Conservatives seem bent on turning the 2016 presidential election into a one-issue referendum on immigration, but it is an entitlement mentality among those immigrants that truly hurts the United States.
The biggest problem plaguing this country today isn’t rampant immigration — it’s rampant entitlement. Immigration rates were far higher during many periods throughout American history —most notably during the mid-19th and early 20th centuries — with entering populations much more illiterate, poor and low-skilled. Yet somehow we thrived as a result of their integration into our economy.
Between 1840 and 1930, 30 million Europeans immigrated to the U.S., including whole metropolises’ worth of Germans, Irish, Poles, Italians and Scandinavians. They came for the same reason people do today — economic opportunity and political freedom. Like Mexicans capitalizing on their porous border with the U.S., immigrants scampered aboard crowded shipping vessels and flooded ports in New York, Philadelphia and Boston.
Immigration as a percentage of the general population was 11 percent during the 1850s and 10 percent during the 1900s. Yet immigration as a percentage of population during the supposedly runaway 2000s was a paltry 3 percent. Though immigration has been slowly increasing since the last great wave of the 1920s, immigration as a percentage of population in the 2000s was still lower than during any decade between 1820 and 1930.
Even mass Mexican immigration is nothing new. During the 1920s, when the U.S. was one third the size it is now, the absolute numbers of Mexicans entering the country was about half the number that entered during the alleged dark years under Reagan’s amnesty program. Since the late 2000s, when Mexican immigration dried up, there have been more immigrants from Asia than Mexico for the first time in a century.
How did the U.S. accommodate so many immigrants without collapsing?
Easy: Our welfare system used to give assistance only to the truly needy — with much more being given via charity — and most citizens immigrants took self-sufficiency as a point of pride. Part of that self-sufficiency included learning English, assimilating to American cultural practices, and even changing the spelling of their names.
In the early 20th century, we didn’t have a federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, disability payments or Obamacare. Do you think those behemoths might have more to do with the state of our finances than some lettuce pickers working off the books in San Jose?
If Marco Rubio’s immigration bill passes, then instead of carping about illegals, Congressional Republicans should pass laws that sharply restrict welfare benefits to legal citizens. The GOP should compromise on Rubio’s bill and leverage the immigration debate to shrink the welfare state. After all, which platform sounds like more of a winner: an ever-expanding welfare state in which we keep those cocky chulos in their place; or a tiny-government, pro-growth, capitalist nirvana to which the world’s hardest-working residents flock to get rich?
Let’s stop getting exercised over day laborers starting construction businesses and use immigration policy as a big fat opportunity to dismantle the welfare state.
