The GOP's Immigrants

WALL STREET JOURNAL (Opinion) 

By Jason Riley

September 1, 2012

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443618604577625901250647644.html

Rare was the speaker at the Republican convention in Tampa this week who did not invoke his immigrant forebears, almost always described as poor or, at best, of modest means upon arrival to the U.S.

This is hardly surprising because we are not simply a nation of immigrants but overwhelmingly a nation people descended from immigrant strivers. The "huddled masses" of the 1800s and early 1900s were tired and poor, not Indian computer engineers and Chinese biochemists.

This point is worth making because although the Republican speakers were trumpeting their downtrodden immigrant parents and grandparents, the Republican platform calls for, among other things, reforming our immigration policies in a way that encourages high-skill immigration and discourages low-skill immigration. In other words, Republicans are calling for an immigration policy that would have denied entry to most of those people they were praising on stage this week.

The argument for favoring better skilled immigrants over the lesser skilled is of course as old as the rest of the debates around immigration. When the Irish and Italians were coming here in droves, restrictionist elites argued that it made no sense to be importing impoverished, illiterate agricultural workers in the middle of an industrial revolution. Moreover, these immigrants were settling in cities like New York and Philadelphia and Boston. The elites insisted that the future was factories, not farms, and that we had no use for this labor.

They were right about the former but wrong about the latter. We did have use for that immigrant labor, which built our infrastructure—canals, railroads, subway systems, etc. Supply created its own demand. Today, we're told that the U.S. has a "knowledge-based economy" and therefore no use for undereducated Mexicans and other unskilled foreign nationals. But we would do better to let the U.S. labor market—via guest worker programs—determine what skills it needs. If there is no work for foreign workers, they won't come here, and the ones already here will leave. Besides, history shows that the central-planning restrictionists have a perfect record of being wrong about these things.