Ignoring the fact that the decision was extremely political (let’s face it, what presidential decision isn’t?), the move made by the Obama Administration to stop the deportation of children of illegal immigrants is, in Obama’s words, “the right thing to do.”  Today’s decision solves an important problem that needed to be addressed.  Children of illegal immigrants occupy an awkward space between the illegal alien and naturalized citizen: after all, why should a child who committed no crime pay the price?  Critics of amnesty for “DREAM-ers” will say that giving amnesty to children up until the age of 16 will encourage more parents to bring their children here illegally, and give them more time to do so.  Is it true that this act will encourage more illegal immigration?  Probably–it is hard to see how it wouldn’t.  But decriminalizing marijuana might lead to more drug use and that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do either.

The greater problem in this controversy is the continued hatred of immigration in general from the xenophobic right, and the weak economic opposition put forward by the protectionist left.  As with so many things in our politics, the right and the left often find themselves strange bedfellows when it comes to questions of innovation and growth.

To the xenophobes, it cannot be emphasized enough that cliché assertion that we are a nation of immigrants.  Hearing the anti-immigration movement spew the same nonsense as the nativists and Know-Nothings of the past reveals a shameful part of our national discourse: a discourse that in countless ways has been built on oppression and exclusion.  As with all immigrants in our history, this latest wave faces opposition from an entrenched majority that believes they constitute the “real” American, even though the ancestors of these “real” Americans faced the same opposition on the same arguments.  In America, there should be no such thing as a foreigner, and yet, we find ourselves every generation with new definitions of foreign-ness to fall back on.  Since 9/11, our discourse has welcomed a new breed of foreigner, the Islamic fundamentalist, with all his attached stigma: terror, oppression of women, and anti-Christian theology.

Now, there is an economic argument, a weak one, against immigration, which the now-infamous Neil Munro heckled Obama with: “What about American workers who are unemployed while you employ foreigners?”  The first, easy response to this argument is that these children aren’t foreigners in anything but name.  If anything, a whole new generation of Americans has just been re-born in their own land.  But the second, economic response is that immigrants aren’t taking American jobs.  There are generally two kinds of immigrants: skilled immigrants who move to the US for a job (and thus are no different than economic migrants who move from state to state for a new job), and unskilled immigrants who come to the US in search of opportunity, safety, asylum or freedom.  Skilled immigrants are certainly not taking American jobs, and in many cases are the only qualified people to do those jobs.  One of my coworkers recently went through a 8 month visa approval process to move to the US to do his own job, and part of the process involved having to prove that he was the only one who could do his job (and not an American).  The logic is overwhelmingly bad.  If we could find someone else to do his job, we would have–it’s obviously cheaper and more efficient to hire someone in the same city and get them to work right away.  Skilled immigrants come to the US to fill holes in our labor market, which are holes created by our own protectionist policies and market inefficiencies–hardly an immigrant’s fault.

Unskilled immigrants, on the other hand, are a different story.  While it is true that immigrants who come to the US with no experience or no existing connections may very well be taking jobs that could be worked by Americans, the fact is that immigrants are often willing to work at a much lower wage than Americans, and undocumented immigrants of course are often willing to work at less than the legal minimum wage.  So a protectionist’s immediate response should not be to limit immigration, but to ask how Americans can compete for jobs in their own country, which of course entails repealing said minimum wage and let people work for the value of their work and not an inflated value that bars Americans from greater employment.  But that issue aside, the fact is that immigrants face natural barriers to employment (language, culture, experience) that native Americans do not face, and if employers are willing and able to legally employ these immigrants instead of Americans, that is, again, a problem with Americans: we lack, on the whole, a range of skills that we are either unwilling or unable to do.  Immigrants have no such prejudices.

Now, it is also the case that many immigrants cannot find employment in the workforce, which is why so many immigrants make a living for themselves by catering to other immigrants, creating new companies and new jobs.  These jobs benefit not just the largely new immigrant workforce (for instance, in Chinese restaurants), but provide a host of goods and services that Americans can buy at low prices–once again bringing the benefit of free markets to laborer and consumer alike.  Are these immigrants taking American jobs?  No, of course not.  If anything, they are creating new American jobs and Fortune 500 companies.  There is also a question of locale.  The idea that an immigrant busboy in Houston is stealing the job of a factory worker in Detroit is ludicrous, as are most ideas emanating from the protectionist left and xenophobic right.

Finally, Obama isn’t employing any foreigners while “Americans are unemployed.”  The whole free-markets thing makes it difficult for Obama to favor one worker over another.  The fact is that Americans are employing immigrants above Americans, and that should tell you just how valuable immigrants are to the economy, as a necessary population to supply needed skills and create innovation.  And if there need be any more proof, look to the people who are trying to build a ship off the coast of San Francisco in order to attract immigrants to our shores to start jobs, while trying to get around outdated immigration policies that threaten to stagnate our economy.