Illegal editor: immigration restrictions hurt legal residents.

AuthorWelch, Matt
PositionFrom the Top

I FIRST BROKE immigration law one month after my 22nd birthday. Czechoslovakia had a rule, left over from the recently expired Communist regime, that foreigners were required to change around $15 per day at the state-run tourist office. Not only did I rail to meet the daily legal minimum, mostly due to poverty, but I changed whatever greenbacks I could with some strictly verboten Egyptian dudes, because they gave a 40 percent better return (when not robbing you, that is). So I was an immigration scofflaw and a violator of my host country's domestic laws, and that's without even considering the kinds of materials I was having mailed to me from Amsterdam.

The way I figured it, then as now, is if the laws governing my place of residence were dumb and/or prevented me from carrying out my peaceful day-to-day transactions, there was no reason to pull a muscle straining to comply.

It wasn't long thereafter that I hired my first $100-a-month illegal aliens. It all sounds so terrible that way, until you consider that the first such hire was me, along with my American co-conspirators and a couple of Yugoslav war refugees. One hundred dollars was lousy in any language, but still higher than the prevailing minimum wage. And it wasn't like we were going to find an ethnically homogeneous pool of local Czechs and Slovaks willing and able to work marathon hours launching an English-language newspaper in just four months. Like start-up businesses everywhere, we had a strong desire to become fully legal in order to avoid uncertainty and potentially costly hassles, but that goal just wasn't as urgent initially as getting product into customers' hands.

These memories come to mind whenever a friend or foe poses one of the most potent questions in America's ongoing family feud over immigration: "What part about illegal do you not understand?" Leaving aside the fact that most of these interlocutors have, at some point in their lives, knowingly (and illegally!) written a wrong date on a check, imbibed an illegal drug, of undervalued an item in a suitcase, there is something undeniably resonant about the criticism that illegal aliens openly flout U.S. law when they cross the border or overstay their visas, and then compound their original crime by either working off the books or obtaining fake Social Security cards. The whole arrangement can feel like an affront to the rule of law, a fact that immigration enthusiasts like me forget or downplay at our peril.

But as...

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