America's Subprime Immigration Problem

Ira Mehlman, National Media Director for FAIR

While attention to immigration policy in the U.S. has been exclusively focused on the illegal variety, passing almost unnoticed is the spike in legal immigration. Invariably, almost apologetically for taking a firmer position against illegal immigration, politicians, pundits and others add that they favor legal immigration. It sounds nice, but it is really just a throw-away line that has no thought behind it.

We're all in favor of legal immigration as a concept, but rarely is anyone asked to define the legal immigration system that they profess to support. How much legal immigration? What criteria should be used for selecting immigrants? Who should legal immigrants be entitled to bring with them? These are not insignificant details; rather they go to the core of what legal immigration is about.

Merely by virtue of the fact that something is legal does not make it good, or beneficial. Legal immigration to the United States is running at record levels, but is it truly benefiting our nation and operating in the public interest, or in the interest of the immigrants themselves?

Legal immigration is up - about 1.2 million in 2007, but so were inflation, mortgage foreclosures, energy costs, and unemployment. While the stock market was up over the 12-month period, it ended the year heading downward and has been in a tailspin in early 2008. Also down are home prices, the value of the dollar, consumer confidence, and our foreign creditors' patience. Cutting interest rates to stimulate economic growth may not provide much of a fix either, as foreign lenders (flush with declining dollars due to our garish trade imbalances) may not be eager to lend us money at lower interest rates.

Thus, while everyone pays lip service to legal immigration, the policy seems to operate without any real connection to other critical economic and social phenomena. The 1.2 million immigrants who came last year may have come legally, but that is small comfort if jobs are disappearing and the nation is sinking into a protracted recession.

We have the unfortunate tendency not to think things through until they go really bad. "Home ownership," is a perfect example. For most of the past seven years, George Bush has been extolling the fact that more Americans than ever owned their own homes - except that they really didn't. More Americans than ever were able to get loans to buy homes they couldn't afford, or go on spending sprees by borrowing against the paper gains they had made in the value of their homes. Now those reckless policies threaten to wreak havoc on the U.S. economy.

"Legal immigration," like subprime loans, may be one of those feel-good policies that lead to all sorts of unintended consequences. After the party is over, we're left with a policy that delivers us a million plus new people each year, whether we need them or not.

We are living with the consequences of far too many policies - economic, social and foreign - that we did not fully think through. When it comes to legal immigration, it's time to start thinking about whether the policies make sense, not just whether they're legal.