Illegal crossings of the U.S. border are down dramatically since Donald Trump resumed the presidency in January. Border-patrol agents made about 6,000 arrests in June — the lowest level in decades. As recently as December 2023, monthly arrests approached 250,000.
Since the start of the year, many labor-intensive industries have also reported worsening shortages of workers. Of course, the two trends are related. While some illegal immigrants have criminal backgrounds or poor prospects for supporting themselves and their families in America, others fill key jobs in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and the service sector.
Freedom Conservatives believe healthy labor markets and order at the border are compatible goals.
“Immigration is a principal driver of American prosperity and achievement,” we argued in the FreeCon Statement of Principles. “America is exceptional because anyone — from any corner of the earth — can seek to live in America and become an American.”
Still, the means by which newcomers enter the country matter. “The United States, as a sovereign nation, has the right to secure its borders,” we continued, “and design a rational immigration policy — built on the rule of law — that advances the interests and values of American citizens.”
Today we spotlight FreeCons who advocate such rational policies, making it easier to enter the country legally in search of freedom and opportunity while enforcing America’s laws fairly and effectively.
Align with public views
Pollster Scott Rasmussen is founder of the Napolitan Institute and, previously, Rasmussen Research. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.
After co-founding what became ESPN with his father in the 1970s, Rasmussen spent decades working in public policy and opinion research. He‘s an editor-at-large at Ballotpedia and comments extensively on politics and policy for major news outlets.
In a recent Washington Times piece, Rasmussen argued that verifying immigration status during the employment process would affirm the rule of law and protect public safety more effectively than spending tax dollars on extensive raids and deportations.
It would “also more closely align immigration policy with public opinion,” he wrote, reporting that “83% of voters believe legal immigration is good for America, and 81% believe illegal immigration is bad.”
“Although politicians often miss the point, voters recognize that America is a nation of immigrants and laws.”
Well targeted
Stephen Moore is a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a FreeCon signatory.
A former Wall Street Journal editorial writer, congressional aide, and leader of Club for Growth, Moore is a prolific columnist and author of many books, including Who's the Fairest of Them All?: The Truth about Opportunity, Taxes, and Wealth in America.
In a recent Unleash Prosperity report coauthored with economist Richard Vedder and Matthew Denhart, president of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, Moore wrote that “immigrants are likely to be more valuable than ever in achieving higher economic growth over the next several decades.”
They urged Washington to expand visa programs for seasonal laborers, high-tech workers, and investor immigrants, among other categories. Raising annual migration quotas would smooth out the “demographic cycle” of fewer young Americans entering the workforce and more Baby Boomers exiting it.
Over the past decade, they observed, immigrants filled nearly 40% of all new jobs in the United States. This occurred even as unemployment rates remained historically low, suggesting newcomers weren’t displacing native workers but rather expanding the economy as a whole.
A “well targeted legal immigration system” that supplies “the talent and the work ethic that America needs is more important today than ever,” they concluded.
Nay, robot
Brent Orrell is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a FreeCon signatory.
A writer for such publications as USA Today, The Bulwark, Deseret News, The Dispatch, Law and Liberty, The Hill and RealClearPolicy, Orrell formerly served as an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Labor, deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and legislative assistant in the U.S. Senate.
In a recent post, Orrell predicted that a combination of “demographic aging, economic growth, and restrictive immigration policy” are “conspiring to create historically tight labor markets in the coming years.”
Can artificial intelligence, robotics, and other forms of automation solve the problem?
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Orrell argued. “As AI helps to offset retirements and streamline ‘knowledge’ worker employment, the demand in fields like construction, manufacturing, hospitality, agriculture, health and elder care — you know, the producers of the housing, consumer products, food, and basic services we rely on and are accustomed to having on demand — continues to grow.”
In the mix
• In the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory and native New Yorker David Harsanyi wrote that “watching the Democratic Party nominate a socialist jihadi apologist for mayor less than 25 years after 9/11 is infuriating.”
“Not because Zohran Mamdani is a Muslim,” Harsanyi continued, “but because he embraces ‘globalizing the intifada,’ a violent, terroristic slogan aimed at his Jewish neighbors — in a city where they have increasingly been targeted.”
“In years past, Democrats would feign offense at being labeled socialists. Today, not a single notable elected Democrat, outside of Sen. John Fetterman, decried the direction of their party. Indeed, many big-name Democrats have endorsed Mamdani, including, despicably, numerous Jewish Democrats.”
• At Fox News, FreeCon signatory David Bahnsen described Mamdani’s primary win as a “dire warning” for the American Right.
“This is what we will get nationally if we do not repudiate right-wing populism,” wrote Bahnsen, managing partner of The Bahnsen Group and author of Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life. Such populists are “borrowing” rhetoric from Mamdani and other left-wingers “but with less magnitude and force, and finding out the hard way that state power and grotesque economic interventions will always be done with more drama by the left than the right.”
“Once the bargain has been made — once the concession is granted that, yes, the government ought to be the key arbiter in economic life — the left-wing populists are going to win the day.”
• In the Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory Ray Nothstine wrote that when the Declaration of Independence was signed, it marked 13 distinct rebellions.
“We should remember the independent spirit of the colonies and their multitude of rebellions that helped shape our federalist system — one in which states and citizens aren’t subjects of a distant authority, but active participants in self-government,” wrote Nothstine, a writer and editor at State Policy Network. “The revolutionary belief that people need not be ruled by a sovereign took root in county courthouses, churches and local assemblies long before it was declared in Philadelphia in 1776.”
He added that federalism “still gives us the best path to exercise and practice self-government. Our challenge is to embrace the Founders’ wisdom.”
• In the Orlando Sentinel, FreeCon signatory Richard Lorenc wrote that revisionist arguments against the American Revolution merely reveal how out of touch many young (and not so young) people are with our country’s founding principles.
“Ours is a nation of ideas and ideals,” wrote Lorenc, who leads a project, Lexandria, to help develop high school students into principled citizens. “That’s what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are all about: the people’s freedoms and how to organize a government that respects and protects those freedoms.”
“At each major crossroad in America’s history — the Revolutionary War, the westward migration, the Civil War, the Great Depression, the two world wars — we’ve leaned into our values and ideals and emerged stronger for it.”