Humane to Whom?

I have said it before but it bears repeating. I think that our immigration policy should be changed in the following ways:

• We should greatly increase the number of work permits available to people from Mexico and Central America. Most of those who come here are migrant workers and would return home if it were easier.
• We should have very rigorous employer-based enforcement of eligibility to work.
• We should allow people brought here illegally as children and who have been in the U. S. all of their lives to remain here legally and whatever standards are established for that should be rigorously enforced.
• We should abolish the immigration lottery and “family reunification” as criteria for admission.
• We should have immigration laws that more closely resemble those of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand than our present laws do.
• We should pick some number of legal immigrants, stick to it, and rigorously enforce our laws. What should that number be? Fewer than one million per year.

When you add it up it means I disagree vehemently with Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s position as expressed in her Wall Street Journal column:

A humane U.S. immigration policy would recognize the need for workers from outside the country and give migrants a legal path to those jobs by allowing them to apply for visas at local consulates. Coupled with an unmistakable message that asylum claims—even with children in tow—aren’t a free pass, access to worker visas would go a long way toward normalizing migration flows.

The estimates of how many people would come to the U. S. if they could vary but 150 million is a pretty good number. Of those 150 million how many could actually support themselves? I mean when you consider the cost of workers who do not read, write, or speak English and have few skills which warrant pay over minimum wage? As Joschka Fischer put it, “We wanted workers; we got people”. They have health care, educational, safety, sanitary, transportation, etc. needs and those do not pay for themselves.

The first thing you learn in economics class, the very first lesson on the very first day is that as when supply exceeds demand the price goes down. The evidence that there is increasing demand for unskilled labor in this country is very, very weak. If it were salaries for unskilled workers would be rising (they aren’t). There’s an additional factor: you can design and build machines to do many kinds of work or it can be done by hand. Which of those happens depends on the supply and demand for unskilled labor. Designing, building, operating, and maintaining those machines generally pays better than the labor they replace does.

Ms. O’Grady’s “humane” policy is humane to people who don’t live in the United States and inhumane to native born Americans and to foreign-born workers who are already here. I don’t think that’s humane at all. I think it’s cruel, exploitive, and opportunistic.