumented immigrant as if all we are is a cancer to this country. I do believe there is a limit to how much this side of conservativism can push someone toward being anti-immigrant. If all a conservative does is speak about all the evils immigration causes, and never once mentions the overwhelming good that immigration causes, than my tolerance will run out and I will have to abandon that conservative. In fact, my friends are well aware of me being on record saying that if the Michelle Malkins, or the Pat Buchanans of the party (and to some degree the Bill O’Reillys) ever get control, I will have to leave the GOP (and probably vote Libertarian). So my point here is not to excuse all conservative arguments against immigration, but to give it a balanced footing.

Now that we covered principles, let’s move to conservative actions.

REPUBLICANS (GOP)

First, the ugly. In every discussion I have had on politics and immigration, a topic that never fails to come up, especially here in California, is Pete Wilson and Prop 187. For the record, this is a perfect example of a Republican that I would not be able to tolerate and would drive me out of the GOP. Leaving the economics of Prop 187 aside for the moment, the mere name of the bill alone is offensive. Almost every person in California, especially those that listen to hip-hop music and overall live in a high minority area, know that 187 is the penal code for murder. In other words, Prop 187 sent a clear message that it wasn’t just anti-welfare or anti-crime, but that it was anti-immigration, and anti-immigration of the worse sorts. This is a message that everybody heard loud and clear, and a message that continues to, and should continue to, hurt the GOP in the state, at least until the GOP completely learns its lesson on this.

However, Prop 187 isn’t all there is to the Republican Party and immigration. As I touched on earlier, all of my family came to the United States illegally, they are all immigrants of Mexico, and I am the first person in my family born in the United States. Yet, up until the ’80’s, very few, if any, had become citizens, but in the 80’s that all changed. Thanks to Ronald Reagan’s immigration reforms of 1986, they were all granted citizenship. Yes, Ronald Reagan, sometimes referred to as the father of the modern day conservative movement, is responsible for one of the most sweeping pro-immigration legislation in the history of the United States.

In addition to President Ronald Reagan’s immigration reform, we also have President Bush proposing a temporary worker program. Now, you may disagree with it, you may say that it doesn’t go far enough, but it is undeniable that it took a Republican president to bring this to national attention. In other words, under eight years of Clinton, and two years of Democrat control of the presidency and congress, you didn’t get any pro-immigration plan at all. It wasn’t until Bush brought the topic up to national attention that you now have Democrats trying to outdo him.

Which brings me to my next point, Liberals and immigration.

LIBERALS

What liberal incentive is there to be pro-immigration? Some people I’ve talked to tend to respond to the principle of ‘love for minorities’, as if this is a virtue exclusive to liberals. They say, just look at all the liberals that love minorities; it is out of a strong desire to have minorities succeed and a strong affection towards us that liberals are pro-immigration. While I don’t deny that there are many truly pro-immigration and pro-minority liberals, I don’t count this as a specifically liberal principle. For every liberal that genuinely cares about minorities, I could show you a conservative that also genuinely cares about minorities. In other words, the heart and it’s desire for good is not itself partisan, it is something you will find in both parties, the same can be said for the cold heart and it’s desire for bad, it is something you will also find in both parties (just like you will find racists in both, Republican and Democrat parties, it is not exclusive to any one group).

So what other principle can liberals bring up? I strongly believe that not only is there not a liberal principle that would give a liberal the incentive to be pro-immigration, but in fact the opposite is true. There are liberal principles that would give liberals the incentive to be anti-immigration; let me just name a couple.

Unions

Whether you think unions are good or not, from an economic perspective unions and cheap labor don’t mix. The more we move towards cheap labor, the more we undermine unions. This is at the core of why unions tend to be against free-trade agreements (it is no coincidence that Lou Dobbs, anchor of Lou Dobbs Tonight on CNN, is strongly anti-free trade and also strongly against immigration); this is also why unions tend to dislike Wal-mart. The cheaper a service can be provided to a customer, the less likely that customer is going to use unions to do the same service, and the more unions control an area, the worse off are people who are willing to perform the same function cheaper.

This is precisely why Cesar Chavez, that beloved union leader of the left, was so strongly against undocumented immigrants. Contrary to popular belief, he was not in anyway pro-immigration, he was pro-union, and it was his strong support of unions that lead him to be strongly against immigrants. He even reached the point of instructing union members to seek out undocumented immigrants and calling the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to deport them whenever they were found.

San Diego Union Tribune columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr describes it this way,

Despite the fact that Chavez is these days revered among Mexican-American activists, the labor leader in his day was no more tolerant of illegal immigration than the Arizona Minutemen are now. Worried that the hiring of illegal immigrants drove down wages, Chavez — according to numerous historical accounts — instructed union members to call the Immigration and Naturalization Service to report the presence of illegal immigrants in the fields and demand that the agency deport them. UFW officials were even known to picket INS offices to demand a crackdown on illegal immigrants.

And in 1973, in one of the most disgraceful chapters in UFW history, the union set up a “wet line” to prevent Mexican immigrants from entering the United States. Under the guidance of Chavez’s cousin, Manuel, UFW members tried at first to convince the immigrants not to cross. When that didn’t work, they physically attacked the immigrants and left some bloody in the process. It happened in the same place that the Minutemen are now planning to gather: the Arizona-Mexico border.

At the time, The Village Voice newspaper said that the UFW conducted a “campaign of random terror against anyone hapless enough to fall into its net.” In their book, “The Fight in the Fields,” Susan Ferris and Ricardo Sandoval recall the border incident and write that the issue of how to deal with the undocumented was “particularly vexing” for Chavez.

So the support for unions is at odds with the support for immigration. The more you are one, the less you must be the other.

Environmentalism

Because several environmentalists tend to have a very weak understanding of economics, they tend to view immigration as very hostile toward the environment. In fact, if you ever follow the actions of the Sierra Club, you will see a yearly struggle over immigration. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Democratic Party’s main environmental enforcer, the Sierra Club, is having another revealing scrap over immigration. A year after losing in a rout, a group of anti-immigration insurgents is back this month making a run at five seats on the group’s 15-member board.

Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization wants the super-green club to endorse immigration limits, with a broader goal of freezing the American population. “The issue of escalating population growth in the United States is the single most important environmental issue in the nation,” board member Paul Watson recently told the AP. In its wire-service deadpan, AP noted that Mr. Watson “is a Canadian citizen and U.S. resident.” It’s an irony of the anti-immigration movement that its most prominent voices, on the right and left, are often immigrants who want to pull up the drawbridge now that they’ve arrived.

While the Sierra Club insurgents probably lack the votes to prevail, their effort is notable for revealing the zero-population-growth roots of the anti-immigration movement. Their argument isn’t about the “rule of law” or “securing our borders”; their main problem is other human beings. They’d prefer fewer of them, the better to preserve America just the way it is, or perhaps was. No offense to Mr. Watson, but if it’s a wilderness museum he wants, why did he leave Canada?

The U.S. is so prosperous because it has always embraced the spirit of economic growth and human enterprise. Meanwhile, Republicans tempted to embrace the anti-immigration cause should understand the political and ideological company they are keeping.

Of course these anti-immigration groups lose every year, but it is not mainly because of the merits of their argument, it is mainly because of political calculations. It would be political suicide for them to come out as anti-immigration; after all, a large amount of pro-immigrant voters, primarily the children of immigrations, vote for their causes.

Why than, do you think that the left supports immigration? If two of the Democrats strongest supports, unions and environmentalists, tend to be strongly against immigration, why do Democrats still support it? For the simple reason that we, latinos, tend to vote liberal, so it is politically convenient for liberals to be pro-immigration.

DEMOCRATS

Which is exactly why Democrats always try to take the middle ground when it comes to immigration. Under two years of control of both the presidency and congress, and under more than fifty years of controlling congress, Democrats were overall silent with regard to immigration (but they were more aesthetic about it). Democrats will talk the talk when it comes to immigration, but they will do the opposite when it comes to policies. In fact, if you want to know one of the primary indirect reasons that there are so many immigrants dying trying to cross the Arizona desert, it is in response to the beefed-up border enforcement begun by the Clinton administration in 1993.

The Economist writes:

Unless, of course, effective physical barriers are put in their way. In 1994, the Clinton administration, shocked by videos of hordes of Mexicans strolling with impunity along the freeway to San Diego, set up “Operation Gatekeeper” along the Californian border (a similar project, “Operation Hold the Line”, had started a year earlier in Texas’s El Paso sector). What this meant in California was two high fences running parallel to each other, helicopter surveillance by day and night, night-vision cameras and hidden electronic sensors. Add the Border Patrol agents and the result was that the pre-1994 flood of illegal immigrants across the 66 miles (106km) of California’s border dwindled to a trickle.

But to what overall effect? The flood has been diverted to the path of least resistance: the desert wilderness of Arizona, where sometimes the border is just a marker post or a single strand of rusting wire. Last year the Arizona Border Patrol made 580,000 arrests, half the national total, as opposed to just 9% before California’s Operation Gatekeeper.

The switch comes at a cost, the worst of which is the loss of life as migrants, attempting to walk for five days in Arizona’s baking temperatures, succumb to thirst. As Border Patrol agents point out, it is physically impossible to carry enough water, and the coyotes who guide the groups are all too willing to leave the weak to die. According to the Rev Robin Hoover, whose Humane Borders organisation attempts to stop such deaths by placing water tanks in the desert, at least 221 border-crossers died last year in Arizona.

So Democrats must go back and forth, on one hand they can’t be too pro-immigration because their underlying principles prohibit them, but on the other, they can’t be too anti-immigration because that would bring about a political disaster, so they choose to speak a bit more pro-immigration than what Republicans do, hoping to get the best of both worlds.

But how long will this last? If immigration is not a core liberal principle, when will liberals abandon their alliance with immigration and start opposing it? As soon as it becomes less politically dangerous to do so, and this may happen much sooner than you expect. For example, the Washington Times writes this about Hillary Clinton (someone who embodies everything I dislike about liberals, btw):

In an interview on WABC radio, she said: “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants.”

“Clearly, we have to make some tough decisions as a country, and one of them ought to be coming up with a much better entry-and-exit system so that if we’re going to let people in for the work that otherwise would not be done, let’s have a system that keeps track of them,” she said.

Unlike many pro-business Republicans, Mrs. Clinton also has castigated Americans for hiring illegal aliens.

“People have to stop employing illegal immigrants,” she said. “I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx. You’re going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work.”

In contrast, Mr. Bush backs a guest-worker program that allows foreign citizens entry into the United States and an eventual path to citizenship. One of the president’s first acts after his re-election was to push for it again, before both domestic and foreign audiences.

So why is she doing it you ask, because,

Jennifer Duffy with the Cook Political Report said a conservative stance on immigration would be wise in the event Mrs. Clinton runs for president in 2008.

“Democrats are asking if it’s really smart to nominate another Northeastern Democrat, and she is a Northeastern Democrat,” she said. “It’s probably smart to blur that perception a little.”

In other words, Hillary Clinton, and with Hillary Clinton Democrats in general, want to win this next election, and they’re not ready to let a non-core issue like immigration get in the way. If it takes coming out strongly against immigration to win the next election, than so be it. After all, it's the other issues that are truly important.

Personally, I didn’t think it would happen this soon, but I guess with Hispanics voting close to 40% Republican in this last election, it becomes less politically beneficial to be pro-immigration.

So this is why I believe that immigration is not completely a liberal or conservative belief, but if it had to be classified under one political philosophy, I believe it to be more a conservative belief than a liberal one.

Before I end this, I don’t want to leave the impression that one must be for immigration in order to be a minority caring person. In other words, the level of immigration, like many other things, is a debatable issue, meaning good people can disagree on the limits of immigration and what should be done about it. I am certainly not faulting Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton or the GOP of being anti-minority, or even anti-immigration, because of the many policies they have supported. As I said above, the effect on crime, the effects on welfare, and to some degree the cultural effects, and the effects immigration has on very many other things are enough to create a vast amount of different acceptable positions one can take on immigration. My only point here was to show how complicated immigration through politics really is, it was not to argue one way or the other whether immigration is good or not.

In addition to the above caveat, there is also another one I’d like to mention. In any discussion about politics and political philosophies, there has to always be some generalization involved or else the conversation would get nowhere. So while I generalize liberals, conservatives, democrats and republicans a certain way, of course I believe that how this is transformed into the actual beliefs of the person are going to vary widely. In other words, I certainly don’t believe that all Democrats are anti-immigration or all Republicans are pro-immigration, or vice versa. In addition, I am well aware of several, several good-hearted liberal Democrats who do have the minority in mind. Just like I am aware of several, several good hearted conservative Republicans who also have the minority in mind. My only point here was to show where immigration fits in based on each political philosophy and political parties’ incentives, nothing more, nothing less. (Originally posted: 8/17/2005)