Category Archives: immigration

The Party of No

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Democratic Party obstructionism continues in the Senate. Recall that the Democrats refused to allow over 300 House-passed jobs-related bills even to come up for debate in the last session and how they shut down the Federal government over a House-passed spending bill that fully funded the government but that didn’t have an additional 2% of what the Democrats demanded.

They’re at it again. The House has passed a bill that fully funds the Department of Homeland Security for the year, which under the last session’s compromise passed in December, had only been funded through the end of this month. The bill also rolls back a number of President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional immigration “executive actions.” Obama’s minions in the Senate are vowing to block the bill, to filibuster it.

Obama has promised to veto the bill, should it make it past the Senate Democrats’ obstructionism. Obama and his minions are fully prepared to shut down HHS, to walk completely away from what little border security they’re willing to provide today, if they can’t have 100% of their way.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) has made the question clear:

It’s a debate that will challenge our colleagues on the other side with a simple proposition. Do they think presidents of either party should have the power to simply ignore laws that they don’t like? Well, will our Democratic colleagues work with us to defend key democratic ideals like separation of powers and the rule of law? Or will they stand tall for the idea that partisan exercises of raw power are good things? The House-passed bill we’ll consider would do two things. Fund the Department of Homeland Security and rein in executive overreach. That’s it. It’s simple….

Remember the Democrats’ behavior in 2016.

A Thought on Immigration and Human Progress

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Over at AEIdeas, James Pethokoukis has an article titled Has human progress stalled? And if so, what can we do about it? In it he talks about the apparent stagnation in human technological progress, and mentions the fact that American “productivity growth averaged nearly 3% during the period 1947-1973,” and we haven’t approached that rate since.

He quoted Aeon:

Yet there once was an age when speculation matched reality. It spluttered to a halt more than 40 years ago. Most of what has happened since has been merely incremental improvements upon what came before. That true age of innovation—I’ll call it the Golden Quarter—ran from approximately 1945 to 1971. Just about everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this time. …  The Golden Quarter was a unique period of less than a single human generation, a time when innovation appeared to be running on a mix of dragster fuel and dilithium crystals.

Then he quoted Aeon again by way of offering an explanation (that I think somewhat begs the question) of why we “spluttered to a halt more than 40 years ago.”

Could it be that the missing part of the jigsaw is our attitude towards risk? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the saying goes. …  In the 1960s, new medicines were rushed to market. Not all of them worked and a few (thalidomide) had disastrous consequences. But the overall result was a medical boom that brought huge benefits to millions. Today, this is impossible. ….

The solutions that Pethokoukis and others to whom he linked in his article, though, are governmental: “maybe too much government regulation.” He also points to demographics [links in the original]:

We are a decade older, on average, today than in 1970 and perhaps more risk averse for that reason. Younger societies tend to be more dynamic, creative, and entrepreneurial, as Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker has written. And economist Robert Gordon cites demographics as one big reason when he thinks the era of fast US economic growth is over.

I think he’s likely right on both scores, but I think government regulations, though hugely important, are the lesser of the two factors. Regulations, after all, even with political inertia, can be undone. Aging is irreversible.

Or is it? Contra Gordon, our rapid economic growth need not be a thing of the past. We can recover our nation’s youth and vitality and our ability and willingness to get out of our comfort zone and take risks, take big risks for big gains, to “land a man on a moon of Saturn and return him safely to the earth within this generation.” That’s what immigration does for us. It’s what immigration always has done for us. Keep in mind: immigrants already are risk takers, or they wouldn’t be here.

A Free Market Solution to Immigration?

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Guy Sorman wrote about a Gary Becker idea for this in a recent CapX article. According to Sorman, Becker’s idea runs something like this:

The immigrant takes a risk, and often pays intermediaries to have access to the accumulated capital available in the host country. Becker therefore proposed that the right to enter a country, and apply for a work visa for various periods of time, should be priced and sold. This is already the case in most developed countries, but it only concerns wealthy investors. Fixing a price on all work visas would allow poorer people—who may get into debt to invest for their future—to have access to privileges now reserved to the wealthiest. This right to a paying visa would suppress most of, if not all, illegal immigration and make border controls, as well as the war on evaders (who would become rarer) easier.

Or not. The idea’s presentation leaves unanswered the mechanism for how possession of a visa would make border controls easier: someone still has to be at the border checking the visa, and someone still has to be…somewhere…tracking the visa and its holder’s departure by the visa’s indicated deadline.

Also left unanswered is the mechanism that makes a bought and paid for visa suppressive of illegal immigration. The man who’s leaving his home country and entering his target country exactly because he has no money and wants a better job is unlikely to be able to afford the visa. Coyotes, you say? They only bring a fraction of illegals across.

Also left unanswered is the mechanism that makes a bought and paid for visa useful when another significant fraction of illegal immigrants enter the target country to (re)join their families who already are here. The cost of illegal entry vs bought and paid for visa entry makes that choice obvious.

All Right Now

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…or nothing at all, ever. That’s the attitude of the Democratic Party in today’s Congress and of the farther right of the Republican Party in today’s Congress. It’s enough to paralyze Congress and keep it from doing much of anything—and to hand Congress back to the Democrats, which may explain some of their attitude.

I’ve argued before that gridlock isn’t, of necessity, a bad thing, but there are a few things Congress does need to accomplish.

A short, partial list includes

  • funding the legitimate tasks of government, those enumerated in Art I, Sect 8 of our Constitution
  • reforming taxes, which would have the side effect of paring back—significantly—an IRS that thinks it’s outside (not merely above) the law
  • reforming immigration
  • privatizing Social Security and Medicare, and getting rid of the Federal contributions to Medicaid

But none of this can be—nor should it be (Obamacare, anyone? Dodd-Frank?)—done all at once. Easy steps, compromises, that bring us incrementally into that reduced government place we should occupy—and will ultimately get us there.

But to get there, we need to take steps, one after another, not hold out for single leaps that cannot occur.

Questions Republicans Should Be Asking

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Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified before the House Homeland Security Committee earlier in the week on, among other things, the subject of immigration. Johnson, by the way, also is a fully licensed and accredited lawyer as well as a politically appointed politician.

A reader wrote to Power Line with some questions for Johnson and others. [emphasis added]

So Jeh says with a smug knowing wink-and-nod “just go to any restaurant here is DC” to see illegal aliens working “under the table.” So is he saying that the employers in DC fill jobs now with illegal aliens? That he knows and the employers know that they are openly, brazenly breaking our immigration and labor laws? So why isn’t he for enforcing our democratically enacted laws? Isn’t he sworn to do so? Isn’t he an attorney? Why isn’t he advocating against the state of affairs that he implies obtains? Why is he advocating open non-feasance of his duty to enforce the laws?

It’s especially rich when he talks about their “coming out of the shadows and STARTING to pay taxes”. Got that? He knows that there are thousands of illegal immigrants and their employers—let’s not forget these scofflaws—who are not paying taxes! OK…so why isn’t he going after them?….for criminal tax evasion?….instead they’re explicitly offering something way beyond amnesty of tax evasion—and a deal that American citizens normally would never get.

Usually a tax amnesty is the government’s waiving the assessed fines, penalties and interest accrued from failure to pay taxes in full and on time—but you still have to pay the actual taxes owed. So the illegal immigrants who have not paid taxes—payroll taxes, most likely since their incomes are low—not only get a tax “amnesty”, i.e., forbearance of fines, interest and penalties—they get outright forgiveness of the actual taxes owed! It is a better deal than any citizen would get if guilty of evading income or payroll taxes. Furthermore it is outright forgiveness for the EMPLOYER’s share of arrears payroll taxes as well…even IF they knowingly hired illegals and failed to pay taxes, it’s outright forgiven.

Republicans should be asking President Barack Obama, Johnson, Democrats generally, and quite a few of their own these questions loudly: in House—and Senate, starting in January—hearings; in townhalls and neighborhoods, especially the rural and poorer ones where unemployment is high and endemic; in newspaper, radio, and television interviews; in letters to the editor.

There are lots of ways to encourage immigration into our country, and we should; we benefit greatly from that immigration. The present way isn’t one of them; on the contrary, it’s highly destructive of our nation.

 

h/t Power Line