http://voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm/2010/07/immigration_the_250-year_persp.htmlThe echoes are eerily familiar. Immigrants, legal and illegal, take American jobs, undercut wages, bring crime and disease, and burden medical and other social services. They don’t learn our language and customs; their kids drag down the schools. The arguments come from radio and TV talkers, from FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, from scholars like the late Samuel Huntington of Harvard, and, of course, from politicians of almost every stripe.
But what they’re saying today -- mostly about Latinos -- was said a century ago about Italians, Slavs, Greeks, Jews, Armenians and Turks, and, before them, about the Irish and the Germans, many of them the same people from whom today’s immigration restrictionists are descended. The Chinese and Japanese, ironically, were to be excluded because they worked too hard
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We now live in a global world where goods, capital and technology are supposed to flow freely across frontiers but, in this country at least, labor is not. The oceans are gone as effective barriers and so far the walls and fences, the electronic gadgetry, and the huge increase in the Border Patrol and other immigration personnel haven’t deterred the flow of people.
So we need new strategies to reduce illegal immigration -- through rigorous enforcement of the labor and worker safety laws, which may itself reduce the incentive of employers to hire and exploit illegal workers, and, most of all, through development of the Mexican economy and infrastructure, all conditioned, as the European Union did with Spain and Portugal, on reform of Mexico’s legal and economic institutions. If the United States spent a fraction on Mexican investment that it has spent in Iraq we might get a lot more for it.
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