Last Sunday, on the TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes, President Donald Trump told his interviewer that he’d like to work with the Democrats to pass legislation giving illegal aliens a path to legal status in the United States. In other words, Trump is now saying he favors making a deal to enact some sort of amnesty for illegal aliens. As Trump put it, he favors removing some violent criminals and wants to “Get the killers out, get the rapists out, get all the rough ones out, get the drug dealers out.” But Trump also claimed that he thinks his policies have been “too tough.” So, he now says he wants to “let the people that are here — and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years — work a deal for them.”
Not surprisingly, this reversal on his immigration policy prompted furious resistance from many who have supported him in the past. As CNN reported Monday, “The flap has set off an extraordinary backlash — with many Trump allies like the Heritage Foundation and the House Freedom Caucus posting on X, “No amnesty...” Other conservatives, from Ron DeSantis to Megyn Kelly opposed the president’s apparent about-face.
Whatever Trump’s actual position is on the matter, it is clear that in the face of the Republicans’ big losses at the ballot box last week, the immigration issue will come to the fore as Democrats push for more policies that encourage mass immigration.
But it’s not just the Democrats. The GOP leadership faces significant pressure from industry-group lobbyists, and from dozens of GOP congressmen who are pushing to lower wages in the US by offering widespread amnesty to foreign nationals.
So, are the anti-amnesty people right? Just how bad is amnesty as a policy? Well, that depends on what is meant by the term “amnesty.” If it means leaving peaceful people alone who don’t collect any welfare and don’t cause any crime, that is one thing. On the other hand, if amnesty means legalizing lower-income workers who collect welfare, and whose children consume government benefits, that’s something else entirely. Moreover, any amnesty that offers foreign nationals citizenship, or even a “path to citizenship” should be rejected outright.
What Does Amnesty Mean?
When it comes to amnesty legislation proposed by various politicians, the definitions often vary widely. Historically, many amnesty schemes involve a “path to citizenship” in which illegal aliens—i.e., foreign nationals with citizenship in another country—are granted legal status which then can be converted into US citizenship. For example, under Reagan’s 1986 amnesty bill, foreign nationals who obtained green cards via the amnesty program could then apply for naturalization under the normal timeline. (In the United States, green-card holders can obtain citizenship in as little as five years.)
In Americaa, citizenship means the right to vote and hold office. So, in practice, “amnesty” very often means that illegal aliens can be converted to legal residents who, within only a few years, can start voting to increase their own access to taxpayer funded subsidies.
Modern Immigration Is Subsidized Immigration
The right to vote is important when it comes to immigration because, in modern times, immigrants use more taxpayer-funded Amenities than the native population. This is true for both legal and illegal immigration. Modern immigration is overwhelmingly subsidized immigration.
It is true that illegal immigrants are often barred from accessing a variety of government programs—although many can still take advantage of benefits in areas such as healthcare and schooling. On the other hand, legal immigrants can access virtually all types of government benefits and thus are even more costly to the beleaguered taxpayers than illegal immigrants.
For example, a 2023 analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies showed:
The 2022 SIPP [i.e., Survey of Income and Program Participation] indicates that 54 percent of households headed by immigrants — naturalized citizens, legal residents, and illegal immigrants — used one or more major welfare program. This compares to 39 percent for U.S.-born households. ...
Our best estimate is that 59 percent of households headed by illegal immigrants, also called the undocumented, use at least one major program. We have no evidence this is due to fraud. Among legal immigrants we estimate the rate is 52 percent. ...
Illegal immigrants can receive welfare on behalf of U.S.-born children, and illegal immigrant children can receive school lunch/breakfast and WIC directly. A number of states provide Medicaid to some illegal adults and children, and a few provide SNAP. Several million illegal immigrants also have work authorization (e.g. DACA, TPS, and some asylum applicants) allowing receipt of the EITC. ...
It is important to note that taken as a family unit, illegal immigrant families, which tend to be lower-income, receive welfare benefits. This is because the US-born children—who are automatic citizens thanks to the insane birthright-citizenship policy—are eligible for all types of welfare programs, regardless of the parents’ status. Moreover, as the CIS report notes, the widespread use of government benefits among immigrants does not come just from the fact that immigrants tend to have lower educational attainment and have more children. The CIS report continues:
Immigrant households without children, as well as those with high incomes and those headed by immigrants with at least a bachelor’s degree, tend to be more likely to use welfare than their U.S.-born counterparts.
The Problem with Expanding Citizenship
This creates a situation in which citizenship—that is, the right to vote—is of great political importance. It is entirely reasonable to conclude that a population that is more reliant on government spending is more likely to vote for the preservation and expansion of those government benefits. This isn’t just true of immigrants, of course. Government, employees, for instance, are rarely found advocating for less government spending. Recent polls, moreover, show that the people that collect Social-Security benefits—namely, people over 65—also overwhelmingly support tax increases to ensure those benefits continue. In the aggregate, expanding citizenship for immigrants—both legal and illegal—will further grow voter demand for an ever-larger welfare state.
What Amnesty SHOULD Mean
In evaluating policy, our standard, as always, must be based on the protection of private-property rights. Any expansion of subsidized immigration is a direct attack on the property rights on the taxpayers, and that means the only acceptable type of immigration is that which is totally unsubsidized.
Immigration is subsidized in two ways. The first is providing immigrants with access to government benefits that are provided either as either services or cash benefits. Public schooling for immigrants—legal or illegal—is a subsidy. Obviously, food stamps, “Section 8,” Medicaid, and “free” emergency room visits are all subsidies, as well. If any of these programs are available to legal or illegal immigrants, then immigration is being subsidized.
Immigration is also subsidized—and thus incentivized—by the expansion of voting rights. The expansion of citizenship rights offers the means of greater access to the American welfare state, and thus to taxpayers’ wallets. The offer of easy citizenship is effectively a means of encouraging and subsidizing more immigration.
(NH: citizenship is not a property right and there is no reason to extend the “right” to any foreign-born residents at all. If the goal is to increase property rights and to limit the power of the state, it is important to remember that there is no libertarian or free-market case for naturalization.)
What this all means is that the only type of amnesty that could be potentially justifiable would be a type in which any immigrant granted amnesty would be required to legally abandon any and all access to voting rights or any government benefits. That means no more food stamps, no more government schooling, and no more free healthcare. It means no more voting for taxpayer-funded freebies. Private charities are free to provide these benefits, so long as the charities do not receive any government grants. Any immigrant who disagrees with this is free to go to where he or she is a citizen. (Ideally, the same restrictions ought to apply to all immigrants, but we’ll stick to illegal-immigrant amnesty for now.)
This would be, in effect, a means of privatizing immigration.
On the other hand, those immigrants who truly make no attempt to access taxpayer funds—those who contract with private employers for employment and are truly productive and peaceful—would be excellent candidates for amnesty. From a private-property perspective, it’s difficult to justify government regulation of this sort of private-sector activity.1
In the current American political environment, of course, we know that this sort of amnesty is not on the table. Amnesty schemes offered by both Republicans are Democrats are fundamentally geared toward expanding immigrant access to the welfare state by expanding legal residency and citizenship. Both paths lead to more taxpayer subsidies for immigrants. Moreover, the industry lobbyists who want more immigrants would likely oppose such a limited sort of amnesty.
The business groups that advocate most enthusiastically for mass immigration tend to like the idea of taxpayers being forced to pay to entice more immigrants to the United States. “Free” taxpayer-funded schooling, healthcare, and groceries for immigrants helps swell the foreign-born workforce for low-wage jobs and thus reduces costs for certain employers. In this way, taxpayer-funded benefits thus act to subsidize migrant wages. This, of course, is just another way that businesses socialize their own costs while privatizing profits.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Yet, both political parties will do their best to ensure we do not see the privatization of immigration any time soon.
- 1
Murray Rothbard did not oppose migration via fully private contract. Lew Rockwell summarized Rothbard’s position on this when he wrote in the introduction to The Irrepressible Rothbard: Rothbard “would not restrict immigration in which people contract for labor (citizenship being an entirely different issue).”
