Squabbling on the right.

NEW YORK, JANUARY 28

If seniority were binding, the new chairman of the Senate's Immigration Subcommittee would be Jon Kyl of Arizona, who however turned it down, ceding to Spencer Abraham of Michigan. Why did Mr. Kyl turn it down? Because Arizona has a very long, porous border with Mexico, and the Hispanic vote in the state is correspondingly weighty. Senator Abraham is from far-off Michigan, and whatever he says about immigration will be unnoticeable at the polls unless Michigan annexes Ontario. Meanwhile, Senator Abraham is fleetingly a hero of the full-house immigration lobby (the more immigrants, the merrier).

The splendid Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal has got a bit of this free-market-on-immigration bug, and in celebrating the turn of events in the Senate, he parlayed a couple of eye-catching illustrations of his point into grand immigration-policy postulates.

He tells us that at Cypress Semiconductor, a Silicon Valley princedom, he learned that 40 per cent of Cypress's top management is foreign born. If the reader thought this an isolated phenomenon, hang on, Mr. Gigot is just warming up: we are advised that more than 40 per cent of U.S. engineering PhDs are foreign born.

Goodness! On the other hand, if 40 per cent of U.S. engineers are foreign born, why should we be surprised that Cypress's top management is 40 per cent foreign born? Surely the arresting disclosure here is how (apparently) few Americans are trained to build advanced-degree bridges. Why is that? Where else is America professionally laggard? Do we need immigrants to teach us ecology? To occupy posts as police chiefs? Senators? Editors? Columnists?

The Ellis Island cultists resist plainspoken reasoning. 1) The United States is greatly desired as a homeland by millions of people whose countries are less free, and where opportunity is less bright. 2) The idea of totally open borders -- anybody who wants to can come on in -- is the stuff of libertarian fancy, nice for tone poems by such as Ayn Rand, but not very good national policy. 3) At various points in history we have opened, and then gently closed, our borders, pending economic and social assimilation. If there is dogged unemployment, there is no manifest need for more labor. If pockets of immigrants are resisting the assimilation that over generations has been the solvent for American citizenship, then energies should go to accosting multiculturalism, rather than encouraging its increase. And, 4) intelligent immigration policy obviously authorizes one more Einstein for Cypress Semiconductor and one fewer welfare immigrant simply because he is second cousin to the second cousin of the uncle who got in last week.

The free-market purists spend very little time worrying about illegal immigration, in part because they don't think any immigration should be illegal, a commitment that lightens their thinking lives, but at some cost to brainpower. Mr. Gigot criticizes the editors of NATIONAL REVIEW for calling for immigration reform and declares that any such move disrespects the program and the mystique of Ronald Reagan, the great optimist. Ronald Reagan in 1981 backed severe punishment for Americans who hired illegal aliens. And in 1986, he signed a bill granting amnesty to illegal aliens but imposing fines to discourage further illegal immigration.

There is a case to be made for reducing legal immigration pending some rectification of the multiculturalism problem. But that in turn is difficult to face because such reforms as English-only become a political hassle. And it really discourages intelligent discourse to inject into the conversation such objections as, Would you have opposed giving a visa to Albert Einstein? And then there is the primary question: Do we or do we not have the right to regulate passage over our own borders? If the answer is in the affirmative, then regulated immigration is nothing more than parsing the rights of a sovereign state. It isn't that the Wall Street Journal libertarians are saying that there is no point in trying to enforce unenforceable laws -- they are all in favor of continuing to put a marijuana smoker in jail. A pity that they can't iron out this wrinkle in their otherwise lily-pure complexion.