Prepared to Dodge All Sorts of Flying Flammable Objects

I've kept quiet about the immigration debate, simply because too many people have become completely unhinged when it comes to this issue. Fact and reason have gone out the window for these people, and, unfortunately, it has become harder and harder to distinguish those who have reasonable positions against illegal immigration from those who are not reasoned and rational about the discussion.

When we were in Tejas over Thanksgiving weekend, I actually had an interesting exchange with my dear father-in-law, while we were watching the news. Apparently, somewhere in the DFW metropolitan area, a preacher had been arrested for alleged pedophile activities. The preacher had a Latino surname. This was, apparently, the smoking gun for the father-in-law, and he harrumphed about it. In response I asked, "What does the fact that he has a Latino surname have to do with the fact he's a pedophile?" His reply, "Oh, you'd be surprised at how one has something to do with the other down here." I was more than a little stunned at his reply. I hadn't thought he would actually go so far. While I was tempted to reply, "Correlation does not equal causation," I kept my mouth shut, lest I upset the delicate peace that is needed for visits.

The father-in-law is usually a pretty rational and reasonable person, who bases his opinions on facts, not inflamed rhetoric, but he's fallen for the worst of the anti-immigration rhetoric, hook, line and sinker. Much of his attitude has been gained honestly, I freely admit, because he is in the manufacturing business, and his most recent job in manufacturing management was at a Maquiladora in Nogales, Mexico. He HATED going over the border every day. And I mean HATED it. The father-in-law is OCD. Everything about the way Mexico works is designed to drive a person like that nuts. Before he received authorization to use the Fast-Pass lane, he would, literally, have to spend hours in line to cross the border, on Fridays and Mondays, in particular, while Mexicans tried to get in and out of their country. His favored phrase for those who would come back with pickup trucks overflowing with items (read poorly tied down, with stuff falling off) was, "The Clampetts." When you're that close to the border, well, no one, not even your local postal carrier, speaks English well, if they speak English at all. The distance signs on the highway are denoted in kilometers, not miles. You're constantly stopped and harassed by the Border Patrol when you're on the freeway. The gorgeous landscape is marred by the litter the illegals leave behind them as they work their way north, toward Tucson and Phoenix, and points beyond. I can understand why people get pissed off about immigration. But that's absolutely no reason to make statements like the father-in-law did. If the pedophile preacher had, in fact, been a pedophile rabbi, would we not be denouncing his statement as anti-Semitic? But because the guy had a Latino surname, it's, apparently, all right to make blanket statements about one thing having to do with the other. How do you debate immigration with someone like this? When everything you say will automatically be discounted with a throwaway line snaked straight from the Lou Dobbs' Xenophobe Hour of Power? Do you even bother?

Well, I've come to the conclusion that you have to. I'll admit I've avoided the topic like the plague because I didn't feel like being used and abused. But the rhetoric is getting out of hand, particularly with the presidential election at hand. I'm not saying there aren't problems with illegal immigration. THERE ARE PROBLEMS. But, if we actually want to solve the problem, (and we do want to solve the frickin' problem, don't we? Or is it just more convenient to use illegals as a scapegoat for all the other assorted ills we have going on?) well, there are certain inescapable facts proponents of walling up the border and kicking every illegal out have to rebut. Jason Riley in today's Opinion Journal points a few of these facts out:

{...}During a sharp exchange with Mr. Huckabee at a recent debate, Mr. Romney said it's wrong to give illegal aliens access to revenue from hard-working taxpayers. "Mike, that's not your money," said Mr. Romney. "That's the taxpayers' money . . . [and] there's only so much money to go around." Following the debate, the Romney campaign released an ad reiterating the charge. "Huckabee even supported taxpayer-funded college scholarships for illegal aliens," says the narrator in a TV spot now airing in Iowa.

If illegal immigrants didn't pay taxes, Mr. Romney might have a point. But they do pay taxes, and by doing so they subsidize services that only legal residents can access. For starters, more than half and up to three-quarters of illegal immigrants in the U.S. are working "on the books," which means they're paying federal and state income taxes, just like the rest of us. They are also paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, even though undocumented immigrants are ineligible to receive benefits from either program. In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee last year, the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration noted that between 1937 and 2003, contributions to Social Security from unauthorized workers totaled an estimated $520 billion.

But even illegals working in the cash economy can't avoid paying consumption taxes, which are levied on the purchase of goods and services. Nor can they duck property taxes, even if they're renting. Mr. Romney implies that illegal aliens are a net drain on state coffers, but Mr. Huckabee's native Arkansas is an example of immigrants paying their way, and then some.

Between 2000 and 2005, Arkansas had the fastest-growing Hispanic population in the country. Today, some two-thirds of the state's 100,000 immigrants are Hispanic and half are undocumented. Yet a study released earlier this year by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation found these newcomers to "have a small but positive net fiscal impact on the Arkansas state budget."

Taking into account both education and health care expenditures, the report found that immigrants "cost" the state $237 million in 2004, but made direct and indirect contributions of $257 million. Immigrant Arkansans also generated some $3 billion in business revenues. According to the authors, without this foreign labor, "the output of the state's manufacturing industry would likely be lowered by about $1.4 billion--or about 8 percent of the industry's $16.2 billion total contribution to the gross state product in 2004."{...}

{my emphasis}

When you look at the entire picture, immigration is good for our economy. It just is. We need a strong economy, with cheap houses, cheap food, and cheap goods. For that economy to stay strong, we need immigration to continue apace. It would be better for the US, in the long run, to embrace immigration, to find an efficient and efficacious method to regulate immigration. This would allow Border Patrol to spend more time keeping the drug traffickers, murderers and other nasty people out of the country. Instead, they have to spend their time chasing after people who would simply like to work for a living, support their families and who aren't going to cause any trouble---and only the drug traffickers benefit from the Border Patrol's overwhelmed situation. Because our system does not work, as it stands, we get both kinds of immigrants---good and bad. And that's not good for anyone.

Other than Lou Dobbs, that is. I hear his ratings are through the roof.