OPINION:
In the event that you did not receive the memo, last week was immigration week in the Republican presidential primary.
Florida Gov. DeSantis offered, as usual, a pretty comprehensive plan that included all the expected approaches: Stanch the immediate bleeding, build a border wall, offer some kind of organized aggression directed at the drug cartels and expand the use of E-Verify. A welcome provision to tax remittances back to the home country was also tucked in.
Remittances are the cash legal and illegal immigrants send home. These are not small amounts of cash that flow out of the country. Mexico receives about $60 billion a year from people in the United States. That represents almost 4% of Mexico’s gross domestic product.
Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala account for another $30 billion or so. It will no doubt surprise and amaze you to learn that a lot of the cash winds up in the hands of the cartels.
A tax on these remittances would reduce the incentive to enter the United States and discourage many from entering the nation illegally.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump, as he has every day since 2015, promised to build a border wall and do something about the cartels. He has the advantage, in this instance, of being the only president in our lifetimes who managed to cobble together a policy that essentially stopped illegal immigration.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration rolled all of that back almost immediately.
Both candidates vowed to do something about birthright citizenship — the idea (perhaps embedded in the 14th Amendment, or perhaps not, depending on one’s interpretation) that if you are born in the United States, you are a citizen of the United States, irrespective of the circumstances of the birth.
That, of course, is an incentive for illegal immigration. It is difficult to separate families and deport the parents of children who are U.S. citizens.
It is time for us to have a serious conversation about birthright citizenship, what behavior it encourages, whether it captures the purpose and essence of the 14th Amendment, and, most importantly, whether it still is a useful policy in the 21st century.
It is also time for us to have a serious and expansive conversation about who really benefits from the presence of illegal aliens in our workforce. The reality is that the beneficiaries are mostly the well-to-do and businesses — small and large — that rely on cheap and exploitable labor who benefit from the suppression of wages brought about by a large workforce of people in the country illegally.
Anything that suppresses the wages of the working class — and make no mistake, that is exactly what illegal immigration does — works to increase the net worth of those higher on the economic ladder.
Criminal immigration exacerbates income inequality. It also crowds the schools and neighborhoods of the working class.
The rich don’t care about that, because they don’t live in those neighborhoods and their children don’t go to those schools.
In short, working-class Americans who compete with illegal aliens for jobs and wages are the ones who suffer.
Mandatory E-Verify — which is an attempt to keep businesses honest with respect to illegal immigration — is a good first step and is welcome and necessary, although it may not be enough. We need enhanced scrutiny of businesses that routinely and knowingly employ illegal aliens.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the campaigns did not address the truth that immigration is good thing — although certainly not when it is illegal, and certainly not in the numbers we have experienced in the last few years.
But in a world in which birthrates are falling almost everywhere (other than Africa), the most prized commodity in the second half of this century is not going to be oil, wheat, water or arable land. The most valuable commodity on this planet will very soon be human beings.
This is good news for Americans. People from around the planet want to move here and want to become Americans. And we assimilate foreigners very well and usually within a generation (if the government doesn’t get in the way with destructive linguistic policies). Most of the rest of the world — Europe, Japan, China — does not assimilate foreigners well at all.
We need an immigration policy that reflects both realities — that rich people are damaging the country by incentivizing illegal immigration and that it is in our national interest to accommodate beneficial immigration.
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House. He can be reached at mike@mwrstrat.com.
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