What are the real issues on the current immigration bill? Milton Friedman said it best, according to Robert Rector.
It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state,”he warned.
Why not? Because of the political bargain represented by the modern welfare state.
In the “transfer state,” government taxes the upper middle class and shifts some $1.5 trillion in economic resources to lower-income groups through a vast variety benefits and subsidies.
It’s not just welfare, but a whole raft of complex benefits and subsidies that are administered by the welfare state’s middle men, liberals.
So when we open the borders to low-skill immigrants we open the floodgates to expanding the welfare state. We change the political balance by increasing the number of people likely to want and likely to vote for benefits and subsidies.
Elections in modern societies are, to a considerable degree, referenda on the magnitude of future income redistribution. An immigration policy which grants citizenship to vast numbers of low-skill, low-income immigrants not only creates new beneficiaries for government transfers, but new voters likely to support even greater transfers in the future.
There is only one practical way for conservatives to view the immigration debate.
“Go ahead. Dismantle the welfare state. As soon as you’ve got that finished, let us know, and then we’ll talk about open borders.”
And that leaves out the real crime of the welfare state, that it delays and hinders the natural adaptation of the immigrant and the low-skilled to the ethos of the modern society, the idea that you prosper by meeting the needs of other people.
The welfare state teaches people that you prosper by forcing other people to meet your needs because you are a helpless victim.
The welfare state is essentially a reactionary idea, a rejection of the principle of voluntary cooperation to meet other peoples’ needs and return to the agricultural era, its servile relationships and its compulsion.
Talk about SiCKO.
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