On Bad-Faith Open Borders

[Valin]

NRO/The Corner:

Fred Bauer

July 25, 2014

 

Over at First Things, Pete Spiliakos, who also blogs at NRO’s very own Postmodern Conservative, turns to the topic of bad-faith open borders. Spiliakos suggests that a workable course of immigration reform would include the following: “making sure that internal immigration enforcement (especially universal job verification and a visa tracking system) is put in place first and that, after such a system is institutionalized, long-standing unauthorized immigrants get both legalized status and a relatively quick path to U.S. citizenship.” The notion of enforcement before legalization and citizenship for current illegal immigrants has considerable appeal to many opponents of the White House immigration agenda. Even Mark Krikorian, one of the fiercest opponents of both the Bush and Obama efforts at “comprehensive immigration reform,” has written favorably of that policy strategy.

 

One of Spiliakos’s key points is that immigration policy needs to be seen in light of a broader pro-worker and pro-middle-class policy agenda:

 

 

Republicans can’t be pro-working-class on immigration and then, like Mitt Romney, mock low-wage workers as entitled dependents who refuse to take responsibility for their own lives. Being pro-working-class also means making the tax code more favorable to working parents and reforming health insurance so that free-market reform also means affordable access to quality medicine.

 

 

Though many in the media and the progressive elite talk about economic inequality and immigration as two separate issues, they are in actuality not entirely distinct. There’s a reason why many reform conservatives have been fairly hostile to the immigration bill that passed the Senate: They see it as undermining the middle class and the average American worker and thereby setting back the hope for an opportunity- and market-driven governing vision. Many of the leading critics of the White House immigration agenda, such as Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, have focused on the pitfalls of a mass legalization that provides even more incentive for illegal immigration and of the expansion of market-distorting guest-worker programs.

 

(Snip)