OK, I’m going to describe someone and you try to guess which Washington think tank he’s written for on immigration this week. Douglas Massey is a sociology professor at Princeton, former president of the American Sociological Assn., contributor to The American Prospect, author of the new book Return of the “L” Word: A Liberal Vision for the New Century (blurbed by Robert Reich and Ruy Teixeira), which Fred Siegel reviewed in the New York Sun saying, “Shorn of his academic pretensions, Mr. Massey is just another Deaniac who is convinced that Democrats have been losing because they’ve failed to show sufficient ideological fervor.”
So who published a paper by him this week calling for an illegal-alien amnesty? Maybe the liberal Center for American Progress? Or the Urban Institute? The Institute for Policy Studies? No, silly, the Cato Institute, of course! Maybe they thought The Return of the “L” Word was about libertarianism. Seriously, though, in the not-too-distant future, immigration is going to become a big enough deal that Beltway libertarians are going to have to choose: either relegate their loony immigration views to the same closet where they currently hide prostitution, pornography and abortion, or become increasingly marginalized and cut off from access to policymakers.