Anti-Immigration and Protectionism

The argument on immigration usually goes something like this,

“Legal immigration is good, but illegal immigration is bad.”

For now, I will ignore the logical and economic fallacies inherent in such a statement, and simply shake my head that the US is further restricting the former in an effort to battle the latter.

If legal immigration is a good thing, why would we restrict it in order to battle illegal immigration? The United States massively raised the cost of visas for Indians coming to this country. The new legislation raises the visa fee to $2,000 per application, and of course, there is no guarantee that an applicant will actually receive the visa.

Why has the U.S. put such an extreme burden on potential Indian immigrants? The answer is to fund the $600 million border security bill, also passed by Congress.

This makes no sense. While I understand the need to protect our border, illegal immigration is not only unharmful, but even beneficial. It’s unfortunate that it has been turned into a bogeyman that politicians of all stripes seek to capitalize on. So not only are we going to great pains to stop something that is beneficial to our economy, we are actually hurting ourselves to do it!

Not only are we restricting legal immigration, thus voluntarily giving away its positive economic benefits, this visa rate hike is simply a measure to protect U.S. IT firms and therefore amounts to nothing more than a tariff.

With such a tariff, we lose out on the clear benefits of Comparative Advantage plus we expose ourselves to retaliatory measures which are commonplace in response to protectionist attitudes.

Immigration restrictions and protective tariffs are both very harmful to any economy so to implement one to “save” us from the other makes no sense at all.