Opinion

Opening the borders for a richer nation

One Sunday, I went to Brighton Beach for brunch with Simon Weber, then the editor of the Jewish Forward, and his most famous writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer.

When we were seated at a table of smoked fish and cheeses, I reported with pride that The Wall Street Journal, where I was then working, had just come out in favor of a constitutional amendment to ensure open borders.

“Oy,” Singer exclaimed. “All those Mexicans!”

This was shocking, particularly coming from America’s most celebrated immigrant writer, a Nobel laureate, no less. I protested so vehemently that Si Weber motioned me out onto his balcony (which overlooked a part of the city where foreign languages were spoken for miles around).

Weber shook his finger in my face and said, “I know you guys from The Wall Street Journal. All you want is cheap labor.”

Well, that was 29 years ago. Simon Weber, one of the great editors in the city, is long gone; he died in 1987. But I see from Bill Keller’s column in Sunday’s New York Times that this complaint about cheap labor is still coming from the liberal camp.

Keller devotes the better part of a column to the opposition to the immigration bill from Democratsand their ilk. He quotes one of them as warning of a“huge political backlash once it becomes obvious to Americans that a broad swath of our citizenry is being sold out in favor of vote-hungry politicians, corporations eager to cut labor costs even further, and military contractors trolling for still more pork.”

“I never thought I’d see the day when I’d be grateful for the knee-jerk opposition of Republicans in the House,” Keller quotes another liberal as writing; the immigration bill is “a slap in the face of the American working class and the millions of unemployed Americans.” He quotes another as writing that the Democrats “no longer represent anyone but billionaires and Big Business.”

Keller is of the view that if immigration reform fails, the blame will belong to the Republicans. Some of them will deserve the blame, no doubt. But many are in the camp that understands that more immigrants mean a bigger economic pie for everyone — that is, the conservative camp that is wedded to economic liberty.

This camp’s greatest tribune at the moment is a new generation at the Journal editorial page. There is also President George W. Bush, who pushed for immigration reform when he was president and this week gave an interview to ABC News in support of the immigration bill.

“I think it’s very important to fix a broken system, to treat people with respect and have confidence in our capacity to assimilate people,” Bush said, without getting into particulars of the current bill. Mayor Bloomberg has been terrific on immigration, throughout his time in public life.

But where are the social conservatives? It has always struck me that this ought to be a merger made in heaven: On immigration, economic conservatives should have the support of pro-lifers, who hew to the teachings of the sages to choose life and comprehend that population growth is economic growth, and that more people means our social and economic salvation.

Yet there was Sarah Palin, one of the most pro-life politicians in the country, condemning supporters of immigration reform, both Republicans and Democrats, with the same arguments the socialist Simon Weber made to me a generation ago. She calls the bill “an absolute betrayal of working-class Americans.”

She’s not alone. Such heroic politicians as Rep. Steve King of Iowaare advancing the same arguments against a bill that would lead to more Americans.

It is hard to think of a single politician who has made the argument that pro-life economic principles and pro-life religious teachings agree on the need for growth — and should trump xenophobia. Yet more than 30 years of covering this debate convinces me, as I tried to convince Simon Weber long ago, that the politician who figures out that point has the best chance of breaking through the standoff on immigration reform.