Immigration, illegal and otherwise

Obsidian Wings' hilzoy on illegal immigration:

I think it should go without saying that it would be better if no one was in this country illegally. For one thing, it's generally better for laws to be obeyed and not broken ('generally' here is to allow for cases like Nazi Germany.) For another, the fact that there are people who are not protected by our laws, and who cannot complain about miserable wages, unsafe working conditions, or horrible labor practices without fear of deportation harms workers everywhere, either directly or by depressing the cost of legal workers.

It seems to me that any workable solution to this problem has to involve altering the incentives facing poor people in central America (and any other countries from which large numbers of people come to the US illegally.) The ideal long-term solution would be for ordinary people in central America to be well enough off that they did not feel that they had to leave their own countries in order to have a decent future. In the more immediate future, however, I see no alternative to serious enforcement against employers who hire illegal immigrants.

Yeah, what she said.

Hilzoy also comments intelligently on border security, here, taking Bush & Co. for their utter cluelessness: she describes sending the National Guard to the border as a "ridiculous stunt" and quotes Josh Marshall's assessment of the plan--""But all I can make of this plan to help guard the border with soldiers is that it's one more example that there is simply no gambit too craven or silly for this president not to resort to it"--with approval.

My dad--he's 85 years old, but not much gets past him--asked me about this plan Saturday when it first entered the news. I hadn't seen the news yet and was flabbergasted. We're pretty much agreed that Bush makes things up as he goes along, scrambling to get his approval ratings above 30. I doubt it'll work: Bush has done everything possible to conflate the issue of workers illegally crossing the border with the related but separate issue of terrorists illegally crossing the border.

Hilzoy concludes:

I think we should do what we need to do to secure the border as soon as possible. But I don't see why we need to use the National Guard as a "stopgap". It's not as though there is a short-term crisis on the border, a crisis so urgent that it would be worth taking men and women who have just returned from Iraq, and whose equipment is antiquated if it exists at all, and send them off to do a job they are not trained to do. Moreover, if there is a crisis that's this urgent, I have to ask why the Bush administration is only now getting around to dealing with it. They have, after all, been in office for over five years now, and if the security of our borders is in fact at a crisis point, that surely reflects their own bad planning.

Go read both of her posts. They're fairly long, but well worth the time.