Illegal immigration talking points smackdown

DallasBlog.com | Trey Garrison:

“So yesterday at the protest at Dallas City Hall I talked to a lot of people who parrotted the party line on illegal immigration that passes for informed debate these days. You know - ‘illegals do the jobs Americans won't do’ and ‘America needs the labor of illegal immigrants’ and ‘there's no practical way to enforce tougher laws on immigration’ and so on. These are spoken as if they are the trump card. Luckily, my favorite economist (I'm so getting a beating at the gym for typing those words ‘favorite economist’) has not one but two columns that put the talking points to lie. Here's part one and part two.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

Thomas Sowell does a pretty good job of parroting the other party line himself, using his own bogus arguments and word games. Go ahead, call illegal immigrants "illegal immigrants". It doesn't change the need for immigration reform. And if immigration reform leads to legalizing more immigrants, then a guest worker program is not a "gate-crasher worker" program, as Mr Sowell would like to spin it. Sure, this may be solving the problem of illegal immigration by legalizing it after the fact. But better late than never.

Illegal immigrants come to America to work. Wanting to work used to be a virtue. In Mr Sowell's world, it's comparable to murder or robbing banks. Is this what Mr Garrison considers to be "informed debate"? It sounds more like the "frivolous rhetoric" and "slippery sophistry" that Mr Sowell decries. When our laws make it impossible for willing employers to hire willing workers, the laws need to be changed. Criminalizing millions of poor people who come to America to work is bad public policy. It's not made better by enforcing it more strictly. If change does away with the illegal status of millions of hard-working residents, so much the better. We ought to be rewarding hard work, not criminalizing it.

Mr Sowell argues that "Americans will not take many jobs at their current pay levels -- and those pay levels will not rise so long as poverty-stricken immigrants are willing to take those jobs." He speaks as if globalization never happened. Those low pay levels aren't going to rise. If the source of cheap labor in America dries up, those jobs are going to dry up, too. Much of our manufacturing base has already moved to China. Services are going to India. What's left? Agriculture? Mr Sowell argues that America grows too much anyway. He is willing to see the entire sugar industry leave the country to do away with the need for immigrant workers to harvest the crop. There are always construction jobs, right? When wage inflation drives up interest rates and bursts the housing bubble, who is going to be buying those new houses? America won't need construction workers, legal or not.

Mr Sowell wants us all to bemoan the "plain and ugly reality: Politicians are afraid of losing the Hispanic vote and businesses want cheap labor." So, now politicians listening to voters is somehow bad? And businessmen wanting to keep their costs low is somehow a new evil? Sorry, but immigration is an issue that Sowell himself seems "unable to discuss rationally." Let's hope the immigration bills before Congress can at least get an honest debate, instead of the word games we hear from economists like Thomas Sowell.