Georgia’s law requires private and government employers to use E-Verify, a federal program, to ensure that workers are eligible to work in the United States. The law also increased the penalties for using fake documents to obtain jobs; offenders now face up to 15 years in prison and $250,000 in fines. Moreover, the law makes it a criminal offense to intentionally transport or harbor illegal immigrants, authorizes local and state law enforcement officials to arrest illegal immigrants and house them in state and federal jails, and requires documentation verifying legal status before people can apply for food stamps or government housing.

Alabama’s law goes even further than Georgia’s. It not only clamps down on illegal immigration, it also prevents illegal immigrants already in the state from establishing themselves. The law requires public schools to verify students’ residency status with birth certificates, bans illegal immigrants from state colleges, and outlaws transporting, harboring, employing, or renting property to undocumented immigrants. The bill also requires law enforcement officers to detain and investigate anyone they reasonably suspect is an illegal.

Opposition to the new laws emerged immediately in both states. In Alabama, churches and charities thought the wording so stringent that they worried about being implicated simply for ministering to illegal immigrants. Episcopal, Methodist, and Catholic church officials in Alabama sued Governor Robert Bentley and Attorney General Luther Strange. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Alabama and Georgia, as well as other civil liberties advocacy groups, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, also brought forward lawsuits because the new law will likely result in racial profiling.

While the specific methods of implementation for Alabama’s and Georgia’s immigration laws could be altered in the hope of minimizing their social consequences by, for example, randomly checking people for citizenship instead of profiling people who look different or out of place, the negative economic results cannot be avoided or minimized unless the laws are ignored. New business paperwork, law enforcement, and incarceration will impose steep costs. All industries will suffer some negative effects, and the fortunes of a number of industries, such as agriculture, restaurants, landscaping, catfish and poultry processing, and construction, will be seriously compromised. Jeffrey Passel estimated in a 2006 study that across the nation, illegal immigrants make up 24 percent of the agricultural workforce, 17 percent of the cleaning industry workforce, 14 percent of the construction workforce, 12 percent of the food preparation workforce, and 9 percent of the production workforce.

The effects of the new laws are already being felt throughout the agricultural industry in both states. Illegal immigrants are now so afraid of imprisonment and deportation that they have stopped supplying their labor during harvest seasons. And it’s not just illegals who are fleeing the state. Green-card carrying immigrants also quit their jobs in protest and are leaving Alabama.

Wasted Crops

Alabama Live reports that central Alabama farmers requested an emergency suspension of the law because millions of dollars of crops were at risk of not being harvested due to labor shortages. In the Wall Street Journal, Alabama Deputy Commissioner for Agriculture and Industry Brett Hall was quoted saying: “We have a big problem on our hands. . . . [F]armers and business people could go under.” Economists say the law will hurt Alabama’s economy, but politicians such as State Sen. Scott Beason (a Republican) called their arguments “absolutely, positively wrong”. He also called the Alabama law “the biggest jobs program for Alabamians that has ever been passed.”

Meanwhile Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia’s law has already caused a severe enough labor shortage that farmers are at risk of leaving up to $300 million of crops rotting in their fields.

The construction industry, which has relied on immigrants in recent years, is also being hit hard. Despite the remaining slack from the housing crisis, delays in Alabama and Georgia are common. Nowhere is the story more tragic than in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where residents and businesses downtown were hit by a tornado last April. Cheap, efficient labor was desperately needed. Yet reconstruction in Tuscaloosa has been slow and has lagged behind Joplin, Missouri, which was hit with a much more severe tornado a month later. While some of the delays in Tuscaloosa can be blamed on red tape, the harsh immigration law certainly has not helped matters.

Unambiguous Benefits

Despite politicians’ ill-informed rhetoric and pro-law rallies by Tea Party groups, the economics of the issue remain unambiguous: Immigration, whether legal or illegal, is a net general benefit for the people of a state or country. The argument is an easy extension of David Ricardo’s argument for free trade; blocking immigration hampers the free operation of an economy in much the same way that blocking trade does. It prevents resources, including labor, from being reallocated to those industries and locations where consumers most urgently want them.

The evidence shows that immigration does not take away jobs or even decrease wages for native workers. Julian Simon in a 1995 study found that immigration does not increase unemployment for U.S. citizens, even among minority and low-skilled workers. George Borjas and Lawrence Katz, in a study published in 2007, found that the only group adversely affected by immigration in the United States was high school dropouts, who saw a long-run 4.8 percent reduction in wages.

Borjas and Katz assumed that immigrant and native workforces do the same work, an assumption that does not bear out empirically. Even with that assumption, however, Borjas in 2008 estimated the net economic gain to native workers from immigration to be around $22 billion annually. When Gianmarco I. P. Ottavanio and Giovanni Peri corrected for this assumption in a 2006 study, they found immigration actually increased natives’ wages in the short and long runs because immigrants complement the native workforce.

More Workers, More Prosperity

As coauthor Luke points out from his farm experience, Americans usually don’t want the jobs that immigrants are willing to take.

The number of jobs in an economy is unlimited because our wants are unlimited. The more people working, the further down our list of wants we can get. Moreover, the more people working, the more potential customers—and hence business opportunities—we have. Immigrants buy or rent houses, purchase food and goods, and dine at restaurants. This is why the United States did not suffer mass unemployment as our population drastically increased over the last few decades, and why there wasn’t a jump in unemployment when women joined the labor force. (See graph.)

Another common argument for the Alabama and Georgia laws is that immigrants will flood U.S. cities beyond capacity in search of higher living standards. If people migrated en masse to those areas with the highest wage rates, one may wonder why all U.S. citizens don’t flood Malibu, California. The reason is that real estate values adjust upward to act as a natural brake on migration. In addition, while there is much need for immigrant labor in the United States, workers will come here only as long as the expected wage exceeds their domestic wages plus the costs of relocating. As more immigrants resettle, the relevant wage will drop, decreasing their main incentive for coming in the first place.

The Welfare Argument

A third justification for legal restrictions is to prevent immigrants from living off government programs. Anyone concerned about this should ask why the Alabama, Arizona, and Georgia laws focus almost all enforcement efforts on preventing immigrants from working. Although immigration laws have provided strong incentives for immigrants not to work, Simon’s 1995 study calculated that on net they paid more into government programs than they took out.

The justifications for Alabama’s and Georgia’s laws fail to pass the test of basic economics. Not only do these laws not bode well for the economy, they also tar the civil rights images of two states that historically have suffered poor reputations in that department. In a country founded on open immigration and the basic freedom of human association and commerce, laws of this nature are a travesty.

We can assume it fell short since the federal government is ever incompetent and has been tight-lipped about how many miles it has completed.

More people cross this international boundary each year than any other in the world—250 million with government permission, a fraction of that without. (Estimates range from 400,000 to a million.) Patches of the border, particularly urban ones, have been fenced and policed for decades. But this dotted line inconvenienced rather than stopped folks who neglected to secure a bureaucrat’s consent for their trip: Travelers trying to exercise their inalienable right to free movement simply went around the barriers. The feds never like being outfoxed, so they extended the fencing beyond populated areas. This drove migrants into increasingly remote and hostile terrain. There they not only had to survive encounters with America’s Border Patrol but also dehydration and other dangers in the desert. No More Deaths, a group that caches food and water along routes migrants are likely to take, estimates that at least 238 travelers perished in Arizona alone in 2006, with more than 4,000 “men, women, and children [losing] their lives in the deserts of the US-Mexico borderlands” from 1998 to the present.

Walling off Rights

You might think that would be tragedy enough for anyone. But as former President George W. Bush said when he signed the SFA, “We have a responsibility to enforce our laws. We have a responsibility to secure our borders. We take this responsibility seriously.” Apparently far more seriously than we do corpses or constitutional limits on government. And so the Act “authorize[d] the Department of Homeland Security to increase the use of advanced technology, like cameras and satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles to reinforce our infrastructure at the border.”

Authorizing DHS to grab more power is about as necessary as authorizing sparks to fly upward. Nevertheless, Congress exempted DHS from all federal laws as part of its 2005 REAL ID legislation. All it has to do is claim that a law impedes progress on the wall. Section 102 (c)1 of the REAL ID Act says, “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section.”

This immunity extends all the way to judicial review: Judges can’t “order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision,” according to Section 102 (c) 2B. So far the unrelieved victims have been mostly Americans whose property the agency has seized or destroyed. Surely even those most opposed to immigration would agree that stopping it does not excuse such tyranny and injustice against citizens.

Environmental Destruction

Among the many regulations DHS is ignoring are environmental ones. But Mother Nature isn’t as easily overridden. There are consequences for flouting the laws of physics, for example. And DHS’s insouciance towards things like gravity and water has already hurt the government’s own property.

On July 12, 2008, a heavy rain near Ajo, Arizona, clogged drains in completed sections of the fence, damming the downpour and flooding Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the only area in the United States where the plant grows wild. Park superintendent Lee Baiza told the Associated Press, “[We] had suggested that [DHS] take into consideration everything that can happen with a weather event. . . . We had a concern that this was going to happen.” And this storm wasn’t even a hurricane such as frequently roars through the Gulf and neighboring Texas.

The Rio Grande River separates Texas from Mexico for 1,254 miles before heading north. It waters a huge variety of wildlife, and that abundance draws conservancies to the area. Some are private, such as the Sabal Palm Audubon Center in Brownsville, Texas. Others are government-held lands that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife or National Parks Service manage. Over the decades, these organizations have cooperated with one another and the Mexican government to form a “wildlife corridor” so animals can range freely even if people can’t. The corridor also acts as a sanctuary for rare or endangered species. But DHS seems as hostile to animal life as it does to human life. It is hacking through this territory with a wide corridor of walls running parallel to one another, asphalt roads between, and hundreds of yards of cleared land to the north and south.

Barriers for stopping bipeds stop quadrupeds, too. This imperils animals that wander widely to feed or mate. Audubon Magazine points out that the inbreeding the wall compels will weaken if not exterminate America’s last colony of ocelots. This cat once roamed the Rio Grande and southern Arizona but now counts fewer than 100 members on the Texas side of the border.

A biologist at the University of New Mexico worries about other predators as well. Dr. Joe Cook told the Inter Press Service, “There is no quetion that jaguars . . . in the U.S. and northern Mexico would be significantly affected by the wall. . . . The only hope to preserve large carnivores in the wild is to have large areas of continuous, unfragmented habitat.”

The Mississippi and Central migratory flyways meet at the Rio Grande. Birds that once rested there during thousand-mile journeys will now contend with barren, paved land instead of trees, bushes, nuts, and seeds. Floodlights that turn desert night into day to discover migrants are already disorienting not only birds but bats and butterflies as well.

Financial Destruction

Matching the wall’s environmental disasters are its financial ones. In January 2007 the Congressional Research Service figured that 700 miles would cost about $49 billion, including maintenance. But as usual with the state’s estimates, this one probably isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, especially if the rest of the barrier is anything like the 14 miles that wind inward from the California coast at San Diego. The first fence there—ten-foot-tall walls of welded steel—went up in 1993. Next came a “secondary” wall, this one 14 feet high, about 103 feet to the north. A chain-link fence runs parallel to that, with “stadium lighting” throwing every ugly detail into sharp relief. This monstrosity was supposed to cost $1 million per mile, but that skyrocketed to $3.8 million. And construction isn’t yet finished, in part because the California Coastal Commission frets about erosion. The bit that remains unfenced meanders through more challenging terrain, with construction estimated to reach $10 million per mile. If the price for the other 700 miles escalates proportionally, we are looking at an outlay of anywhere from $200 to $490 billion.

There are other, more hidden expenses. For example, the Fish & Wildlife Service has spent $100 million of our money over the last three decades to buy and replant land near the Rio Grande. The wall will ruin that investment. It will also end “eco-tourism” and the $125 million that 200,000 visitors annually spend in the hopes of glimpsing an ocelot or a Muscovy duck.

Naturally, while most Americans pay for the fence, a select few profit. DHS hired Boeing to implement its Secure Border Initiative (SBI) in September 2006. The company will install 1,800 towers as a “virtual fence” on our northern and southern borders within three years to “detect and track intruders through the use of cameras, sensors and motion detectors,” as Federal Computer Week puts it—all for only $2.5 billion. Needless to say, Boeing and DHS trumpeted their lucrative deal as a revolutionary, unprecedented, sure-fire solution for the “border problem” the feds have created. But the Washington Post took a more jaundiced view, citing the government’s “series of failures [in] control[ling] U.S. borders.” So did agents on the ground. Rich Pierce, executive vice president of the Border Patrol’s union, told Federal Computer News, “[SBI]—it’s been tried and it’s failed. . . . They’re not going to try anything new. . . . The people in the field know it’s not going to work.”

So did the legislators voting the funds. Rep. Harold Rogers was chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee from 2003 until January. According to the June 26, 2006 issue of Government Computer News, he “noted that spending on border security since 1995 has ‘quadrupled from $5.1 billion to over $17.9 billion,’ and the number of agents has jumped from 5,000 to 12,319. ‘However, during this same period, the number of illegal immigrants has jumped from 5 million to an estimated 12 million,’ Rogers said. ‘The policy of more money and no results is no longer in effect. We will not fund programs with false expectations.’” That would explain his subcommittee’s handing $39.9 billion to DHS in FY2009 with Rogers’s “support,” as he proclaimed on his website, despite the agency’s reputation even among the feds as one of their most wasteful and dysfunctional bureaucracies.

Sending Property Owners to Limbo . . .

Knowing that the fence won’t stop immigration, that it merely allows politicians to look as though they’re fixing an issue they’ve ginned up into a crisis, must particularly gall the property owners losing homes and businesses. Most of those victims live in Texas since the feds already own much of the land along the other states’ borders.

The barriers have always been more of a sieve than a fence since they proceed in fits and starts with long gaps between. The new miles of fence will not be much different, according to the Border Patrol: Tom Rudd, the Patrol’s chief in Brownsville, Texas, is “expecting a total of nine miles of fence segments,” according to PBS. “The segments, Rudd says, will act like funnels, pushing migrants into areas where his agents will be waiting to capture them.”

Those funnels bisect plenty of private property, including homes, farms, businesses, and nature preserves, as well as national parks and even towns. Stunningly, they don’t line the actual border. Some of the wall lies as much as two miles north of it. Landowners whose properties fall within that region face a bizarre limbo, severed from the rest of the country—and from the services their taxes supposedly buy them. Audubon Magazine quotes the Society’s executive director in Texas, Anne Brown, on the fate of its Sabal Palm Center: “From what we’ve heard, we’ll have to close. We can’t figure a way to keep it open, because we’ll be cut off from the rest of the United States. Will we be insured? Will we receive city services? We can’t let Ernie [the caretaker] live here anymore.” The magazine adds, “The sanctuary and its unique plants and wildlife will be taken from the American people, and what survives will be, for all intents and purposes, ceded to Mexico.”

Ordinary owners in Limbo Land also face extraordinary challenges. Pamela Taylor is an elderly émigré from England who married an American soldier 50 years ago, then moved to Brownsville with him. If anyone should welcome the protection the wall allegedly provides, it would be Mrs. Taylor. She once arrived home to find a migrant hiding from the Border Patrol in her living room. But she fears DHS and its fence far more than she does people looking for jobs and better lives. “They said the fence was gonna go right across the street,” she told PBS. “And . . . my son-in-law asked, ‘Well, do you mind, how are we going to get out?’ And the fellow from the Corps of Engineers said, ‘Well, you know, we hadn’t really thought about that. I guess you’re gonna have to follow the border patrol out.’” Obviously, that enormously complicates even the simple errand of buying groceries. And it could be fatal should Mrs. Taylor need a doctor.

PBS asked the Border Patrol’s Rudd about ingress and egress for the Americans caught in this quandary. Rudd said there will be “gates” and that “we’re still lookin’ right now—at different—locking mechanisms of what’s gonna work best in certain areas. . . . [O]ne approach that I’m lookin’ at . . . is—a push-key type, you know, the—the number system, a push pad . . . enforced with a camera—so we can make sure that that number or that combination—doesn’t get compromised . . . basically work with the owner to find out who’s gonna be in that area, what kinda vehicle they’d be driving.” The government hasn’t touched Mrs. Taylor’s property and so isn’t offering even eminent domain’s pittance, but it robs her nonetheless. Her land will be worthless. What buyer wants a hassle every time he needs a quart of milk?

DHS plans to swipe some properties lying directly in the fence’s path in their entirety, particularly when the parcel is small because the owner is poor. Other times, the fence threatens only a portion of the property—but it might as well take the whole piece because once again it’s destroying the land’s value. Leonard and Debbie Loop and their children own a 1,000-acre farm in Brownsville. But the wall will exile 800 acres to Limbo Land.

. . . Unless They’re Rich or Connected

Given that the wall doesn’t follow the border, as well as its frequent stops and starts, its placement is arbitrary at best. Many victims have noticed that while DHS expects them to sacrifice their interests, it is skirting property belonging to wealthy, politically connected neighbors. One victim, Eloisa Tamez, is a 72-year-old woman who still lives on some of the 12,000 acres her ancestors received in a Spanish land grant. She’s been down this road before. The feds stole more than half her holdings in the 1930s to build levees, and they didn’t pay a dime for any of it. The Texas Observer reports that now they want more. But the wall gobbling Ms. Tamez’s home stops short two miles down the road. That just happens to be the edge of Sharyland Plantation, 6,000 acres that billionaire Ray L. Hunt is developing into a luxurious, gated community of million-dollar homes. Hunt, of course, is not only George W. Bush’s buddy but his benefactor, too, since he’s kicking in $35 million toward the presidential library. The wall resumes on the other side of Sharyland.

Under former secretary Michael Chertoff, DHS refused to answer questions from folks like Ms. Tamez. But silence has long been one of the agency’s favorite tactics. It almost always withholds information on the grounds that telling the citizens who pay its bills what it’s doing with their money would jeopardize national security. It will neither confirm nor deny who’s on its notorious Terrorist Watch List, for instance, not even to the victims themselves. And so it goes with the wall. DHS refuses to verify its plans or discuss its rationale for the wall’s route. That leaves many owners grappling with rumors and stomach-churning uncertainty. Others are fairly sure DHS will steal their holdings because it has already ordered them to sign waivers allowing surveyors to measure their property. Those who refuse find themselves facing condemnation of their land.

Chertoff tried to cast cooperating with the agency’s theft as a patriotic duty. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, he announced in February 2008, “I respect private property. But you cannot make border security and national security an individual choice for each individual landowner. . . . [W]hen people are smuggling drugs and human beings across the border, for an individual landowner to say, ‘I don’t care. I want to make sure that my view of the river is unobstructed,’ is not an acceptable answer.”

Dictatorical and Dishonest

That’s not only arrogant and dictatorial, it’s also profoundly dishonest. Protestors do not mourn vanishing vistas. They are instead defending their homes and businesses, some of which have been handed down through their families for generations. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s unconstitutional jihads against those drugs and people it doesn’t like forces folks who want to transport either to smuggle them. Politicians have tried to control people’s movements and have failed at this immoral task; nevertheless, they expect the rest of us to cooperate with their new, desperate, criminal measures. Why?

Unfortunately, Leviathan has convinced most Americans that its campaign against “illegal” drugs justifies any and all abuses. So now it excuses its militarization of the Mexican border because of the marijuana crossing it. The feds take the same tack with “illegal” immigration. But they also spin things a bit differently to hide their heartlessness. They bewail the “smuggling of human beings,” conflating immigration with—incredibly enough—slavery.

In a speech on September 9, 2008, at the “Stop Human Trafficking Symposium,” conveniently sponsored by Customs and Border Patrol, Chertoff announced that “the line between so-called voluntary migration and human trafficking is not a very bold line. It is often the case that people who begin the movement across the border in a voluntary way . . . quickly turn into victims when they are held for ransom, or when they are required to work off the cost of the smuggling by paying off the vast majority of their wages to the smuggling organizations.” That may be exploitative, but it isn’t slavery since slaves seldom receive wages and so can’t “work off” any “cost.” And Chertoff ignores the fact that the government’s criminalization of migration gives those few entrepreneurs who do victimize their clients the chokehold they need: A “restaurant owner” who allegedly “trafficked hundreds of adults and children into the United States . . . threatened to turn them in to the authorities as illegal aliens if they tried to escape,” according to the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune.

DHS portrays as vicious criminals guides who conduct people through hostile terrain and help them avoid the Border Patrol. The agency then presents its own ferocious attacks on immigrants, its armed patrols and cameras, its dogs, handcuffs, and holding pens, its hunts through the desert in air-conditioned ATVs for exhausted, fleeing families, as “rescuing” them from “human traffickers.” Odd, isn’t it, that migrants pay these “traffickers” to chaperone them across the border but try to fend off their “rescuers” by throwing rocks. They seldom succeed. Rather, they play right into the government’s hands: it charges them with the “crime” of self-defense, AKA, “assaulting a federal officer.” This inflates the number of “felons” crossing the border so that the feds “save” us from an even bigger menace.

An Unconstitutional Line in the Sand

Whether they’re between states or countries, borders soon cease to be noticed by most people living along them. They marry one another, establish businesses, visit, laugh, cry, agree, disagree, and dream together. So it is along the U.S.-Mexican boundary. The wall will sunder these families and friends as mercilessly as Berlin’s barricade did Germans.

The Founding Fathers understood government’s essence, its cruelty and callousness, far better than do modern Americans. That’s why their Constitution never empowers politicians to regulate anyone’s movement into or out of the country (except for slaves, fittingly enough: What else are we when we beg a bureaucrat, “Please, may I enter?”). Article 1, Section 9 bars Congress from “prohibit[ing]” the “Migration or Importation” of “such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit” until 1808. If we dismiss the doctrine of enumerated powers, this implies that Congress may prohibit all the migrating and importing it likes thereafter. And if we also dismiss the literary and historical context that limits Article 1, Section 9 to slaves, it appears the feds may indeed control anyone’s immigration after 1808—but only in those states existing at the Constitution’s adoption. None of those border Mexico, and mighty few do Canada. DHS needs to relocate its wall down the Atlantic coast.

Nor does the Constitution deputize the central government to “protect” the country’s borders, much less build walls “funneling” migrants through deadly desert where cops lurk to kidnap them. Immigration ought never to have been federalized in the first place; government had no business arrogating an “interest” in it during the 1870s, then tightening its vise each decade since. Immigration is an issue of property rights—not the DHS’s infernal abrogation of them, but a decision by the folks Michael Chertoff so despises, “each individual landowner,” as to whether migrants may cross his property.

Despite its utter lack of constitutional authority, DHS will probably continue militarizing our borders. Its current secretary, Janet Napolitano, opposed a physical wall when she was governor of Arizona. As she told AP, “You show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border.” Heavily implied is her support for more border agents as well as more high-tech surveillance. Napolitano is as implacable an enemy of freedom of movement as her predecessor Chertoff was, even if her methods differ.

Meanwhile, America has another border to the north, which Boeing’s contract covers as well. Landowners there should be very worried, given the abuses their southern brothers have suffered.

Indeed, all of us should worry, if not panic, when we remember that the walls keeping others out also keep us in.

That’s an interesting thesis, but as the book unfolds, the arguments sound more and more familiar. Krikorian argues that immigrants at current numbers can’t be assimilated and that “mass immigration” jeopardizes national sovereignty and security, our quality of life, our jobs, wages, and wallets.

Despite his avowed goodwill toward immigrants, Krikorian’s book is a polemic written to paint immigration in the worst possible light. The word immigration hardly ever appears without the modifier “mass” before it, even though the immigration rate today is far lower than a century ago. He dismisses efforts in Congress to legalize low-skilled immigration as “amnesty” legislation, even though the proposals would have imposed fines, probation, and security checks. He also ignores important findings in the immigration literature for the sake of advancing his argument.

Krikorian’s worries about assimilation are nothing new and carry no more weight today than similar worries about the Italians, Poles, Irish, and Germans in past eras. Government promotion of multiculturalism and bilingual education don’t help assimilation, but they are not the insurmountable hurdles that Krikorian paints: Studies show second- and third-generation immigrants are almost all fluent in English.

The book is at its xenophobic worst in the chapters on sovereignty and security. Krikorian warns that “Mexico City is moving to being, in effect, a second federal government that American mayors and governors must answer to . . . becoming a permanent participant in the day-to-day business of governance, [exercising] joint dominion” over American territory. As evidence for “this assault on American sovereignty” he mostly just musters quotes from Mexican officials urging the U.S. government to reform its immigration system.

That’s only the beginning. While just about everybody recognizes that radical Islam is the most likely source of future terrorist activity against the United States, Krikorian is eager to bring every immigrant group under equal suspicion. In a section titled “Future Wars,” the author manages to slander millions of normal, peaceful, hardworking immigrants from China, Korea, and Colombia. “Though the nearly 700,000 Korean immigrants here came from South Korea, there can be little doubt that the Communist regime in the north has a network of agents already in place among them,” he writes, casting unwarranted suspicion on the corner grocer in Brooklyn and the worshippers at the Korean Central Presbyterian Church down the road from where I live in northern Virginia. In the same vein, Krikorian writes, “War with China is by no means a certainty, but it is clearly possible, and the nearly 1.9 million Chinese immigrants throughout the United States, including a major presence in high-tech industries, represent a deep sea for Beijing’s fish to swim in.” Is this really a valid argument for turning away immigrants such as Taiwan-born Jerry Wang, cofounder of Yahoo!, or Beijing-born Liang Qiao, the Iowa-based coach of the American Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson?

Turning to jobs and wages, Krikorian sounds like a class-warfare “liberal.” “Mass immigration affects society as a whole by swelling the ranks of the poor, thinning out the middle class, and transferring wealth to the already wealthy,” he asserts. The facts say otherwise. Studies show that immigration benefits the large majority of Americans, not just the wealthy. The middle class has not been thinning out but moving up: The shares of households earning below $35,000 a year and between $35,000 and $100,000 have both declined in the past 20 years as the share earning above $100,000 has grown. Fewer Americans were living under the poverty line in 2006 than in 1994, and the poverty rate has actually been trending down in the past 15 years—a time of robust immigration.

It is true that low-skilled immigrants consume more in government services than they pay in taxes, as Krikorian argues at length. But he dismisses the practicality of limiting access to welfare while glossing over the fact that the average immigrant and his or her descendents generate a sizeable net fiscal surplus for the government.

In the final chapter Krikorian advocates deep cuts in legal immigration and a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration. Among his preferred coercive tools would be a national database of all U.S. workers, native and immigrant alike; uniform national ID documents; enlisting local law enforcement officers in pursuit of illegal immigrants; and even barring private property owners from renting to people without the right documents.

There are plenty of thoughtful questions to be considered when it comes to the role of immigration in a free, modern, and globally connected society. Unfortunately, this book brings nothing new to the discussion.

The story is an old one. There has been more than one time in history when the effort to restrict immigration has hindered the progress both of those who were trying to improve themselves and of the civilization that was trying to keep them out. It is worth the time it takes to review a lesson from the late second century and the story of an emperor whose policies were not as wise as his philosophy.

Marcus Aurelius was born in AD 121, at the high point of what Adam Smith’s friend Edward Gibbon said was the historical period during which humanity enjoyed the greatest prosperity and happiness it had ever known. Aurelius was 15 when the Greek orator Aelius Aristides announced that it was time for the whole world to lay down its arms as if at a festival; the only tasks with which the cities of the Empire needed to concern themselves were those associated with the construction of public buildings—fountains, gymnasia, temples, arches, schools, and workshops.

It was in many respects a time like our own. The general population was more interested in athletic contests than in business or the affairs of state. Epictetus offers a vivid account of the Romans’ love for gladiatorial contests and chariot races, the partisans of the whites, reds, blues, and greens debating endlessly the merits of their respective teams. “Freedom” had come to mean order, stability, regularity, and the maintenance of ancient social distinctions. Plutarch said the Romans had as much liberty as the government allowed them and it was just as well that they were not given more. Like motivational speakers in modern America, “philosophers” (who were said to have been as common as cobblers) toured the Empire offering easy answers to difficult questions. Two of the young Aurelius’s teachers, in fact, had become wealthy on the lecture circuit.

The education of Roman children was for long centuries entrusted to private enterprise, but late in the first century Vespasian brought the more important schools of rhetoric under imperial control by turning professors into government employees, complete with a pension after 20 years’ service. Early in the second century, the financing of secondary education became a municipal responsibility. Aurelius records his gratitude for the fact that rather than sending him to a government school, his father had decided to have him home-schooled.

Actually, this was his maternal grandfather, Antoninus Pius, who had adopted three-month-old Marcus when the boy’s father died. The Emperor Hadrian, who was a frequent visitor in the home, took a liking to the child, and when Antoninus Pius was selected to succeed Hadrian, it was with the specific provision that Marcus Aurelius would succeed Antoninus Pius. The tasks of government were mastered in a series of political appointments, the offices assigned carrying increasing authority as youth gave way to manhood and manhood became maturity. When Aurelius became emperor in AD 161 he was almost as well prepared for the job as anyone could have been.

But only “almost”: the new emperor had gained no experience with military action, the necessity for which confronted him as soon as he assumed the throne. A half century of peace had encouraged Rome’s leaders to neglect what Adam Smith said was a government’s primary obligation, that of protecting its society from military violence on the part of other societies. An attack from Parthia (modern-day Iran) caught the Romans off guard. The assets of the imperial household were auctioned off to raise funds, an army was formed, and Aurelius’s adoptive brother Lucius Verus took command of it.

Looking for Trade

Along the Empire’s northern borders, meanwhile, German tribes were on the move. The record of negotiations with them suggests that they were less interested in conquest than in opportunities for trade and land on which to settle. There had been a time in history when they might have been welcomed, a time, Gibbon said, when Rome had been open to the contributions of every slave, stranger, or barbarian who was willing to play a part in making her great. By the self-indulgent second century that time had passed, and the tribesmen were treated as a threat to imperial security. Aurelius assembled another army and commanded it in a series of campaigns along the Danube. Between battles he entered his thoughts in a diary, which was found among his things after he died and published as Meditations.

Libertarian Author

The ideas contained in this small volume seem to mark its author as a libertarian. At one point, he comes close to suggesting that the tribesmen have as much right to occupy the land as the Romans do to keep them off it. The spider that captured a fly, he said, the man who trapped a boar, and the solider who killed a “Sarmatian” (the generic term for the peoples who lived along the Danube) might all be regarded as predatory thieves.

The philosophy of the Meditations is part of an intellectual tradition going back to the third century BC, to the city of Tarsus, and to a man named Zeno. Aristotle’s opinion that people were from the hour of their birth marked out either for subjection or for rule found no echo in the teaching of Zeno. He believed that society should not be divided into classes, for all could become wise. Men and women might have different roles and different capacities, but they were equal as free moral agents. The ideal state would embrace the whole world, and its laws would be dictated by nature rather than convention.

Called “Stoics” because of the porch (stoa) on which their teacher gave lessons in Athens, Zeno’s followers believed that everything from the falling of a leaf to the rise of an empire could be explained in terms of a single underlying principle, or logos. In The Economy in Mind, Warren Brookes grasps the essence of this concept when he talks about how the natural ecosystem maintains its own balance. All of its elements, he says, are so closely interrelated that even the best-intentioned efforts at regulation bring about reactions and distortions throughout the system. The accommodations by which the ecosystem moves toward equilibrium are part of nature’s tendency to preserve, protect, and strengthen itself. Such adjustments may entail some discomfort, but the results they lead to are better than anything that could be produced by means of intervention from the outside.

The Stoics said the universe, as animated and directed by the logos, tends toward harmony, and the wise person seeks to live with this in mind. This meant, first of all, tending to one’s own business. Aurelius said that each person should focus on his private concerns because these were his particular thread of the universal web. Such a focus might draw criticism from external observers, but it was the only way to happiness and peace of mind. Your critics have reasons of their own, Aurelius told himself, but you cannot afford to concern yourself with those. Do not look around for praise or encouragement. Just keep your eyes fixed on your purposes.

Not Narrow Self-Interest

Using a term that was popular during the eighteenth century, Adam Smith called this “self interest.” In Aurelius’s mind it referred not to a narrow selfishness but to the simple truth that his own concerns are the only things about which a person can know enough to be effective. And this, remember, was the opinion of an emperor, a man whose authority reached so far that even the Chinese knew about him. His concerns included much that was not strictly private. He could oversee the management of imperial affairs and direct the operations of an army, but he refused to pry into other people’s motives, and he wished they would resist the temptation to pry into his.

Focus on the issues of your own life, Aurelius said, because that is how you can make the maximum possible contribution to the good of the universe. To each individual thing Nature has assigned enough time and energy, and in the case of human beings enough intelligence, for a limited number of tasks. The wise person therefore concentrates his attention on what is actually in his power. The fig tree does a fig tree’s work, a dog does a dog’s work, and a bee does the work of a bee. The sun has one job, the wind another, storm clouds a third, and all play a part in the final result. Just so, each human being has his own particular tasks, and no one knows more about how to do them than the person to whom they have been assigned.

This being true, it is not merely foolish but barbarous, to deny a person the privilege of pursuing what he believes to be his proper concerns. A man is always justified in seeking what he imagines to be his own good. We are all working together for the same end, Aurelius insisted, some of us knowingly and others unconsciously. Even the malcontent who is trying to stand in the way will be found in the end to have played an important part. The best of all possible governments would therefore be concerned primarily with upholding the liberty of the subject.

Detailed regulation on the part of the state was counterproductive because of the unseen rationality already built into the nature of things. Early in the fifth book of Meditations Aurelius said, “Look at the plants, sparrows, ants, spiders, bees, all busy with their own tasks, each doing his part towards a coherent world order.” Adam Smith went into some length with a paraphrase of these lines and the surrounding passages in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which was published 17 years before The Wealth of Nations. It seems probable that the notion of an “invisible hand” was something he discovered in the writings of Marcus Aurelius.

This idea was destined to work a revolution first in the intellectual and then in the economic life of the eighteenth century. It had little impact on the life of the second. It is true that Aurelius initiated a systematic effort to reduce the extent of slavery, not quite a campaign for general emancipation, but a policy of granting freedom whenever it was possible to do so. Again and again the surviving documents report that a slave had attained his freedom in accordance with the emperor’s command. This policy may bear witness to an understanding of the relationship between economic efficiency and the Stoic insistence on personal liberty. Aurelius writes of having spent a long time with Cato’s Agriculture, which argues that cultivation could be accomplished more effectively by free men than by slaves.

Debasing the Currency

To the extent that liberation was carried on in defiance of popular beliefs, it was the exception rather than the rule. In other respects, Aurelius’s policies paid homage to expectations. Returning to Rome after a military campaign, he granted the citizens’ demand for eight gold coins per person. The old practice of paying the peasants to have children reached its widest expansion. Imperial extravagance was funded by debasing the currency. The philosophic emperor’s greatest downfall, though, came in the way he dealt with his problems on the northern borders.

Repeating the sentiments of Zeno, he had described all the world’s inhabitants as fellow citizens of a single city. A consistent application of this insight might have been the salvation of Rome. The soldiers coming back from the war with Parthia carried with them a plague, which infected every area to which they were later assigned. In Rome itself, the death rate rose to over a thousand a day, and corpses were carried out of the city in heaps. Whole cities reverted to jungle or desert. For this depopulation the tribes of the north were a ready solution, the very friends and allies of which Mediterranean civilization was desperately in need. Treated instead as enemies, they responded in kind, and years were wasted in expensive wars.

These wars, in turn, were a major cause of the military chaos that overtook Rome during the third century. Aurelius’s son Commodus made a hasty treaty with the tribes along the Danube but retained the prerogatives his father had assumed for the sake of military operations. Unresolved tensions along the northern frontier and the hostility of Parthia led Commodus’s successors to expand the army. With additional legions came additional expenditures, and the competition for scarce resources produced new centers of power. Roman generals began to direct their forces against each other rather than the “barbarians,” and a once tightly-knit polity unraveled. The Empire of which Diocletian assumed control in AD 285 was a mere shadow of what it had been a hundred years before.

The situation facing the United States at the dawn of the 21st century is similar to the one Rome faced in the evening of the second. There are on the one hand implacable enemies, who seem to be bent on the destruction of Western civilization. There are on the other hand potential friends, who would like very much to share in and contribute to the abundance they see just across the border. Modern America is like ancient Rome in that it seems to be incapable of distinguishing between its enemies and its friends.

Some may reply that the members of this latter group must be treated with hostility because crossing the border is a violation of our laws. Those who say this should consider the words of Aurelius’s forebear in Stoicism, Cicero, as reported by Will Durant late in eighteenth chapter of Caesar and Christ: “True law is right reason in agreement with nature, world-wide in scope, unchanging, everlasting. . . . We may not oppose or alter that law, we cannot abolish it, we cannot be freed of its obligations by any legislature, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder of it.”

Natural Order

There is a law that no legislation can rightfully attempt to override. What Adam Smith described as every person’s uninterrupted effort to improve his own condition is one expression of that law. It is as much a part of the natural order as the forces that bring springtime and fall. Left to operate freely, such forces tend toward harmony, progress, and improvement. Hindered or bottled up, they may become destructive. Today’s leaders might do well to consider the unfortunate example of Marcus Aurelius.

On March 2 it was revealed that for years the government of Canada has been randomly opening the incoming mail of Canadian citizens and copying the contents into a central database—all in the name of fighting illegal immigration. At Canada Post facilities all across the country, federal agents routinely open letters and parcels originating from abroad that weigh more than 30 grams (1.06 ounces) in the battle against people-smuggling and “international criminals.”

Customs officials regularly pass along the information they find to other government departments. In some cases customs will confiscate documents and send them to other departments; in others, documents are merely copied and sent along, while the original mail continues on to the addressee. Officers are not required to obtain any warrant before opening and photocopying the material.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) has created a centralized database that catalogs the documents and information passed along by customs; the database can be accessed by immigration officials all across the country.

Canadian customs officials have admitted that they open packages randomly as they come into the country, and CIC officials have also admitted that they routinely receive documents from customs inspectors, but continue to claim that the measures are needed to police migration into Canada.

Canada’s federal privacy commissioner, George Radwanski, criticized Canada Customs and has now launched an investigation into the way the mail is being “inspected.” “Opening people’s mail, particularly on a large scale without benefit of a warrant, is not a good or attractive thing.” said Radwanski.¹

To most people, his response should be striking because of what it is missing: namely, a flat-out statement that this sort of activity by government agents is illegal. Sadly, in Canada, it is not. In 1992 the government gave itself the legal approval to open mail at all border and customs checkpoints. It may not be a good thing, or an attractive thing, but in Canada it is a perfectly legal thing.

The immigration department was given the authority to begin collecting such information in a barely publicized amendment to the Customs Act, which was passed by Parliament in 1992 in a favorite tool of politicians—an omnibus bill. Before 1992 Customs could only seize goods if it suspected their transportation was a violation of the Customs Act. With the new amendment Customs Canada inspectors are authorized to open mail that weighs more than 30 grams without a warrant and are permitted to seize goods, including parcels and packages, if a customs officer suspects a violation of “any Act of Parliament.”

This little-known—at least until now—legislative change authorizes Canada Customs officers to act as agents for the intelligence branch of CIC in its business of identifying, intercepting, seizing, and/or copying “suspect” mail and courier packages.

A training manual for immigration intelligence officers who record the details of “inspections” explains that the objective is “the creation of a national database relative to documentation being sent in the mails or by courier services internationally.” This training manual, which was released with several sections censored, was obtained by Richard Kurland, an immigration lawyer, using the Access to Information Act. The 24-page manual instructs agents to record names, birth dates, family information, destinations, and travel histories, and to describe any other documents seized. If a package contains travel documents, it recommends recording airline tickets, baggage tags, and seat numbers. The manual also says that the database is scheduled to be upgraded with digital scanning capabilities, allowing officials to enter photographs and text images.

Clearly Marked?

Canada Post claims that any letters and packages that have been opened are clearly marked so the recipients know their contents have been inspected. But some immigration lawyers say that they’ve suspected for a long time that their mail was being opened without notice. Several immigration lawyers from across Canada say they have discovered their mail—especially correspondence with clients—had been opened, and some say that they believe they are being targeted by Immigration Canada. They insist they were never told that their mail was being opened, whether information was kept or copied, or why.

Kurland believes his mail has been opened regularly for years. He says his mail has been opened so frequently that his colleagues would usually gather around him to see how his latest packages had been stamped or repackaged. “We don’t let the government tap our phones without permission from a court. Why should it be any different with the mail?” Kurland asked.² He said that there is nothing to stop CIC from expanding their interception of letters to any group of Canadians. “This is not about immigrants; they can open the mail of all sorts of people. How do they choose whose mail to open? Who knows?”³

Another immigration lawyer from Montreal said that once when she inquired about a late courier package she was told by customs that they made random checks of mail and photocopied any documents involving immigration or tax issues and then sent them on to the appropriate federal department. A Vancouver immigration lawyer, Elizabeth Bryson, said that mail from the same client was held up twice when it was opened by customs officials. On the second occasion the package of letters, applications, photographs, and copies of documents was expressly marked as privileged and confidential communication between a client and a lawyer. She said she was told by a customs official that they opened mail based “on a roster to view documents” and did not target her or her client specifically.

“From what they say, it seems they are on fishing expeditions in the hope of finding something,” Bryson remarked. “How can I promise my clients confidentiality if there is a government agency, without any reasonable basis, that is opening my correspondence?”⁴

“I’m not 100 percent sure what this has to do with [people] smuggling at all, because the documents are being sent to people in Canada,” said Joyce Yedid, a Montreal lawyer whose own clients’ documents have gone missing or arrived unsealed. “They’re not being sent for any other purpose, so I don’t see the connection. This is a non sequitur.” Yedid also said that mail addressed to her at her law office has also been opened.

Yedid mentioned years of frustration trying to determine who intercepted her clients’ mail and where it went. She also questioned the legality of the whole procedure. “My clients have told me that some of these envelopes were clearly marked as being covered by solicitor-client privilege,” she said. “To the best of my knowledge, they have no right to open these things.”⁵

The Immigration Act allows officials to seize documents at ports of entry such as airports or harbor ports. But with the release even of the censored version, the intelligence manual acknowledges what immigration lawyers have long suspected—that the federal government has been seizing personal mail and keeping it on file.

A CIC spokeswoman, Danielle Sarazin, admitted the department regularly receives documents seized by customs officials, but defended the whole practice with the claim that it was a necessary measure against the increasing frequency of document fraud and false refugee claims. “The whole purpose of seizing mail is to preserve program integrity,” she said. “What we want to do is take fraudulent documents out of circulation. We also want to seize documents that can be used to effect the removal of people who should not be in Canada.”⁶

Questionable Packages

Sarazin went further and reassured Canadians that “Immigration knows what kinds of packages are questionable, so we’ll share that information with Customs.”⁷ She also claimed that only immigration staff members with special clearance are allowed access to the central database and that CIC provides customs officers with the profiles of suspect pieces of mail. She could not, however, identify the precise criteria that Customs uses to seize immigration-related mail. She also said she didn’t know if correspondence between clients and lawyers, or others, was kept by CIC, but insisted that there is no attempt to interfere with or subvert the legal process.

The spokeswoman for the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, Colette Gentes-Hawn, said she couldn’t comment specifically on the allegations made by the lawyers, but acknowledged that Customs regularly opens mail at random. “Most packages that are opened at the border are those that seem suspicious for one reason or another, but “we do enough of a plain random [search] so we know what’s going on,” she said. “No warrant is necessary and a report is filled out only if something illegal is found. Otherwise, the contents are repackaged and stamped opened by customs.”⁸

She said letter-sized envelopes under 30 grams usually go untouched, but that some larger ones are opened with an attempt to screen out contraband. “If the package is from Colombia, obviously that says something. If it’s from France or Holland, there could be ecstasy in there.”⁹

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the cabinet minister responsible for Customs, National Revenue Minister Martin Cauchon, couldn’t explain to reporters “why some mail was being copied and sent to other government departments. He walked away in the middle of an interview returning about five minutes later with an explanation. Cauchon said his agents refer the contents of packages to other government departments if they find any evidence of criminal activity.”¹⁰

This discovery of criminal activity follows the invasion of property required to make the “discovery” in the first place. One crime legitimizes another. Supposedly, Customs officers can open mail only if they “feel” that it might contain something illegal, like drugs, but the Act requires that officials have only “reasonable grounds” to believe the contents of a parcel “might” be illegal. Why then even bother to specify that only parcels above 30 grams are fair game?

Private-Sector Collection

For comparison, consider how the government treats the information it controls with how the government requires the private sector to treat its consumer information. On January 1, the act of governmental hypocrisy called the Personal Information and Electronic Documents Act became law. It requires airlines, telephone companies, banks, and other federally regulated organizations to specifically ask customers for permission before taking down their personal information. They must also tell customers exactly why they need it and who will see it, and ensure the information is protected.

This legislation allegedly establishes the right in Canada to protection of personal information. Except when it comes to mail, apparently.

Originally created to instill consumer confidence in the security of electronic commercial transactions, the Act is so strict that an organization is forbidden to use personal information for anything other than the purpose originally specified. If the organization wants to use the data for something else, it has to ask permission again.

This Personal Information Act sets up a system of policing to protect consumers from the dire consequences of junk mail. First, a person must take a complaint to the organization in question. If that doesn’t work, the complainant can write to the federal privacy commissioner, who then has an entire year to file a response report with his recommendations to the organization about what it should do. To make this recommendation, the privacy commissioner has the power to subpoena witnesses or obtain search warrants. From there, a person can decide to take the matter to federal court.

There is no dollar limit on the amount of the fines the court can impose on a business or institution.

Shouldn’t all this apply to the state’s vastly more pernicious collection and cataloging of data on its citizens?

One has to ask what is the greater threat to privacy: the latest AOL carpet bombing of North America or the state’s confiscating your mail and copying the contents into a centralized state database.

Worst of all, perhaps, is that this invasion of privacy and confidentiality by the state was a one-day news story. Where is the outrage? This is proof yet again of Canadians’ timid submission to political power.

Notes

1. “Mail opened, copied and sent to bureaucrats,” March 3, 2001, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Web site, http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?category=Canada&story=/news/2001/03/02/privacy_mail010302.
2. Campbell Clark and Mark MacKinnon, “Customs draws fire for opening private mail,” Toronto Globe and Mail, March 2, 2001.
3. Charlie Gillis, “Federal officials opening private mail,” National Post Online, March 2, 2001, www.nationalpost.com/.
4. Clark and MacKinnon.
5. Gillis.
6. “Liberals raked on mail issue,” Globe and Mail, March 2, 2001.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. “Mail opened.”