Illegal Immigration

In some ways I'm conflicted about the issue of Illegal immigration. Many of my fellow libertarians think anyone should be able to come and go as they please. Ideally, that's how it should be. However, pragmatically, it just doesn't make sense. I think we must carefully control the borders, but liberally grant work visas for those who want to work. We need to weed out the criminals and potential terrorists. But we should also allow good people wanting to support their family to come here. There are several arguments for and against doing something to fix the problem of illegal immigration.

One argument for fixing the problem is that illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans and legal immigrants. If you truly believe in free market capitalism as I do, this is not an issue. It is perhaps a little bit unfair to those who play by the rules, but if someone is willing to do a job for less money than someone else, then that's just free market capitalism.

Another argument is that illegal immigrants are overwhelming our social services. This is true in many cases, particularly in communities where there are large populations of illegal immigrants. However, if charities took care of such services rather than the government, then it would not matter as much. Individual charities can set their own requirements for eligibility for benefits, and people could choose which of these charities they wish to support. If we continue to have social services provided by the government (as we almost certainly will for as long as any of us are still alive), then we could demand that only citizens and legal immigrants should be eligible for benifits. Without doing anything else, this solution would address this argument. This would also help provide incentive for immigrants to come here legally.

Some may argue that illegal immigration leads to higher crime rates. This is actually a pretty good argument, though many who make this argument seem to think of immigrants in general as thugs. I belive most are not. By having tight control over our borders, we can keep many criminals from coming here.

As I just mentioned, I believe most immigrants, more specifically hispanic immigrants, are good people. If I grew up in a big city where there was a problem with hispanic gangs, I might have a little different prospective. But I grew up in a rural area where there was a large hispanic population who mostly worked for agricultural businesses. Amoung the hispanic students at school, some were poor students, some were great students, and some were average. The percentages of hispanic students in each group seemed to be about the same as with white students. And just like the white students, most were pretty good people with a few who were bad. White and hispanic students interacted as if there were no differences. I can't imagine anyone who is familiar with hispanics who would want to prevent them from comming to this country.

Demanding that people come here legally is not about preventing hispanics or any other group of immigrants from comming here (although there are some bigots for whom this is exactly what the issue is about). It is about making sure the rate of immigration is a rate that our social services can manage, and at the same time filtering out criminals. Right now, it seems to be easier for people to come here illegally. While it is easy for us to criticize illegal immigrants for disregarding our laws, people in desparate situations will easily disregard immigration laws to feed their families. It is up to us to make sure people come here according to our laws, but at the same time, we need to make it easier for people to come here legally.