Conflicting interests: Taxation, illegal immigration, and liberty
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Kevin at The Smallest Minority points us to this story
about determined minority high-school students competing against the
best-and-the-brightest from MIT in a robotics competition -- and
winning. It's an excellent reminder that the results you get from our school system are hugely dependent on what you bring to the table in terms of brains, and more importantly, enthusiasm. Schools do not fail because their students are undermedicated or genetically incapable of learning. They fail because the students don't want to learn, or can't be bothered to work hard at learning. All other obstacles can be overcome by determined students regardless of supposed cultural, financial, or genetic barriers. (Hiring incompetent teachers doesn't help, and is in fact one of the few things we can probably fix, but it's not the core problem). So with that said... most, if not all, of the students described in that article were illegal immigrants, or the children of illegal immigrants. One, in particular, wanted to join the military as a career option -- but could not, because his family was in the US illegally. It seems cruel to deny these students the same education benefits granted to ordinary citizens when they are clearly capable, deserving individuals who would probably make good use of the opportunity America not only offers, but represents, to the poor and oppressed across the world. They do not say, "I want to work hard and have a fair chance to succeed." Even though that is what they mean, they say it differently in the rest of the world. They say it like this: "I want to go to America." And yet America is becoming increasingly insular. Our society is often divided along racial and ethnic lines, in large parts due to efforts by the Democratic party. We are facing tough economic choices regarding education, social security, health care, and other entitlement programs. And we are facing a terrorist threat that cannot be ignored. Our citizens do not want to work at the low-skill, low-pay jobs taken by illegal immigrants. Nor do they want to pay more for goods and services. Those low-pay, low-skill jobs are given to illegal immigrants because no one else wants them, and they are kept off the tax books because it keeps costs -- and thus consumer prices -- down. Many of those jobs would become economically insupportable if they were taxed and regulated the way that on-the-books jobs are treated. We deny many benefits of American society to illegal immigrants. It's not quite second-class citizenship status; call it second-class residency. Yet this flies in the face of our history, because America has thrived by providing a haven for those who want to work hard, take risks, and seek in return not government benefits... but merely opportunity. America is not the land of the free college education. America is the land of opportunity. And we have some hard choices to make if we want to keep that title. We cannot allow the flow of illegal immigrants to continue. What was an acceptable security risk before 9/11 is now unsupportable. We need to know who is entering our country, and we need to stop terrorists and criminals at the borders. Once inside our country they can disappear into the population, and locating them after that requires intrusive measures that threaten our cherished tradition of liberty. Better to stop them at the border. And yet we cannot simply stop them all. It's hard to measure the effect it would have on our economy, but it's easy to understand the effect it would have on our principles. If America is to remain the land of opportunity, we need to continue to offer opportunity to the world. More practically, it's politically impossible to muster the required resources to close our southern border. People will sneak through no matter what we do. If we can't stop them, we need to know who they are. That's what Bush is driving at with his various not-quite-an-amnesty immigration programs. It's not something his Republican base is terribly happy with. I have a certain amount of sympathy for those views. The problem of illegal immigration affects people in the southern border states personally and viscerally. The same routes that smuggle people also smuggle drugs, and the people running those routes are criminals willing to threaten violence to protect their interests. How long before those same routes begin to smuggle terrorists? But those problems are associated with illegal immigration. Make the immigration legal, and the honest folks who just want a piece of the American dream will participate. The illegal smuggling routes will become the domain of criminals only -- and there will be no political cost to cracking down on those. Once you've done that, though, there's still a problem. Do you provide all the benefits of citizenship to these now-legal immigrants? Or do you maintain a second-class status? If you prefer to offer them the same benefits, how do you fund those benefits? Remember, if you tax those jobs at the same rate as other jobs, many of those jobs will go away entirely -- and you are left with legal immigrants on welfare rather than illegal immigrants struggling to make the American dream come true. The solution is to recognize reality. Our politicians have created a government wherein the costs of compliance (in the form of taxation, regulation, and so on) are high enough to exclude the vast majority of unskilled laborer jobs. Quite simply, we can't afford to provide welfare, social security, health benefits, and free education to low-income workers, because the cost of providing those services is greater than the revenue that can be derived from taxing the workers. Hard choices indeed. The people who created those programs have a ready answer. "Raise taxes on the rich!" they cry. "Redistribute the wealth!" Well, the graveyard of history is filled with the corpses of communist and socialist nations that tried exactly that and found out that it doesn't work. More importantly, in America the market has spoken, and the market has decreed that it is better to import undocumented workers in violation of the government's tax laws than to pay the taxes. Do you doubt me? Some people made a stink last year because the Libertarian candidate for President was a tax protester. But Badnarik is just one man. The real tax protestors are companies like Wal-Mart who refuse to pay taxes on their employees in favor of employing illegal immigrants. We're not talking wild-eyed libertarian lunatics picketing the Internal Revenue Service here. We're talking rational corporate actors making decisions to break the law. The current tax regime is unsupportable, and the trends all suggest that it will continue to get worse. We can't afford the pseudo-socialist state that 60 years of Democratic dominance has given us. They mortgaged our future to pay for it, stealing the money we contributed from a mythical trust fund, and now the bill is starting to come due. We see it in jobs that go to illegals because they can be kept off the books, and we see it in the looming social security crisis. The solution is to tighten our belts, abandon failed programs funded by fraudulent pyramid schemes, and return to a government of limited size and limited means. Once we remove the excessive taxation, regulation, and red tape from the economy, the jobs presently held by illegal immigrants can become legal jobs held by legal immigrants. Those jobs will still face a tax burden, but a dramatically reduced one. The people working on those jobs will not have to live outside the law. They won't get a free ride to college, but they don't anyway; they will get the opportunity to work their way through college, which they are presently denied, even if they want to. Most important of all, they won't be terrorists. True, ordinary Americans will have to give up some of the benefits they receive. But that is both fair and inevitable, as the behavior of companies like Wal-Mart demonstrates. And it will put pressure on the educational system to return to a sane pricing structure, rather than demanding that our students mortgage their own future to support professorial frauds like Ward Chuchill. Rather than taxing only the rich to support programs for the poor in an unsupportable cycle, taxes will be low, fair, and applied to everyone equally; prices for education will be low, student choice will force schools to compete for students (resulting in better quality education for everyone), and the American Dream will remain an opportunity available to anyone willing to work hard for a fair wage. UPDATE: This posting was included in the Carnival of the Capitalists. |
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