Message to Congress: Immigration

The real issue in immigration is the legality of entrants to this country. It is caused not only by the vast economic difference between the United States and its southern neighbours, but also by the unwillingness of the United States government to recognize our own economic need for the low-cost labour illegal immigrants currently provide.

If there are a million, or two million, or ten million illegal Latin American immigrants in this country, it is because there has been, over a course of many years, an artificial and irrational dearth of residency visas issued to persons in Latin America. Just increase the number of visas being issued; in a few years, persons here illegally will find themselves frozen out of the labour market by the arrival of legal immigrants, and they will move on to other places, or back where they came from --- possibly to apply for legal entry.

If we are seriously concerned that the presence of illegal immigrants depressed wages for legal residents, including citizens --- and this is true only at the very lowest economic levels --- raise the minimum legal wage. If that is unpalatable, accept that legal residents' wages will be depressed by the number of immigrants willing to work for the present legal minimum.

At the same time, make it easier for the United States to deport those legal immigrants who are, or become, undesirable: criminals and (I suppose there must be some, though I've never seen evidence of it) lazy people who just want to sit home and watch telenovelas as if they were citizens. Restrict access to certain (expensive) social services: immigrants are not entitled to unemployment insurance; they are not entitled to welfare benefits; they are not entitled to long-term medical care at public expense. 

They are, though, entitled to work in safe conditions just like the rest of us, and their children are entitled to be educated at public expense just like our own children. They are entitled to reasonable emergency medical care, and if they are required (like the rest of us) to have health insurance, they are entitled to whatever that health insurance provides. 

Concerning the Continental Price Divide

I've always known that South Texas is a relatively inexpensive place to live. That fact is reinforced every time I visit a restaurant or grocery store in Southern California or New York, or even in the Midwest. (The prices at a Wal-Mart in Menominee, Wisconsin took me by surprise.) But I noticed something on this most recent trip that I had never noticed before: there is a dividing line --- a Continental Price Divide, if you will --- that runs down along the Rocky Mountains from Canada to Mexico. Until this trip, I'd always travelled in the southern part of the West: California, Nevada, Arizona. The rise in prices as you go west from Texas is somewhat gradual, although no less noticeable for that. But up north --- and this is what really surprised me --- the change in prices is steep and sharp. In the north, the change is like a cliff, while in the south, it's a sloping plateau.

I'd always assumed that it had to do with things like transport costs and state tax policy. I still think those must necessarily play a part --- witness the difference between the price of gas in South Lake Tahoe, California, and Carson City, Nevada, less than 50 miles away; only the comparatively rapacious tax policy of California, the state with the least efficient government, can account for the great difference. And despite all the cost-lowering progress in transport, brought about by technological advances in my lifetime, moving things still costs money, and moving it farther costs more (to a point).

But these can't be the only factors at work here. I say this because of the sharp difference in prices from one side of the Cascade Mountains to the other, within the state of Washington.

Prices for things tourists are interested in --- primarily gas, lodging, and restaurant food --- are high to the point of exorbitance in Seattle, as in all of coastal Oregon and California. This was more or less what I expected to find, and, sadly, wasn't disappointed. But get across the Cascades into the eastern counties of Washington state, and suddenly prices for gas and food drop. The burger that costs you $9 in Port Townsend, on the Olympic peninsula, is only $6.50 in Grand Coulee. The gallon of premium gas that costs $3.55 in Sea-Tac on Saturday night is only $2.99 in Spokane on Sunday afternoon. 

I suspect the trend holds good in lodging as well, but because of special arrangements made in advance in one place, and not the other, I can't really say with any specificity. All I can say is that I found a reasonably-priced room pretty much at random on the eastern side of the mountains, but couldn't locate one in a week of internet searches on the western side.

I don't know what causes this sharp bifurcation. Why is it that people in, say, Everett, Washington will pay 40% more for a hamburger, and 20% more for gasoline, than their neighbours in Spokane? 

Ideas, anyone?