REPUBLICAN RIFT
Repudiating Reagan
GOP nativism is bad economics and bad politics--and it's anything but conservative.
Just what is it about immigration that makes so many conservatives lose their bearings?
Broach the subject, as President Bush did in January with his guest-worker initiative for illegal aliens, and free-market advocates start forgetting principles. (Flexible labor markets? What use are those?) Self-styled realists start fantasizing. (Let's just deport all 10 million of 'em, Elian-style!) And colorblind sensibilities are suspended. (White hegemony, where have you gone?) Suggest that immigration, legal or otherwise, not only is in the American tradition but a net benefit to our economy besides, and watch the editors at National Review and the pseudo-populists at Fox News come unhinged.
Border restrictionism has had a storied past two decades on the political right, even though many of the stories end badly. Alan Simpson's 1986 employee sanctions bill made it a crime to "knowingly" hire an undocumented worker. This unenforceable law hasn't stopped illegal immigration, but it has created a thriving black market for false identification papers.
The 1992 presidential bid of Pat Buchanan, who wanted to freeze all immigration for five years while he constructed a Maginot Line along the Mexico border, was something of a dud. And California Republicans learned the hard way in the mid-1990s, courtesy of the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, that denying education and health benefits to eight-year-old aliens is a political loser in the long run.
Actually, some Golden State pols still haven't learned their lesson. Earlier this month, State Senator Rico Oller took immigrant bashing to new depths in a GOP primary race for Congress. He distributed loathsome mailers with a picture of Mexicans crossing the border superimposed on an image of a masked, gun-toting terrorist. Alas, Mr. Oller lost the election to Dan Lungren, the pro-immigration candidate he targeted in the mailers.
Mr. Bush, who's trying to prevent his party from being overtaken by its Rico Ollers, has his work cut out. So determined is conservatism's nativist wing that it's even made common cause with radical environmentalists and zero-population-growth fanatics on the leftist fringe. The Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies may strike right-wing poses in the press, but both groups support big government, mock federalism, deride free markets and push a cultural agenda abhorrent to any self-respecting social conservative.
FAIR's founder and former president is John Tanton, an eye doctor who opened the first Planned Parenthood chapter in northern Michigan. By Dr. Tanton's own reckoning, FAIR has received more than $1.5 million from the Pioneer Fund, a white-supremacist outfit devoted to racial purity through eugenics.
Board members of FAIR actively promote the sterilization of Third World women for the purposes of reducing U.S. immigration prospects. And if anything disturbs the good doctor more than those Latin American hordes crossing the Rio Grande, it's the likelihood that most of them are Catholic, or so he once told a Reuters reporter.
CIS, an equally repugnant FAIR offshoot, is a big fan of China's one-child policy and publishes books advocating looser limits on abortion and wider use of RU-486. CIS considers the Sierra Club, which cites "stabilizing world population" fourth on its 21st century to-do list, as too moderate. And like FAIR, CIS has called for a target U.S. population of 150 million, about half of what it is today.
Unlike their counterparts on the restrictionist right, these organizations don't distinguish between legal and illegal immigration. They want the border sealed as a means to a fanciful, neo-Malthusian end. Both sides, however, do share the same intellectual framework--an overriding pessimism and lack of understanding about markets, which is why both also tend to oppose free trade.
This errant strand of conservatism is dumb economics, dumber politics and decidedly un-Reaganesque. In his farewell address, President Reagan--who used to receive a third of the Latino vote that Tom Tancredo, Lamar Smith and other myopic Republican lawmakers are so eager to concede to Democrats--spoke about a Shining City that's "teeming with people of all kinds" and has "doors open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here." These pages, for more than three decades under the tutelage of our late editor, Bob Bartley, have promoted a similarly optimistic take on immigration and how it serves the country's interests. Our history as a nation of immigrants informs this view, but so do certain demographic realities on the horizon.
Seventy-seven million Baby Boomers will start dipping into our pay-as-you-go Social Security system by the end of this decade, a phenomenon that will double the current number of retirees by 2030 and reduce the worker-retiree ratio from three to two workers per retiree. That's an enormous burden for a labor force expected to increase by less than 8% over the same time period. To cover the shortfall, payroll taxes would need to rise by at least a third to more than 18%.
In addition to raising immigration quotas, President Bush wants to normalize the status of millions of hardworking illegals already here and making a contribution. The law-and-order tub-thumpers on the right denounce any such talk as amounting to an "amnesty" that ultimately rewards lawbreakers. That's a fair point, and their only legitimate one, but it doesn't suffice as an argument that advances the debate.
Our current illegal immigration problems result from a policy at war with the law of supply and demand, a war that pro-growth conservatives understand is as unwise as it is unnecessary. Short of mass alien deportations at gunpoint, which would damage the economy and aren't likely to fly well with the public, any transition to a more sensible system will involve some sort of decriminalization.
And the president is attempting to do just that--bring some sense to the system. Post-9/11, a guest-worker program that invites illegals to join the above-ground economy only makes us safer. It means less time chasing workers essential to our economic well-being and more time sorting through genuine terror risks.
Foreigners have always served to enrich our culture, replenish our work force, keep us competitive globally and save us from heading where stagnant, immigrant-averse Europeans and Asians have already arrived. In the coming decades, a proper immigration policy will be needed more than ever. The sooner Republicans settle this intraparty spat and start listening to their inner-Reagan, the better off they'll be.
Mr. Riley is a senior editorial page writer at the Journal.
