Amnesty Economics

Inde­pen­dent Sen­ate hope­ful Char­lie Crist has got the right idea when it comes to immi­gra­tion reform. He’s put two and two together and real­ized that when you give ten mil­lion peo­ple who are already work­ing here the right to pay taxes, you cre­ate bil­lions of dol­lars for Social Secu­rity and bud­get short­falls. Why was that so hard? Watch:

The right thinks this is a bad idea, but the argu­ments are deeply flawed. The idea that mass amnesty would “only post­pone the even­tual col­lapse” is just not true. The worker legal­iza­tion would not be a one-​​time shot in the arm for the country’s demo­graph­ics but a deep reform of the immi­gra­tion process that guar­an­teed a steady influx of young, able, tax­pay­ing work­ers. This is exactly what we need to coun­ter­bal­ance our own aging pop­u­la­tion; it’s exactly the sort of oppor­tunis­tic immi­gra­tion that this nation has always encour­aged and pros­pered from.

The other claim of the anti-​​immigration move­ment is that amnesty some­how betrays the prin­ci­ples of the law. While it is of course a con­tra­dic­tion of the law as presently stated, that’s the point of hav­ing a sys­tem under which we can change laws that don’t work. That’s why, in 1986, Ronald Rea­gan him­self helped pass a ver­sion of amnesty which was a very sen­si­ble one: a one-​​time change, for all ille­gal aliens who could prove five years’ res­i­dence, to “tem­po­rary” sta­tus from which they could then apply for full cit­i­zen­ship over time.

Unfor­tu­nately the new processes couldn’t keep up with the demand, and now the process can take as long as a decade. It’s bro­ken again, and the back­log is now so incred­i­ble that another adjust­ment is required. It’s a mat­ter of when and how much more than it is one of “if.”

21 May 2010 – 4:26 pm | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Economics | Tagged | Comments (189)