Speech #970218509

Mr. President. should we open our borders to the millions of people desiring to immigrate to the United States? Some of my libertarian and conservative friends think we should. A lot of elected officials. judging from congressional inactivity over the last decade. apparently agree. A thoughtprovoking contribution to the immigration debate was offered by Robert W. Whitaker in an essay entitled "Societal Property Rights." published in the New Right Papers. I hope my colleagues will read this essay and reflect on this problem before we take up S. 2222. the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1982. I submit for the REcoRD this essay by Robert W. Whitaker. The essay follows: SocIETAL PROPzTy RIGHTS (By Robert W. Whitaker) * Why is it that labor is worth so much more on one side of a border than on the other? This is a question basic to immigration policy. Is it merely the irrational greed of American workers which keeps our borders closed to the tens of millions of people from poor countries who would be willing to come here and work for less? As a matter of fact. liberals. libertarians. and big businesses are in implicit agreement on this point. Liberals are generally opposed to enforcement of our immigration laws. Big business sees a great prospect for profit as represented by largescale immigration of cheap labor. Libertarians believe in equal pay for equal work everywhere on earth. They believe that all labor of the same quality should be paid the same. so restricting the movement of labor between nations is immoral. This reasoning can go pretty far. Some time back. a conservative magazine contained an article protesting the lax enforcement of U.S. immigration laws on the Rio Grande. A flood of letters poured in. most of them with a single theme: A border to keep people out of the United States is as immoral as the Berlin Wall. which keeps people in East Germany. To equate the Berlin Wall with American immigration laws is to say that the rest of the world has as much right to settle in the United States as East Germans have to emigrate. The point libertarians lose sight of is that immigration laws mean that we have something other people want. There are things in America. the product of Americans. which others would like to share. Some of these things are noneconomic. such as freedom.