Laura Collins for American Action Forum: Pew Hispanic released a new poll on immigration that shows some troubling opinions on legal immigration. The survey found that 31 percent of those polled think legal immigration should decrease and 39 percent believe immigration levels should remain unchanged. Only 24 percent think the United States needs more legal immigration.
The 24 percent of respondents who favor more legal immigration understand that good immigration policy is good economic policy. As the American Action Forum has shown, benchmark immigration reform that increases the number of legal immigrants and temporary workers would be good for the economy, raising the pace of economic growth by almost 1 percent, increasing GDP per capita by $1,500, and reducing the federal deficit by over $2.5 trillion.
The 70 percent of people who want to leave legal immigration unchanged or reduce it hold a dangerously anti-growth opinion. In the absence of additional immigration, the U.S. economy will contract. The American fertility rate is too low to replace our current population. Immigrants are both a short-term and long-term solution — they can immediately bolster the labor force and tend to have higher fertility rates than native-born Americans. Immigrants have other economic benefits as well, including higher rates of entrepreneurship and labor force participation.
Legal immigration should be embraced as a pro-growth policy. Reducing it will be disastrous for the economy.
TRUANCY LAWS GO HAYWIRE
Walter Olson for the Cato Institute: George W. Bush’s secretary of education in 2004 “hosted the first-ever National Truancy Prevention Conference, where he called for a ‘crackdown’ on school absence.” On the other side of the aisle, impeccably progressive California attorney general Kamala Harris as a state senator introduced a bill to imprison parents for as long as a year if their kids miss too much school. Lawmakers also proceeded to raise school-leaving ages; President Obama himself has proposed making schooling compulsory until age 18 or graduation.
Texas not only criminalized truancy but has provided for young offenders to be tried in adult courts, leading to extraordinarily harsh results especially for poorer families. But truancy-law horror stories now come in regularly from all over the country, from Virginia to California. In Pennsylvania, a woman died in jail after failing to pay truancy fines. “More than 1,600 people have been jailed in Berks County alone — where Reading is the county seat — over truancy fines since 2000.”
The criminal penalties, combined with the serious consequences that can follow non-payment of civil penalties, are now an important component of what has been called carceral liberalism: we’re finding ever more ways to menace you with imprisonment, but don’t worry, it’s for your own good. Yet jailing parents hardly seems a promising way to stabilize the lives of wavering students. And as Colorado state Sen. Chris Holbert, sponsor of a decriminalization bill, has said, “Sending kids to jail — juvenile detention — for nothing more than truancy just didn’t make sense. When a student is referred to juvenile detention, he or she is co-mingling with criminals — juveniles who’ve committed theft or assault or drug dealing.”
LOOK FOR GOP TO DEFEND OBAMACARE IN FUTURE
Clyde Wayne Crews for the Competitive Enterprise Institute: It happens to be the case that, in terms of overall counts of rules and regulations published in the Federal Register as final rules, the George W. Bush administration tops that of Barack Obama.
In its first six years, The Bush administration issued 24,241 rules; an average of 4,040 annually. The Obama administration, in its first six years, issued 21,804, for an average so far of 3,634 each year.
That Republicans are heavy regulators is no surprise. Books have been written about business as usual under the GOP once it gains power. News reports today in fact illustrate that Republicans will extend Obamacare subsidies in the event of a Supreme Court decision finding them illegal in the dozens of states that didn’t set up their own health care exchanges.
That means future Republicans candidates in the America of tomorrow are likely to defend positive rights to Obamacare funded by others either with or without a Supreme Court victory this month, just as they now do with respect to programs like Medicare and Social Security spawned by their progressive nominal opponents. (Alternatively, rising insurance rates could lead to insurance company demonization sufficient enough to effect the transformation to a single-payer system that some planners preferred in the first place; if that happens, Republicans will ultimately defend that too.)
Compiled by Nathan Rubbelke from think tank research.
