Grover Norquist group's loony libertarian immigration ideas

On Friday, RedState front-paged the Brian Johnson article "Conservative Immigration Reform is Right Next to Unicorns and Leprechauns" [1]. At first you might think he's just some random libertarian loon, until you see the article in its original location at the "Alliance for Worker Freedom" [2]. Scrolling to the bottom, you see that AWF is a member of the H2B Workforce Coalition and the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition and is a project of Grover Norquist's "Americans for Tax Reform". So, let's take a look at it.

First, like most libertarian plans and all libertarian plans involving immigration, it's rooted in a complete rejection of reality. In our reality, millions of Americans are unemployed. In their reality:

The American economy requires growth in our domestic workforce at levels that are beyond our current rate of natural population growth.

It starts with this:

Far too often, government has looked to excessively regulate immigration into this country. While the United States was founded and built by those not born on this soil, some in Congress continue to place excessive blockades on those seeking legal employment in America. At the same time, laws and restrictions are placed on businesses which force compliance with arbitrary caps and quotas just to hire willing and able workers.

The founders were from other countries, but they started a new country, with new rules. In addition that's somewhat similar to the immigration tradition fallacy. If the U.S. had been started in this decade, no doubt the founders would take the issues discussed at the last link into account. And, Grover Norquist's allies on the far-left might want to take note that if there were no "arbitrary caps and quotes", the U.S. would be flooded with skilled immigrants who'd drastically lower wages for U.S. workers such as teachers and nurses.

They also support a superficially free market in employment, oblivious to the fact that those who employ low-wage illegal aliens are receiving a massive subsidy: they're able to pay a low wage because those employees have access to a wide variety of public benefits such as free schools for their children and so on. And, even if libertarians click their heels twice and make a wish, that's not going to change any time in the near future. In fact, those public benefits would only increase as those low-wage workers eventually end up voting Democrat. Not only are they supporting massive subsidies, they're supporting giving more power to those at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from them. No one ever said libertarians were smart.

If you scroll down at [2], you'll see links to them supporting the AgJobs amnesty/indentured servitude plan and opposing eVerify. Discussing those is left as an exercise for those with much more patience.

[1] redstate.com/brian_m_johnson/2009/05/29/
conservative-immigration-reform-is-right-next-to-unicorns-and-leprechauns/
[2] workerfreedom.org/Immigration-Policy-a2786

Mon, 06/01/2009 - 13:25 · Importance: 4