Doing Our “Fair Share” for All Those Illegal Immigrants 

You’ve heard about the governors of Arizona and Texas bussing illegal immigrants to New York City and Washington, DC. According to Politico, they’ve sent 4,000 of them to the Big Apple since May.

As the mayor of a sanctuary city, Adams is doing his best to welcome these people. He’s giving them free housing, free health care, and free cellphones, to boot. But, golly gee! It’s a big challenge. And expensive!

So, he’s demanding help from the federal government in the form of National Guard troops and billions of federal tax dollars. And he’s calling out the border state governors. What they’ve done is “unimaginable,” he announced in a press conference.

I agree. You can’t imagine the effect of policies you endorse unless you experience the full range of their consequences. And at a total of 4,000 new denizens, New York City is not even close to giving sanctuary to its “fair share” of those crossing the border each year.

Here are the numbers: In the case of NYC, the equation would go like this. The nominator is the US population – now at about 330 million. The numerator would be NYC’s population – about 8 million. Eight million is 2.4% of 330 million. So that makes NYC’s fair share of the 2.6 million migrants that have passed through our borders in the past 12 months about 62,000.

Subtract 6,000 (that Texas and Arizona sent) from the fair-share number of 62,000, and you get 56,000. Which means that Mayor Adams should ask Arizona and Texas to send him another 56,000 migrants asap!

Seriously, though…

The argument about immigration over the southern border has been politically charged (i.e., insanely stupid) for as long as I can remember. Every study I’ve looked at says that some degree of immigration is good for the US economy for all sorts of reasons.

But most Republicans fear that letting in hundreds of thousands of Central Americans (mostly) will result in unfair competition with unskilled US workers and the deterioration of American culture. Whatever that is. So their position is to put up the wall and keep the inflow to a well-vetted trickle.

Democrats and Libertarians, on the other hand, have favored letting in larger numbers of the politically oppressed and financially disadvantaged. And since Biden came into office, the free flow of illegal immigrants has been running at about 2.6 million per year.

My take: The US needs a sane (i.e., bipartisan and non-political) solution that will allow lots of Mexicans and Central Americans to come into our country each year. But they should be well vetted and come here on temporary visas, giving them the ability to fill the tens of thousands of low-paid jobs that illegal immigrants are filling now. And these work permits should allow them to return to their countries to be with their families.

They should be given the chance to find employment. When they do, they should be taxed, just as legal workers are. And the benefits they receive from those taxes should be no more and no less than what legal workers get.

The federal government’s job should be to figure out how many immigrants we should be letting in each year, and what sort of qualifications we (the US) needs. My guess is that the bulk of what we need (maybe 80%) would be honest, hardworking people happy to work at or below minimum wage. The other 20% would be people that were able to bring in other things we need. (Money and/or valuable skills, mostly.)

Of course, that won’t happen soon. In the meantime, Mayor Adams and the other mayors of sanctuary cities should stop complaining about illegal immigrants being bussed into their cities. They should do what they keep telling conservatives to do: Take responsibility for their “fair share.”