Milton Friedman - Illegal Immigration - PT 1

Some interesting thoughts on immigration from economist Milton Friedman ( [VIDEO] ): I’ve always been amused by a kind of a paradox. Suppose you go around and ask people: ‘The United States before 1914, as you know, had completely free immigration. Anybody could get in a boat and come to these shores and if landed at Ellis Island he was an immigrant. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? You will find that hardly a soul who will say that it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. ‘But what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?’ ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘We couldn’t possibly have free immigration today. Why, that would flood us with immigrants from India, and God knows where. We’d be driven down to a bare subsistence level.’ What’s the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There’s a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not? Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promises a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible th

One potential side effect of a minimum income is to make the U.S. (or any country implementing it), even more immigrant hostile. These programs usually only consider the effects in a vacuum, not with respect to much larger population that wants to get in. Either immigration needs to be restricted, or you have a "lower" non citizen class that doesn't get these benefits from the beginning (ironically perpetuating more inequality). Milton Friedman discussed this fundamental contention between welfare and free immigration, and it's coveted a little here: [VIDEO] .

It's fair to bemoan the general decline of your society with the desire to better your personal lot through immigrating. It's likely that they don't dislike foreigners but they do dislike being forced to subsidise them via taxes. It's a side effect of the welfare state. Milton Friedmen convers it pretty well in [VIDEO] . It's an old problem :/