It's time to open ourselves to immigration, end drug war

Well, it certainly looks like the Republicans are going to do their best to make immigration one of the top issues of the fall campaign.

Today President Barack Obama came to the University of Texas to talk about education and his plans to push the United States back to the top of the list of countries with college graduates. We currently rank 12th among 36 developed nations, despite a higher education system that attracts thousands of foreign students every year because of its excellence. A little over 40 percent of adults has a college education, and as Obama rightly points out, the nation needs to get to 60 percent and soon. Without that education, we won’t be able to compete in a world economy increasingly driven by what you know.

While the president was talking education, the right-wing governor of Texas, Rick Perry, was making his own splash with a letter to the president calling for more troops at the border. Perry isn’t exactly a credible messenger in some ways, of course. He did memorably start talking secession from the U.S. shortly after Obama came to office.

But before dismissing Perry’s letter as another Republican appeal to the nativist forces of the Tea Party and militia movements--one that has led leading GOP members to call for revocation of citizenship as a birthright for those born in this nation--it’s worth a peak at his argument.

Perry lays out a case for more federal help at the border based on worries that the raging drug war in Mexico could spill over into his state.  Already, more than 28,000 people have died in the battles over drugs since 2006, and there’s no end to the carnage in sight.

And there have been a few incidents--including a rise in kidnappings in McAllen and the murder of a drug cartel member--on Perry’s side of the border that rightly concern the governor.

So I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that his concern for the safety of his state’s residents is legitimate. If I were governor of Texas and all hell was breaking loose just across the river and the border was as porous as it is, I’d be worried.

But what Perry neglects in his letter are the two sure ways to end the violence that so concerns him.

One is a comprehensive path to citizenship for the 20 million or so undocumented aliens currently in the United States. We have to face facts. Whether we like the way they got here or not, we’re not going to deport 20 million or more people.

We need to combine that path to citizenship with an open and clear path for the millions more people around the world to come to this country and contribute to our society. One of the great strengths of America throughout its history has been just that openness.

If we embrace such openness, we will reap untold benefits in new waves of entrepreneurial energy from Silicon Valley geniuses who come from India or China or Brazil or any one of dozens of other countries to our great universities and stay to found future tech giants here in the U.S. And we will see that same entrepreneurial energy drive food carts in our cities, dry cleaners and restaurants throughout our nation, and hundreds of other businesses that will create thousands of jobs for new immigrants and old alike.

Immigration is part of the American formula for success, and we should be more open to it, rather than less, as long as we provide a rational and humane system for immigrants to come to our shores and contribute to our society.

The second thing we need to do to address Perry’s concerns is end the drug war in Mexico, along with the ongoing drug trade in Colombia that funds the rebels against that nation’s legitimate government. That, we could do with a simple act of Congress, albeit one that would take more political guts than either the president or Congress currently possess.

We could end the drug wars in Latin America, as well as the violent drug fights in our own native underworld by simply legalizing drugs. No illegal drug trade, and there will be no huge amounts of cash and guns flowing from the United States south to fund the drug battles. Further, there would be no profit incentive for the gangs of Mexico, or, indeed, New York or Chicago, to fight for drug turf. We could pull the plug on the whole thing if we had the political will.

Yes, that would bring the price down for drugs like marijuana and cocaine, and yes, it would to an extent legitimate those drugs and lead to a spike in usage.

But there are ways to combat such undesirable outcomes short of prohibition, which so clearly hasn’t worked. Taxation of drugs could fund effective intervention and treatment programs, as could the money we currently spend locking low-level drug users and dealers in prison. Advertising and public disapproval could be as effective a weapon against drug use as it has been against smoking. You get the idea.

The prohibition of drugs has failed. It’s time to get on with pragmatic approaches to mitigating the damage drugs cause their users, and to ending a failed policy that has cost thousands of lives and will cost thousands more if left unchecked.

And our current immigration policy has failed as well. It’s time we tap into the better angels of our nation’s nature and create as open and transparent a system for allowing immigrants into this nation legally as we can.

Then, Gov. Perry, we can start talking about whether we really need those troops at the border or whether the money we’d spend on them would be better spent on, say, education.