An interesting take on immigration

Angry Bear has an interesting discussion of legal and illegal immigration. In the end he's for more immigration:

This in turn relates to the still deeper question of why we allow immigration in the first place: is the goal to improve the US, or is it to improve the lives of the individuals who want to immigrate?

For me, both goals matter, at least to some degree. I'm more sympathetic toward that poor Mexican farm worker than I am toward the Nigerian doctor, but the Nigerian doctor will probably make me (and the rest of the US) a tiny bit richer than the Mexican would. To me, those two effects roughly balance out. As a result, I’m not particularly in favor of changing the rules to only allow high-skilled immigrants in to the US. I can see the logic of it (it’s really an economist’s logic, after all), but it doesn't satisfy my sense of morality.

...

Putting this all together, I find that I don't worry about illegal immigration any more than I worry about legal immigration. I'd like there to be fewer illegal immigrants, but only because I'd like more of them to be able to enter the country legally. Put another way, I could possibly favor harsher treatment for illegal immigrants, and I’d even be willing to pay for stricter border enforcement... but only if those policy changes were accompanied by a much more liberal legal immigration policy, and a policy to bring current illegal immigrants into fully legal status. Note that I am not advocating completely open borders - I think that some sort of limit on legal immigration is reasonable, simply because overly rapid population growth in the US would cause its own set of problems. However, current population growth in the US is only about 1% per year, including immigration. That is near the lowest levels of
population growth ever experienced in the US - only in the 1930s was it lower. I
think the US can handle a bit more than that.

Robert Reich was also on Market Place this morning arguing for stricter enforcement of laws against employing illegal immigrants since companies often employ illegal immigrants since they are less likely to complain about poor pay and working conditions.

Sadly, I think these types of arguments are not likely to be persuasive to middle America. Instead, immigrants will steal our jobs and rape our women.