Illegal Immigration-the
Overlooked Solution
Immigration, especially the illegal kind, is fundamentally an economic issue. Until it is solved, no amount of barbed-wire, cement walls, laws, or enforcement will stop it. To stop it, the economic conditions in the countries that people want to leave have to be made good enough to make them want to stay at home. This, however, requires a shift in economic thinking, for as long as labor is thought of as a commodity rather than a resource, nothing will change.
The world-wide economic question to be answered is this: What does it take to make people everywhere active consumers rather than passive laborers? And the answer, of course, is money.
When thought of as a commodity, current economic thinking requires that labor be purchased as cheaply as possible, whether the purchase is being made domestically or abroad. The consequence of this, however, is that such people can at most become marginal consumers, especially since current economic thinking also requires that prices be set as high as the market will bear. But what the current economic thinking fails to notice is that marginal consumption yields marginal profits.
If economic thought shifted to viewing labor as an economic resource, the emphasis would not be on protecting the investments of stockholders, it would be on increasing the wages of labor without taking those increases back in higher prices. As labor earns more, laborers consume more, businesses sell more, and profits take care of themselves, and shareholder value rises.Most people would be satisfied with the economic conditions in their native lands, and immigration would diminish to a trickle.
When economists began to think of labor as a commodity, the world economy was sent on a road to meager consumption, economic business cycles, continuous uncertainty, and huge amounts of never ending poverty. Yet the road back is quite simple. All we need is the will to take it. (8/28/2005)
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