When I dug into Humane and Pro-Growth, I realized that I had fallen behind in the immigration debate. Sure, I’ve read all of my Econlog co-blogger Bryan Caplan’s excellent posts on immigration. And I’m quite familiar with the powerful arguments that Kennedy School economist Lant Pritchett and the Center for Global Development’s Michael Clemens have made for much more open borders. But what I was not familiar with was how anti-immigration many conservatives at National Review and other publications have been and how well journalists like Shikha Dalmia and Kerry Howley have answered them and other critics. My attitude toward this e‑book is much like that of John Maynard Keynes after reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom: “In my opinion it is a grand book…. Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.”

The e‑book is a collection of various articles that Reason writers have published in the magazine and elsewhere since 2006. There is some overlap between the articles. For example, you see a number of times a World Bank estimate that if the wealthier countries allowed a mere 3 percent increase in their labor force through relaxed immigration restrictions, the annual gain to citizens of poor countries would amount to a whopping $300 billion, while the annual gain to the citizens of rich countries would be about $50 billion. But those numbers are so important that they’re worth repeating. Bit by bit, the various articles build a powerful case, on both economic and humanitarian grounds, for allowing many more people in on the American dream.

My favorite articles in the volume were by Dalmia, a senior analyst with the Reason Foundation, and Howley, formerly with Reason magazine and now managing editor of Houstonia Magazine. A close third were the pieces by Jesse James DeConto, a contributing editor to Prism magazine and a regular writer for the Huffington Post and other publications.

Mythbusting / The book is particularly good at busting myths about American immigration. Consider, for example, the claim that illegal immigrants are particularly prone to crime. Obviously, they are—to the extent that they’re breaking the law by being here. But various critics of immigration accuse them of disproportionately breaking laws against murder, rape, burglary, etc. In “Five Myths that Restrictionists Peddle,” Dalmia presents strong evidence against that notion. If illegal immigrants were more dangerous, one would expect crime rates to increase as the percent of residents who are illegal immigrants increases. The evidence, though, is the exact opposite. She writes:

The violent and property crime rate in Arizona actually declined between 1998 and 2008 as its illegal immigrant population soared, debunking the central rationale for the harsh anti-immigrant law it recently adopted. The same is true for California, New Mexico, and Texas. Indeed, El Paso, a Texas border town that has a predominantly Hispanic population—much of it foreign, illegal, and poor—had the third lowest violent crime rate in 2008, after Honolulu and New York.

That makes sense. The last thing illegal immigrants want is contact with law enforcement—it could lead to their being deported.

Why, then, do many Americans think that illegal immigrants are particularly dangerous? Could it be because we’ve heard people like Rep. Steve King (R‑Iowa) say that illegal immigrants murder 12 Americans a day and kill another 13 Americans daily by driving drunk? In a 2009 article, “The El Paso Miracle,” Reason contributing editor Radley Balko artfully debunks King’s statistics. According to Balko, King says he got those numbers from a Government Accountability Office study that he had requested. Well, not quite. What the GAO study showed is that 27 percent of prisoners in federal prisons are non-citizens. According to Balko, King then applied that 27 percent to all murders and drunk-driving fatalities and, voilà, concluded that 27 percent of those crimes are committed by non-citizens. Talk about proof by assumption! I would not want King teaching statistics. Of course, as Balko notes, most convicted murderers and drunk-driving offenders are in state prisons or local jails, not in federal prisons. And according to the U.S. Justice Department, only 6.4 percent of inmates in all prisons combined are non-citizens. My own quick check of U.S. data shows that in 2010, 7.3 percent of people living in the United States were non-citizens. In other words, non-citizens are slightly underrepresented in U.S. prisons.

What about the idea that illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes and disproportionately collect the benefits of the welfare state? Dalmia punctures that myth, writing, “[A]vailable evidence suggests that unauthorized workers contribute more in taxes than they consume in services.” She quotes a National Research Council finding that over their lifetimes and factoring in their children’s taxes, unskilled immigrant families pay on average $80,000 more in federal taxes than they consume in federal benefits. Moreover, she notes:

[T]hat was before the 1996-welfare reform act. Since then, illegals have been barred from collecting most means-tested federal benefits except for emergency medical services. However, they didn’t get a reprieve from taxes. All of them pay state sales taxes and property taxes (through rent) that help offset the cost of roads, schools, and other non–means tested services they use. And 62 percent of them also pay federal income taxes (via withholdings) while 66 percent contribute to Social Security and Medicare. Their Social Security contributions put $50 billion annually into something called the “earnings suspense file” that they’ll likely never see again because they use fake Social Security numbers on their returns that can’t be traced back to them.

One objection many people have to immigration, legal or illegal, is that “they take our jobs.” But in “Don’t Badmouth Unskilled Immigrants,” George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen and Daniel M. Rothschild, associate director of the Mercatus Center’s Global Prosperity Initiative, note that much foreign labor complements that of U.S. citizens. For example, “54 percent of tailors” in the United States are foreign-born. Moreover, much of the labor that illegal immigrants do is the kind of hard work that our immigrant grandfathers did, but that few Americans will do today.

In his 2006 article, “America Spurns the Foreigners It Needs,” DeConto tells a moving story about legal and illegal immigrants working on Christmas tree farms in North Carolina. Often working 10- to 16-hour shifts hauling and piling Christmas trees, they worked for wages ranging from $6 to $8 an hour. DeConto highlights the story of a legal immigrant named Buca. He writes, “To comply with federal law, Buca must return to his native Veracruz, in southern Mexico, and renew his H‑2A temporary guest worker visa or risk losing it and drawing up to $10,000 in fines for his employer.” Thus his family is temporarily disrupted every time he has to travel for renewal.

One of the most common views that Americans hold, whether or not they oppose immigration, is that illegal immigrants have “cut in line” in front of would-be immigrants who are trying to enter the United States legally. The fact, notes Dalmia, is that “there is no queue for unskilled workers to stand in”—that is, no immigration slots allocated to unskilled workers. One implication of this fact, she notes, is that “Amnesty for them therefore has zero bearing on the wait time of skilled workers.”

Dalmia also challenges columnist George Will’s view that the Constitution should not be read literally to give citizenship to everyone born in the United States. Will would not automatically extend citizenship to people born here if the birth mother was here illegally. Dalmia notes that the idea that illegal immigrants are showing up to have an “anchor baby” that would enable the family to stay in the United States doesn’t fit the facts. Quoting a Time magazine report, she writes, “[O]f all the babies born in 2008 to at least one unauthorized parent, over 80 percent were to moms who had been in the United States for over one year. Actual instances of ‘birth tourism,’ where moms expressly came here to deliver babies on American soil, accounted for about two-tenths of 1 percent of all births in 2006.” Besides, she writes, “Kids have to wait until 21 to seek legal status for illegal parents and the parents must typically then wait outside the U.S. for at least 10 years before they can obtain their green cards.”

Conservatives? / As I noted above, I had no idea how nasty some conservatives at National Review are, both to illegal immigrants and to those who would hire them. In her 2007 piece, “Women Need Immigrants,” Howley reports on a blog post by National Review writer John Derbyshire titled, “Mow Your Own Lawn.” And she quotes National Review editor Rich Lowry’s statement, “It’s time to tell middle-class families across the country, from California to the suburbs of New York: Mow your own damn lawns.” Howley, showing more sympathy than Lowry for those who would employ illegal immigrants, replies: “We could mow our own lawns. We could also make our own candlesticks and churn our own butter. The question to ask isn’t why we don’t live in a more self-sufficient America, but why Americans—and especially women—would ever want to.” Howley, noticing the obvious gains from trade, sympathizes with immigrants also. She writes, “There is no development policy, no feasible amount of foreign aid, no poundage of fair trade coffee that will help someone from a developing country to a better life more than opening the door to a better economy, instantly doubling or tripling the value of their labor.” Amen.

Various authors also point out the fact that serious restrictions on immigration require a seriously large government. In a 2012 piece, “Big Brother’s Border Blindness,” Reason contributing editor Greg Beato points out that between 2000 and 2010, the Border Patrol’s budget had grown from $1 billion to $3.4 billion and the number of agents had grown from 9,212 to 21,444. In a 2012 article, “Captive Citizens,” Dalmia calls attention to the “business death penalty,” first pushed in Arizona by then-governor Janet Napolitano. The penalty is a kind of “three strikes law” in which the third time that businesses are caught employing illegal immigrants, they are forbidden to operate in the state. That’s not small government.

So what should be done about immigration? One promising proposal made by Pritchett in an extensive interview with Howley is to let people in as guest workers but not give them all the benefits of citizenship, including welfare. He challenges the late Milton Friedman’s view that open borders are incompatible with the welfare state. Pointing out countries with broad welfare systems but liberal immigration laws, Pritchett says:

Singapore manages to maintain an enormously high level of benefits for its citizens with massive mobility. Kuwait has one of the highest immigrant populations in the world, and you can’t ask for a more cradle-to-grave welfare state than what Kuwait gives its citizens. So it’s obviously possible to maintain whatever level of welfare state you want and have whatever level of labor mobility you want, as long as you’re willing to separate the issues.

What about the concern that guest workers would be second-class citizens? That’s better, he says, than what they are now in their home countries: fifth-class citizens.

I’ve hit a few highlights, but there’s so much more in this fine book. Read, learn, and agitate for open (or, at least, more-open) borders.