The Wall Street Journal editorial page is generally pretty conservative but it also takes positions that are considered "pro-business", so it shouldn't be surprising that most of its editorials about illegal immigration cast the issue in a misleading light that serves to further the paper's aim of opening our borders to all comers. I personally think such a system might be preferable to what we've got now, where we keep out the talented and law-abiding and implicitly welcome the poor and criminals, but neither their preference nor the status quo seems ideal to me. A particularly egregious example of the Journal's blatant miscasting is this recent piece defending illegal immigration with baseball. They make the typical improper conflation of immigration (which few oppose) with illegal immigration, and then go a step further and act as if Major League Baseball players are somehow analogous to low-wage, uneducated laborers and criminals.
The new study, "Immigrants, Baseball and the Contributions of Foreign-Born Players to America's Pastime," was conducted by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit organization focused on trade and immigration issues. Executive director Stuart Anderson told us that the statistics he compiled about baseball point to the benefits of immigration for our society as a whole. (The full baseball report is available today on www.nfap.com.)For one, he notes, it's no accident that 44% of this year's All-Star Game starters--and nearly a quarter of the members of the four 2006 playoff teams--were foreign-born. (The study did not even count the foreign players who were on disabled lists as of Aug. 31, though that might have boosted some percentages even higher.) The dream of coming to this country is a huge motivator for talented people who are willing to work hard in order to make a better life for themselves. In baseball, as in many other spheres of life, the ones who make the journey here tend to be achievers.
Professional athletes are statisical outliers in just about every way, and it seems nonsensical to defend a proposal for open borders by pointing to how immigrant baseball players have affected their sport. It's true that many of whose who come here are strongly motivated, but by what? Most just want to work, but there's no way to separate them out from the ones who are here as criminals or came to merely take advantage of the American welfare state.
Most striking, however, is what the study reveals about the relationship between the soaring number of foreign-born players and major-league salaries. One of the most potent anti-immigration myths says that granting visas to foreign workers drives down salaries for Americans in the same field, be it technology or anything else. Like the cry that "they're stealing our jobs!" this myth ignores reality. In truth, an employer's ability to hire all the skilled labor he needs tends to lead to higher productivity and, ultimately, a growing economy that will create a demand for more jobs, not fewer.At any rate, research for the study revealed that an influx of foreigners in the fixed market of 750 major-league roster jobs hasn't depressed salaries. On the contrary. As the percentage of foreign-born players doubled after 1990, average salaries quadrupled. Among the factors at work: the visa-holders contributed to more exciting play and higher attendance.
It's not clear, however, that a flood of cheap labor would contribute to more exciting gardening or higher attendance dishwashing. Unlike baseball, which is an entirely manufactured industry, there are only so many lawns to mow and houses to clean. America will certainly benefit from accepting more highly educated workers who want to stay and become Americans, but baseball and low-wage manual labor are very different industries.
It's perfectly reasonable to argue that we would benefit from a higher immigration rate -- though I wouldn't agree at this moment -- but what rationale is there for completely unregulated immigration? There are six billion people in the world who would love to move to America, but we couldn't possibly absorb them all. Our cuture can only assimilate so many people each year, and even now we're stuggling.
Despite the fact that all men are created equal, not all cultures are equal, and we need to discriminate against potential immigrants who desire to come to America but not to become Americans in every sense of the word.
Yeah, that oped pissed me off too. I stopped reading it at the point they compared legal immigration of highly paid baseball players to the waves and waves of poor workers streaming over the border.
I am finding the WSJ harder and harder to stomach. While their oped page is mostly conservative (with the exceptions you noted), their regular features and articles still have a leftward slant, something that the WSJ oped page itself has mentioned from time to time.