WSJ still pushing open borders

Quietly, behind the subscription wall--and I'll bet this one doesn't make it onto opinionjournal--the WSJ is still agitating for amnesty. Latest is Gordon Hanson's sigh of relief, claiming that by avoiding the amnesty bill, the economy was thrown right into the brier patch where it was born--and that the status quo is just peachy:

The plan's main defect was not -- as House Republicans claimed -- an amnesty for illegal immigrants. The U.S. has long had an implicit contract with those able to get into the country, be it by securing a green card or slipping across the border: If you work hard and keep out of trouble, you will be allowed to stay in America. For the most part, immigrants have embraced the opportunity. Relative to similarly skilled native-born adults, illegal immigrants are more likely to have a job and less likely to engage in crime.

Oh, really? An implicit contract?

I don't recall signing such a contract (duh, it's "implicit"), nor ratifying it by my actions. Do you? I wonder exactly who in America is empowered to reach these sweeping implicit contracts with foreign workers.

If anything, I think the enormous backlash against the shamnesty bill was a repudiation of the idea of just such an implicit contract. We want to know who's here, and we want them to pay taxes, and we want to be able to kick them out promptly if they misbehave, which right now we are neither willing nor able to do. Contracts impose obligations on both parties; one side repeatedly violated theirs and again and again, while our side showed zero interest in enforcing our rights under this implicit purely rhetorical mythical contract.

Most importantly, we want to be able to keep people out once we show them to the door. Without any credible plan to do so, the whole thing was a big implicit joke.

No, the real drawback of the Senate's plan was that it sought to replace a dynamic and reasonably efficient market for low-skilled workers with a Byzantine guest-worker program. The U.S. economy absorbs around 300,000 new illegal laborers each year. These workers build houses, harvest crops, man assembly lines, clean homes and care for children, accounting for nearly 30% of U.S. labor with less than a high school education. Under the numbers Congress was contemplating, the new work visas would have satisfied only two to three years of demand for new illegal labor. After that, employers would have had to make due without extra low-skilled help, an insane prospect given the abundance of willing and available workers next door in Mexico.

Frankly, "insane" is just a wee bit alarmist for the predicted increase in the price of lettuce. Not having any idea who enters the country over our unmonitored southern border? I happen to think we're approaching the "nutso" spectrum there; but full on "insane" sounds like more of the WSJ's patented rhetorical excess on the issue--in which all the troglodytes who disagree with them are deranged racist puppets of sinister nativist forces.

Skipping ahead:

The one element of the Senate's plan that is likely to survive is greater spending on enforcement at the Mexican border, which would continue a two-decades long increase in the U.S. Border Patrol's operations. Tightening the border might be justifiable on national security grounds, but an economic rationale is harder to find.

No credible research says illegal immigration imposes large economic costs on America. Even the estimates produced by the Center for Immigration Studies -- a think tank that is strongly anti-immigration -- puts the net annual cost of illegal immigration at less than one-tenth of a percent of GDP. This means that if the additional cost of reducing illegal immigration to zero were greater than $13 billion, the economic return on the extra enforcement would be negative.

Some members of Congress want to spend far more than this amount, though few believe even large sums would enable the Border Patrol to halt illegal entry altogether. Apparently, the worst we can expect from this round of immigration reform is some wasteful new spending.

In other news, eradicating Al-Qaeda and stopping Iran's nuclear arsenal might be justifiable on national security grounds, but an economic rationale is harder to find. I realize this guy is an economist and doesn't want to wander too far from his field of expertise. But come on.

You know why the anti-shamnesty forces won the day? The pro-amnesty Republicans argued on political expediency and the economic bottom line, and they are still doing so.* Antis argued national security, and also to appealed to higher ideals such as the nature of American citizenship--and how it shouldn't be for sale-- and the meaning of national sovereignty. Those are big stakes.

We may pay a political price for that. We may not. But if the Republic survived the Carter years, it can survive four years of Hillary if it has to. In the meantime, it can certainly survive a few seasons of expensive lettuce.

We may even re-learn how to grow our own.

*Don't know whether Prof. Hanson is a Republican or not; but the WSJ's editorial board led this charge and I suspect they're pretty much GOP boosters.