REMINDER: THIS EVENING! Thursday, October 26, at 7 p.m. Eastern. Austrian economics star Pete Boettke will be our third presenter in our online Austrian conference: “How Austrian Economics Impacted My Life.” Register here to receive your Zoom link. I hope to see you there!
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One of the arguments that proponents of America’s socialist system of immigration controls make is that illegal immigrants enter the United States without being invited.
That just isn’t true. In fact, there are a massive number of invitations that are sent out to illegal immigrants on a daily basis.
The invitations come through the price system. In a free-market economy, prices serve as invitations to people, including illegal immigrants.
Suppose, for example, that farmers in California are in severe danger of losing their strawberry crops if the crops are not immediately harvested. They raise their wage rates, say, to $40 an hour. That extremely high wage rate is an invitation. It says to Mexican workers, for example: “We need you to come work for us right now, and we are willing to pay you very high wages if you’ll come here and accept our job offers.”
California strawberry field.
Workers in Mexico hear about that extremely high wage rate. They might also hear that farmers are reimbursing travel expenses and feeding and housing their workers. They don’t know why farmers are offering so much compensation, and they don’t need to know. All they need to know is that they are being invited by that extremely high wage rate to drop everything immediately and travel to California to make some big money fast. As soon as they finish out the harvest, they return to Mexico with a large amount of cash that goes a lot further down there than it does here.
Everyone benefits from this free-market, price-driven economic system. The farmers benefit because they stay in business and make a profit. The workers benefit because they are making lots more money in California than they could make in Mexico. Consumers benefit because they’ve got lots of inexpensive strawberries to buy and eat.
Prices serve as invitations for consumers as well. For example, consider a grocery store. It sends out an invitation to everyone, including illegal immigrants, to come to the store. That invitation, however, does not come in a formal way with a written invitation. Instead, the store offers to sell people products at attractive prices. It is the prices that invite people into the store, along with, of course, the quality of the products. It is revealing that no retail store in the United States posts a sign that states “We do not sell to illegal immigrants.”
It’s no different with respect to housing. Landlords and home sellers use rental prices and housing prices to invite people, including illegal immigrants, to rent or buy dwellings from them.
Notice that no landlord or home seller declares, “We will not rent or sell to illegal immigrants.”
But there is another factor that we need to consider. Why shouldn’t people be free to travel to other parts of the world simply because they want to? Why should their travel to another country depend on someone’s invitation?
For example, during the past several years, thousands of people have moved from California to Texas, especially the capital of the state, Austin. Sure, lots of them were invited to do so by employers and, no doubt, by high wage rates in Texas. But surely lots of people simply moved to Texas because they wanted to, with the aim of finding a job after they got there. What’s wrong with that?
What happens when wage rates start to go down? The price system is sending a message to workers: “We don’t need you as badly anymore.” What happens when rental prices or home prices and other prices start to soar in a particular area? People tend to go elsewhere.
Though the intricacy of the price system, the free market is self-regulating. This free-market process brings about harmony, prosperity, and liberty.
It is America’s decades-old immigration-control system, which is based on the core socialist principle of central planning, that brings perpetual chaos, crisis, death, suffering, violence, and corruption, along with an immigration police state that has destroyed liberty and privacy for people along the border.
