I guess that settles it?

The illegal immigration debate in the United States seems to be largely over, at least from my perspective. I just finished watching both of the the recent major party debates, and not one leading candidate suggested the possibility that illegal immigrants are anything but a "growing problem." The candidates' ideas of how to keep illegals out are varied, but overall they agree: undocumented aliens are a disease which needs to be cured (I should note that Kucinich sort of came out in favor of freer immigration, but he's against free trade and loves unions, which creates a rather large conflict of interest. Also, let's be real - he's got no shot at the nomination).

Lots of candidates from both parties readily support increased legal immigration, by which I suppose they mean the flow of immigrants who have been approved on a case-by-case basis by our government. Today, legal immigrants tend to be educated, skilled workers or their family members, but that's only because their numbers are so limited by bureaucratic quotas and inefficiencies (granted, we still allow more immigrants to enter each year than any other country in the world). The problem with this "solution" is that eventually we will have to start allowing in immigrants of slightly less impressive backgrounds if we are to expand legal immigration. There are far more people who want to move to the United States than there are skilled workers with good prospects for high-paying jobs, meaning more legal immigration will drastically change the demographic of the immigrant population. Expand immigration enough, and the same people who were supposedly stealing jobs and committing crimes at appalling rates as illegals will be allowed to enter as documented, legal aliens. The "problems" created by inflows of unskilled workers will not have gone away, but the government will have a better idea of who lives where and they'll be able to collect taxes more easily.

So, problem ... solved?

To me, most politicians approach the immigration debate from the wrong angle to begin with. They view economics as a zero-sum game in which one immigrant's improved fortune has to create some sort of misfortune for an American. That fact is that immigrants can and do create wealth for themselves at no one's expense. The same false logic applies to free trade. Many people assume that jobs and cash being sent abroad have to cause nationals to lose their jobs or lower their wages. John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich often bring up the massive job losses that American workers have incurred as a result of freer trade between the US and China or Mexico. What they never mention is the much larger number of entirely new jobs which have been created as a result of economic growth, a phenomenon inextricably linked to increased trade. Similarly, politicians don't often talk about the available improvements in standards of living for illegal aliens. The continued traffic of immigrants risking almost all of their already-limited assets to get to the US is proof enough of the opportunities that exist there.

To make matters worse, both parties seem to have agreed that we need to start cracking down on employers of illegal immigrants, people whose only crime is the provision of work at a mutually agreed-upon wage. If they've been convinced somewhere along the way that minimum wage laws don't cause unemployment (read: labor shortages), watch what happens when businesses have to start paying every illegal immigrant six bucks an hour.

It seems to me that increased human mobility has almost always been followed by increased human prosperity. For that reason, among others, I believe that people have the right to live wherever they want, provided they obtain their property via consensual means. In fact, if we cancel for xenophobia and racism, any argument for increased immigration restrictions directed at foreigners is really no different from arguing for increased mobility restrictions between states within the US. And why stop there? If immigration restrictions are justifiable because the movement of new people and new workers from Mexico to California hurts Californian workers, shouldn't we be restricting human mobility of all kinds? Doesn't a Vermonter moving to New Hampshire hurt the workers of New Hampshire? What about a Brooklynite moving to Queens?

Even if we accept the horror stories of job losses and drug trafficking supposedly attributable to immigration, the policies being advocated won't make any difference. Immigrants will still be the same exact people with the same exact same desires: get a job, create a better life for myself and my family. Your government can label me however they want.