Highly emotional members of the left have been known to bemoan immense wealth. Possessing a fixed pie, zero sum view of the world, they imagine that wealth is taken as opposed to being created.
Which speaks to one of the beauties of immigration for members of the right: it exposes the left’s beliefs about wealth and inequality as rather baseless. When desperately poor immigrants risk their lives to get to the U.S., they not infrequently migrate to the richest of the rich cities. That’s where the opportunity is. Score one for the right.
Except that certain aspects of immigration expose the right as similarly foolhardy. It’s popular on the right to say it’s not fair that border towns like Yuma, AZ suffer the elite’s comfort with immigration and alleged desire for cheap labor. The critique fails.
If work were legal, foreign workers could skip the border towns largely bereft of opportunity. In other words, if work were legal migrants would never set foot in the border towns said to be burdened by immigration, and instead would go straight to where opportunity is greatest, including the richest U.S. cities. Overrun border towns are an effect of government trying to plan a market phenomenon, not immigrants.
From there, the right frequently lean on the Milton Friedman line about open borders being incompatible with a welfare state, except that if immigrants were coming to the U.S. to get on the dole, why would they migrate to the most expensive locales where housing (among other market goods) is the most difficult to come by? Why not stay in Yuma or Laredo where welfare checks stretch the furthest?
The above question is never answered, nor is the statistic about remittances from Mexican migrants back to Mexico. $63 billion worth in 2023 alone. The latter rejects the dole as the instigator of migration, not to mention what some of the remittances are sent back to pay for: housing. Yes, the goal of all too many migrants isn’t to be American and stay in the U.S., rather it’s to maximize their ability to earn money in the richest parts of the richest country on earth so that they can return to Mexico.
All of which calls for even more in the way of legalized work that is regulated by market forces. If so, as in if work were legal there would be much less incentive for migrants to bring the whole family. Why would they when the dollars remitted stretch so much further in Mexico, including toward the purchase of new houses that would be out of reach in the U.S.
Conservative Ramesh Ponnuru acknowledges the reality of immigration, but wants government to limit it to the “skilled.” Maybe, but for the conceit; one that ignores market signals. See remittances yet again. No one would allow Ponnuru to plan the import of computer chips, but it’s ok if he plans human capital?
After which, Ponnuru is once again a conservative. He should welcome the arrival of the “unskilled” as evidence that all the wealth and inequality stateside doesn’t harm the poor as redistributionist lefties naively believe, but is in fact the solution to poverty. Isn’t that enough?
If not, let’s at least view immigration for what it is: a rejection of the deeply held views held by the left and the right. Contra emotional, zero sum left wingers and intelligent conservatives like Ponnuru, markets always speak. Those who want better will continue to find a way here regardless, and precisely because neither side wants the U.S. to become a police state. Too bad neither side wants markets as the police state alternative.