Oppose Obama's Immigration Plans

Written by David Frum on Thursday April 16, 2009

At his joint press conference today with Mexican president Felipe Calderon, President Barack Obama reminded listeners of his two votes for immigration measures that included amnesty – and then declared his continuing support for the so-called comprehensive approach.

These statements do seem to corroborate earlier media reports that the president does intend to make an early priority of immigration reform along the lines previously proposed by George W. Bush and John McCain. So maybe this is a good time to explain why I think Republican party modernizers should favor a more restrictive immigration policy.

1) If modernizers should agree on anything, it is the need to refocus the party on the economic concerns of the middle class. The immigration policies of the past three decades have exerted serious downward pressure on the incomes of less-skilled workers, both directly (by lowering wages) and indirectly (by pushing up regressive state and local taxes).

2) Modernizers should favor more reality in Republican party policy and less fantasy and sloganeering. On the immigration issue, the weigh of evidence cuts against the Bush-McCain-Obama approach. Current policy offers almost zero net benefit to the native-born population of the United States, and more unskilled immigration would worsen the economics of immigration still further.

3) Modernizers should wish to emancipate the GOP from control by its narrow special interests. The Bush-McCain approach on immigration represented just this kind of special interest politics: it offered large benefits to a few, while spreading costs over many.

4) We’re allowed to care about the impact of immigration on US politics. Immigration is tilting US voting to the left and to the Democratic party. Nonleft non-Democrats are entitled to feel that this is changing the rules of the game – and since so much of the immigration is illegal, it is changing the rules by breaking the law.

5) Current immigration policies has large social effects that modernizers should find uncongenial. Those policies are transforming the US into a society that will be less skilled on average than it might have been. They are making the US a more radically unequal society, and a society that imposes more heavily on the natural environment.

What we should learn from Bush and McCain is the need to engage Hispanic citizens in a more inviting and respectful way. We can do that without commiting ourselves to an immigration reform that is injurious to the country –and that constitutes a surprisingly low priority for Hispanic voters. (Only 31% of Hispanics identify immigration reform as a top priority, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, thus ranking immigration sixth of the policy areas offered. The environment ranked fifth.)

Tone is important, inclusion is important, finding issues that unite conservatives of all races and ethnicities is important. Republicans can do all those things without being hornswoggled into accepting supposedly comprehensive immigration policies that are bad for middle-income voters, bad for the country’s future, and bad for our hopes for fair political competition.
Category: News