Trojan Piñata
Honduran Caravan, Illegal Immigration

HT: Vanderleun.
Category Archive 'Illegal Immigration'
30 Oct 2018
Progressives Fed Up With AmericansBerthold Brecht, Illegal Immigration, Left Think, Progressives![]() Robert Curry contends that Progressives, after losing in 2016, resemble the East German government of 1953, unhappy with the uprising in East Germany, referenced in Berthold Brecht’s famous poem, looking to elect a different people. The difference between today’s American Progs and the 1950s East German Nomenklatura being that our Progressives actually have a method of tinkering with the constituency of the electorate. Die Lösung Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni ————————– The Solution After the uprising of the 17th of June
30 Jan 2017
Trump’s Wall"Fixed, Donald Trump, Illegal Immigration, Trump's Wall![]() “Fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity. If mountain ranges and oceans can be overcome, anything made by man can be overcome.†–George Patton. 01 Sep 2016
Joe Scarborough’s “Amnesty Don”Country Western Music, Donald Trump, Illegal Immigration, Joe Scarborough![]() Joe Scarborough scored a big hit in his feud with Donald Trump by releasing this Country-Western song, mocking Trump’s softening his stance on deporting illegal immigrants. 2:48 video 25 Aug 2016
Trump Flipflops on Immigration2016 Election, Ann Coulter, Donald Trump, Illegal Immigration, Trump's Reliability![]() Personally, I prefer Trump’s position on immigration now that he has flipflopped, but Ann Coulter, poor girl!, is having kittens over it, and just two days after her very own pro-Trump campaign book was released. What do you suppose all the Trumpkins who stay on board are going to say when Trump starts revising his position on Gun Control? and when he announces his new and thoroughly-revised list of potential Supreme Court appointees? 23 Nov 2014
SNL Mocks Obama’s Executive OrderBarack Obama, Due Process, Executive Orders, Illegal Immigration, Saturday Night Live![]() 21 Nov 2014
Obama Divides Rather Than Leads… AgainBarack Obama, Dirty Politics, Illegal Immigration![]() Barack Obama piously quoted Scripture and posed as a great idealist going out on a limb to do the right thing for poor Hispanic immigrants but, in reality, he was playing ruthless partisan politics, setting aside due process and overreaching his own authority in order to set a trap for Republicans and permanently lock in the Hispanic vote for democrats. Something needs to be done to bring American immigration policy into line with America’s economic needs, and something needs to be done to regularize the status of people living here and doing most of the country’s worst-paying and most disagreeable jobs, but before that can be done, we need to win the national debate and properly form a consensus. What Barack Obama just did was the precise opposite of building a consensus. He divided the country further and inflamed passions over an issue on which the country is not thinking rationally and in which we were already excessively divided. And he did it cynically for political gain. Peter Suderman makes the same point at Reason:
18 Jun 2014
More Immigration ArgumentsCurrent Events, Illegal Immigration, Immigration![]() 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:
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. 11 Aug 2013
Etiology of Large-Scale Illegal ImmigrationIllegal Immigration, Immigration![]() Ezra Klein explains that Princeton Professsor Doug Massey identifies the recent decades’ great influx of Hispanic illegal immigration as a classic case of unintended consequences. However, if you don’t like Hispanic immigration, Massey also points out, you can cheer up: that period of immigration is also basically over.
Read the whole thing. I think Massey is right. 02 Aug 2013
Good ArgumentsIllegal Immigration, Immigration, Libertarianism![]() Pretty Naomi Broadwell looks at immigration the way I do. Hat tip to John Hinderaker. 21 Jun 2013
The “Law-and-Order” ArgumentEthics, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, Law-and-Order Argument, Philosophy, The Law![]() The Immigration debate has a tendency to turn red-blooded conservatives into censorious old ladies, who are shocked, shocked and indignant and offended that Hispanic immigrant laborers would have the temerity to violate THE LAW. Sophisticated people realize that there are laws and there are laws. During first year of law school, the distinction is universally explained between Malum in se, actions, like murder and theft, which are genuinely wrong and violative of Natural Law, and Malum prohibitum, things, like overtime parking, which are illegal only because of some arbitrary regulatory enactment. Entering the United States in order to improve one’s condition through honest work is obviously merely Malum prohibitum, the violation of a regulation, not something evil in and of itself. As I remarked in a previous posting, a lot of freedom-loving Americans (and even conservatives) are notorious for their lack of respect for mere regulation. They had to repeal Prohibition because so many Americans ignored the law. The 55 mph speed limit is nearly universally flouted by American motorists. Americans commonly violate current drug laws in much the same way they used to violate liquor laws. What percentage of graduates of elite universities have never smoked pot? The number must be very very small. It is just plain silly, and not especially manly or becoming, to go around striking sanctimonious poses and ranting about “enforcing the law.” The philosopher Robert Paul Wolff wrote a small monograph in 1970, titled In Defense of Anarchism, in which he demonstrated that, really, everyone has some point of independent moral judgement at which he will cease to obey the edicts of the State. TYPICAL EXAMPLE: The Gestapo Standartenführer demands that you reveal the hiding place of some Jews. Sometimes “the law is an ass,” sometimes the law is immoral, sometimes the law is simply obtrusive and inconvenient, and we ignore it. When our sclerotic, unprincipled, and embodying-no-useful-purposes contemporary immigration regulations provide no opportunity for desperate people to enter the country, and some, determined to support themselves and their families and to better their condition, ignore those regulations and enter anyway, my sympathies are with them. America was founded by, and for, the enterprising, the daring, and the rebellious. The country came into being as the result of a general inclination toward resistance to arbitrary regulation and authority. I’ve read indignant editorial after indignant editorial complaining about illegal immigrants “jumping ahead in the line” and “not playing by the rules.” Frankly, I think those arguments represent nothing more than opportunistic poses. Why do we even need a line? People come here to work because we need their services and we hire them. The market is a self-correcting mechanism. If we do not need more low-skilled Hispanic laborers, jobs will not exist, and they won’t come here. We do not need a quota system and a line to keep someone from mowing my lawn. I do not care if Jose Jimenez violated some pointless federal regulations, which as far as I am concerned do not need to exist. If he stands up, sits down, turns around, says “Simon says,” and goes through all the rigmarole required, none of that benefits me or anybody else at all. What benefits me and the country generally is the availability of affordable labor. I don’t need some federal form filled in. I need yard work and some roof shingling done. Real morality is on the side of the illegal immigrants. Spouting law-and-order-ism and demanding that everyone follow pointless and arbitrary rules is the function of busybodies and old ladies and Statists. Your are browsing
the Archives of Never Yet Melted in the 'Illegal Immigration' Category.
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