Immigration

Immigration: Global Warming on the Right

by Scott McPherson November 2, 2007

Honest debate on issues such as national health care, free trade, energy policy, and environmental controls is nearly impossible today. Something wicked this way comes, claims the Left, and it trumps any quaint old arguments about freedom and individual initiative. You see, man-made global warming is wreaking havoc on ...

Rational Irrationality and Bad Policies

by George Leef October 1, 2007

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan (Princeton University Press, 2007); 276 pages; $29.95. For many years, the standard account of the tendency for democratic governments to adopt perverse policies (restrictions on free trade, for ...

How Grandma Got Legal

by Mae M. Ngai August 1, 2007

“Made in America — by immigrants” and “We too have a dream” read signs at the May 1 marches across the country. By invoking an American ideal, today’s newcomers are staking their claim as the latest generation of nation-builders. But their critics object to this appeal to history; they ...

Immigration Tyranny

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 20, 2007

A popular argument among advocates of immigration controls is that a nation has a “right” to control its borders. The argument is based on the supposed “right” of the U.S. government to station gendarmes along its international borders, including on privately owned land, to prevent people from coming into ...

Gilchrist, O’Reilly, and the Cowardice Factor

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 9, 2007

A debate on immigration controls vs. open borders was recently scheduled to take place at Pomona College in California. On one side of the debate was a man named Jim Gilchrist, a conservative who founded the “Minuteman Project,” an organization devoted to helping the U.S. Border Patrol arrest, punish, ...

Immigration Policy Reveals What We Are

by Sheldon Richman March 25, 2007

The new compromise immigration bill is drawing lots of flak, not least from conservatives who object to granting amnesty to millions of so-called illegal aliens in the country. (I prefer to think of them as independent migrants.) Here I have to agree with the conservatives. The illegals shouldn’t be granted ...

Leave Americans in Mexico Be

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 11, 2007

There is a big immigration problem that has been growing year after year. An increasing number of American citizens are moving to Mexico, and some of them are even becoming undocumented workers. Even worse, they are refusing to assimilate and are even insisting on retaining their U.S. citizenship. Six years ago, ...

I Lift My Sword above the Bolted Door

by Samuel Bostaph December 1, 2006

Emma Lazarus had better stay in her grave if she knows what’s good for her. Why do I say that? Well, the blackhearted villainess deliberately contributed to what is now known as “the immigrant problem.” When she wrote her sonnet “The New Colossus,” and donated it to be auctioned off as part of the fundraising to build a pedestal ...

U.S. Immigration Debate Is a Road Well Traveled

by Michael Powell November 1, 2006

They were portrayed as a disreputable lot, the immigrant hordes of this great city. The Germans refused for decades to give up their native tongue and raucous beer gardens. The Irish of Hell’s Kitchen brawled and clung to political sinecures. The Jews crowded into the Lower East Side, speaking Yiddish, fomenting socialism, and resisting forced assimilation. And by their sheer ...

No Immigration Trouble at the Check-Out Counter

by Scott McPherson September 22, 2006

To hear anti-immigrant types and their spokesmen tell it, any intelligent American only needs to look around to see all the trouble that immigrants cause us. A heterogeneous society just won’t work, they say. Too many problems with language differences and clashing cultures. And then there’s the burden on the ...

Conservatives and Immigration Control

by Bart Frazier July 31, 2006

To most people, the idea of open borders seems like a radical idea. And of the people most vehemently opposed to it these days, conservatives top the list. But if a run-of-the-mill conservative were to take the philosophical underpinnings of his politics into account, he would find that he too ...

Independent Migrants Have Rights Too

by Sheldon Richman June 2, 2006

You’d never know it from the recent public discussion, but the people disparaged as “illegal aliens” — in fact they are independent migrants — have the same natural rights to life, liberty, and property that Americans have. As long as they violate no one else’s natural rights, they should be free ...