The American Spectator

It’s no wonder that Mexican officials, along with Mexico’s consuls in the U.S., vigorously promote the northward flight of their nationals, even providing an instruction manual, in comic-book form, on how to sneak across the border and not get caught later. But when high Mexican officials self-righteously and undiplomatically assert that any U.S. effort to stem Mexican immigration would be a human-rights violation, American officials might quietly encourage them to get their own house in order and foster economic growth, so their citizens don’t have to abandon ship.

Advocates are right that the United States needs a new immigration policy, though one along very different lines from what they propose. We need an open and welcoming policy, shaped solely by the interests of our own nation, not by pressure from our neighbors or by passive acquiescence in the illegal status quo. No one, except for scare-mongering amnesty advocates, is suggesting the massive roundup and deportation of the millions of illegal immigrants already here. Instead, The Immigration Solution suggests we start by enforcing the laws already on the books, policing our borders vigorously, and stiffly fining employers who hire illegals. If judges object that the machinery for identifying illegals — the federal government’s system for verifying Social Security numbers — is flawed, Washington should fix it at once. Without an opportunity to work, illegal immigrants would return home, just as 60 percent of immigrants from the first great migration went home when the Depression dried up jobs here.

Then we should craft an immigration policy that is generous in the number of people we admit, but that chooses newcomers not because they are a citizen’s elderly parents or adult child or brother, however needy or unskilled, as at present, or because they successfully snuck into the country some years ago, like the 3 million illegal Mexicans amnestied in 1986, but because they have skills that the U.S. economy needs, including the ability to speak English. Immigrants most certainly do enrich our country, and not just those who are electrical engineers or medical researchers but also those who can fix an engine or run an X-ray machine or manage a small business. Other advanced nations that are immigration magnets, as Steven Malanga recounts in The Immigration Solution, have devised such selective policies with great success. Since we can only admit a fraction of the millions who would like to come and participate in the prosperity and freedom that Americans have built by their own efforts and with the benefit of their uniquely American culture and political system, let’s choose our immigrants by asking not what this country can do for them, but what they can do for this country.