By Art Carden

"The law perverted! The law--and, in its wake, all the collective force of the nation--the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law become the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish! Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens."

Those aren't my words, as much as I wish they were. They're not: they're the words of the 19th century economist and essayist Frederic Bastiat, from his slender volume The Law. His words to the people of France in 1850 could havebeen just as easily been written to Americans (and Alabamians) in 2012.

Restrictions on immigration embody the law perverted, to use Bastiat's phrase. The United States used to be a country that welcomed the world's tired, its poor, its huddled masses yearning to breathe free. During the Progressive Era, that changed. Under the influence of the eugenics movement, American policymakers intervened in the labor market in a number of ways. They passed laws restricting labor force participation by women and children, they passed minimum wage laws, and they passed restrictions on immigration.

As the economist Thomas C. Leonard documents, and as Steven Horwitz and I discussed in The Freeman a little over a year ago, these laws were passed specifically to protect white male workers and, in the case of