| Sorry, George. The Solution Is Disincentives |
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| March 30, 2006 |
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RUSH: Here's George in Palm Beach, Florida. George, nice to have you on the program.
CALLER: Rush, how are you today? What an honor to talk to you. Thank you so much.
RUSH: I couldn't be better, thanks for asking. It's great to have you with us.
CALLER: Just a little background on me before I start this. I live in Palm Beach County. I live just a little ways from you. I live on the same side of the bridge as you. I'm exactly the same age as you. I'm involved in agricultural in south Florida. It's been very good to me obviously. I agree with you 99.99% of the time, but you are absolutely wrong about this notion that you have that Americans will take the jobs that some of these immigrants are working in. It's just not true. It's absolutely not true, and I would really like to prove that to you and to show because I know what kind of person you are. I've listened to you for 18 years now.
RUSH: George?
CALLER: I know what kind of person you are, and it's not true.
RUSH: George?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: You know what? I will not even require that you prove it because I trust you. I believe you when you say it. My answer to you is, "Then let legal immigrants take the jobs if nobody will pick fruit or whatever." By the way, in California, we had this argument some 20 or 30 years ago. You couldn't get Americans to pick tomatoes and so forth. So they actually reengineered the shape of tomatoes and built a machine to pick them so that human beings aren't necessary.
CALLER: That's totally -- that's a different situation. Those tomatoes are grown for processing. Everything down here is fresh market stuff, that's what I do, fresh market produce.
 RUSH: Look, we needn't argue because I believe everything you're saying is true, but it's not a justification for sustaining and promoting illegal immigration. There are plenty of legal immigrants coming in the country that need entry-level jobs, things like this to get started, and why couldn't they do the job?
CALLER: I'm not saying --
RUSH: Why does it have to be illegals?
CALLER: How are we going to make them legal to do it then?
RUSH: How are we going to--
CALLER: How are we going to make it legal for them to do it? How are we going to legalize them to do this work?
RUSH: There are two kinds of immigrants in this country to get in every year, legal and illegal, and I'm just asking --
CALLER: Rush, the legal ones have jobs. The legal ones are working in industries and they're working.
RUSH: Not all of them. Now, wait a minute. I'm running out of time here. Are you saying -- I got 30 seconds -- are you saying the illegals are poor; the legals are accomplished and achieved when they arrive?
CALLER: I'm saying that the illegals are the ones that are working in our industry because the legals -- they've gotten into society. They've gotten the better jobs. They're not the ones that are taking these types of agricultural jobs.
RUSH: I'm glad you called because this illustrates one of the sides of the argument that is roiling the Republican Party. Agribusiness is very eager to promote the use of illegals to keep wages down, price of food down. George, I wish I had more time, but I've gotta run. I'm up against it.
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RUSH: I have to respond to the nice guy from Palm Beach, George, who is the agribusiness guy who was making it clear what the divisions are on the Republican side when it comes to this issue. He made the point that only illegals will pick his crops. He tried to say that legals come in and are more qualified than illegals and so forth, but the point about that is that he's asking -- I love the guy -- but he's asking to be subsidized. He's asking for taxpayers to subsidize his business by looking past the law, so that he can hire people for a low wage or what have you. George, frankly I know you're out there, and I know this is going to make you mad, George. You were a great call, and I gotta respond to it. But George is the kind of guy that was supposed to be fined under the Simpson-Mazzoli act back in 1986 for hiring illegals, and they promised that that would happen and so forth, and it hasn't, and I wanted to mention that.
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RUSH: Here's Tony in Ellsworth, Maine. Tony, I'm glad you called. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Rush, one o'clock cigar dittos to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. Appreciate that.
CALLER: I agree that illegal immigration is definitely a problem and we definitely need to secure the borders, but I have to disagree with you on the guest worker program. I think it would actually bring some order to a burgeoning problem in this country. We have 11 million people that are, you know, supposedly 11 million people that are here illegally, and we have no tracking of them or anything. I think this guest worker program would give us some control over those, and anybody that is not suitable we can deport them. There's a whole -- when -- remember when Bush announced this several months ago, it was last year sometime --
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: -- at first I had the reaction, "Oh, no, it's amnesty," but then I thought about it more and I said, "You know, it's probably a brilliant plan because then we can get rid of the people that are undesirable."
RUSH: Well, here we go. Guest worker program. Guest workers. Amnesty. It's amnesty. Okay, we'll call it guest worker. Are you disagreeing with me on this, Snerdley? Okay, all  right. No, not this part. Now, again, Tony, let me ask you a question about this. We got the guest worker program, blah, blah, blah, and we're going to track them now. They've got to show what -- what's going to force them, what's going to motivate them, inspire them to actually show up and register? What if they don't?
CALLER: I really don't know the answer. I think a lot of people that come here, come here honestly, they want to work, they want to better their lives and I think the majority of people that are here, you know, illegally they want to do that because of the economic opportunities. They want to be part of the, you know, American dream, and like Mark Belling said yesterday, it's actually easier for somebody to get here illegally than it is legally, and I don't disagree --
RUSH: Yeah, that's the way it's supposed to be. That's another absurdity. But all these do not add up to excuses for not doing anything about it. They just don't. You can't justify it with any of the excuses that I have heard so far. I think actually what people are trying to do with this legislation is remove the word "illegal." If they could, they'd legalize these people tonight to get rid of the issue, but they come up with a typical bloated bureaucratic piece of legislation that requires for its enforcement the people who are the targets of this bill to actually do all the work. |
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You gotta show up. You gotta pay a fine. You gotta go to English class. The question is, if want to track 'em and so forth, keep tracking their movements and find out how they're doing assimilating, if they are or not -- if they don't show up, if they don't show up and register and pay the fine -- I don't know what we're going to do to find them because the argument we can't deport them, and I understand one of them, it's a large number. But if we're not going to try to track them down now when they're already illegal, what in the world makes anybody think we're going to?
By the way, the figure 11 million, 12 million, it is a guesstimate. It's a total guesstimate. I mean, there's some statistical projection behind it to get to it. But it's still a guesstimate. So we're never going to really know if they've all shown up or not. We won't even know if 75 or 80% of them show up. My guess is far fewer than that will, and then those that don't how we going to know they even exist? How we going to know where they are? What are we going to do to try to track 'em down? This is all the enforcement side and I'm telling you the answer is zip, zero, nada.
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RUSH: You know, folks, I'm not trying to beat a dead horse. I'm really not, but I have these almost visceral reactions when I hear these arguments, "Well, we have to understand them. We must get to know them, and they're poor, and they so want to come here and improve their lives." Okay. Just because people want to come here, what does that have to do with setting immigration policy? We know people want to come here. That's not the question. We don't have an immigration policy because we don't have problems getting people. We know they want to come here.
I mean, everybody would like to have four cars or a big house. Well, okay. Let's pass a law allowing yourself to just go move into somebody else's. Just go move into somebody else's house and we'll let it happen just because you want it. You can come up with all kinds of analogies to this that illustrate the folly of it. One of the things that is not being contemplated in this piece of legislation, we all admit that we have an illegal immigration problem, regardless what you think about how to fix it, do we all agree, ladies and gentlemen, in class today that we have an immigration problem? All right. We want to solve it.
Part of the solution here is creating disincentives to it, and there are no disincentives. I mean, this piece of legislation is pretty much just the opposite. This is an incentive to keep coming in illegally. Now, a disincentive would be punishing those who facilitate it, like businesses, which is the core enforcement mechanism in Simpson-Mazzoli, and it went by the wayside. Three employers, corporations, were fined when they told us they were going to capture four million illegals this way. They never do enforce this stuff.
You have to deny them driver's licenses. You have to deny them in-state tuition to colleges and so forth. There are incentives to come here illegally. No system-wide punishment, free public school education, free medical care on the taxpayers' expense. I mean, we're incentivizing this, not disincentivizing. It's not complicated. What's lacking here is simply will and leadership. Nobody wants to. This is tough to lead on because you see a lot of  votes out there, and even if they don't see votes in the illegals -- and the Democrats do -- they don't see votes in the illegals, they still are afraid of upsetting the Hispanic community that's here legally as a voting bloc which is larger than the African-American. They're larger than that. They're the #1 minority in the country. It's no accident that the swimmer, Ted Kennedy, is calling this the new civil rights movement. These Democrats and liberals look to the past, look back, look to the history and try to recycle their great glory days rather than moving forward. So it's no accident he's calling this illegal immigration bill he's got amnesty, whatever you want to call it, guest workers, the new civil rights movement. He's talking to the biggest minority in the country.
Here's Cory in Watertown, South Dakota, you're next on the program.
CALLER: Hi. An honor to be with you, sir, today.
RUSH: Thank you. Thanks very much.
CALLER: Well, I just had a point I wanted to bring up to one of your earlier callers. He said he couldn't stay in business without illegal immigrants. To me, that sounds like the same argument that was used about 200 years ago just before the Civil War. We can't keep our economy going without slavery. I mean, it's ridiculous. The idea that you can't keep your business going without having somebody you can pay less than minimum wage and not give them a decent living is absolutely ridiculous. It's indentured servitude. That's all it sounds like to me.
RUSH: No. No, no, no, no. (doing elite liberal impression) "It's opportunity. It's an opportunity, Cory, for people of the deprived places in the planet to come and experience and get their toes and feet wet planting the seeds of their American dream." That's how it's portrayed. I'm being cynical, you're absolutely right, but I'm being cynical with you just as a way of agreeing with you. But George from Palm Beach, and I know I'm making him mad out there, and I'm not trying to do that, but it is a stretch to me when you say that your business can't operate without illegals.
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| Read the Background Material... |
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Headline: Why Americans Hate This "Immigration" Debate
Source: American Thinker
Date: April 3rd, 2006
One of the most striking features of the immigration debate now raging in Washington is that none of the Democratic or Republican proposals seem to hold any appeal for ordinary Americans—which is why this debate is generating so much frustration among voters that no matter which proposal Congress adopts, the issue itself threatens to shatter both parties’ bases and dominate the November elections.
Simply put, the debate in Washington isn’t about “immigration” at all – and that’s the problem.
To ordinary Americans, the definition of “immigration” is very specific: You come here with absolutely nothing except a burning desire to be an American. You start off at some miserable, low-paying job that at least puts a roof over your family’s head and food on the table. You put your kids in school, tell them how lucky they are to be here – and make darn sure they do well even if that means hiring a tutor and taking a second, or third, job to pay for it. You learn English, even if you’ve got to take classes at night when you’re dead tired. You play by the rules—which means you pay your taxes, get a driver’s license and insure your car so that if yours hits mine, I can recover the cost of the damages. And you file for citizenship the first day you’re eligible.
Do all this and you become an American like all the rest of us. Your kids will lose their accents, move into the mainstream, and retain little of their heritage except a few words of your language and – if you’re lucky—an irresistible urge to visit you now and then for some of mom’s old-country cooking.
This is how the Italians made it, the Germans made it, the Dutch made it, the Poles made it, the Jews made it, and more recently how the Cubans and the Vietnamese made it. The process isn’t easy – but it works and that’s the way ordinary Americans want to keep it.
The Two Hispanic Groups
But the millions of Hispanics who have come to our country in the last several decades – and it’s the Hispanics we’re talking about in this debate, not those from other cultures—are, in fact, two distinct groups. The first group is comprised of “immigrants” just like all the others, who have put the old country behind them and want only to be Americans. They aren’t the problem. Indeed, most Americans welcome them among us, as we have welcomed so many other cultures.
The problem is the second group of Hispanics. They aren’t immigrants – which is what neither the Democratic or Republican leadership seems to understand, or wants to acknowledge. They have come here solely for jobs, which isn’t the same thing at all. (And many of them have come here illegally.) Whether they remain in the U.S. for one year, or ten years – or for the rest of their lives – they don’t conduct themselves like immigrants. Yes, they work hard to put roofs above their heads and food on their tables – and for this we respect them. But they have little interest in learning English themselves, and instead demand that we make it possible for them to function here in Spanish. They put their children in our schools, but don’t always demand as much from them as previous groups demanded of their kids. They don’t always pay their taxes – or insure their cars.
In short, they aren’t playing by the rules that our families played by when they immigrated to this country. And to ordinary Americans this behavior is deeply – very deeply – offensive. We see it unfolding every day in our communities, and we don’t like it. This is what none of our politicians either understands, or dares to say aloud. Instead, they blather on – and on – about “amnesty” and “border security” without ever coming to grips with what is so visible, and so offensive, to so many of us – namely, all these foreigners among us who aren’t behaving like immigrants.
The phrase we use to describe foreigners who come here not as “immigrants” but merely for jobs is “guest workers.” And we are told – incessantly – that we need these “guest workers” because they take jobs that Americans don’t want and won’t take themselves. This is true, but it’s also disingenuous. Throughout our country’s history, immigrants have always taken jobs that Americans don’t want and won’t take themselves. For crying out loud, no foreigner has ever come to our country out of a blazing ambition to dig ditches, mow lawns, bag groceries, sew clothing or clean other people’s houses. If we hadn’t always had a huge number of these miserable jobs available that none of “us” would do – there wouldn’t have been a way for immigrants throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to step off the boat and find work.
A willingness by “immigrants” to start at the bottom – so they can move up the economic ladder or at least give their kids a shot at the higher rungs – is precisely how the system is supposed to work. And it always has. (My own family is one of the tens of millions that did precisely this. My grandfather came from Poland and found work as a pocket-maker in New York’s garment district. The pay was low, the hours were long, and when the old man finally retired he could hardly move his fingers or see without thick glasses. Yet one of his sons, my uncle, became a lawyer with a fancy practice on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His kids did even better; his son wound up chairman of Stanford University’s history department, and his daughter became a famous art critic, moved to London, and married an Englishman who became a member of the House of Lords. What is astonishing about this story is that – it isn’t astonishing. It’s the sort of thing that happens all the time, and it’s why ordinary Americans don’t want to change the system that made it possible.)
Blame the Birth Rate
One fact that hasn’t been part of the immigration debate is this: During the past two decades our national birth rate has dropped to just below the 2.1 births-per-woman replacement rate. So we really do need to “import” people because – to put it bluntly – we haven’t bred enough of them ourselves to do all the work that needs to be done in an affluent, ageing society like ours. But then, we’ve always needed “more” people to do the work we want done. And we’ve always brought them in from elsewhere – as immigrants.
Yet today we have millions of foreigners among us who have come here to work, but not to immigrate. Our politicians tell us that we must accept this because – for the first time in our history—we’ve reached that point when we need “guest workers” who aren’t immigrants to keep our economy growing. If this is true—and isn’t it odd that no one has troubled to explain why it’s true – then we must find some way to distinguish between “immigrants” and “guest workers” so that they aren’t treated the same just because they both are here. And if it isn’t true that our continued economic growth requires “guest workers” who aren’t immigrants—then the entire concept of “guest workers” that lies at the core of virtually every proposal now before Congress, including amnesty for those who are here illegally, must be abandoned in favor of something that makes sense.
Until our elected officials come to grips with the real issue that’s troubling ordinary Americans – not a growing population of foreigners among us, but rather a growing population of foreigners among us who aren’t behaving like immigrants – public frustration will grow no matter what bill Congress passes in the coming weeks. It could lead to the kind of political explosion that none of us really wants.
Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. His DVD on The Siege of Western Civilization has become an international best-seller.
Headline: Poor Trend: We're Importing Latin America's Poor
By: Rich Lowry
Date: April 4, 2006
Forget the long-running bipartisan concern about creating an educated, highly skilled workforce. What the U.S. economy desperately needs is more high-school dropouts — so desperately that we should import them hand over fist.
Such is the logic of the contention by advocates of lax immigration that the flow of illegal labor from south of the border is a boon to our economy. But it doesn't make intuitive sense that importing the poor of Latin America would benefit us. If low-skill workers were key to economic growth, Mexico would be an economic powerhouse, and impoverished Americans would be slipping south over the Rio Grande.
The National Research Council reports that an immigrant to the U.S. without a high-school diploma — whether legal or illegal — consumes $89,000 more in governmental services than he pays in taxes during his lifetime. An immigrant with only a high-school diploma is a net cost of $31,000. Eighty percent of illegal immigrants have no more than a high-school degree, and 60 percent have less than a high-school degree.
Steve Camarota of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies estimates that illegal immigrants cost the federal government $10 billion a year. State and local governments lose even more. Illegals pay some taxes, but not enough to cover governmental expenses like Medicaid and treatment for the uninsured.
According to Camarota, if illegal immigrants were legalized, their net annual cost to the federal government would only increase, tripling to $30 billion a year. Immigrant workers don't earn enough to pay much in taxes, while they qualify for all sorts of governmental assistance. As they become legal, they will get even more assistance — the benefits that they get from the Earned Income Tax Credit, for instance, would increase by a factor of 10.
Whatever benefit illegals provide to the economy in general must be minuscule. All workers without a high-school education — illegal and otherwise — account for only 3 percent of economic output. Even if illegal immigrants were dominant in low-skill industries, their broader impact would be small. But they aren't dominant, and that includes job categories associated with immigrants. Nearly 60 percent of cabdrivers are native-born. In only four of 473 job classifications are immigrants a majority of the workers.
The U.S. has an ample supply of native-born workers with a high-school education or less, but Camarota suggests they are being pushed out of the labor force by the influx of illegals. From 2000 to 2005, the percentage of high-school dropouts holding a job dropped from 53 to 48, and this trend was particularly pronounced in states with the highest levels of immigration. Illegals compete with the very workers least equipped to thrive in our economy.
Pro-immigration conservatives sometimes argue that, through immigration, we are importing social renewal. But the illegitimacy rate among Hispanic immigrants in the U.S. is 40 percent. They aren't coming from countries that are paradisiacal models of social conservatism. The illegitimacy rate in Mexico is roughly one third, and in El Salvador it is 73 percent.
With the U.S. population aging, don't we need highly fertile immigrants to replenish our working-age population? Actually, there aren't enough immigrants to change our age structure significantly. According to Camarota, 66.2 percent of the U.S. population was of working age in 2000. If all post-1980s immigrants and their U.S.-born children are excluded, the number falls to only 65.9 percent. With immigrants, the U.S. fertility rate is 2.1; without them, it would be 2.0.
Immigration from Latin America, in short, does not chiefly benefit our economy, government or society, but rather the immigrants themselves. Their motives, if not their means, are admirable — they want to improve their lives. Advocates of a lax immigration policy should admit that their policy has a humanitarian, not an economic, rationale, and its beneficiaries aren't Americans but mainly people from rural Mexico.
If we really need more poorly educated workers here, we can always rely, unfortunately, on the public schools to produce them indigenously.
Thomas Sowell: Guests or Gate Crashers? Part I
Date: March 28, 2006
Immigration is yet another issue which we seem unable to discuss rationally -- in part because words have been twisted beyond recognition in political rhetoric.
We can't even call illegal immigrants "illegal immigrants." The politically correct evasion is "undocumented workers."
Do American citizens go around carrying documents with them when they work or apply for work? Most Americans are undocumented workers but they are not illegal immigrants. There is a difference.
The Bush administration is pushing a program to legalize "guest workers." But what is a guest? Someone you have invited. People who force their way into your home without your permission are called gate crashers.
If truth-in-packaging laws applied to politics, the Bush guest worker program would have to be called a "gate-crasher worker" program. The President's proposal would solve the problem of illegal immigration by legalizing it after the fact.
We could solve the problem of all illegal activity anywhere by legalizing it. Why use this approach only with immigration? Why should any of us pay a speeding ticket if immigration scofflaws are legalized after the fact for committing a federal crime?
Most of the arguments for not enforcing our immigration laws are exercises in frivolous rhetoric and slippery sophistry, rather than serious arguments that will stand up under scrutiny.
How often have we heard that illegal immigrants "take jobs that Americans will not do"? What is missing in this argument is what is crucial in any economic argument: price.
Americans will not take many jobs at their current pay levels -- and those pay levels will not rise so long as poverty-stricken immigrants are willing to take those jobs.
If Mexican journalists were flooding into the United States and taking jobs as reporters and editors at half the pay being earned by American reporters and editors, maybe people in the media would understand why the argument about "taking jobs that Americans don't want" is such nonsense.
Another variation on the same theme is that we "need" the millions of illegal aliens already in the United States. "Need" is another word that blithely ignores prices.
If jet planes were on sale for a thousand dollars each, I would probably "need" a couple of them -- an extra one to fly when the first one needed repair or maintenance. But since these planes cost millions of dollars, I don't even "need" one.
There is no fixed amount of "need," independently of prices, whether with planes or workers.
None of the rhetoric and sophistry that we hear about immigration deals with the plain and ugly reality: Politicians are afraid of losing the Hispanic vote and businesses want cheap labor.
What millions of other Americans want has been brushed aside, as if they don't count, and they have been soothed with pious words. But now the voters are getting fed up, which is why there are immigration bills in Congress.
The old inevitability ploy is often trotted out in immigration debates: It is not possible to either keep out illegal immigrants or to expel the ones already here.
If you mean stopping every single illegal immigrant from getting in or expelling every single illegal immigrant who is already here, that may well be true. But does the fact that we cannot prevent every single murder cause us to stop enforcing the laws against murder?
Since existing immigration laws are not being enforced, how can anyone say that it would not do any good to try? People who get caught illegally crossing the border into the United States pay no penalty whatever. They are sent back home and can try again.
What if bank robbers who were caught were simply told to give the money back and not do it again? What if murderers who were caught were turned loose and warned not to kill again? Would that be proof that it is futile to take action, when no action was taken?
Let's hope the immigration bills before Congress can at least get an honest debate, instead of the word games we have been hearing for too long.
Thomas Sowell: Guests or Gate Crashers? Part II
Date: March 29, 2006
Bogus arguments are a tip-off that you wouldn't buy the real reasons for what someone is doing. Phony arguments and phony words are the norm in discussions of immigration policy.
It starts with a refusal to call illegal aliens "illegal aliens" and ends with asking for "guest worker" status for people who are not guests but gate crashers. As for the substantive arguments, they are as phony as the verbal evasions.
What about all those illegal workers that we "need"? Many of the illegals are working in agriculture, producing crops that have been in chronic surplus for decades. These surplus crops are costing the American taxpayers billions of dollars in government storage costs and in the inflated prices created by deliberately keeping much of this agricultural output off the market.
Do we "need" illegal workers to produce bigger surpluses?
In California, surplus crops grown and harvested by illegal immigrants are often also subsidized by federal water projects which charge the farmers in dry California valleys far less than the cost to the government of providing that water -- and a fraction of what people in Los Angeles or San Francisco pay for the same amount of water.
Surplus crops grown with water supplied at the taxpayers' expense and raised by illegal workers can be grown elsewhere with water provided free of charge from the clouds and raised by American workers paid American wages.
Naturally, when the real costs of those crops have to be paid by the farmers who raise them, less will be grown -- that is, there will not be as much of a surplus going to waste in government-rented storage bins.
With some crops, we don't really "need" any of it. If the United States had not produced a single grain of sugar in the past 50 years, Americans could have gotten all the sugar they wanted and at lower prices, simply by buying it on the world market for half or less of what domestic sugar costs.
Sugar has been in chronic surplus on the world market for generations. It can be grown in the tropics far cheaper than it can be grown in the United States. All the land, labor, and capital that has been spent growing sugar here has been one huge waste.
We don't "need" to grow sugar, with or without illegal workers.
Many people are understandably sympathetic toward Mexican workers who come across the border illegally, not only because of the poverty which drives them from their homelands but also because their willingness to work makes them in demand.
When you see beggars on the street, they are usually white or black, but almost never Mexican. But American immigration laws and policies are not about whether you like or don't like Mexicans, though some demagogues try to play the race card.
For too long, we have bought the argument that being unfortunate entitles you to break the law. The consequence has been disastrous, whether the people allowed to get away with breaking the law are Americans or foreigners.
Legalizing illegal actions is the easy way out, so it is hardly surprising that politicians go for that.
One of the ways of legalizing illegal acts is by the automatic conferring of American citizenship on babies born to illegal aliens in the United States.
The law that made all people born here American citizens made sense when people crossed an ocean and made a commitment to become Americans.
Today, it is just another way of essentially legalizing illegal acts by making it harder to deport those who broke the law.
One of the most bogus of all the bogus arguments for a "guest worker" program is that it is impossible to find all the millions of illegal aliens in the country, so it is impossible to deport them.
If tomorrow someone came up with some brilliant way to identify every illegal alien in the country, it would not make the slightest difference. Right now, those who are identified as illegal, whether at the border, in prisons, at traffic stops or in any of our institutions, face no penalty whatsoever.
Identification is not the problem. Doing nothing is the problem.
Headline: Answering 13 Frequently Asked Questions About Illegal Immigration
Source: RightWingNews
Date: March 26, 2006
1) How many illegal aliens are there in the United States? Since they're not here legally, there's no way to do a precise count. Most estimates are in the 10-12 million range, but some people believe as few as 8 million illegal immigrants are here and others think the count may go as high as 20 million plus.
2) How do the American people feel about illegal immigration? Time and time again, across numerous polls, the American people have expressed displeasure with our lax border security and illegal immigration. Here's some info on some of the more recent polling data from a column written yesterday by Tony Blankley:
(A) Gallup Poll (March 27) finds 80 percent of the public wants the federal government to get tougher on illegal immigration. A Quinnipiac University Poll (March 3) finds 62 percent oppose making it easier for illegals to become citizens (72 percent in that poll don't even want illegals to be permitted to have driver's licenses). Time Magazine's recent poll (Jan. 24-26) found 75 percent favor "major penalties" on employers of illegals, 70 percent believe illegals increase the likelihood of terrorism and 57 percent would use military force at the Mexican-American border.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll (March 10-13) found 59 percent opposing a guest-worker proposal, and 71 percent would more likely vote for a congressional candidate who would tighten immigration controls.
An IQ Research poll (March 10) found 92 percent saying that securing the U.S. border should be a top priority of the White House and Congress.
Unquestionably, the American people see illegal immigration as a problem and want the borders to be secured.
3) So, if the American people oppose illegal immigration, why does Congress seem so reluctant to do anything about it? The Democrats look at illegal aliens as an easy way to pad their vote totals. Because Hispanics tend to vote for Democrats in disproportionate numbers, 10 million illegal immigrants could translate into a net gain of 2-3 million potential voters for the Democrats once they become US citizens.
Republicans tend to be hesitant to crack down on illegal immigration because they fear alienating Hispanic immigrants and because the members of the business community who make money by hiring illegal aliens, funnel part of their ill gotten gains into Republican (and to a lesser extent, Democratic) coffers.
This leads to a situation where many Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill talk tough about illegal immigration and border security in order to placate the voters, but in actuality, they work hard to keep the flow of illegal aliens from being cut off.
Here's Mark Krikorian giving some examples of how our lawmakers often work behind-the-scenes to thwart our immigration laws:
In ninety eight, the border patrol noticed that the work force picking onions in the vidalia onion fields of Georgia appeared increasingly to be illegals, so they did some raids, arrested a few dozen illegal aliens, and all the rest of them ran off. So the farmers were there stuck with onions in the ground and no one to pull them out. It was all their own fault, they knew what they were doing, but nonetheless, they were outraged. They called their Congressmen, and by the end of the week, three of Georgia's Congressmen and both Senators, Republicans and Democrats, wrote a joint letter to the Attorney General demanding that the Immigration Service stop enforcing the law. Because they said the INS does not understand the needs of American farmers. Which in ordinary English means, "let them pick the onions, then arrest them. Preferably before we have to pay them". Well, the INS got slapped down and stopped.
So what they tried as an alternative to raids, was something called Operation Vanguard in Nebraska. It was sort of the first effort at something like this to see if it worked. They didn't do raids anywhere, all they did was subpoena personnel records. And they didn't just pick one or two employers, they did all the meatpacking plants in all of Nebraska, so that no one of them would be inconvenienced while the others benefitted. They took the personnel records back to the office, checked the Social Security numbers, and came back with a list of people who seemed to be illegal, who did not have authorization to work. They said "we know some of these people are legit and the records are wrong. We want to fix those people's records and the ones that are illegal, have to leave of course". They came back with four thousand names. One thousand people showed up and got their records fixed and three thousand were never heard from again. They were illegal aliens. It worked really well and it was intended to be repeated every two to three months so as to wean the whole industry off of the use of illegal aliens.
After one effort like this, the political and business elite in Nebraska went insane. The ranchers and the meat packers teamed up with the governor. The governor's predecessor, now Senator Nelson, was hired as a lobbyist to put an end to this initiative. Senator Chuck Hagel made it essentially his mission in life to see that this was never repeated and it wasn't. And the Senior INS official who thought it up in the first place was invited to retire early -- and he did. If you're a bureaucrat and you have kids in college, you're going to take the hint: Congress doesn't want you to enforce the law. So the Immigration Service essentially gave up enforcing the immigration laws inside the country. They focused on the important, but narrow, issues of criminal aliens and smugglers. I'm all for that, criminal aliens and alien smugglers are the scum of the earth, but there's a lot more to the issue than just that. But, going after those parts of the issue doesn't get you in trouble politically. So that's what they did, they gave up because Congress told them to stop doing their jobs. They really haven't changed that much (since) 9/11.
4) What about Pete Wilson, the former governor of California? Didn't he try to crack down on illegal immigration and wasn't there a backlash against Republicans because of it? This is a myth that has been seized upon by pro-illegal immigrant forces, but it doesn't bear up under scrutiny.
In 1994, Pete Wilson supported Prop 187, a bill that cut off government services to illegal aliens. Prop 187 passed with the support of 59% of the voters (including 31% of the Hispanic vote). So, did Wilson get buried by the "backlash?" No, instead he won a 15 point landslide victory.
Fast forward to 2006. The current Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger voted for Prop 187, had Pete Wilson as the co-chair of his campaign, said he would not approve driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, and was still elected in a very liberal state that's 34% Hispanic.
The idea that being tough on illegal immigrants is guaranteed to cause a massive backlash for Republicans at the polls simply isn't true.
5) Well, what about an Amnesty for illegals? Didn't we have one of those before? Back in 1986, during the Reagan administration, illegal aliens who were already here were allowed to become American citizens. Basically, it was supposed to be a one time amnesty for illegals and in return, security measures would be beefed up to take care of the illegal immigrant problem once and for all.
However, in practice what happened was that once the illegal immigrants were made citizens, the enforcement provisions weren't treated seriously, and even more illegal aliens poured across the border hoping to get in on the next amnesty.
Today? We're talking about essentially the same sort of proposal in the Senate. Allowing illegal aliens to become citizens in return for security measures, in practice, may or may not actually ever be put into place.
6) If illegals weren't allowed to become citizens, what would be the problem with allowing illegal aliens who are already here to stay as guest workers? There are at least three major problems with allowing illegal aliens to stay here as guest workers.
Number one, many Americans don't realize this, but there are countless millions of foreigners waiting patiently to enter the United States the right way. To allow the illegals who are already here to stay rewards lawbreakers and makes the people who respected our laws look like chumps.
Number two, when you reward illegal behavior and treat people who obey the law like chumps, you can expect more lawbreaking. In other words, if we allow the illegals who are already here to stay here, we can expect another massive onslaught of illegals to enter our country because we'll have shown them that breaking our laws pays.
Number three, if we give the illegal aliens who are already here free passes that allow them to continue working and create a guest worker program, there's a very real danger that what we'll end up with is a guest worker program AND massive numbers of illegals pouring into the country. As was mentioned earlier in this FAQ, the politicians in Washington have a heavy incentive to keep the flow of illegals going and they've lied before about crack downs on illegal immigration. So, you can't simply take the Federal government's word for it when they say they're going to toughen up security in return for a guest worker program. Americans will only be able to believe it when it happens.
7) Isn't it practically impossible to deport all the illegal aliens? There is no bigger straw man in the whole debate over illegal immigration than the idea that you have to round the illegals up, one by one. There's actually a much easier way to do it.
You see, the majority of illegal aliens are coming here to get jobs. If you crack down on the employers who are hiring them, then the jobs will disappear, and the majority of illegal aliens will self-deport.
Will every illegal alien go home if they can't get a job? No, but the vast majority of them will and having, let's say, a a few hundred thousand illegals in the US, as opposed to 8-20 million, would be a vast improvement.
8) But, aren't these illegal aliens doing jobs Americans won't do? To begin with, in many of the industries most associated with illegal immigrant labor, you find that the majority of workers in those fields are not illegals. As Rich Lowry pointed out in National Review:
"According to a new survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, illegals make up 24 percent of workers in agriculture, 17 percent in cleaning, 14 percent in construction, and 12 percent in food production. So 86 percent of construction workers, for instance, are either legal immigrants or Americans, despite the fact that this is one of the alleged categories of untouchable jobs."
Moreover, it needs to be pointed out that there's no such thing as a job, "Americans won't do." There are only jobs Americans won't do at a certain price. Consider your job. Would you still do it if the pay were 50% less? For most people, the answer to that question is, "no."
Well, since illegal immigrants generally come from poor countries with mediocre economies, they're willing to work for much lower wages than the going market rate because they're still making substantially more than what they can make at home. So, if there's a large influx of illegal aliens into an America industry, it depresses wages so much that Americans simply won't do those jobs any more for the going pay rate.
This harms poor Americans the most, because they're the group that generally ends up competing with illegal aliens for jobs on the low end of the pay scale.
9) If these illegal aliens were to leave the United States, wouldn't there be a major impact on the American economy? There's disagreement about that, but it's highly doubtful. As Rich Lowry at National Review has pointed out:
"Phillip Martin, an economist at the University of California, Davis, has demolished the argument that a crackdown on illegals would ruin it, or be a hardship to consumers. Most farming — livestock, grains, etc. — doesn't heavily rely on hired workers. Only about 20 percent of the farm sector does, chiefly those areas involving fresh fruit and vegetables.
The average "consumer unit" in the U.S. spends $7 a week on fresh fruit and vegetables, less than is spent on alcohol, according to Martin. On a $1 head of lettuce, the farm worker gets about 6 or 7 cents, roughly 1/15th of the retail price. Even a big run-up in the cost of labor can't hit the consumer very hard.
Martin recalls that the end of the bracero guest-worker program in the mid-1960s caused a one-year 40 percent wage increase for the United Farm Workers Union. A similar wage increase for legal farm workers today would work out to about a 10-dollar-a-year increase in the average family's bill for fruit and vegetables. Another thing happened with the end of the bracero program: The processed-tomato industry, which was heavily dependent on guest workers and was supposed to be devastated by their absence, learned how to mechanize and became more productive."
If every illegal alien here today currently left America, the immediate economic impact would be insignificant and over the long haul, the impact would likely be negligible.
10) What about other costs to society? On the whole, are illegals a net benefit or net liability to the American economy?
The answer to this question can vary wildly depending on what's included as an asset and what's not included as a liability. For example, liberal economist and popular New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says that overall, illegals are an insignificant, positive asset to the economy, although their presence harms poor Americans:
"First, the net benefits to the U.S. economy from immigration, aside from the large gains to the immigrants themselves, are small. Realistic estimates suggest that immigration since 1980 has raised the total income of native-born Americans by no more than a fraction of 1 percent.
Second, while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration - especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst- paid Americans.
The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration."
On the other hand, according to a conservative group, the Center for Immigration Studies:
"Based on Census Bureau data, this study finds that, when all taxes paid (direct and indirect) and all costs are considered, illegal households created a net fiscal deficit at the federal level of more than $10 billion in 2002. We also estimate that, if there was an amnesty for illegal aliens, the net fiscal deficit would grow to nearly $29 billion."
Again, estimates vary on how much of an impact illegals have on the economy, but most of the credible ones show the benefits are insignificant or even in the negative range.
11) Is there a crime problem related to illegal immigrants? Absolutely, and in areas where illegals congregate heavily, crimewaves tend to follow. For example, illegals are responsible for much of the serious crime in Los Angeles. Here's Heather Mac Donald on that topic from back in mid-2004:
In Los Angeles, 95% of all outstanding warrants for homicide target illegal aliens, and over 60% of all outstanding felony warrants. Illegal aliens, and immigrants generally, are a major, and unacknowledged, driver of gang crime.
Moreover, according to Jim Kouri, the vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police:
"It's widely been reported that illegal aliens comprise upwards of 27 percent of the US prison and jail population."
Make no mistake about it: illegal aliens are responsible for a very significant percentage of the rape, murder, robbery, and mayhem that occurs in the United States.
12) Do illegal immigrants put a strain on our health care system? In some border states, illegals are straining our hospitals to the breaking point and beyond. Here's an excerpt from Arizona Senator John Kyl:
"The estimated annual cost to hospitals and other providers of emergency health care nationwide for illegal aliens is $1.45 billion. According to congressionally-commissioned research from the MTG Corporation, the annual cost to just the 24 counties along the border in Texas, New Mexico and California exceeds $200 million, and for Arizona's four border counties alone it's $32 million per year.
These unreimbursed costs, and other health-related issues, have put Arizona hospitals in a state of dire fiscal emergency. As a result, some have closed, or are in danger of having to close their emergency rooms and other services.
Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee, for example, closed its ob/gyn department for several months because it had to provide labor and delivery services for illegal immigrants on an emergency basis and received no compensation. Maricopa County Hospital incurred uncompensated costs of over $1 million just to treat two burn victims."
Furthermore, because illegal immigrants often come from Third World Countries with poor health care systems, diseases like Tuberculosis, Chagas disease, Leprosy, Dengue fever, Polio, and Malaria that had practically been wiped out in the United States are being reintroduced here by illegal aliens who were infected in their home countries. The percentage of illegals infected is small, but when you consider, for example, that Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis can cost $250,000 to treat and Americans are picking up the tab for each case illegals bring into the US, the bills can add up in a hurry.
13) Some people say that it's impossible to secure our border? Are they right? No, they're not. The reason why our borders are not secure today is because the border patrol has been dramatically underfunded, undermanned, and not given the technology they need to do their jobs.
For example, we only have 11,000 border patrol agents working on both the US and Canadian border combined. On the other hand, New York City alone has 39,110 officers. How can anyone expect us to secure both our Northern and Southern borders with 1/3 of the personnel used to handle a single city?
Furthermore, we don't give our border patrol agents the technology that they need to do their job. As Congressman Tom Tancredo has pointed out, with the proper technology our borders can be locked down tightly:
"The marines did a little (exercise) just North of Idaho. One Hundred marines with three drones and two radar stations controlled 100 miles of the most rugged border you ever saw in your life. While I was there, just one week-end while I was there, they intercepted four people coming across on ATVs carrying four hundred pounds of drugs, we got a light plane trying to come in under the radar, and so it can happen. We can control our borders, we just choose not too."
If we properly staff our border patrols, build a wall, use sensors, remote controlled drones, and radar stations, we can slow the raging flood of illegal aliens coming over our border down to a trickle. It's not "impossible," in fact, it probably wouldn't even be all that difficult, we just haven't made the effort.
Headline: We Don't Need "Guest Workers"
By: Robert Samuelson
Source: Washington Post
Date: Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Economist Philip Martin of the University of California likes to tell a story about the state's tomato industry. In the early 1960s, growers relied on seasonal Mexican laborers, brought in under the government's "bracero" program. The Mexicans picked the tomatoes that were then processed into ketchup and other products. In 1964 Congress killed the program despite growers' warnings that its abolition would doom their industry. What happened? Well, plant scientists developed oblong tomatoes that could be harvested by machine. Since then, California's tomato output has risen fivefold.
It's a story worth remembering, because we're being warned again that we need huge numbers of "guest workers" -- meaning unskilled laborers from Mexico and Central America -- to relieve U.S. "labor shortages." Indeed, the shortages will supposedly worsen as baby boomers retire. President Bush wants an open-ended program. Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) advocate initially admitting 400,000 guest workers annually. The Senate is considering these and other plans.
Gosh, they're all bad ideas.
Guest workers would mainly legalize today's vast inflows of illegal immigrants, with the same consequence: We'd be importing poverty. This isn't because these immigrants aren't hardworking; many are. Nor is it because they don't assimilate; many do. But they generally don't go home, assimilation is slow and the ranks of the poor are constantly replenished. Since 1980 the number of Hispanics with incomes below the government's poverty line (about $19,300 in 2004 for a family of four) has risen 162 percent. Over the same period, the number of non-Hispanic whites in poverty rose 3 percent and the number of blacks, 9.5 percent. What we have now -- and would with guest workers -- is a conscious policy of creating poverty in the United States while relieving it in Mexico. By and large, this is a bad bargain for the United States. It stresses local schools, hospitals and housing; it feeds social tensions (witness the Minutemen). To be sure, some Americans get cheap housecleaning or landscaping services. But if more mowed their own lawns or did their own laundry, it wouldn't be a tragedy.
The most lunatic notion is that admitting more poor Latino workers would ease the labor market strains of retiring baby boomers. The two aren't close substitutes for each other. Among immigrant Mexican and Central American workers in 2004, only 7 percent had a college degree and nearly 60 percent lacked a high school diploma, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Among native-born U.S. workers, 32 percent had a college degree and only 6 percent did not have a high school diploma. Far from softening the social problems of an aging society, more poor immigrants might aggravate them by pitting older retirees against younger Hispanics for limited government benefits.
It's a myth that the U.S. economy "needs" more poor immigrants. The illegal immigrants already here represent only about 4.9 percent of the labor force, the Pew Hispanic Center reports. In no major occupation are they a majority. They're 36 percent of insulation workers, 28 percent of drywall installers and 20 percent of cooks. They're drawn here by wage differences, not labor "shortages." In 2004, the median hourly wage in Mexico was $1.86, compared with $9 for Mexicans working in the United States, said Rakesh Kochhar of Pew. With high labor turnover in the jobs they take, most new illegal immigrants can get work by accepting wages slightly below prevailing levels.
Hardly anyone thinks that most illegal immigrants will leave. But what would happen if new illegal immigration stopped and wasn't replaced by guest workers? Well, some employers would raise wages to attract U.S. workers. Facing greater labor costs, some industries would -- like the tomato growers in the 1960s -- find ways to minimize those costs. As to the rest, what's wrong with higher wages for the poorest workers? From 1994 to 2004, the wages of high school dropouts rose only 2.3 percent (after inflation) compared with 11.9 percent for college graduates.
President Bush says his guest worker program would "match willing foreign workers with willing American employers, when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs." But at some higher wage, there would be willing Americans. The number of native high school dropouts with jobs declined by 1.3 million from 2000 to 2005, estimates Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors less immigration. Some lost jobs to immigrants. Unemployment remains high for some groups (9.3 percent for African Americans, 12.7 percent for white teenagers).
Business organizations understandably support guest worker programs. They like cheap labor and ignore the social consequences. What's more perplexing is why liberals, staunch opponents of poverty and inequality, support a program that worsens poverty and inequality. Poor immigrant workers hurt the wages of unskilled Americans. The only question is how much. Studies suggest a range "from negligible to an earnings reduction of almost 10 percent," according to the CBO.
It's said that having guest workers is better than having poor illegal immigrants. With legal status, they'd have rights and protections. They'd have more peace of mind and face less exploitation by employers. This would be convincing if its premise were incontestable: that we can't control our southern border. But that's unproved. We've never tried a policy of real barriers and strict enforcement against companies that hire illegal immigrants. Until that's shown to be ineffective, we shouldn't adopt guest worker programs that don't solve serious social problems -- but add to them.
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