I heartily endorse Max Sawicky's comments on immigration, with the caveat that I think a guest worker program including a clear and achievable mechanism for citizenship is a decent compromise. This conversation, by the way, is not saying nearly enough about remittances, the money sent by legal and illegal immigrants to their home countries. That cash is the largest direct source of foreign aid in Mexico, and, without it, the Mexican economy would have done far worse over the past few decades. Since a collapsed state on our Southern border is a near-nightmare scenario, we shouldn't, particularly when talking about safety, underplay the added economic stability that Mexican immigrants provide to their home country. Here's Fed Chief (then Fed Governor) Ben Bernanke giving a speech on the subject:
Many immigrants to the United States send substantial shares of their earnings--sometimes half of their incomes or more--to family members in their home countries. The U.S. Department of Treasury estimates that remittances to developing countries totaled more than $90 billion last year.3 These remittances have a significant economic impact on the receiving countries. Remittance flows to developing countries typically exceed official development assistance, are similar in magnitude to foreign direct investment, and are more stable than either of these other flows. For example, in 2002, the Latin American and Caribbean countries received $32 billion in remittances, of which $25 billion came from immigrants to the United States. These remittances constituted about 2 percent of the gross national products (GNP) of the region in that year. In 2002, remittances from citizens working abroad accounted for nearly 30 percent of the GNP of Nicaragua, 25 percent of the GNP of Haiti, and 15 percent of the GNP of El Salvador. Mexico receives the largest absolute amount of remittances in Latin America--about $9 billion in 2002.4 Just-released figures show that total remittances to Latin American and Caribbean countries in 2003 rose about 19 percent from the total in 2002, to $38 billion (Inter-American Dialogue Task Force on Remittances, 2004).
The rest of his address is good, by the way, and if you're interested in the subject, I urge you to read it.
