|
The simple truth about illegal immigration
On the matter of illegal immigration, ideally, people should be permitted to do whatever doesn't infringe on another's God-given rights. In fact, in most cases, this greater freedom results in greater benefits for everyone concerned.Employers should be free to hire whomever they want. Employees should be free to seek work wherever they want. National borders impede this free-market concept by impeding immigration but that's not really the problem. Instead, our immigration problem stems from built-in institutional evils. Milton Friedman made this point some years back: You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.' It follows that you can't build a fence high enough, or round up enough illegal immigrants to deport, or punish businesses with fines enough to discourage billions of people from seeking something for nothing. Most of the world lives in conditions that make the lives of the U.S. poor look utterly extravagant. One of our colleagues yesterday made the obvious yet rarely confronted observation that the cost of providing just one student an education in California runs as high as $15,000 by some estimates. What father of four children wouldn't do whatever he could to provide his four children with the equivalent of $60,000 in free tuition every year rather than let them grow up in squalor and in a Third World country where they probably won't get any kind of an education? What mother wouldn't prefer to have her child born in the U.S. with the guarantee of lifetime health care (substandard as it's likely to be under ObamaCare) rather than in some backward nation where it's as likely as not the kid would be dead by age 5? When you add up everything the U.S. provides at no cost to people who don't have much income health, education, welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing - we're fortunate we're insulated by two massive oceans or else billions of people would be flooding across the borders to take advantage. That doesn't even take into consideration the additional lure of jobs, which are vastly more plentiful here than in impoverished nations. Or the elevated comforts of paved roads, no sewage in the streets, relative safety from marauding criminals and all the other benefits of the U.S. lifestyle. As long as we as a nation provide stuff for free, people who don't have that stuff will come here to get it. You can't deport them fast enough, or build a wall high enough to discourage people lured by freebies paid for by the American taxpayer. The only way to permanently solve that problem is to permanently end the welfare state. Turn off the spigot and they'll stop coming here for free drinks. Posted by: GolfBravoUSMC 2010-05-21 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=297266 |