Borjas estimates that the wealth transfer from American employees displaced by illegal immigration to their American employers is enormous, roughly half a trillion a year. It’s not a bad deal for illegal immigrants, either, who earn far more than they ever would have back home. A “drywallero” makes a lot more in Houston than in Honduras. So, we have to build the wall.
Walls are going up all over the world, even if Republican majorities in Congress won’t really fight for them. Democrats tell us walls are racist. As President Trump reminds them, “We don’t build walls because we hate the people on the outside. We do it because we love the people on the inside.”
In the Third World nations the Democrats want to send more of your money to, you see how often walls are going up around homes. Some nations—such as Israel and Hungary—put walls around their borders. But to build a wall you need the will. Americans clearly have it more than their bought-off government does. The success of consumer products like Ring or caller ID prove that Americans want to know who is at their door wanting in, or on their phone seeking access. However high we build the wall, it won’t be high enough to stop someone who overstays a visa, but we can stop new interlopers.
Walls must go up around some of our concepts, too. Citizenship should be one such concept. Birthright citizenship-by-fraud should not be allowed into the legal lexicon in America if we really love and cherish her as much as we should.
Nor is birthright citizenship recognized in many other places. Our left-wing courts often draw inspiration from foreign powers seeking to import foreign concepts into our law. And yet they are quite cautious about drawing lessons from abroad when it comes to birthright citizenship policies. It’s easy to see why. Only thirty countries out of nearly two hundred practice birthright citizenship, Michael Anton notes. Fully 6.8 billion of the world’s people live in regimes that bar birthright citizenship. Are they all racists and nativists too? Or do they cherish what they have more than we do?
All of our enemies want their money here and that’s because we have integrity. You have to have integrity to have a country. You have to know who is coming and going and how often. Banks implemented Know Your Customer laws to stop money laundering by criminals. Employers need better technological tools to help make sure they aren’t unwittingly employing illegal aliens. Do we not have a right to know who is in our home? If a man’s home is his castle, does he not deserve to build a moat around it? Do he and his neighbors on Neighborly or the Neighborhood Watch not have a right to defend their homes? We can’t have white picket fences if we can’t trust our neighbors not to invade by climbing over them.
For most Americans, these issues are obvious, but not for our business elite. Let’s explain the issue in terms that they can understand. If you and I started a company together and I suddenly added another class of shareholders, you’d rightly sue me for breaching our agreement. The elite have an obligation to protect the workers who we already have and are patriotically obligated to serve. To be a public servant, you must actually serve the public. To be a business leader, you have to lead. Maybe Mitt Romney is right, and corporations are in fact people. You should then be asking not what your country can do for your corporation but what your corporation can do for America.
But isn’t America a nation of immigrants?
America is a nation of settlers who have restricted and permitted immigration when it suited our interests. Globalization has reduced the size of our world while simultaneously increasing its complexity. In 2020 and beyond, our immigration policy should not be based on a poem, and nor should it look and feel like a Ponzi scheme. And no, illegal immigration is not an “act of love” as Jeb Bush put it, but of breaking and entering. Unlawful entry is a crime. In the best of scenarios, we hope that the breaking of our laws stops after getting here illegally, but all too often it doesn’t. I’ve looked into the tear-filled eyes of Angel Mothers who lost children to violent illegals. The mere existence of the category Angel Mothers is living evidence of our failure. President Trump was right when he came down that escalator. They aren’t sending their best—but they are taking ours.
There’s been plenty of romanticism about the Ellis Island chapter in American history, but we are a fundamentally different country now, and those years were hardly the most stable in our history. There were anarchist bombings, organized crime, riots, machine bosses, and buying off of politicians and elections. Haven’t you seen Boardwalk Empire? Gangs of New York? The numbers of those still coming are enormous—millions every year, some legally, some illegally. It makes little sense to import a low-skilled labor force before the robots automate our jobs.
Indeed, immigration and technology are always in tension. More immigration logically leads to less innovation. The higher the wage the better the market signal for entrepreneurs to build the next labor-saving robot. We oftentimes hear the phrase “jobs Americans just won’t do” used by immigration boosters, but I’ve yet to hear of a robot who stole research for his overlords in the Communist Robot Empire.
Productivity gains usually come from “eating people” (that is, eliminating their jobs), as tech columnist Andy Kessler puts it, and software is eating the world, as tech investor Marc Andreessen puts it. Let us work to make sure that process doesn’t
