I am strongly in favor of "controlling our borders"—but that requires solving two problems, not just one. Below are the two problems we need to solve to gain proper control of our borders and avoid a sizeable economic problem down the road.
Problem 1 of 2:
Today, too many immigrants are here illegally. Half arrived legally, then overstayed their visas; the other half came in illegally. It’s not that the vast majority are not contributing to our economy, or desirous of becoming good, productive citizens; it’s mainly that it only takes a few bad eggs to do a lot of damage, and we don’t know who they are when they come in illegally.
Problem 2 of 2:
Today, too many would-be immigrants are kept out by an inept, incompetent process for “legal” immigration. Scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, doctors, inventors, artists, and productive would-be contributors to our economy and society are loath to break our laws, and loath to put up with our incompetent immigration process. So they stay away voluntarily. If we’d fix the ineptness of the current “legal” immigration process, we’d unbottleneck the system. Added bonus: we’d know who they all are, because they’d all have come through legally.
Unfortunately, the US House of Representatives is on its way to solving problem 1, but not problem 2. In other words, the US House of Representatives is about to shoot our country’s foot off with a shotgun.
The image at the top of this article is what I think would be an appropriate logo for the one-sided policy, if it passes the House. Do you think Bill O'Reilly might be willing to pose for it? He'll deserve a lot of the "credit" for it. Or how about Rep. Tom Tancredo, who will probably deserve even more "credit" than O'Reilly if it passes?
Growth-minded Republicans should know better than this, and ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Here's the economic problem we face:
The baby boomers start retiring en masse in just a few short years. Who will replace them in the workforce? Not immigrants, if the House has its way. Not our school systems, either. The consequence: keeping our economy growing will be far more difficult, and that greatly increases the chances of a lengthy recession, or even a deflationary depression, as a result of the boomers exiting the workforce. [And anyone who thinks productivity per worker will grow fast enough to compensate sufficiently for the workforce hit is a bit more optimistic than I am. I'm not ruling it out, but I'm not ruling it in, either.]
In the May 8 issue of InformationWeek, Editor-in-chief Rob Preston gave us a warning in his article titled Job No. 1 For The U.S.: Build A Tech Workforce:
...the biggest obstacle to our continued economic prosperity is our [in]ability to produce enough skilled workers to meet the tech demands of the coming decades.
Our schools are not producing them. Nor is our inept “legal” immigration process providing them. Both of those facts add up to a looming problem for our economy, because...
...technical innovation drives productivity gains, which in any country is the source of wealth creation. Therefore, if U.S. companies don’t have ready access to that ingenuity, the domestic economy will stagnate.
If the U.S. House of Representatives ends up shooting our country's foot off in today’s myopic convulsion of xenophobia, instead of providing us the leadership we need on this issue, my optimism about the future will have to be revised downward a notch or two.
Sorry about that; I know a lot of readers come to this blog to read about the brighter side of things, but I've just about had it with the one-dimensional, oversimplified excuse for thinking that's getting all the headlines and cable-TV airtime on the immigration question. At this blog, I've been hammering away for a long time at a fundamental truth: A growing economy mitigates the effect of a growing debt. But the converse of that is just as true: A shrinking economy exacerbates the debt burden. We are ignoring that half of the debate, though. Reason: Politics trumps economics. Xenophobia makes for effective bumperstickers, and very bad economics.
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I’ve written about this before. Here’s the suggested-reading list again:
• ...by George Gilder
• ...by Steve Forbes
• ...by Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker
• ...by my favorite economist/columnist, Alan Reynolds
• ...and another one by Alan Reynolds
