Richard Posner compares immigrant amnesty to tax amesty. His excellent point is that amnesty is a conventional policy tool and should not be despised.

However, Posner is not nearly cynical enough about the motives of thosse who complain that amnesty “rewards criminals.”

The Americans who for one reason or another are most concerned about illegal immigration are not much or maybe at all concerned about legal immigration, and so converting illegal to legal immigrants should be regarded by them as a highly beneficial step.

Hardly. Today’s most “concerned” are just as fond of citing IQ studies and “national culture” as the racialists who shut down legal immigration a century ago. They are the ones in need of amnesty.

Posner’s final paragraph is also excellent:

The solution is for Mexico and the other poor countries from which illegal immigrants come to become rich. As soon as per capita income in a country reaches about a third of the American level, immigration from that country dries up. Emigration is very costly emotionally as well as financially, given language and other barriers to a smooth transition to a new country, and so is frequent only when there are enormous wealth disparities between one’s homeland and a rich country like the United States. The more one worries about illegal immigrants, the more one should favor policies designed to bring about greater global income equality.

I agree with Alex Tabarrok’s pragmatic Open Letter on Immigration and hope it gains wide support — as it appears it already has amongst the top econobloggers.

My thoughts match those of Michael Giberson:

We should find a policy solution that readily accomodates the personal pursuit of freedom and opportunity, and which does not restricts the ability of persons to pursue freedom and opportunity based upon where on this planet they happened to have been born. Lucky for me, the consensus view of economists is that what I think of as the right thing to do for moral reasons is also likely to be, on net, a benefit to society overall. Actually, lucky for us that the right thing to do is the good thing. Lucky for all of us.

I’ll go further and suggest the letter that people ought to be signing on with is the Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid.

I’ve been meaning to write about the recent larger than expected (very pleasant surprise) anti-anti-immigration rallies and in particular yesterday’s idiotic column from Paul Krugman (which I won’t link to as it is behind NYT’s shortsighted “select” service), but I’ve been very busy and Bryan Caplan has better said what I think in fewer words than I would have used in Half Million Rally Against Anti-Foreign Bias, With Critics of Immigration Like This, Who Needs Advocates? and Are Low-Skilled Americans the Master Race?

The comments on these posts are full of idiots, but the estimable Chris Rasch works in one of my favorite links — the Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid.

However, I cannot restrain myself from picking on Krugman’s “Unconfortable facts about immigration” column. Krugman, with emphasis added:

First, the net benefits to the U.S. economy from immigration, aside from the large gains to the immigrants themselves, are small

This from someone who professes to be concerned about inequality. What better way to decrease inequality than to allow very poor people to drastically increase their incomes, merely by living and working across a river or entirely imaginary border? Why shouldn’t someone born in Mexico have the opportunity to earn the same wages as someone born in the United States with identical skills?

If we substitute “born in [jurisdiction]” to “born with [race or gender]” the answer is obvious.

Basic decency requires that we provide immigrants, once they’re here, with essential health care, education for their children, and more.

Here Krugman lets it slip: on one side of an imaginary border, one is human and must be treated with basic decency, whatever one thinks that entails. On the other side of a border, one is subhuman.

Anyone who professes to care about inequality and does not call for complete freedom to move, live and work across jurisdiction borders is deluded by the fog of jurisdicitonism.

As I was writing this Matt McIntosh posted an excellent followup to Caplan, Privileged By Birthright?:

It’s long past time for cosmopolitans everywhere to mount a serious offense against the premise that location of birth is a morally relevant category.

…

I realized a while ago that one way to tell a true liberal (in the broad philosophical sense, not the narrow North American political sense) from a poseur is whether their moral circle extends to include as much moral consideration to those beyond their border as to those within it.

Indeed!