(Newser)
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Faced with demographic challenges, the GOP is clearly hoping that lightening up on immigration policy can save its neck. "Maybe it will, and maybe not. But it could save everyone else's," writes A. Barton Hinkle at Reason. Hinkle thinks we need to focus on bringing more people to the US, not fewer, because immigrants tend to be positive additions to the country. "Compared with native-born Americans, immigrants are more likely to start a business … more likely to work, and less likely to commit crime."
Immigrants make up 13% of the population, but 18% of small-business owners. A higher percentage of them work, too, often in jobs no one else wants. "Americans who resent having to compete with immigrants for jobs suffer from a double delusion," both because they assume immigrants only take jobs—they're also employers and consumers—and because it implies they have some claim to jobs they haven't been hired for. "The term for that is 'entitlement mentality.'" For the full column, click here.
