Personally, I wouldn’t care if you doubled or halved immigration quotas. But once you set foot on US soil, I say you should have human rights. As for morality, that’s a relative thing. Some people like monarchy or communism or arson or fascism for example. I don’t.
I oppose open borders. There are no advocates for it in US Congress. The Economist magazine editorialized for it some years back. There’s not a country in the world that doesn’t police its borders in some way, and I think they have a right to do so.
Q: Is immigration in our best interest? A: How much are we talking about? There’s a very good case for having non-zero immigration. There’s an economic case for having somewhat higher immigration at current US levels: it would make the US a richer country, or at least that’s what the empirical literature indicates. That’s not a general result: it’s a result specific to the US at a given time.
There is one general result from economics: the effects on native wages are, to a first approximation, a wash. Why is that? Let’s look at this in slow motion. Foreign worker arrives on US shore and takes a US job. Boo-hiss. Then pay day comes and they spend money, adding to demand for labor. Rah-rah. To a first approximation, these effects wash out.
To a 2nd approximation, whether domestic workers win depends upon the extent to which foreign labor is a complement or substitute for US labor. It turns out that the answer is, “Mostly complement”, probably connected with foreign workers lower language skills on average.
So more immigration would make the US richer, and less makes it poorer, not that I care because bigots gotta bigot. But once you are here you should be treated with humanity, by people with humanity. As opposed to the other kind. You do that by beefing up eVerify and enforcing illegal working at the employer level.
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