A Good Summary Of The Immigration Issue

From David Frum:

1) The issue is not just illegal immigration. The problems associated with current immigration policy – very large numbers, very low skills – are associated with the legal dimensions of current policy too.

2) It’s time for Republicans to revisit the actual economics of immigration rather than the slogans. It’s often assumed that immigration is economically beneficial. That’s no longer true, anyway it’s not true for the host population. (Obviously immigration is beneficial to the immigrants themselves, or they would not do it.) The gains to the U.S. economy from current policy are vanishingly tiny. The costs to state governments are surprisingly huge: last I checked, immigration costs every California household $1200 a year in higher state and local taxes.

3) Immigration should be conceived not as an “ethnic” issue, but as a human capital issue. Inadequate schools and low-skilled migration are together pointing the U.S. to a future workforce  (as the ETS has warned) of dramatically lower skills and even literacy.

4) Here’s the toughest nut for Republicans to swallow. We’re going to have to discard the old language that the Bush economy was the “greatest story never told” and squarely face up to how bad the economic record of 2001-2007 was for most Americans. We can’t put immigration as one cause of the disappointment while denying that the disappointment existed in the first place.

Agreed on all points.  The problem of course is that serious immigration reform rapidly runs into charges of racism/it’s un-American to support enforcement.  Most reasonably people can get beyond that heated rhetoric, but there are just enough kooks on both sides of the spectrum to stymie meaningful change and leave this matter in the morass of simple partisanship.

We’ve changed.  The immigrants coming to this country have changed.  The world has changed.  No longer can a man with little grasp of English and nothing more than a rudimentary education come over here and make a middle class income.  No longer can our economy support tens of millions of individuals, un-assimilated into the mainstream, dependent on social services and unable to do to more than the most menial of jobs.  The problem is bigger than illegal vs. legal immigration.