Everybody likes to criticize New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. From his often-comic writing style to simplistic sound bites about interviewing taxi cab drivers, he’s earned humorous criticism over the years. But Friedman’s recent column titled “We Need a High Wall With a Big Gate on the Southern Border” was correct in many libertarian-adjacent ways. Much of his column could have been based off original Cato research.
Friedman began with the admission that at least three factors are driving the surge of migrants at the southern border and he doesn’t know how to apportion blame among them. He singles out seasonal trends, President Biden’s actions, and the recovering U.S. economy. There are other factors, to be sure, such as actions in the last two years of the Trump administration and Mexico’s changing laws and policies, but Friedman identified some of the broad potential causes for this specific surge. It’s refreshing to read Friedman say he doesn’t know which of those causes is dominant because we don’t yet know either. Frankly, they all play a role.
Friedman then writes that the more than 170,000 apprehensions of migrants along the border in March 2021 is evidence that the U.S. needs a “high wall with a big gate.” Friedman then goes off the rails when he writes that, “Only by assuring Americans that we have a high enough wall to control illegal immigration — or its equivalent in terms of border controls and repatriation measures — can we maintain a public consensus for a big gate.” He gets the causality reversed: A big gate protects us more than a high wall. As my colleagues and I have noted, expanding legal immigration is the only way to get sustainable control over the border as new visas channel would-be illegal immigrants into the legal system.
From 2000–2018, when the U.S. increased the number of lower-skilled H‑2 visas issued to Mexican migrants, the number of illegal immigrant Mexicans who crossed the border dropped dramatically. We estimate that every three visas issued to Mexicans reduced the number of Mexican illegal immigrant apprehensions by two because they were driven into the legal market.
Friedman later writes:
Without proper border controls and simultaneous investments in stabilizing weak countries — which Biden has smartly proposed — we and the European Union will face many more surges. And you can be sure that another Trump-like figure will emerge to exploit them — and undermine support for legal immigration right when we need it more than ever.
Sending taxpayer money to poor countries won’t reduce emigration and may actually increase it, even if it’s effective at increasing development, but Friedman’s emphasis on enforcement is also misplaced. The only way to get sustainable and enforceable border controls is to have a big enough gate that draws in large numbers of would-be illegal immigrants into the country legally. One reading of Friedman’s piece argues that enforcement must occur first and then Congress can increase legal immigration as a benefit second. It should be reversed: Legal immigration will increase the enforceability of our immigration laws.
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