Free the economy
Welcome immigrants, innovation
I mmigration brings out social engineers across the political establishment. We see this in the controversy over Donald Trump’s support for legislation—the RAISE Act—to halve legal immigration while tilting it to favoring well-educated English-speakers over low-skilled non-English-speakers. Co-sponsor Sen. Tom Cotton, who surely would deny he’s a social engineer, says, “For decades, our immigration system has been completely divorced from the needs of our economy.”
That’s the typical balderdash that comes from the mouth of a social engineer. Unfortunately, those who call themselves free-enterprisers, like Cotton, routinely display the central-planner’s mindset when it comes to immigrants.
But even progressive opponents of Trump’s position, such as Bernie Sanders, believe “we” must update immigration policy to better serve “the economy.” They just argue with Trump and Cotton over the details.
But what is this thing they all call “the economy”? It’s not a mechanism or an organism to be supervised and occasionally revitalized according to a central plan. Rather, it is hundreds of millions of American producers and consumers, who also happen to be embedded in a global marketplace. Why can’t we be trusted, without the direction of politicians, to decide for ourselves what we need and to engage in social cooperation—that is, among other things, to trade goods and services—to obtain it?
It is we whom social engineers like Trump, Cotton, and Sanders wish to control. In the process, they would cruelly keep poor people in perpetual misery and political oppression by locking them out of America. Why?
Because, they say, the economy doesn’t need them.
How do these presumptuous know-it-alls divine what skills will be demanded in the future? They would have to know what products we will want in the future. But we don’t know what we’ll want because lots of things have not been invented yet. And we can’t predict who will invent them.
People who today have few skills and who speak little or no English will be among those who make our lives better. Let them come here to make better lives for themselves—that’s their right, which is justification enough. But the rest of us will benefit from their contributions.
Advocates of immigration control—progressive and conservative— often say the economy doesn’t have enough jobs for the people already here. This assumes the “size” of the economy is fixed and that more people would mean less for everyone. But when we understand that the economy is an unending process of exchanges between people seeking their betterment, we can see through this fallacy. Newcomers are both producers and consumers, and their entry into our society presents new opportunities on both the supply and demand sides. In a freed economy this would portend higher living standards for everyone.
Contrary to Cotton and the other social engineers, resources are not fixed, as evidenced by the fact that seven billion people are far wealthier today than much smaller world populations were in previous ages.
Resources—that is, useful materials—are not even “natural.” As the great economist Julian Simon taught us, what we call natural resources are merely useless things and even detriments until someone exercising intelligence—“the ultimate resource”— discovers how to use them to improve our lives.
Not so long ago you would have paid dearly to remove crude oil from your land. Then a chemist distilled kerosene from it. Kerosene was better and cheaper than whale oil for lighting lamps; and so, suddenly, finding oil—“black gold, Texas tea”—on your land turned you into Jed Clampett.
True, we live in a world of scarcity, but that doesn’t mean total wealth does not grow, making everyone richer. Because of human intelligence, we get more and more output from less and less input, giving everyone access to a greater array of goods at lower prices.
Let’s also dispense with the nonsense that current immigrants are subversive because they bring their own cultures and languages. That slur was hurled at every immigrant group throughout American history. We will thrive when people are free to live in any peaceful way they choose. The tribal nationalists are wrong.
If we Americans value freedom, we will ignore the social engineers, open the borders, and liberate ourselves.