Immigration

16 June 2007

Apparently I’ll have to take the position on immigration reform that we must deport all 12 million illegal aliens immediately, as this is claimed to be the only alternative to immediate amnesty. The fact that we "can't deport them all" is supposed to lead to the conclusion that we must grant amnesty to all illegal aliens. Well, we can’t catch all the murderers either, so I guess we need a "comprehensive murder reform bill” as well. It's not "amnesty" I guess, if we ask them to pay a small fine. But if it's "impossible" to find and deport illegal aliens, how come we know so much about them? I keep hearing they are Catholic, pro-life, hardworking, just dying to become American citizens, and will take jobs other Americans won't. How do we even know there are 12 or so million of them? Why not only 1 million, or perhaps 25 million? Since Ted Kennedy's 1965 Immigration Act, more than half of all legal immigrants have been unskilled and non-English-speaking Mexicans. America takes in roughly 1 million legal immigrants each year, and only about 30,000 of them have Ph.D.s. Why would any rational immigration policy discriminate against immigrants with Ph.D.s in favor of unskilled, non-English-speaking people? Notably, the biggest proponents of the government's policy of importing a huge underclass of unskilled workers are not themselves unskilled workers. The great bounty of cheap labor by unskilled immigrants isn't going to Americans who hang drywall or clean hotel rooms… and who are having trouble getting jobs now that they're forced to compete with the vast influx of unskilled workers who don't pay taxes. The people who make arguments about "jobs Americans won't do" never seem to be in a line of work where unskilled immigrants can compete with them.
Perhaps the immigration debate would be different if we were importing millions of politicians. At present, it’s a case of “you lose your job, while I keep my Senate seat, and I get a low cost maid as well!” If immigrants were to threatened Senate seats… The only beneficiaries of these famed hardworking immigrants -- unlike the rest of us lazy Americans, are the wealthy, who want the cheap labor while making the rest of us pay for the immigrants' schooling and health care. These great lovers of the downtrodden (the downtrodden trimming their hedge that is), pretend to believe that their gardeners' children will be graduating from Harvard and curing cancer someday, but 1) they don't believe that; and 2) if it happened, they'd lose their gardeners.

According to "Alien Nation" author Peter Brimelow, "There is recent evidence that, even after four generations, fewer than 10% of Mexican-Americans have post-high school degrees, as opposed to nearly half of non-Mexican Americans." So this means you'll always have the gardener and maid I guess. As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently said, our golf fairways would suffer without illegal immigrants: "…who takes care of the greens and the fairways on your golf course?" Another job that Americans won’t take perhaps? Well, mowing a lawn that size wouldn’t rate real high on my “things I’d like to do” list, but I’ve done worse.In Samuel P. Huntington's book "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity," he asks: "Would America be the America it is today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no it would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico or Brazil", and I don't particularly want to live in Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil either. But now I guess I have no choice, since our open border immigration policy means they’re coming here instead.

Yes, this country has absorbed huge migrations of illiterate peasants in the past, most notably the wave of Irish immigrants (my great-grand-parents included) during and after the Great Famine, then the influx of German (more of my great-grand-parents) and Italian immigrants at the turn of the last century. But they came here legally, and worked hard at becoming Americans. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, immigrant and first Jewish member of the Supreme Court, said that Americanization required that the immigrant adopt "the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here" and that he adopt "the English language as the common medium of speech." Brandeis also said "We properly demand of the immigrant even more than this -- he must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done will he possess the national consciousness of an American." Or, in view of the politically correct “cultural diversity” beloved by so many liberals, is this merely "empty rhetoric" and "racist" speech?Until our culture is again capable of Americanizing immigrants, it's ridiculous to talk about a massive influx of Hispanic immigrants accomplishing anything other than turning America into yet another Latin American banana republic. And it is a fact that no one is trying to turn these immigrants into Americans, witness the expanding barrios and ghettos in so many of our larger cities. To the contrary, Democrats are trying to turn new immigrants into wards of the state (apparently with considerable success), so that they will become permanent Democratic voters, while Republicans in Washington are seemingly trying to turn immigrants into a permanent servant class. In the meantime, as politics rage on, Central Americans migrate to the United States in great numbers, bringing with them an assortment of criminal drug organizations, along with some of the world's most brutal gangs -- including the notorious and rapidly growing MS-13's (Mara Salvatrucha), an extremely violent group with close to 10,000 members in thirty-three states.I can well understand why so many people would like to immigrate to this country. As stated above, my own ancestors came to the new world to escape any number of cultural and economic difficulties. (A dedicated Feinian, and having a slight difference of opinion with the British occupation forces, great grandpa Fogarty [as the story goes] left Ireland one step ahead of the hangman.) However, he came to this country, legally. He became an American citizen, legally. He worked and paid taxes, legally. He became a comparatively wealthy man, legally. And he stayed out of trouble (except with his Priest probably) while doing all this. Is it asking to much of today’s immigrants to do things legally as well? We’re supposed to be a nation of law abiding people, and breaking our laws in getting here is a poor way to start on the road to citizenship. Most people immigrate to the United States to gain the standard of living they would like to have as Americans… Well, OK, if they want to come to this country and be Americans, perhaps they should start behaving like Americans, beginning with obeying our immigration laws.

With my deadline rapidly approaching, I’ve just learned that Teddy Kennedy’s compromise immigration bill (S.2611) failed a Senate test vote by a 45-50 margin, somewhat short of the 60 votes needed, and has now been withdrawn. But never fear, it’ll soon be back, in an only slightly modified form I’m sure.