Low-skill immigration and big government
June 21, 2007| By Nathaniel Ward
With the latest secretive immigration bill now up for consideration, Heritage experts are hard at work exposing the proposal’s flaws and proposing principled, conservative alternatives.
Read Heritage’s principles for sound immigration reform.
A recent article outlines one of the problems with the bill: it would expand the size of government. “Sen. Ted Kennedy understands that a steady stream of low-skill immigrants will help him build a much larger, tax-fueled government,” Heritage expert Robert Rector writes on National Review Online.
Rector points to an insight economist Milton Friedman had a decade ago about immigration: “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.” This is because in a welfare state, or as Rector puts it, a “redistributive transfer state,” new immigrants will demand government services at tremendous taxpayer expense.
“The grant of citizenship is a transfer of political power,” Rector writes. “Access to the U.S. ballot box also provides access to the American taxpayer’s bank account. This is particularly problematic with regard to low-skill immigrants.”
One obvious solution to Friedman’s dilemma is to limit government and rein in government wealth transfers, he continues. But it would be far harder to limit government after dramatically expanding low-skill immigration, as the current Senate proposal would do. “Within an active redistributionist state, as Friedman understood, unlimited immigration can threaten limited government.”
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.