Last week Ann Coulter used her weekly column to defend Mitt Romney’s self-deportation immigration policy and his support for building a fence on the US-Mexican border and E-verify.
“These positions are totally at odds with Establishment Republicans who pander to the business lobby by supporting the cheap labor provided by illegal immigration, and then accuse Americans opposed to a slave labor class in America of racism,” she claims. “If this continues, America will become California and no Republican will ever be elected president again. Big business doesn’t care and Establishment Republicans are too stupid to notice.
Coulter is off base in her assessment that it is “big business” which benefits most from illegal immigrants providing a surplus of cheap, unskilled labor.
If consumers are free to shop at numerous competing businesses, the reduced labor costs will be competed away, driving down the cost of goods such as food for all Americans. Such immigration is beneficial to all Americans, so long as the costs paid at checkout accurately reflect the total costs to society.
She goes on to claim that ,”[t]oday, 70 percent of illegal immigrant households collect government benefits — as do 57 percent of all immigrant households — compared to 39 percent of native households.”
Coulter is correct that a higher percentage of illegal immigrants receive government aid than either legal immigrants or natural born citizens.Therefore the welfare state can mask the true costs of immigrant labor.
What makes illegal immigration untenable is not an influx of low-skilled workers looking for jobs. It is an influx of people hoping to be showered with the benefits of a large and growing American welfare state.
Milton Friedman once said that open immigration and the welfare state are incompatible. If you eliminate the incentives provided by the welfare state for people to come here illegally, then only those who will actually contribute to the American economy will immigrate. If only those who could support themselves were attempting to enter America, our immigration system would be much less complex and better able to keep out people who may pose a threat to our country’s economy.
Coulter says that she fears the United States at-large devolving into the state of California.While I have nothing against California culturally, it would be a tragedy if the United States were to descend into the fiscal nightmare California is in.
California has not found itself in the predicament it is in due to immigration, but instead bad state spending and regulatory policies. California remains one of the most difficult states to start a business in, and has some of the most generous benefits for government workers at both the state and local levels.
While the United States does owe much of its deficit to welfare programs, the overwhelming cause of the nation’s poor long-term fiscal outlook is entitlements promised not to select portions of the populous, but to everyone. If America does come to resemble the bankrupt state of California, it will be due to our politicians refusal to address entitlement programs that cover everybody, not just the handouts of a few as Coulter implies.
While Coulter is right to critique free handouts, immigrants who come to America to be productive rather than mooch off the state contribute to the economy by providing cheap labor which lowers the cost of goods for everyone.
