By Roderick Law (Lyceum)
“It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” Milton Friedman said. Unfortunately, plenty of American politicians have spent the intervening decades unwittingly proving him right.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, we certainly had a welfare state, but illegal immigration consisted mostly of Mexican nationals crossing the border to do seasonal work and returning home in the off-season. Few asked for asylum and most were uninterested in taking up permanent residence, limiting their fiscal and social impact on the United States. Importantly, Mexico was then not effectively run by drug cartels.
Today, illegal immigration is different. DHS has observed a “steep increase in Southwest Border encounters of extra-regional nationals.” That is, many illegal immigrants come from places other than Mexico and northern Central America. From 2013 to 2018, they averaged 28,000 encounters a year, just 6 percent of the total. By 2022, they numbered 1 million, or 43 percent. In 2000, Mexican nationals accounted for 98 percent of apprehensions at the southwest border, but by 2024, they accounted for only 30.6 percent of encounters.