Relaxed
immigration correlates with a thriving America. Few remember that most
of our grandparents (including those of this columnist) who immigrated
to America did so freely. They just showed up and came right in without
confronting a crazy quilt of laws or phalanx of DHS agents. Relaxed
immigration is part and parcel with economic growth.
It was not until the 1920s that quantitative immigration laws were adopted.
Previously only “illiterates, persons of psychopathic inferiority, men
as well as women entering for immoral purposes, alcoholics, stowaways,
and vagrants” (and, shamefully and to our detriment, Chinese and
Japanese) were excluded.
In the context of this policy immortalized by Emma Lazarus as “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-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door,” America
thrived.
Then tribal, anti-classical, political forces contrived to apply
restrictions motivated at least partly based on Malthusian theory. This
theory, anathema to supply siders, claims that there just isn’t enough
wealth to go around and immigrants would dilute the prosperity of those
already here.
That’s nonsense. The sovereign states and dependent territories with the highest population density in
the world, Macau, Monaco, Singapore and Hong Kong, are among the most
prosperous in the world. Some of the least populous states, such as
Sudan, Mali, and Chad, are among the most destitute. The correlation
between population density and prosperity is not exact. Yet it clearly
is tight enough to give lie to the claim that population growth (whether
through fertility or immigration) is, in the context of political and
economic freedom, anything other than a great blessing.
As the late Professor Julian Simon once wrote (in a book by that title) people are “The Ultimate Resource.” From The Ultimate Resource II:
“The world’s problem is not too many people, but lack of political
and economic freedom. Powerful evidence comes from pairs of countries
that had the same culture and history and much the same standard of
living when they split apart after World War II — East and West Germany,
North and South Korea, Taiwan and China. In each case the centrally
planned communist country began with less population ‘pressure’, as
measured by density per square kilometer, than did the market –directed
economy. And the communist and non-communist countries also shared much
the same birth rates. But the market-directed economies performed much
better economically than the centrally-planned economies. This powerful
demonstration cuts the ground from under population growth as a likely
explanation of poor economic performance.”
People as resource is part of an integrated classical liberal world
view. Another great classical thinker, the late Professor Melchior
Palyi, formerly chief economist of Deutsche Bank, wrote in The Twilight of Gold 1914-1936: Myths and Realities (Henry
Regnery and Company, Chicago, 1972), about a classical era, now mostly
forgotten, that was “a golden age.” The era’s leaders offered an
integrated worldview, extending to monetary, financial, and …
immigration policy. How did it work out?
“Rising living standards of a rapidly growing world population,
tremendous capital accumulation, accelerated technological progress, a
vastly broadening area of well-organized international trade and
finance, of political democracy and individual freedom–all these were
the hallmarks of growth in the century between Waterloo and Sarajevo,
and of its second half in particular. Toward the end of that period, and
for a while thereafter, there was little doubt in the minds of most
contemporary observers that such phenomenal developments as the
skyrocketing of foreign long-term investments from under $6 billion in
1864 to over $70 billion just before World War I was closely related to
the basic monetary institution of the age, the gold standard.…
“The meaning of the gold standard–with its unrestrained and
uncontrolled private ownership of gold–cannot be appreciated in
isolation from the institutional and psychological background that
characterized the civilized world in the decades before 1914. ‘The
outstanding feature’ of that period was the unity of the economic world,
as has not been achieved at any other time.”
The gold standard was not the only hallmark of this epoch:
“’…there was freedom of travel without passports, freedom of
migration, and freedom from exchange control and other monetary
restrictions. Citizenship was freely granted to immigrants….”
The Republican Party aspires to the status of the party of economic
growth. By branding those who have moved here outside the unenforced
laws of a broken immigration system as “illegals” — and opposing a
redemptive path to citizenship — some Republicans have, willy nilly,
aligned against the policy most conducive to equitable prosperity:
comprehensive reform.
Comprehensive immigration reform is not just about interests,
prosperity. It’s also about values. Opposition to finding a path to
citizenship also is rooted in a colossal misunderstanding of the values
of these immigrants: conservative ones.
Many Republicans have little social connection or rapport with
Latinos (and vice versa). Republicans from states with high-density
Latino populations, such as Texas, are less prone to misunderstanding.
But too many Republicans mistake Latinos as intrinsically Democratic
voters. Of course, they surely will become so if repudiated and insulted
by the GOP.
This is a big mistake. The worldview of Hispanics trends much closer
to a conservative vision than to a progressive one. Mexico’s
“declaration of independence” from Spain, celebrated on September 15th,
reads like a Tea Party manifesto. The speech by the Mexican Jefferson,
Father Miguel Hidalgo, is as close to the heart of our Mexican brothers
as is the Declaration of Independence is to the people of the United
States:
“My children: a new dispensation comes to us today. Will you receive
it? Will you free yourselves? Will you recover the lands stolen three
hundred years ago from your forefathers by the hated Spaniards? We must
act at once…. Will you defend your religion and your rights as true
patriots? Long live our Lady of Guadalupe! Death to bad government!”
“Will you defend your religion and your rights as true patriots?” “Death to bad government?” These are sentiments that would be branded by
the Department of Homeland Security as “Extreme Right-Wing,” defined in
its “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States,
1970-2008,” as “groups that believe that one’s personal and/or national
‘way of life’ is under attack and … that the threat is imminent (for
some the threat is from a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group),
and believe in the need to be prepared for an attack … by participating
in paramilitary preparations and training. Groups may also be fiercely
nationalistic…, suspicious of centralized federal authority, reverent of
individual liberty….”
The words of the Grito were spoken, as were the words of the
Declaration of Independence written, at the moment of actual
insurrection. Resoundingly, the core values of human dignity and liberty
persist. About half of our Hispanic population derives from Mexico. And
Hispanics from south of Mexico tend very much to share these values.
Let us now praise, among others, El Libertador, Simón Bolívar.
As this columnist has written elsewhere
“The millions of Hispanics in America make up an invisible conservative
electoral El Dorado, ‘City of Gold,’ enriching American society. They
are ‘imprisoned lighting’ that can, once unleashed, help restore America
to greatness.”
Immigration reform now migrates from the Senate to the House. Support
for such reform, absolutely including a path to earned citizenship by
the hard working and otherwise law-abiding, is a stand for the American
principles of dignity, liberty and prosperity. These are three
transcendent conservative values. It is baffling to this columnist,
himself a proud fiercely conservative Tea Partier, that so many of his
highly esteemed conservative colleagues seek to delegitimize the
conservative reform efforts of good conservatives like Sen. Marco Rubio.
Comprehensive immigration reform is a stand for dignity, liberty, and
prosperity. It is part and parcel of a stronger conservative movement …
and a golden age for America and the world. It is not merely the right
thing to do. It is the Right thing to do.
* Ralph Benko serves as senior advisor, economics, for American
Principles in Action, advisor to and editor of the Lehrman Institute’s
http://thegolddstandardnow.org, and is, with Charles Kadlec, the author
of “The 21st Century Gold Standard: For Prosperity, Security, and
Liberty” available for free download in ebook form from
http://agoldenage.com. He also authored “The Websters’ Dictionary: how
to use the Web to transform the world,” which won the “Trophée du choix
des Internauts” (“The People’s Choice”) in the World e-Democracy Forum
Awards, 2010, Paris, France. (Download a free and complete eBook
version, http://thewebstersdictionary.com.) He manages
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Gold-Standard/132694736755192. Benko
was a junior official in the Reagan White House; founder of the
Prosperity Caucus; and a member of the original Supply Side movement.
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