open the borders

Emailer Ryan asks, "So what is your preferred immigration policy, anyway?"

Well, I'm going to assume that we're talking about a world where we're still in capitalism and maintaining the fiction of borders in the first place here. So here's my ideal policy under those conditions: been convicted of a felony? No? Come on in. While you're here, you have to obey our labor laws and pay payroll and income taxes into our system. You can become a naturalized citizen after you've been here a couple years, as long as you're playing by the rules, and the process is mostly a formality. That's about it.

People say, how can you say you support labor if you'll let tons of cheap labor in? To which I reply that the availability of cheap labor is only part of the story of our unemployment, and that the cheap labor that really hurts is a) labor in countries like Bangladesh, outside our borders, working for pennies and in horrible conditions and b) labor by undocumented immigrants, inside our borders, working for less than minimum wage and without labor protections. Neither of these problems are exacerbated by expanding legal immigration. Indeed, I suspect that turning almost all of the undocumented immigrants coming in into legal immigrants would have considerably positive effects for labor. There's reason to think that they would be broadly friendly to progressive economic politics, and they might prove a natural constituency for joining organized labor, which is not a realistic option for many undocumented immigrants.

Update: Would we need some government investment to handle the influx of many new immigrants? Sure. We can take some from our ludicrous, failed border enforcement efforts. Besides, we need the jobs.