Tamar Jacoby: The Case for Bush's Immigration Plan

"The White House proposal, introduced in early 2004 and allowed to drop from sight during the election year, is back on the table. The president laid out his ideas again in the State of the Union and is reportedly planning a major initiative to take the issue to the public later this spring," says open borders supporter Tamar Jacoby in the Weekly Standard. "The best analogy is Prohibition: Unrealistic law is extremely difficult to make stick. Realistic limits are another thing entirely. We can have robust immigration and the rule of law too--if, instead of wishing away the influx, we acknowledge reality, then find a smarter, more practical way to manage it. And that is exactly what the president proposes we do through his guest worker program."

(FAIR comment: The difference between rum smuggling and alien smuggling is that the latter involves people rather than a commodity. These are people whose effects on our society may last for the rest of their lives and represent a major cost to the nation's taxpayers, distorted labor market conditions that harm the poorest Americans, a drain on the economy because of money sent home as remittances, deterioration of services and unsustainable population increase. It is also important to recognize that, unlike with prohibition, there has been no real effort to enforce our immigration law since it was made unlawful to hire illegal aliens in 1986.)