Planning and running are two very different things. I think I understand this question. Milton Friedman said something similar about the contradiction of open immigration and the welfare state. I think the only contradiction here emerges when you have the positive entitlements of any kind--which, incidentally, is the front on which most mainstream people I talk to (i.e. my students) find compelling reasons for limiting immigration. The argument that becomes central for them is that immigrants don't pay taxes and yet they use services like schools, hospitals, welfare--they even complain about the use of police and prisons. I seem to remember this being an important question on this list last spring.
Perhaps there was a time when this could be answered with the dire predictions of Pat Robertson types, but since 1996 when the IRS issued these tax ID numbers, not only are many people paying in, but if memory serves, they have contributed more than they use. This is in a situation where we have effectively set up an underclass that is without legal protections and therefore could be exploited by the free market as viciously as it wants to. This low paid labor is something that the entire economy benefits from. Hayek might be right, it would fuck up economic planning if we had open borders and immigrants were guaranteed legal protections of citizens, but not in the way he meant it. In this case, because it would make most everything cost more: a lot more.
In fact, an argument could be made that the only way to really plan the economy (or, for that matter, for the labor market to work its Austrian magic) would be to not have an enormous black market for labor. In all likelihood, the only way this would be eliminated would be to have a completely open door policy on immigration. Any other half measure would simply divide up the immigrant population amongst people who got in through guest worker programs (and other such hokum) and the people who got here outside of the bureaucratic framework and would surely be hired under the table.
As for the entitlements situation, I imagine it would be more difficult to deal with population changes, but on the whole we need something like
300K people immigrating a year just to keep up with all the people leaving the workforce *in order to continue providing the benefits for the people retiring.* Maybe I'm making fundamental economic errors here, but it seems like immigration not a whole lot different than any other variable you'd have to consider in your planning. If all immigrants were legal they'd all pay taxes.
If you prefer market based solutions, it seems to me that, after an initial glut, the number of people coming to the country would fall dramatically, theoretically, in the perfect world of market based solutions, to the exact number necessary to do the work. Tying peasants to their parishes was something that Adam Smith thought was a problem. I don't think there would be that many people flooding across the border just to take advantage of the welfare state. For one thing, there's not much of one.
I think it is a convenient (and capital friendly) argument to think that open immigration is a problem because we can't plan for it. The only thing the federal government is really committed to is preserving the value of capitalist property and negotiating the value of the dollar based on setting interest rates--in other words, all the things, and only the things, Friedman said you could do with monetary policy. Growth in general, job growth in particular and all those other goodies are just externalities.
as for...
>> [WS:] I have nothing but praise for the open door policy, but I am afraid
>> that at this junction of time it is mainly the Wall-Street types and
>> libertarians who espouse it. Most of the traditional "target
>> populations"
>> of the left - blue collar, low-income, minorities, unemployed etc. - are
>> deeply anti-immigrant and xenophobic - I am afraid.
Poor things, they are just born xenophobic, eh? Though I am sure there are perfectly good structural reasons for working class people to find immigrants to be big competition, any time I hear arguments like this I am reminded of Mike Davis' _Prisoners of the American Dream_ where he shows over and over again the way that politicians have used xenophobic arguments to divide the working class, particularly in the 19th century.
I'm sure there is some good honest homegrown racism in every community (though as joanna points out, it is likely in a variety of different directions) it is often this kind of fear that gets exploited by politicians trying to prevent just the kind of united front Wojek mentions and Carrol advocates.
In so far as this fear is irrational, it is one of the few that doesn't get dismissed outright as illegitimate by elites. That's because it is an easy sell and a nice thing to have in your back pocket if things start to get rough, such as in the spring and summer when all of the sudden the right wing woke up to the national crisis of immigration. Not a problem in Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar then all of the sudden it is threatening the very fabric of our civilization. Right. There is a big difference between kneejerk racism and fear of what you don't understand or can't control and supporting the construction of a 700 mile fence and the deportation or imprisonment of 11 million people. And this with a budget deficit: talk about being bad for economic planning.