It’s not strictly fair. I responded to Chris’s previous comments before, but his arguments are representative of that school of thought, and this comment just came in and provokes rejoinder.
Chris writes:
[L]ets dissect those three arguments:
Law breaking: SO because there are really two sides to the law breaking issue (employers and illegals) we should just give it a mulligan? C’mon. That’s not addressing the issue. That’s ignoring it. What would you say to the immigrant from Taiwan that has stood in line and waited for an available immigration slot? Too bad, you don’t swim as well? How is it Conservative, how is it JUST or fair to those that followed the rules? Put it in terms of jumping the line at Disneyland. If we just sayscrew it, there won’t be a queue…it’ll simply look like anarchy.
Actually, I have responded to the law-and-order and the (Michelle Malkin) standing-in-line arguments repeatedly and at length. See the malum-in-se versus malum-prohibitum discussion in some earlier posts.
Our immigration laws do not, in fact, embody any real principle of Natural Law or American political philosophy. Neither do they reflect any kind of substantive consensus resulting from a national debate. They are mere semi-random regulations evolved over time from earlier regulatory schemes modified by reflexive kinds of political compromise within the legislature.
Our immigration regs are ill-conceived. They fail to reflect our traditions, our values, or to respond to our economic needs, and they get produced by occult political processes remote from the views of real American voters on either side of the issue.
Breaking these kinds of rules is a victimless crime. If some Mexican laborer crosses the border, comes here and goes out and picks strawberries for Farmer Jones, he is not doing anybody any harm at all. I’ll happily go along with you guys on the other side in supporting deportation of illegal immigrants who do commit crimes or who try signing up for welfare.
As to standing-in-line, we have currently a dysfunctional system. There is no line for the poor Mexican who wants a better life to stand in. The quotas have no room for him at all. Michelle Malkin is a pretty girl and she is a ferocious little fighter for the conservative side. I’m happy that she came to America, but personally I don’t care a plug nickel how she did it. Michelle’s filling out the proper forms and standing in the proper lines benefited me not in the slightest. On the other hand, I have frequently benefited from affordable labor services from Hispanic gentlemen who did my yard work in California, repaired the roof on my Virginia house, painted my lawn furniture, and bussed my table and washed my dishes in restaurants all over America.
Economic impact: They tackle jobs most Americans won’t. Try to understand this, if you give them amnesty, guess what, they won’t take those jobs either!!! The reason they take them is because the jobs paying $20 an hour actually check their legal status. If they are legal, they have no incentive to cut lawns, pick fruit or do any of the other stuff you insist that they should do. So who’s going to cut your lawn? Well the flood of mexicans that will follow…. because remember, you STILL HAVE NOT GOT CONTROL OF YOUR BORDER.
That’s an inventive argument. I think legalizing the status of illegal immigrants will very likely gradually move them out of the off-the-books black market economy and eventually make nearly all of them formally-employed tax-payers, but I don’t think that that means they will suddenly be displacing people with better skills, grander educational credentials, and more extensive indigenous connections. The process of upward mobility only in rare cases favors the first generation arrivee. The general rule is that the second or the third generation become fully assimilated and moves up and out of the immigrant neighborhood and the laboring classes. When they do, decades down the road, yes, we will be needing more immigrants. Trading citizenship and a better life for one’s descendants by doing the rotten jobs at low pay has always been the American way.
And you are never going to have control of thousands and thousands of miles of sea coast and wilderness border without paying some immense army to stand there 24-hours-a-day. It will never be economically feasible to really control the border.
The way to control the border with respect to illegal immigration is to arrange to have our labor needs met domestically by allowing enough legal immigration to meet them.
Threat to American Culture: Assimilation preserves American values… That’s a great platitude, one that we all like to think is true, but the reality is, Hispanic immigrants ARE NOT ASSIMILATING. PERIOD. One only has to live in the Southwest to understand this. You might think that this is some Darwinian process, and to a certain extent it is… But your advocating cultural suicide as a conservative value? How is that Conservative?
As I’ve jocularly noted, a few conspicuous cases of non-assimilation (the Amish) go back to colonial times and work out tolerably enough when they do.
The American Southwest is a peculiar case, and one not affecting most of us (who don’t live there) directly. The Mexicans, one is obliged to note, were actually there first. There have always been Spanish-speaking Mexican communities in the Southwest. You also have some Indians, living on reservations and not completely assimilating. It’s that kind of stuff, beyond the cactuses, gila monsters, and rattlesnakes, that gives your part of the country its special regional flavor, its local color. Take away the cactuses, the Indians, and the Mexicans, and Tucson could be Harrisburg.
The truth is that we have a long record of successfully digesting and assimilating all sorts of exotic undesirables, including types who make today’s Mexicans seem harmless. I believe the Mexicans and other Hispanics will assimilate. It’s true that in LA and other urban barrios, you are going to have politically poisonous radicals and gangsters. All waves of immigration inevitably include a certain percentage of drunks, whores, political agitators, and criminals. They used to publish Socialist newspapers in Polish and Lithuanian back where I grew up during the immigration era. The grandchildren of their readers cannot read Polish or Lithuanian, don’t live there anymore, and commonly vote Republican.
Today’s Hispanic immigrants typically work hard, save their money, and live lives of sacrifice to better their family’s future. I feel quite certain that they feel about taxes and welfare exactly the way I do. People who work hard and have family values are natural born Republican voters. We just need to make it clear that there are lots of Republicans, like myself, who sympathize with their efforts and who admire their sacrifices. If they could be persuaded that not all Republicans hate their guts, we could get plenty of their votes.
You want an end to lawlessness? Get rid of the number system. Go back to the law of 1906. Erect Ellis Airport and Bus Station. Anybody capable of self-support, and not a criminal, diseased, or Islamic, or otherwise subscribing to a noxious ideology favoring war against Capitalism and/or Western society should be free to come there, stand in line, fill out the forms, get examined by a doctor, and enter the US provisionally. After several years of satisfactory residence, he can start applying for naturalization.
T. Shaw
What is your problem?
What do you not understand about, “You can have a welfare state or open borders, but not both.â€?
Bob S.
Breaking these kinds of rules is a victimless crime. If some Mexican laborer crosses the border, comes here and goes out and picks strawberries for Farmer Jones, he is not doing anybody any harm at all.
Except for the identity theft many use to evade detection and arrest. And the other laws governing how people function in today’s technological and controlled society. I don’t agree with all the laws but to say that illegal immigration is a victimless crime is not accurate.
Economic impact: They tackle jobs most Americans won’t.
I disagree with this argument and in fact offer the opposite. Instead of taking jobs American’s won’t take — they fill jobs that otherwise citizens would finally stoop to take. Most people don’t want the menial, repetitive jobs filled by unskilled immigrants but as long as there is a steady flow of immigrants there is little motivation for employers to pay more. In addition, there is little room for citizens to fill those positions out of need. The illegal immigrants are in effect creating a lower limit on employment. If that makes sense.
And you are never going to have control of thousands and thousands of miles of sea coast and wilderness border without paying some immense army to stand there 24-hours-a-day
Sorry but that is a bad argument; there will be limited immigration via the sea or the more remote borders. Sure there will be some but the logistical and economics dictate most immigration will occur via easily accessible routes. Control those and you’ll reduce (never eliminate) much of the flow.
Threat to American Culture: Assimilation preserves American values…
Frankly there is an entire issue outside of immigration at the root of this problem. We are no longer actively seeking assimilation within our own society much less by people outside our borders.
We have allowed the country to splinter into thousands of cultural values instead of incorporating the best of all into one unifying whole. Not all cultural values are equal; yet today we are supposed to treat them as if they are and that is a huge problem.
Bob S.
Phil McKann
The cartoon paints a false equivalent, one you obviously agree with.
You believe they will assimilate, I do not. Or rather they will assimilate, but into Obama’s America as it is being built. There is zero room for Conservatism or Classic Liberalism there, except as a quaint idea. So I guess you’re comfortable just posting and blogging about your ideas rather than expecting to see them actually realized. Yale does that.
This isn’t a Southwest issue, although it is to me, but that is your blind spot. I’ve personally seen it in Illinois (rep. Guitierrez), southern Idaho, Georgia, Tennessee (Jack Daniels, away from the tourist distillery, is staffed with illegals), and Michigan. Look at the Most Wanted for any of those states and tell me what you see. Check your own area, you might be surprised.
When does it end? 11 Million? 40 Million? 400 Million? The cartoon lampoons people with my concerns as some curmudgeon though an historical lens; immigration stopped and presumably no harm done. Nothing is being done to stem the influx, in fact it is being pushed from outside as well as inside.
If it ended when there was no demand for labor, fair enough. But in today’s America it is labor and welfare, welfare never being a variable before that will have to run out. What would happen then?
I believe that they will keep coming in until the U.S. is indistinguishable from Mexico, and I think it is by design. The ruling elite’s problem with America is Americans.
Chris
Sigh. It would be nice if you addressed the practical issue, rather than the philosophical theory for a change. As another said, perhaps Yale does that to a person. USMA does not.
You assert that the laws are broken, ill-conceived etc. Fine. I do not substantially disagree with you. BUT, what does that have to do with 11 Million illegal immigrants? Change the law back to the 1906 versions..but I would add that no eligibility for public support (welfare etc) for a period of 25 years. But regardless of what you change the law to be, there are still 11 million law breakers who have to go through the system in some manner.
Economically, you THINK that formerly illegal immigrants will move into better paying jobs. Well I’m glad you think that. But what’s really going to happen is that the next wave of illegals will come rolling in to take over the lawn mowing etc…. what are you going to say then? Make them legal too. F**kit… lets just drop the pretense and open the border… no point trying to actually be a state anyway.
You’ve noted with humor the Amish non-assimilation. Hey that’s great… are they bringing in their cousins from Holland too?! Maybe you’ve never lived or worked in a Latin American sh*thole but I have… you want the favelas being built down the street?
See I don’t blame those folks for wanting better for their children…for striving for it… but they could do so in their Country rather than export their way of life to this Nation.
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. You will have your way… simply because Politicians no longer represent their constituents. Amnesty will be given, the cycle will repeat, and America will become the 32nd state of Mexico…. You’ll be dead and gone… you won’t have to live with what you’ve advocated…but my Children and their children will suffer for stupidity such as yours.
GoneWithTheWind
When you were young you had a tradition of shitting your pants and you valued a pacifier. But you grew up. What does it matter that 100 years ago our population was so small that immigrants contributed positively if today it is the opposite. Have you noticed that the unemployed and the welfare crowd exceed the working class? We don’t need immigrants legal or illegal. The ONLY reason we have immigration today is to benefit certain special interests. The average citizen will be harmed by mass immigration and in fact they have already been harmed by the explosion of immigration legal and illegal since the Kennedys opened the doors in the 60’s. We don’t need immigrants and we most certainly do not need poor uneducated immigrants who do in fact refuse to assimilate. I was in grade school in the 40’s in a large Eastern city and new immigrant children were common ever year in school. The teacher would introduce them and explain that they didn’t understand much English and to help them learn. Within three months they spojke as good English as anyone did. The difference is today there is a very large special interest group that benefits from immigrants NOT learning English and not assimilating. So instead we spend mountains of money to teach them in their native language.
I will make this prediction with absolute conviction that I am correct. One day you and I and everyone will be denied life saving health care because of the high cost and our advanced age. While at the exact same time ilegal immigrants will be costing our health care system billions and billions each year.
T. Shaw
Victor Davis Hanson: “Most cynical of all, however, are the moralistic pundits, academics and journalists who deplore the ‘nativism’ of Americans they consider to be less-educated yokels. Yet their own jobs of writing, commenting, reporting and teaching are rarely threatened by cheaper illegal workers.
“Few of these well-paid and highly educated people live in communities altered by huge influxes of illegal aliens. Their professed liberality about illegal immigration usually derives from seeing hardworking waiters, maids, nannies and gardeners commute to their upscale cities and suburbs to serve them well — and cheaply.
“In general, such elites don’t use emergency rooms in the inner cities and rural counties overcrowded by illegal aliens. They don’t drive on country roads frequented by those without licenses, registration and insurance. And their children don’t struggle with school curricula altered to the needs of students who speak only Spanish…”
Based on 24/7 rabid, pro-amnesty propaganda, I am letting lapse the very old WSJ subscription. I will use the money to buy bullets.
Chris
So Hanson knows Zincavage personally? Who’d have thought it…
JDZ
I’m old and retired. The Mexican immigrants can have all the money NYM makes.
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