Letters

From the October 1994 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

There are about 65,000 immigrant visas issued each year to brothers and sisters (and their immediate families). Although this seems a lot, it is only about 7 percent of all immigration each year. I am telling my new client applicants in this category that I expect a wait of between 15 and 20 years.

Other classes of relatives include spouses and children of legal permanent residents. Because these immigrants come under a quota list, they have to wait from three to five (and, for nationals of some countries, many more) years to obtain their immigrant visas.

Family applications are hardly the way potential immigrants wish to come into the United States in the 1990s. Our government made a big mistake during the 1980s by granting amnesty to undocumented aliens and agricultural workers. This created a massive incentive to fraud and to enter illegally while awaiting the "next amnesty." There is a better way.

Immigrants should be allowed to enter the United States to work in certain occupations that are experiencing shortages, as determined by measuring unemployment claims. If those claims amount to 2 percent or less of the estimated workers in a category, aliens who can prove at least two years experience or training in that skill should be given work visas. Those visas should be renewable every two years only upon the alien proving he or she is paying taxes and continues to work in the occupation. After six years that alien would be entitled to legal permanent residence. Harsh penalties would have to be imposed for persons who provide fraudulent documentation.

A system such as this would be easy to administer and would allow persons to come into the United States who would benefit our country and who would benefit by our country. Those people would be unlikely to abuse our system of government services and would be likely to pay more into the system than they take.

Harry A. DeMell
New York, NY

Mr. Gillespie replies: My article begins with the premise, "If the United States is not going to allow open immigration...." Within a framework of limited immigration, I think that entry fees are a workable alternative to the current policy of family reunification. Entry fees would, I think, simultaneously motivate potential immigrants to hone the skills necessary for success in America and ameliorate growing anti-immigrant sentiment.

It would also sidestep the bureaucratic inefficiencies built into employment-based systems, such as the one proposed by Mr. DeMell, in which the government decides what skills are most in need. Contrary to Mr. Davies's assertion, I don't see the entry fee as analogous to travel costs experienced by 19th-century immigrants. I was instead repeating Gary Becker's important point that contemporary immigrants are already paying huge costs in the form of "long queues and bureaucratic procedures that often delay entry for years." I also don't think that proposing a more efficient way of allocating scarce visas necessarily means I accept, as Mr. Stevens charges, "the faulty premise that individual immigrants cause the high cost of the welfare state." In fact, I explicitly reject that premise by quoting statistics that undercut "the increasingly common portrayal of immigrants as welfare dependents mooching off the taxpayers."

Having said all that, I agree with the respondents that immigration policy is really only of concern in a welfare state. As I noted in my article, "The rise of the welfare state in the 20th century greatly complicate[s] the model of largely unfettered immigration." If we dismantled the welfare state--a proposition to which REASON is obviously dedicated--we would similarly dismantle most impediments to open immigration. As I wrote regarding 19th-century immigration, "Although there was always considerable anti-immigrant sentiment, there was also at least a grudging sense that anyone had a right to settle in America." Protectionism Racket

The similarities in your back-to-back articles, "A Tale of Two Countries" and "P.S., Inc." (June), were striking. In the case of the Philippines, the ruling elite has enacted protectionist laws and regulations designed primarily for self-enrichment at the expense of the overwhelming body of the Philippine people--under the guise of the noble aim of keeping the Philippines for the Filipinos and not allowing foreigners to profit in an exploitative way.

In the case of the public schools, teachers' unions try to stop any form of choice or private- sector involvement in the school system. While they abhor profit on the part of any private enterprise that might improve results at lower costs, they certainly seek to maximize their own profit at the expense of taxpayers and children alike. Again, they claim a noble aim: to keep the dirty word profit out of the minds of children and keep them pure and pliable to the ultimate aim of socialism.

James T. Loberg
Anaheim, CA

Although I agree with William McGurn ("A Tale of Two Countries") that protectionism is harmful to the consumer and beneficial only to the vested interests that control uncompetitive enterprises, his article does not prove his case. If one is to argue against protectionism, one must somehow explain the economic success of Japan and South Korea. Both of those economies are fiercely protectionist and both have enjoyed tremendous success during the period in which the economy of the Philippines was spiralling downward. They have also managed to attract foreign investment by companies such as Ford Motor Co., General Motors, and RCA Victor even though foreign ownership in local companies is limited to minority interests.

It would appear to me that what has destroyed the economy of the Philippines is corruption. Although there is strong evidence that corruption existed in Japan and South Korea, its nature and extent seems to have been quite different from that which exists in the Philippines. Corruption in Japan and South Korea seems to occur when successful businesses make payments to political parties and elected officials to favor laws which help the industry in which the business operates. In the Philippines, corruption seems to take the form of individuals buying the right to operate a monopoly which is protected from competition from within the country as well as from without.

D.L. Freeman
Montreal, Canada

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The strongest attack on this assumption comes from an unlikely source: Warren Farrell, formerly an activist in the women's movement and the only man elected three times to the board of the National Organization for Women. Farrell is the author of The Myth of Male Power (Simon & Schuster, 1993), which Barbara Dority, co-chair of the Northwest Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce, says has the "potential for being The Feminine Mystique of the men's movement." Farrell writes: "Feminism justified female 'victim power' by convincing the world that we lived in a sexist, male-dominated, and patriarchal world. The Myth of Male Power explains why the world was bi-sexist, both male and female-dominated, both patriarchal and matriarchal--each in different ways."

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