By Art Carden

"The law perverted! The law--and, in its wake, all the collective force of the nation--the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law become the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish! Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens."

Those aren't my words, as much as I wish they were. They're not: they're the words of the 19th century economist and essayist Frederic Bastiat, from his slender volume The Law. His words to the people of France in 1850 could have been just as easily been written to Americans (and Alabamians) in 2012.

Restrictions on immigration embody the law perverted, to use Bastiat's phrase. The United States used to be a country that welcomed the world's tired, its poor, its huddled masses yearning to breathe free. During the Progressive Era, that changed. Under the influence of the eugenics movement, American policymakers intervened in the labor market in a number of ways. They passed laws restricting labor force participation by women and children, they passed minimum wage laws, and they passed restrictions on immigration.

As the economist Thomas C. Leonard documents, and as Steven Horwitz and I discussed in The Freeman a little over a year ago, these laws were passed specifically to protect white male workers and, in the case of immigration restrictions, to prevent what they called "race suicide." As Horwitz and I write, "(t)he eugenicists supported immigration restrictions because they believed that members of 'low-wage races' would compromise not only whites' living standards but also whites' genetic stock through miscegenation." A lot of people probably don't know it now, but immigration restrictions have their roots in ideas that are economically illiterate and morally outrageous.

What about welfare? Again, that's a fair question, but it's an argument against the welfare state and not against immigration per se. In an article that appeared in The Freeman last year, Troy University economists Scott Beaulier and Daniel J. Smith, along with their MBA student Darrick C. Luke, wrote that one of the offered "justification(s) 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."

The cruel irony is that while a lot of people think that opening the borders would lead to a massive redistribution of wealth from Us to Them, estimates by Lant Pritchett in Let Their People Come suggest that an increase in immigration equal to just a 3% labor force increase in wealthy western countries would lead to an increase of $51,000,000,000 in the incomes of the world's rich and an increase of $300,000,000,000 in the incomes of the world's poor.

Not only would greater immigration lead to much higher incomes for immigrants, it would lead to higher incomes for natives, as well. And yet the law here is guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish. Pritchett notes that rich countries are spending $17,000,000,000 per year to prevent immigration. In other words, rich countries are spending money to impoverish themselves.

Yes, it's true that people who are in the United States illegally broke the law, but so did a lot of people who taught slaves to read in the first half of the nineteenth century. The controversy surrounding Alabama's immigration law should give us an opportunity to lay aside questions about the details of the laws on the books and ask whether they should be enforced or repealed. After a careful consideration of the evidence, I think the answer is obvious. They should be repealed.

Art Carden is Assistant Professor of Economics at Samford University's Brock School of Business, a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, and a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute. Email: wcarden@samford.edu.

Once again, space does not allow for an exhaustive discussion of sources or a detailed response to every possible objection, but interested readers may wish to consult this essay by Benjamin Powell (along with the videos here), Lant Pritchett's Let Their People Come, this EconTalk podcast with Bryan Caplan, this lecture by Bryan Caplan sponsored by the Future of Freedom Foundation, and the essays in the Winter 2012 issue of the Cato Journal.