From John Hood, on free trade.

Hmmm, it appears that some Republicans and Democrats are abandoning different parts of global trade. Republicans have a strong anti-immigration contigent while Democrats have similarly influential protectionist groups.

Republicans have a strong anti-immigration contigent...

Karl,
I'll play the silly game, who's anti-immigration? Many Republicans are anti-ILLEGAL-immigration, not I'm not aware of anyone who is totally anti-immigration.

Steve, my statement was in error. I meant from the point of view of free trade, labor is just another good to be traded. Hence, there should be few if any restrictions on immigration by the free trader viewpoint. My take is that Democrats favor much fewer restrictions on immigration than Republicans do, including more generous treatment of illegal immigrations and higher import quotas too. Meaning that they would more closely align with free traders on the issue of immigration.

I'm all in favor of much higher immigrant quotas. I'm also in favor of ripping up the immigration bureaucracy and rebuilding it in order to achieve higher quotas without cutting corners.

What I am *not* in favor of is worshipping those who refuse to follow the law.

I’m really rejecting the labels because I think they’ve come to mean things that aren’t very useful in what we should be talking about going forward

Man, she's just as good at deflection as her husband is. She doesn't answer the question, then shores up the fortification by redirecting a portion of the question "labels", and then forces in a perception "should be." Apparently, Bill's been doing some coaching, because no matter if you like Bill or not, he can speak.

Karl,
I'll agree with that.

The reason I asked was that my ex-NYC dwelling, super-lib cousin, said that same thing recently with added ire for GWB. But she tends toward hating all things non-liberal. I was beginning to think I'd missed something.

"For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world" - Declaration of Independence, citing one of the complaints against George III

"If I want to buy anything, whether it's from Akron or Astrakhan, the only government red tape I want to have to deal with is calculating the sales tax. That's my trade policy." - yours truly, in Samizdata comments

Many Republicans are anti-ILLEGAL-immigration, not I'm not aware of anyone who is totally anti-immigration.

What you are missing, Steve, is that there wouldn't be so much illegal immigration if they government hadn't banned way too much immigration. It's not as if immigration law is set in a tablet, although that is the way that the Republicans are acting. They are acting like the illegal immigrants have violated an invented 11th commandment: Go Back to Egypt, Thou Shalt Not Trespass.

The truth is that you are looking at a failed war on immigration, bigger and worse than failed war on drugs. Illegal immigrants from Mexico are, for all practical purposes, second-class Americans. The immigration laws that they violated are itself the real violation: the laws are full of vindictive heads-we-win, tail-you-lose bureaucracy. These laws can't possibly be enforced. Maybe a Communist dictatorship could enforce such laws, but a capitalist democracy can't.

So it's not about "worshipping" people who "refuse" to follow the law. It's about leaving alone people who can't afford to follow outrageous laws.

Harris: "leaving alone people who can't afford to follow outrageous laws."

Controlling ones borders is "outrageous laws"?

Controlling ones borders is "outrageous laws"?

It's not really about controlling borders. Most immigration, legal and illegal, is a big game of visas and quotas. They come on one kind of visa and the immigration service wants them to have another kind of visa. There are millions of people in America for whom the immigration service can't even decide if they are legal or not. Their rule is, if you're on American soil, it's up to you to prove to us that you're legal. If they are incompetent and don't process valid evidence of legality, then it's your problem, you're still not legal.

The simplest thing for many of the immigrants to do is to just ignore the insane bureaucracy. When they go to the immigration office to try to straighten out their paperwork, then the attitude they get is, "Who do you think you are? Who gave you permission to take a job here? Are you really married? When was the last time you had sex?"

A lot of immigrants get a lot of crap from the immigration office because the quotas breed a bad attitude. They breed a bad attitude because the quotas are not realistic. The immigrants want to work and the employers want to hire them. The quotas are an attempt to shoehorn the job market into a shape that it will never have, unless America turned Communist.

We would control our borders better if the immigration service accepted the real job market instead of its quotas from on high. Then the immigrants who just want a job would have good reasons to get documented. Those who are an actual security problem would not be able to hide among them, as they can now.

Unfortunately, the public discussion is contaminated with wild metaphors that do not fit the realities of immigration. The real issue is paperwork, not fence-jumpers.

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