There were “lines for everything” in the former Soviet Union. That’s what Hedrick Smith conveyed to rapt readers in his 1976 book, The Russians.
As frustrated Americans endured long waits for price-controlled gasoline in the 1970s, Smith reminded Americans of how good they had it through Russians for whom shopping was an endless, frequently fruitless exercise. That is, unless they had “blat,” which was a Russian word for access to goods (including Western items) only available in shops accessible to a small elite.
Blat comes to mind amid an ongoing debate about immigration in the U.S. Conservatives in particular claim they’re for immigration so long as it’s legal, and arrivals “get in line” for the privilege of being here. It’s puzzling.
Lines are generally an effect of governmental attempts to centrally plan a market phenomenon. And a market phenomenon immigration is, as evidenced by $63 billion (in 2023 alone) worth of remittances into Mexico from Mexican individuals working in the U.S.
Why then, would conservatives want government to manage the inflow of prospective workers? Not only have border officials proven unequal to the job (as the number of illegals stateside attests), why the demand (from conservatives no less) that mere workers or would-be Americans suffer the powerful inefficiency of government on the path to becoming American? The question rates a pivot.
Think last fall's World Series. Shohei Ohtani starred for the Los Angeles Dodgers as he continued to build a case for greatest baseball player of all time, while his fellow countryman Yoshinobu Yamamoto was crowned Series MVP.
Notable about the two players from Japan is that neither is a U.S. citizen. Despite this, both worked without fear of deportation thanks to P-1A Visas that international athletes under contract to U.S. teams have available to them. As is seemingly true with any country, there are always exceptions able to jump the proverbial line.
To which a not unreasonable response might be that Ohtani and Yamamoto are extraordinary and legal. It’s fair enough, but unknown is why conservatives would seemingly countenance government as the entity allowing some, but not all private businesses the privilege of choosing their employees. It’s “blat,” modern American edition. And there’s something wrong with it from a conservative standpoint.
That’s because extraordinary is in the eye of the beholder as free markets constantly remind us. Furthermore, how odd for conservatives to side with government as it substitutes its narrow knowledge for the information-pregnant marketplace on the matter of human capital. As remittances to Mexico attest, the markets are telling us that the U.S. needs theoretically low-skilled Mexican workers in addition to Japanese baseball greats.
Next, isn’t migration to better opportunity on its own a sign of extraordinary individual qualities? Conservatives rightly revel in American citizens taking their talents to their highest use, and far from where they grew up, so why the disdain when the ambitious from outside the United States pursue opportunity within it?
Most of all, governments simply cannot plan market activity. We saw this through hours-long lines for gasoline in the 1970s, and we saw it during the Biden years as government officials vainly attempted to plan the arrival of people. Chaos ensued, needlessly. Conservatives know why.
Which is why if they believe in free markets and legal immigration, conservatives should recoil at governments choosing who can and cannot work in the U.S. Instead, let the markets decide who should come here to work, free of lines that are an inevitable effect of the central planning that Hedrick Smith wrote about so brilliantly fifty years ago.
