Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy quotes Reagan’s 1989 Farewell Address:

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. (emphasis added)

and concludes himself:

Reagan’s positive attitude towards immigration was not just an isolated issue position, but was integrally linked to his generally optimistic and open vision of America. I would add that it also drew on his understanding that America is not a zero-sum game between immigrants and natives – just as he also recognized that it is not a zero-sum game between the rich and the poor. Immigration could promote prosperity and advancement for both groups in much the same way that free trade benefits both Americans and foreigners. Reagan probably did not have a detailed understanding of the economics of comparative advantage which underpins this conclusion. But he surely understood it intuitively. Those who reject Reagan’s position on immigration must, if they are to be consistent, also reject much of the rest of his approach to economic and social policy. Today’s conservatives can argue for immigration restrictions if they so choose. But they should not claim the mantle of Reagan in doing so.

In response to my recent posting How About a Nice $35 Tomato?, Mr. Robert Humelbaugh posted the following comment:

I’d rather pay higher prices for tomatos, then the taxes I’ll pay when 12 million people, AND thier little bambinos go on welfare, and we pay 50% taxes, on top of all the other tax we pay. They will not bring a net gain to the tax base. They will be a net loss. Who will take it in the teeth?

This precise point was addressed yesterday by the Wall Street Journal‘s lead editorial:

The immigration debate is roaring again, and we’re happy to join the fun. One place to start is a myth that has become a key talking point among restrictionists on the right — to wit, that immigrants come to the U.S. for a life of ease on the public dole.

Leading this charge is the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector, who argues in a new study that “the average lifetime costs to the taxpayer will be $1.1 million” for each low-skilled immigrant household. Hispanic immigrants and their families are a net national drain, he says, because they “assimilate into welfare.”

Mr. Rector and Heritage have done some good social science research in the past, but this time they have the story backward: In most cases immigrants will pay at least as much in lifetime federal taxes as they receive in benefits.

One basic flaw in the Heritage analysis is that, as a study by the Immigration Policy Center points out: “The vast majority of immigrants are not eligible to receive any of these [welfare] benefits for many years after their arrival in the United States. . . . Legal permanent residents cannot receive SSI [Supplemental Security Income], which is available only to U.S. citizens, and are not eligible for means-tested public benefits until 5 years after receiving their green cards.”

Illegal immigrants are also ineligible for any kind of federal welfare benefits — with the exception of emergency health care. Many of the Congressional proposals to legalize this population would not allow these workers to collect welfare until waiting up to eight years for a green card and five years after that.

The “welfare” charge is also refuted by the experience of the federal welfare reform passed 11 years ago. That law reduced the welfare eligibility of new immigrants on the sensible grounds that the magnet for America should be work, not a government handout. Ron Haskins, an architect of that reform and the author of a 2006 book on its consequences, concludes that “the use of welfare by noncitizens has declined rapidly” in the wake of that law.

Between 1994 and 2004, the percentage of immigrant households collecting traditional cash welfare payments, supplemental security income, and food stamps fell by about half. The decline in welfare use was more rapid for immigrants than for native-born Americans. The exception has been Medicaid, thanks to states that have increased immigrant eligibility for the state-federal program in recent years.

However, immigrants have a positive financial impact on the most expensive federal entitlements: Medicare and Social Security. This is because immigrants generally come when they are young and working. Seventy percent of immigrants are in the prime working ages of 20-54, compared to only half of the native-born American population. Only 2% of immigrants are over 65 when they arrive compared to 12% of natives.

As a result, most immigrants contribute payroll taxes for decades before they collect Social Security or Medicare benefits. The Social Security actuaries recently calculated that over the next 75 years immigrant workers will pay some $5 trillion more in payroll taxes than they will receive in Social Security benefits. These surplus payments more than offset the costs of use of other welfare benefits received by most immigrant groups.

There’s no doubt that immigrants draw on public resources, like the roads and the schools. The latter is mandated by a Supreme Court decision, Plyer v. Doe, and in any event would our society rather have these children in school, or wandering the streets? Even immigrants who don’t own homes, and thus don’t pay property taxes, finance public schools indirectly through rents paid to landlords. As for health care and roads, immigrants who receive paychecks have their income taxes withheld, and they also pay sales tax and other levies like everyone else.

Perhaps most important, immigrant earnings and tax payments rise the longer they are here. According to Census data for 2005, immigrants who have just arrived have median household earnings of $31,930, or about 30% below the U.S. average of $44,389. But those in the U.S. for an average of 10 years have earnings of $38,395; for those here at least 25 years, the figure is more than $50,000. Those earnings wouldn’t be increasing if most immigrants were going on the dole. They are instead assimilating into the work force, growing their incomes as their skills increase.

As Congress debates immigration policy, the Members should keep in mind that the melting pot is still working; that taxes by immigrants cover their use of public services; and that finding a way to let immigrants work in the U.S. legally is the humane and pro-growth solution to the illegal immigration problem.

And the more people look at it, the more a lot of people are concluding it should not.

Ed Morrissey rightly observes:

Proverbially, a compromise succeeds best when it leaves all sides unsatisfied. However, the compromise which everyone hates usually fails, and that appears to be the case with the new immigration reform package — and that spells trouble for any hopes of reaching a compromise at all. While immigration hardliners have found enough devils in the details to populate an entire plane of Dante’s Inferno, immigration advocates apparently dislike the bill at least as much.

The New York Times quotes Robert P. Hoffman, an Oracle vice president and co-chairman of Compete America, a coalition of high-tech companies.

Under the current system,” Mr. Hoffman said, “you need an employer to sponsor you for a green card. Under the point system, you would not need an employer as a sponsor. An individual would get points for special skills, but those skills may not match the demand. You can’t hire a chemical engineer to do the work of a software engineer.”

David Isaacs, director of federal affairs at the Hewlett-Packard Company, said in a letter to the Senate that “a ‘merit-based system’ would take the hiring decision out of our hands and place it squarely in the hands of the federal government.”

Employers of lower-skilled workers voiced another concern.

“The point system would be skewed in favor of more highly skilled and educated workers,” said Laura Foote Reiff, co-chairwoman of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, whose members employ millions of workers in hotels, restaurants, nursing homes, hospitals and the construction industry.

Denyse Sabagh, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said, “This bill does not give employers what they need, and some are pretty upset about it.”

NZ Bear has an easy-to-comment-on version of the bill on-line.

————————————————

I think the Blogosphere is reaching the right conclusions: there are too many things wrong with this bill (from both sides’ perspectives) for it to be passed. And those of us who do support an amnesty for illegals shouldn’t get our way without winning an open and extensive public debate.

We need to avoid the traditional liberal methodology of imposing our more enlightened opinions on everybody else de haute en bas by some kind of legislative coup.

This Illegal Immigration mess demonstrates beautifully the difficulties Americans have conducting serious, rational debates on emotionally-charged, ideologically-driven issues of national policy.

If conservatives can make a meaningful difference by substituting genuine and substantive debate for emotionalism and blind ideological war on this one, we would be effectuating a reform even more basic.

Conservatives are still raving today over the proposed Immigration Bill.

Legalizing the status of (an estimated) 12 million illegal aliens in the United States is being looked upon by people like Mark Steyn as a capitulation.

If so, it’s a capitulation to reality.

Illegal aliens are here, because Americans want to hire them. because the US economy needs them.

They snuck over the Rio Grande in many cases, rather than arriving on steamships at Ellis Island and doing the appropriate paperwork, because Ellis Island is closed, and legal admission to the US via airports and bus stations was not an option.

I think quite of lot of my conservative compatriots have lost their marbles on this particular issue. How would you get rid of the 12 million+ people here, even if you wanted to? House to house searches? A new system of commissars inspecting every American farm, construction site, restaurant, assembly plant, and front lawn to catch people violating the law… by working?

Suppose all this was even possible. You waved your magic wand, and all those Hispanics were instantly gone.

Who’s going to harvest American crops you buy at the supermarket? Whose going to fill the shelves?

When you eat out, who’s going to bus the tables and wash the dishes?

When you want a house, who’s going to frame it and nail up the sheetrock?

Who’s going to mow your lawn and mine?

I’ve heard the answer from voices on the right: If you pay enough, you can attract native-born American labor.

Regional conditions vary, of course, but in a lot of places I’ve lived you’d have to pay high school dropouts like investment bankers to get them to work at all, and they’d still do lousy jobs.

If you eliminated cheap immigrant labor, the economic impact would be devastating to this country. The price of everything you buy would skyrocket. Produce, processing, and delivery costs would go right through the roof. Restaurant prices would multiply. Every little thing you buy in a retail store would go up dramatically in price, so that native-born stock boys and counter clerks could make big bucks. Prices of new homes would rise enormously, and their size and amenities would shrink.

How would you like $50 movie tickets? $35 supermarket tomatoes? $50 McDonald’s Happy Meals? And you’d be mowing your own lawn.

Of course, not all pay scales would rise. You’d just transfer a lot more manufacturing, assembly, and food processing jobs permanently out of the country.

Conservatives ought to be working on the issue of assimilation, and looking to welcome to the Republican Party a major new constituency of Roman Catholic, family-oriented, hard-working people. Those Hispanics will pay taxes, and be just as annoyed as the rest us of us by liberal elitist busybodies trying to tell them how to live.

Senators from both parties, including Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and John Kyl of Arizona, are sponsoring a comprehensive immigration bill which would potentially legalize the status of an estimated 12 million illegal aliens and would fundamentally change immigration policy.

AP:

The proposed agreement would allow illegal immigrants to come forward and obtain a “Z visa” and – after paying fees and a $5,000 fine – ultimately get on track for permanent residency, which could take between eight and 13 years. Heads of households would have to return to their home countries first.

They could come forward right away to claim a probationary card that would let them live and work legally in the U.S., but could not begin the path to permanent residency or citizenship until border security improvements and the high-tech worker identification program were completed.

A new crop of low-skilled guest workers would have to return home after stints of two years. They could renew their visas twice, but would be required to leave for a year in between each time. If they wanted to stay in the U.S. permanently, they would have to apply under the point system for a limited pool of green cards. …

In perhaps the most hotly debated change, the proposed plan would shift from an immigration system primarily weighted toward family ties toward one with preferences for people with advanced degrees and sophisticated skills. Republicans have long sought such revisions, which they say are needed to end “chain migration” that harms the economy.

Family connections alone would no longer be enough to qualify for a green card – except for spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens. Strict new limits would apply to U.S. citizens seeking to bring foreign-born parents into the country.

The anti-immigration element of the right is howling with rage.

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) complains:

This rewards people who broke the law with permanent legal status, and puts them ahead of millions of law-abiding immigrants waiting to come to America. I don’t care how you try to spin it, this is amnesty.”

Nation Review Online is editorializing against it.

As bad as the status quo on immigration policy is, it is preferable to this bill. Recent improvements in border security have apparently reduced the number of illegal crossings, and well-publicized raids on workplaces can be expected to have a chilling effect on employers who are in violation of immigration laws. But we suspect that this increased enforcement was largely designed to win passage for amnesty and a guest-worker program, and will end once this goal is achieved. We urge senators to cast protest votes against this bill, and House members to do their best to defeat.

And Michelle Malkin is on the warpath.

——————————–

The ravings against “amnesty” are, I’m afraid, ladies and gentlemen, just plain nuts.

Conservatives imagining that the federal government is going to conduct house-to-house searches all over the country to round up and deport every single illegal alien are just as goofy as liberals yearning for house-to-house searches to find and confiscate every firearm in the land.

This sort of thing is just not on.

The kind of draconian measures required to eliminate private gun ownershio, or to deport every illegal alien, are fundamentally inimical to our Constitution, laws, and culture. Those federal agents would run into armed resistance before long in either enforcement project.

What kind of country would we be if we kicked in doors in order to deport poor people who have for the most part come here to do the humble and unpleasant jobs that you can’t find a native-born American to do?

Back before WWII, where I grew up in Pennsylvania, high school kids living in the small towns used to work for the farmers during the harvest to earn pocket money. Does anybody really think that today’s American kids are going to go out and dig potatoes?

America is a nation of immigrants. We have a lot of illegal immigrants today, not because those immigrants are bad people, but because our immigration system and laws have been drastically at odds with economic reality. Americans need, and want, low-priced labor not otherwise available, but Americans (not uncharacteristically) lacked the realism and political will to modify our laws in order to make legal immigration of laborers possible.

I think reforming the system to make it much easier for technically skilled, highly educated people to come here to work is extremely desirable, but we need more unskilled labor than we produce at home, too.

I’m in favor of legalizing illegal aliens, and I don’t have a problem with making them learn to taken an oath in English, and pass a simple test on American civics. On the other hand, the idea of the federal government charging poor laborers $5000 to become citizens is downright nasty, and making those people jump through pointless hoops (like returning to their country of origin) as a mere ritualized procedure is just a sop to the nativist yahoos (Sorry, Victor & Michelle!), which ought to be eliminated.

In general, laws need to reflect reality. When our immigration laws, like our current drug laws or Prohibition in the old days, conflict with the heart’s desires of Americans, those laws will always be found to be less than universally enforceable. Laws which can be only randomly and selectively enforced make a mockery of the rule of law and always lead to widespread law-breaking and to the corruption of law enforcement.

AP:

Three Yale University students have been arrested on charges of setting fire to an American flag hanging from the porch of a private home.

The three were arrested early yesterday after police on patrol spotted the burning flag and tore it from pole where it was mounted to the house on Chapel Street, police said.

Said Hyder Akbar, 23, Nikolaos Angelopoulos, 19, and Farhad Anklesaria, also 19, were arrested on charges ranging from reckless endangerment to arson.

“Though the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated flag-desecration statutes in 1989 and 1990 on First Amendment grounds, that does not mean that individuals can burn flags and face no criminal charges,” said First Amendment scholar David Hudson of the First Amendment Center.

“There are generally applicable criminal laws, such as laws against vandalism, for which there is no free-speech defense,” Hudson said. “Justice Scalia alluded to this fact in his opinion in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) — a case involving a juvenile who burned a cross in a neighbor’s yard — when he said the city of St. Paul had ‘sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire.’ Presumably, the authorities in this (New Haven) case have ‘sufficient means’ to prohibit such threatening conduct.”

Angelopoulos and Anklesaria, who are freshmen, are both foreign citizens. Anklesaria is British and Angelopoulos is Greek.

Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan, according to police, but is a U.S. citizen. Both Anklesaria and Angelopoulos had to hand over their passports

Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan but is a U.S. citizen, police said. He worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, ”Come Back to Afghanistan,” based on his experiences, the Yale Daily News reported Wednesday.

At the arraignment in Superior Court a few hours after the arrests, bond was kept at $25,000 for Angelopoulos and Akbar, but was reduced to $15,000 for Anklesaria. They remained jailed last night.

Police said the students had two encounters with officers. Officers Stephanija Van Wilgen and Diane Gonzalez were responding to an unrelated call Haven at about 3 a.m. and were flagged down by the students who asked for directions. A short time later, the two officers returned to Chapel Street to see if the students had found their way home and spotted the burning flag.

“There was a glow in front of the house which they identified as a flag mounted on a pole to the house and it was engulfed in flames,” police spokeswoman Bonnie Posick said.

Van Wilgen pulled down the burning flag to prevent the fire from spreading to the house and Gonzalez tracked down the three men.

A century ago, people, like both my grandfathers, came to this country from Europe to take humble jobs performing hard labor in the coal mines where fatal accidents were common and where the occupational disease of anthrasilicosis shortened every miner’s life, and they were still grateful all their lives that America had taken them in and provided as much opportunity as that.

Today, Ivy League Universities give scholarships to hairy primitives from exotic strongholds of barbarism hostile to our country and our civilization, who are so grateful for being here that they set American flags on fire.

They should revoke that one ungrateful wretch’s citizenship, and deport all three of them so fast their heads spin.

————-
On second thought:

Upon reflection, it occurred to me that they are all very young, after all. And there is the significant difference that my Lithuanian grandfathers settled in America in respectable communities possessed of decent values, where patriotism, gratitude, courtesy, and common sense were valued and part of expected conduct.

These little wetback arsonists get their values and attitudes from centers of contemporary anti-American elitism, like California’s East Bay and Yale University. Is it any wonder they have no sense of gratitude or appreciation toward the United States? They are obviously loyal enough to the treasonous community of fashion they currently inhabit.

Rather than deport the kids, we should probably be deporting the President of Yale and its administration and faculty.

————-
More details

Oldest College Daily:

Three Yale students, including the son of a former governor of an Afghan province, were arrested early Tuesday morning after burning an American flag attached to a home on Chapel Street.

Hyder Akbar ’07, Nikolaos Angelopoulos ’10 and Farhad Anklesaria ’10 were arrested for charges including first-degree reckless endangerment, third-degree criminal mischief, second-degree arson, breach of peace and conspiracy to commit second-degree arson, the New Haven Register reports today. The two freshmen are both foreign citizens, and Akbar is a United States citizen, though he was born in Pakistan. Akbar worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, “Come Back to Afghanistan,” based on his experiences there.

According to the police report, as reported in the Register, the students were arrested after police found the burning flag, which had hung off 512 Chapel St. The arresting officers had previously assisted the students by giving them directions back to campus from Chapel Street in Fair Haven and later found the students a few blocks away from the burning flag. The three students admitted to police that they lit the fire, according to the report. The New Haven Police Department was not available for comment Tuesday evening.

The students were set to spend Tuesday night in jail after a Superior Court judge refused to release the men without bail, the Register reports. The bail for Akbar and Angelopoulos was set at $25,000 and was $15,000 for Anklesaria.

In an earlier posting, we noted that a Montreal policeman had gotten into big trouble for writing a humorous song urging Third World immigrants to make some effort to assimilate or go home.

At that time we were only able to find a video of the song. We could not find the text anywhere on the Net, and our own modest abilities were insufficient to enable us to produce an accurate transcription.

One of our readers was kind enough to send us a link to a site which did publish the text.

On pense que ça commence à faire lÃ
On pense qu’on a assez ri de nous autres lÃ
Pis pour ceux qui n’seraient pas contents
Crissez-moi votre camp

On veut bien accepter les ethnies
Mais non pas à n’importe quel prix
Si tu veux te joindre à notre beau pays
Tu devras faire certains compromis

Lorsque accueilli dans une place
Il faut se fondre à la masse
Parce qu’on peut dire qu’ici tu es bien
Plus que d’où tu d’viens!

On peut maintenant porter le kirpan
Parce que nous autres on est tolérant
Changer les règles du YMCA
Pis un coup parti du CLSC

Nous sommes-nous fracturé la raison?
Pour les caprices de chaque religion
Vos accommodements raisonnables
On est pu capable!

Y’est maintenant temps qu’on soit entendu
Quand notre culture se fait cracher dessus
Si tu n’es pas content de ton sort
Y’existe un endroit qu’est l’aéroport

Toi ma minorité ethnique
Arrête un peu ta musique
Sinon dans ce cas-là tu devras
Retourner chez toi
Retourner chez toi

(roughly translated by JDZ)

We think that enough is enough;
We’ve had enough of being ridiculed by strangers.
Too bad for the malcontents;
Do us a favor, and decamp.

We are happy to accept ethnic immigrants,
But not at absolutely any price.
If you want to be part of our beautiful country
You ought to compromise a bit.

When you are welcomed to a place,
You ought to try to fit in.
Because, after all, you’re better off here
Than you were where you came from.

You can now carry your kirpan
Because we’re tolerant of others,
Change the rules of the YMCA,
Stage a coup against the CLSC.

Have we lost our reason?
Over the whims of each Religion,
Of your reasonable accomodations
We are now less capable.

Now is the time for us to be heard,
When our culture has been spat upon,
If you are not content with your lot,
You can try the option of the airport.

All you ethnic minorities
Should stop playing your own tune for a bit,
And, if you won’t, you will have to
Go back where you came from.
Go back where you came from.

Special thanks to Nelle Chan and Dominique R. Poirier, and thanks to Dominique R. Poirier again for some corrections.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

–Robert Frost, Mending Wall

Last night, the Republican-majority Senate voted 80-19 to build a 700 mile double-layer fence along the US border with Mexico. Since the House has already passed the same measure, and President Bush is on the record as supporting it, it looks like a done deal.

I suppose the indulgence of Congress and the Administration in this symbolic gesture is an inevitable sop to the growing Republican constituency opposed to illegal immigration, but I’m afraid I personally just detest this sort of nonsense.

Building a wall is an ugly symbolic gesture. Our adversary in the Cold War built walls to keep people in, and now we’re going to build a similar wall to keep people out. This is bad art. It contradicts our values and our image of ourselves. 700 miles of brute negativity can never be compatible with what America is all about.

Any federal project on such a scale will always cost far, far more than initially projected. As the Washington Post observes, this wall is going to have to cross a lot of extremely difficult terrain, and cost overruns are going to skyrocket.

The fence, of course, will not work. Anywhere a guard with a gun is not standing next to it, people will find ways to dig under it or climb over it. Since we will have already invested a staggering amount of money in the project, efforts to make it work will inevitably proceed to more drastic and extreme measures, at further costs, both monetary and otherwise. Bad policy of this kind never stops at a single step. Folly will be piled upon folly as the desired goal continually recedes unrealized.

We are a fundamentally decent, liberal and humane society. A wall is only going to work if it features mines, electrified wire, watch-towers, guard dogs, and machine guns. We’re only just starting this policy with the initial wall. And exactly how far down that road do we really want to go? Are we going to shoot pregnant women trying to sneak over the border to clean our houses?

There are also other, perhaps minor, but unattractive considerations.

The fence will intrude on the Tohono O’odham reservation in Arizona, interfering futher than previously with that people’s free movement within its own traditional trans-border Sonoran desert homeland.

It will be bad news for Southwestern wildlife, which also has a habit of ignoring borders. The jaguar has been verifiably sited again in Southern Arizona recently for the first time in many years. A large predator of this kind, particularly in so difficult an environment, can only exist if it has access to an enormous range of territory. It needs to travel from far-separated canyon “islands” in the desert containing water over great distances. Is this fence worth removing the jaguar from the list of American species?

The proposed fence is really just a confession that we have a habit in this country of passing laws (immigration laws and drug laws) which we really don’t want enforced. Politicians vote for them, seeing strong opinion poll majorities in favor of restricted immigration and drug prohibition. But the same American public smokes the pot, snorts the coke, and gets its lawn mowed, its car washed, and a lot of its hard labor done by illegal aliens.

We could have been enforcing existing immigration laws all along, if we really and truly wanted them enforced. Federal agencies have tried and given up, because enforcement efforts have always provoked strong protests to congressional representatives, who time and again have intervened to put a stop to them.

The only positive thing I can say about all this is that it is just a sop. The fence represents only an expensive and symbolically ugly federal pretense at “securing our borders,” intended to appease those incensed about illegal immigration. Expensive, futile, and ugly as it is, it will obviously be less injurious to American life than the far worse alternative: a regime of identity cards (Paperien, bitte! – “Your papers, please!”), workplace inspections, and massive deportations of people who are (in overwhelming majority of cases) just here to do work we don’t want to do ourselves at prices we are willing to pay.

The Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania: (in red, clockwise from 9 o’clock, Northumberland County, (Montour County is not included, and is white) then Columbia County, Luzerne County, Lackawanna County, Carbon County, and Schuylkill County.

The community of fashion is largely unaware that a mere two and a quarter hours (111 miles) from midtown Manhattan, one may enter a startlingly different universe, a hardscrabble countryside dotted with working-class towns, falling into ruin after eight decades of decline.

Anthracite coal mining was the Region’s sole economic engine, and cheaper and more convenient forms of energy began challenging hard coal’s position in the American economy as early as 1920. The mineworker’s union unpatriotically broke its pledge to refrain from striking during WWII, and when the miners came back from the war, they found those war-time strikes had very effectively promoted large-scale domestic conversion to heating oil.

Modern environmental regulation in the 1950s was the final straw. By that time, the easy coal in veins close to the surface had been mined out, and it was necessary to dig deep for coal. Available remaining deposits lay below the water table, and the Federal Government would no longer permit collieries simply to pump mine water (thoroughly laden with sulphuric acid) out into local streams and rivers, heading for the Susquehanna and ultimately Chesapeake Bay. Maple Hill, the last colliery operating in my hometown, closed in 1954.

Populations have steadily declined for decades, and the only countervailing trend has been the arrival in the Region in the course of the last two decades of a rapidly increasing new population of Hispanics.

Welfare recipients from New York and Philadelphia first migrated outward in search of a cheaper cost of living (where a welfare income would go farther) to the Lehigh Valley cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton. But prisons, constructed during the prison-building boom of the War on Drugs atop the mountains of the Region as a sop to the regional economy persuaded the same element to cross the Blue Mountain. In some cases, they wanted to be able to visit relatives inside serving time.

The Anthracite Region is a backwater, preserving, as in amber, the culture, values, perspectives, and racial attitudes of a couple of generations back. Only the fact that a very substantial proportion of the local population is over 80 years old significantly diminishes the combustability of the mixture of a newly immigrated Hispanic population (often of less than ideal respectability) with a witches’ brew of belligerent white ethnics.

Even half a century ago, when I was a boy, life in the Region drifted along at its own pace, safely removed from the mainstream currents of news and fashion. But, this time, a part of the Region is at the forefront of national political developments.

The city of Hazleton, in Luzerne County, has responded to a one third growth in population by newly-arrived Hispanics post-2000 with drastic steps aimed at illegal immigrants, taking advantage of recent headlines to fuel radical political action in much the way Berkeley, California would. Even worse, Hazleton’s outbreak of Nativism is attracting press coverage, and inspiring the local Solons of other municipalities to emulation.

The LA Times reports:

Under the new law — which is a modified version of a ballot initiative proposed in San Bernardino — anyone seeking to rent a dwelling in the city will have to apply to the city for a residency license, and submit to an investigation of citizenship status. Landlords found renting to people without licenses will be fined $1,000 a day. Business owners found hiring, renting property to, or providing goods and services to illegal immigrants will lose their business permit for five years on a first offense and 10 years on a second.

There is a certain irony in the descendants of the Central European miners, shot down by nativist sheriff’s deputies in 1897 at Lattimer, keeping the old Luzerne County spirit of hospitality alive, just the same as it has always been. I really wonder who it’s going to be that the grandchildren of today’s Mexicans and Dominicans are going to be trying to kick out a hundred years hence.

————————————
UPDATE

Well, Hazleton’s moment as Immigration policy vanguard will soon be over.

A leftwing coalition of rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, is suing Hazleton.

There isn’t going to be a contest. I’m not really sure whether the ACLU’s latte budget exceeds the real estate tax revenues of the city of Hazleton, but you get the idea. Financially speaking, Coal Region communities are definite non-starters in modern litigation battles. The mayor of Hazleton will be waxing the Pennsylvania ACLU head guy’s car on Saturdays henceforward, if that’s what he requires. Experiments in Draconian local policy on illegal immigration will need to be conducted in places like California and Arizona, where cities have the wherewithal to fight.

I think myself that the case of the immigration of Roman Catholic Latin Americans of primarily European descent to the United States is a very different thing from the Islamization of Europe, but Fjordman‘s pessimistic essay attacking Third World immigration Trans-Atlantically is, as usual, an insightful contribution to the debate.

Imagine you have two such houses next to each other. In House A, the inhabitants have over a period of generations created a tidy and functioning household. They have limited their number of children because they wanted to give all of them a proper education. In House B, the inhabitants live in a dysfunctional household with too many children who have received little higher education. One day they decide to move to their neighbors’. Many of the inhabitants of House A are protesting, but some of them think this might be a good idea. There is room for more people in House A, they say. In addition to this, Amnesty International, the United Nations and others claim that it is “racist” and “against international law” for the inhabitants of House A to expel the intruders. Pretty soon, House A has been turned into an overpopulated and dysfunctional household just like House B.

This is what is happening to the West today.

I’m getting old, so I get up early. And I’m currently living in California (“the fiery furnace”), featuring the Mediterranean style of climate, where nights are cool, mornings are pleasant, and afternoons are hot as hell. The Bay area has about the same population as New York City, and prime time parking is a problem. So, all in all, I like to run as many errands as possible first thing in the morning.

When I roll down the hill onto El Camino Real, the local main drag (whose name reflects the fact that the first settlers of significant portions of today’s United States did not, in fact, arrive via the Mayflower) around 6:30 AM Pacific Time, there is nobody up and about, but my elderly self, and the Mexican guys who work at the car wash, who can be seen crossing over to McD’s to get their modest breakfasts, before starting a long day of car polishing and cleaning.

I get my car washed and waxed at the place they work. It costs $30 for the whole treatment, and it takes time, but we Anglos fill our own gas tanks, give the keys to Mexican attendant, then sit comfortably at umbrella-ed cafe tables sipping lattes, and enjoying balmy Pacific breezes, while large crews of Mexican workers clean, wax, and polish our cars to perfection.

Nobody but desperate, sincere, and strongly motivated immigrants is ever going to do that kind of unpleasant work at low enough wages to make the service possible. Yeah, you might get Americans to do it for $100 an hour, but nobody is going to pay for multi-hundred dollar car washes.

Close the borders, throw them all out, and we’ll all be washing our own cars. Just as we’ll all be cleaning our own houses, not eating out (after restaurants with $100 an hour dishwashers and busboys) become prohibitively expensive and close, and renting small apartments (since you can’t get cheap construction labor, and house prices have sky-rocketed out of reach). Food will be kind of pricey too, once we have to pay the kind of money it takes to motivate the native-born Great Unwashed to do anything. Who do you think picks the lettuce? Who do you think works in the slaughterhouses?

At the bottom of the foothill of the Santa Cruz Mountains I currently reside upon, there is a strip mall with an inexpensive restaurant, where I sometimes drop in for a burger and a pitcher of beer. Several recent weekend evenings (when my wife was out of town on business), I drove down there for dinner, and on Friday and Saturday nights at 7 and 8 o’clock, I saw Mexican workmen hammering and sawing away, well after normal working hours on weekend evenings, fixing up a storefront for a new restaurant. When I see men working hard at 7 and 8 o’clock at night, pulling double shifts on weekend evenings, I am impressed at the character of those men. You won’t find many cars in the nearby parking lots of Oracle or Electronic Arts (where the work produces a lot less perspiration and a lot higher pay) at equivalent hours.

Most illegal aliens come here and work hard. Most of them try to do a decent job, which is more than you can say for lots of people native born. They pay taxes, and they are Roman Catholics with strong family values. When I look at those illegal alien Mexican workers, I see the kind of people who work for a living, who are sooner or later going to vote Republican.

Sigmund, Carl and Alfred gets fed up, and tells it like it is.

The time has come once more for SC&A to unload.

We don’t care who we insult or who takes offense. Unlike the other brilliant therapists who regularly blog, we are dead and thus don’t give a rat’s ass about what you think. Further, we are smarter than you, better looking than you and the object of desire of fabulous and good looking women. For you whiny,metro-sexual and sensitive bastards out there, we concede you look very nice in your pink shirt, yellow paisley tie and dress flip-flops with tassels

Onwards.

Let’s get real about immigration. The same cheap ass bigotry that is on display today in much of the right wing blogosphere, predates you. That’s right- your high minded bigotry, couched as ‘concern,’ is nothing new.

When the Irish Catholics came off the boat in New York, escaping from famine and certain death, high minded Americans beat the crap out of them because the freakin’ Catholic papist evil bastards were going to ruin the country.

When the Italians and the Jews got off the boat in New York, there were those who met them at the docks and welcomed them with baseball bats- literally. Why? Because the damn Jews and more papist evil bastards Italians were going to ruin America. Later migrations of other ethnic groups were met with similar experiences. If the welcome in New York wasn’t enough, that human flotsam that boarded trains to middle America had it even worse. There was no ‘neighborhood,’ there was not much of an immigrant community to find refuge. Immigrants to these shores faced hatred and bigotry that was unimaginable. Some of this fine and caring ‘immigrant aid societies’ sold children into servitude in theMidwest (Norman Rockwell never got around to painting pictures of Italian and Irish kids being beaten and worked like farm animals), to never again see their parents. There are countless, similar stories, but they are irrelevant. The only saving grace this country had is the truth that Europeans were even crueler and in other parts of the world, the kafir was treated even worse.

Incredibly, immigrants survived despite the bigotry of many of this country’s citizens. Now, pay attention lefties and stop touching yourselves. Your as racist and bigoted as any on the left. We’ll get to your sorry and miserable asses later. As for the Hispanics reading this, stick around- you too, are in need of a reality check.

Here’s the deal- Hispanic immigrants aren’t going to ruin America. You know why? Because they come here as ‘wretched refuse.’ They have no other place to go. They see the buffet and smorgasbord of possibilities and are willing to work for their share. They have crossed mountains and deserts because they have a dream- they are not broken. That has always been the American way.

Hat tip to Dympha.