To the Editors:
I agree with one thing in Professor Medina’s editorial in the Sept. 9 Maroon: that ignorance fuels the immigration debate. Too often, proponents of open borders and supporters of illegal aliens ignore the real impact of their policies. Their assumptions are wrong, and demonstrate an ethnocentrism that has dramatic effects for the home countries of immigrants. Said simply, the brain drain causes economic instability.
America became a refuge for European immigrants because of monarchs and political dynasties that were unshakable. English oppression pushed out Puritans, and the Irish and German monarchs stalled the economy through war and religious persecution pushing central European immigration a century ago. The people who left are those who would otherwise have demanded political change in their home countries.
Democracy is a fluid system adjusting to the needs of the people. Latin American democracies, then, should provide social mobility and economic advancement yet many abandon their home countries in order to come to America. Those with wealth and education migrate instead of agitate, leaving instead of organizing.
And America is an appealing destination. We have lavish social programs and benefits, good colleges and an economic system that gives great opportunities to many people. That system, however, is not unique to America, and for as much as we may want to sentimentalize American greatness, it can no doubt be deconstructed down to a healthy, low level of government regulation and intervention coupled with an entrepreneurial spirit within our society and embedded within our culture.
If that allure drains away those who would become doctors, lawyers, law professors and business leaders from their native countries, aren’t we prolonging and making poverty permanent in a region of the country most vulnerable to American imperialism? Said through statistics, a quarter of our doctors are from other countries. There are more Ethiopian doctors in Chicago, according to Foreign Policy magazine, than there are in Ethiopia, a country of 80 million.
This all also ignores our own vulnerable populations within America. While we may be a nation of immigrants as Prof. Medina points out, we’re also a nation of record unemployment, with young, unskilled and minority populations most at risk of losing their job and being unable to find a new one if lost.
It’s easy to say that we should just open up the border even further when one has a comfortable position and guaranteed job, but we owe the unemployed a greater deal of protection. Competition for low-skilled entry-level jobs depresses wages and raises unemployment. We perpetuate American poverty while serving the employment needs of big business and large corporations saving a buck by relying on cheap labor. It’s unseemly and on multiple levels un-American.
We should end immigration until we can get reasonable control over our economy, until we can truly handle and sustain a new influx of immigrants. We can be a good society by creating those jobs through common-sense business and labor reforms, encouraging efficiency through laws and easing our onerous environmental regulations on our struggling manufacturing sector. The tragedy of our current economic malaise is that it’s a man-made disaster through national policies that drive malinvestment instead of market-driven efficiency.
Our political class crafted these policies, unleashed them on our economy, and now those who are low-skilled or new to the workforce pay the price for those bad ideas. It would only be compounding those problems to suddenly let in more immigrants.
Americans have long meddled in Latin affairs to the detriment of those countries, now we have the ability to meddle without the need of troops. We can perpetuate our empire by keeping our immigration policies so tuned as to take away the best and brightest of these countries.
People like Prof. Medina, should further consider their policies, and their sometimes, unintended consequences, before they further foist them upon the American people. To keep our immigration policies in place, and not control our border while continuing our failed economic policies will be the ruin of the native countries of these immigrants, and will have extremely negative consequences for American workers.
Ben Wetmore
Third Year Law Student
