McArdle on Illegal Immigration

Reasonable:

     Immigration restrictionists and advocates both struggle with that question to some degree, depending on the scale they use when considering it. On the macro scale, restrictionists find it easy to say, no, of course we can’t let in every single person who wants to come, because doing so would transform the country into one that few Americans of any political persuasion would want to live in.     The United States would be vastly more unequal, in income and opportunity. Migrants would languish in the kind of squalid poverty that the America hasn’t seen for a century, in numbers — a doubling of the U.S. population is probably a conservative estimate — that would defeat any conceivable tax-and-transfer program. When you’re working with long strings of zeroes, the restrictionist position seems overwhelmingly compelling.
     But on the micro scale, where you can see the human faces, “reasonable” immigration restriction starts looking more like “ruthless.” Those Honduran migrants lying under a tarp in Huixtla, Mexico, aren’t any less deserving than you are of clean drinking water, safe streets and a warm, dry abode. They just failed to hit the Pick-6 in the birthplace lottery. By what moral right do we tell them to go back to Tegucigalpa and hope that their local MS-13 chapter decides to prey on somebody else? Looking at actual faces, rather than zeroes, many people would answer: “None.”
     A truly open-borders policy has almost no constituency in the American electorate, but it’s the implicit philosophical framing of most media stories on immigration, which tend to focus on the micro problems of individuals, not the macro problem of just how many of those individuals the country can admit. [my emphasis]

This all seems really right to me. Despite my recent jihad against the left's craziness on illegal immigration, I'm not insensitive to the plight of illegals and aspiring illegals. I hope we can help them. We just can't help them by letting all of them in. The cost of doing so would be to shift the U.S. in the direction of the very places they're fleeing. 

     I've long said around this joint that my major sympathies lie with those fleeing violence...and that that's one of the reasons I take a harder line on illegal immigration from economic motives. It's not because I don't understand that poverty is bad. Rather, if we hadn't already let in 22 million people who came here mostly for economic reasons, we'd have more leeway to let in more people fleeing violence. 

     I want to emphasize this again: "A truly open-borders policy [is] the implicit philosophical framing of most media stories on immigration..." As I've been saying for like six or seven years, sometimes getting a lot of flack for it. Just sayin'...