Topic: Trade and Immigration

Border Enforcement without Reform is Doomed to Fail

By
Daniel Griswold

The news media are playing up President Bush’s proposal, to be unveiled in an Oval Office speech tonight, to send National Guard troops to stop illegal immigration across our 2,000-mile border with Mexico. The real news is that the president and the Senate are about to work together to pass real immigration reform, including a new temporary worker program and a path to legalization for the millions of undocumented workers already here. The Cato Institute laid out the intellectual argument for such an approach in two major studies, Willing Workers and Backfire at the Border.

The large majority of workers here illegally have come for the same reasons immigrants have come to our shores throughout our history, to build a better future for themselves and their families–and to help us build a stronger U.S. economy in the process. Our economy continues to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs each year for low-skilled workers, while the supply of native-born Americans willing to fill those jobs continues to shrink. The American workforce is getting older and better educated. Yet our immigration system has no legal channel for a peaceful, hardworking person from Mexico or other countries to enter our country legally to fill those jobs.

Two decades of ramped-up enforcement have failed to fix the problem. We’ve increased spending on border enforcement 10-fold, we’ve built walls for miles into the desert, and we’ve raided hundreds of U.S. business from coast to coast. Yet the number and inflow of illegal workers just keeps growing. We need an immigration system that reflects the realities of American society and the American economy. A program to legalize millions of workers would allow the U.S. government to concentrate its enforcement on the real criminals and terrorists trying to sneak into our country.

It’s good news that President Bush and a majority of Senators seem to understand that enforcement without reform is doomed to fail.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Trade and Immigration

The Devil in Massachusetts

By
Arnold Kling

Betsy McCaughey digs into some of the details on the effects on business of Massachusetts’ brave, new health insurance experiment:

Say, for example, you open a restaurant and don’t provide health coverage. If the chef’s spouse or child is rushed to the hospital and can’t pay because they don’t have insurance, you – the employer – are responsible for up to 100% of the cost of that medical care. There is no cap on your obligation. Once the costs reach $50,000, the state will start billing you and fine you $5,000 a week for every week you are late in filling out the paperwork on your uncovered employees (Section 44). These provisions are onerous enough to motivate the owners of small businesses to limit their full-time workforce to 10 people, or even to lay employees off.

What else is surprising about this new law? Union shops are exempt (Section 32).

Of course, in states like Maryland (where I live), the possibility of killing off jobs in small businesses would hardly deter the passage of similar laws.  As far as politicians here are concerned, undermining the private economy is not a legislative bug.  It’s a feature.

Topics: 
General, Health Care, Trade and Immigration

Medicare

By
Arnold Kling

On May 2, I attended an American Enterprise Institute symposium on Medicare’s financial outlook. That outlook is awful.

I offered the Stroke of a Pen solution of raising the age of eligibility going forward. In Crisis of Abundance, I explain in more detail how to phase out Medicare.

This idea was ridiculed by the panel. For the most part the panel reminded me of an old business cartoon with the caption, “I don’t have a solution, but I really admire your problem.”

However, the most likely alternative to cutting benefits is “cost control,” meaning price controls and/or rationing. The audience and the panel seemed much more receptive to cost control than to cutting benefits. Maybe the AEI is getting ready to play a role in the Hillary Clinton administration.

One of those who emphatically resisted cutting benefits was Mark McClellan, the Medicare czar. He was so gung-ho about Medicare’s quality initiatives that during the Q&A I asked him whether Medicare should take over health care for everyone. Instead of saying, “No,” he gave a political answer about how Medicare’s new initiatives were a “partnership” with the private sector.

Public-private partnerships are problematic, in my view. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and private-public partnerships absolutely corrupt the private sector.

We have reached the point in health care policy where government is like the ten-year-old boy who starts fires so that he can be lauded as a hero for helping to put them out. Massachusetts gives huge hospital subsidies for “uncompensated care”—the subsidies apparently exceed the cost of care, because one of the obstacles to the Massachusetts reform is that hospitals are worried that they will lose money. Anyway, these subsidies, along with dysfunctional insurance regulations, favor uninsured free riders, causing the fire that needs to be put out with health insurance mandates.

McClellan lauded the Massachusetts reforms.

Topics: 
General, Health Care, Trade and Immigration

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