So I’ve blogged before about how stupid the “No on is illegal” slogan is. It’s an absurd and wholly unjustified parsing of a common linguistic form. I mean would anyone raise a protest about the use of the term ‘illegal bicyclist’? Obviously not because an ‘illegal bicyclist’ is someone who is bicycling illegal just as an ‘illegal alien’ is someone who is illegally in this country. Neither term suggests that the person’s mere existence is illegal. Not only is this slogan wrong but it makes the whole movement look silly, stupid and irrational.

Terms aside in some sense I very much support the goals of this movement. Quite clearly the number of immigrants the US is taking in is nowhere near an unsustainable amount (consider them as a percent of population to earlier waves of immigration). Also while I used to worry that highly skilled immigration would cause a brain drain I’ve been convinced that in fact it causes the exact opposite. Since highly skilled workers retain many ties to their homelands it actually encourages high tech development in the home country as well as bringing economic benefit to the US.

However, I’m bothered by the fact that most of these protesters seem to support the status quo. The more I learn about illegal immigration from Mexico and further south the more I’m appalled at the horrible price it exacts upon the immigrants themselves. This price is primarily an indirect result of the illegality. Rather than being able to cross openly migrants must put themselves in the hands of coyotes and rather than taking out loans or other financial instruments for legitimate passage to the US they must catch free rides on gang controlled trains or otherwise engage in dangerous types of transit.

Illegal immigration really does need to be stopped in the same sense that illegal drug use needs to be stopped. We need to figure out a way to legitimatize the process to eliminate the harms that illegality brings. A guest worker program combined with amnesty and real employment enforcement is a good start but we need to both give the workers the chance to stay here permanently (even if we deny them social services that we might give citizens) and ensure that we allow in more guest workers than we are now allowing in illegal immigrants. Also we must exempt them from minimum wage laws otherwise their will be too much incentive for companies to hire genuinely illegal migrants. I know many people might not like the idea of exempting them from minimum wage but it’s a choice between legally doing so and the harms of illegal immigrants working for below minimum wage.