Immigration, Freedom, and the Constitution

Abstract

In recent years, many conservatives have come to favor a highly restrictionist approach to immigration policy. But that position is in conflict with their own professed commitment to principles such as free markets, liberty, colorblindness, and enforcing constitutional limits on the power of the federal government. These values ultimately all support a strong presumption in favor of free migration. ********** I. IMMIGRATION AND FREEDOM Let us focus on free markets first. Immigration restrictions are among the the biggest government interventions in the economy. They prevent millions of people from taking jobs, renting homes, and pursuing a wide range of opportunities that they could otherwise have. Economists estimate that if we had free migration throughout the world, we could double world GNP. (1) That is not a gaffe or a mispring; it is a real estimate. Perhaps doubling GNP is overly optimistic. Still, increasing it by, say, 50 percent is a greater effect than virtually any other realistically feasible change in economic policy. (2) The reason why immigration restrictions have such an enormous effect is pretty simple. People become much more productive when they move from countries where they have little or no opportunity to use their talents, to those where they can be more productive. Just crossing from Mexico to the United States makes a person three or four more times more productive than they otherwise would be, even without improving their skills in any way. (3) And the opportunities to improve skills are, for most immigrants, far greater in the U.S. than where they initially came from. There is an enormous amount of wealth that can be created just by cutting back on our immigration restrictions. But it would be a mistake to say that the issue here is primarily economic. It is also, and even more fundamentally, about freedom. When people come to the United States from poor and oppressive societies, they increase their freedom in many ways. Think of refugees fleeing religious or ethnic persecution, women escaping patriarchal societies, or people fleeing massacres such as those perpetrated by ISIS. The ancestors of most modern Americans escaped such oppression during the period when we wisely did not have the kinds of immigration restrictions that we do today. If we had today's immigration policies back then, the ancestors of most of the current US population would never have been allowed to come. Immigration restrictions undermine the freedom of native-born Americans as well as immigrants. Because of our immigration laws, millions of native-born Americans cannot hire the workers they want, associate with the businesses that they choose, nor benefit from the entrepreneurship of immigrants; on average, they tend to be more entrepreneurial than native-born citizens. (4) II. IMMIGRATION AND DISCRIMINATION Current immigration policy is also inimical to the principle of color-blindness in government. In December 2014 President Obama's Department of Homeland Security concluded that it cannot enforce immigration restrictions unless it continues to engage in massive racial profiling. This is the one area where the Obama administration believes that racial profiling is a good thing. (5) Such profiling affects not just immigrants but millions of native-born citizens whose sole crime is that they happen to be of the same race or ethnicity as many undocumented immigrants. (6) If you believe in ending racial discrimination in government policy, this would be a great place to start. I am aware of no other area where federal law enforcement openly resorts to racial discrimination on such a large scale, even under a liberal administration that is, in general, hostile to racial profiling. Most conservatives and libertarians support the principle of colorblindness in public policy, or at least a strong presumption in favor of it. We do not believe that the government should discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. …