Honest Admission

Even Progressive planners knew some migration defies regulation.

Virginia Postrel from the November 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Yes, you read that correctly.

The Progressives were worried about Jews, Poles, and Italians, not the century-old flow of Mexican workers to and from the Southwestern states. And there was a logic to their priorities. Arbitrary lines are even more arbitrary when they divide historically, geographically, and economi cally connected people. Saying someone can't commute from Juárez to El Paso is a lot stranger than saying someone can't migrate from Vilna to New Yorkand enforcing the former prohibition takes a lot more firepower.

So until 30 years ago, any able-bodied Mexican worker who could pay a head tax and visa fee and pass a Spanish literacy test could legally come to the United States. Some still came illegally not everyone had the money or reading skillsbut the border was essentially open. ("Undocumented workers" in those days were potentially legal migrants who just hadn't paid the fees to get proper papers.) Ellis Island lived on in the Southwest.

When Pete Wilson draws a contrast between his by-the-book Irish grandmother and bad Mexi cans running across Interstate 5, he is playing on a common ignorance of history. He's suggesting that today's illegal immigrants have the same legal options as Katie Barton but willfully flout the law. And he's hiding the history of the U.S.-Mexico border. America's Southern border has never been more closed to immigrants, legal and illegal, than it is today.

Politicians and activists who demand that we hermetically seal the bordersespecially those who demand that we simultaneously impose a moratorium on legal immigrationare being both grandiose and dishonest. They are imagining that they can muster the pure force needed to completely restrain the free flow of labor, and they are pretending that such force will have little or no effect on the average American's life. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The great political task of the next few decades will be to reverse Progressivism rather than, in a new era of economic and social change, to repeat its errors. And that task is not just about antitrust law or land-use regulation or even welfare reform. It is about saying no to Jeremiah Jenks and his intellectual descendants, about refusing to centrally plan America's ethnic composition, about treat ing Ellis Island not as a backdrop for photo ops but as a model for policy.