Importing Poverty
One place where I break from many conservatives is on immigration. This morning I saw a particularly bad argument from Mark Steyn (via Instapundit) on The Corner on National Review Online
When advanced economies admit ever larger numbers of unskilled workers (plus a chain of relatives through “family reunification”), they are importing poverty. The President says this is to do “the jobs Americans won’t do”. For the sake of argument, take him at his word. So why won’t Americans do them? Because they’re a great way to ensure you live in poverty. So we import foreigners to be our poor people. Can we import just the right number to ensure that poverty doesn’t “grow”? Unlikely.
There are arguments to be made both for and against immigration, but you can’t be in favor of mass unskilled immigration and then pledge to fight the “war on poverty”. It’s like spooning out a bathtub with a thimble while leaving the faucets running.
The first statement is unagruably true. Allowing in a lot of poor people is indeed importing poverty (something like, give us your poor.) However, many of us believe, myself included, that a whole lot of the poverty in the world is because of bad systems. Totalitarianism or simple garden variety corruption that stifles innovation and free enterprise, trapping millions of people into abject poverty.
What is particularly disturbing about this argument though, the idea that ‘fighting poverty’ and bringing poor people into our own country is somehow incompatible is that it is first based upon some idea that poverty we don’t have to look at doesn’t exist. One way to fight poverty, probably the most effective and cheapest way, is to allow poor people trapped by destructive systems to move to a place where those systems are less destructive.
Indeed, this method usually is not only ‘free,’ it is an economic benefit to the nation accepting these people. Yes, when they come here they are only able to get ‘poor’ jobs, but they, and their children, are now in a system where much more of their potential can flourish, unleashing the human energy and creativity. As an added bonus, the sort of people that are willing to leave the comforts of their own culture and try for a better future are exactly the sort of people that you can expect to produce economic growth. They represent the essence of American values. I want more of that type of person in my nation, as their economic activities both now and in the future, will raise my standard of living.
(Steyn’s post is apparently jumping off from this post by Mark Krikorian which is even worse)
