| Cowardly Pols Pander for Hispanic Votes |
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| March 30, 2006 |
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 RUSH: (Reuters) "President Vicente Fox paused for a long moment before answering a question on how long it would take Mexico to reach a stage where citizens no longer want to cross the US border to seek work. After pausing, he said, 'Generations. It's a long way to narrow the gap between incomes and Mexico and on the other side of the border.' Roughly half of Mexico's population lives on less than five bucks a day, according to government figures. The US minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. The annual Mexican gross domestic product per capita is just under $7,000, and is almost $44,000 in the United States."
Basically he says we're going to be an economic mess in my country for generations. Well, what about this new oil find? What about this new super port that you're going to build now? They don't want to fix this circumstance or situation. I have to tell you, folks, there's some things about this that are really starting to irritate me, and I hope that this does not disappoint some of you in terms of preparation, but I have been prepping this program a little bit last night, yesterday afternoon, but this whole notion... The Senate right now is opening debate on this immigration bill, and "Republicans swiftly began arguing over whether the legislation would amount to amnesty for millions of illegal residents in the United States."
You know, "amnesty" is about as popular a label as liberal is, and that's why they don't want amnesty associated with it, but that's what this is. Make no mistake about it. There's no other way to look at it. People are trying to say, "Weeeell, $2,000 in fines and having to go to English class is not amnesty," but it is, because there's no enforcement. Anybody want to bet that this is not going to be enforced? I'll tell you why it's not going to be enforced. It isn't going to be enforced because it's an election year, and all the elected officials in Washington in both parties seem to care about is the Hispanic voting bloc.
They don't care about the citizens of this country and what they may think about this. They care about this new voting bloc. It's a stunning thing to watch. It's pure cowardice in action. Pure fear is running all of this, this whole issue. Guest workers? They're trying to call them guest workers to avoid the amnesty label. They're not "guest workers." They are illegal immigrants. People are out there insisting on a comprehensive plan which means a pathway to citizenship. We've been through this before. Simpson-Mazzoli. I was talking about this the other day. |
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In 1986 when they pushed Simpson-Mazzoli the key argument was that employers would be fined for hiring illegals, and Jeff Sessions, Senator Sessions from Alabama on the Senate floor yesterday said that in 2004 there were a total of three instances where employers were charged. So we've been through this. They don't enforce any of this stuff. Simpson-Mazzoli, 1986, the big argument there, the key argument, the thing they sold it with, "We're going to fine employers who hire these illegals." You know, we had all kinds of arguments being made.
"Well, you know, free market countries, people do jobs that Americans won't do." That's another one I'm getting fed up with, too, by the way, which I'll get to here in just a second. But, you know, the argument. Mark Belling yesterday talked about this. I got a lot of e-mails about his opinion of this. I guess he said that we shouldn't be punishing businesses because we allow these kids, the kids of illegals, into our schools, and we do. He's right about that. But we do it by order of the judiciary, and that started 25 years ago. But if we don't have employer sanctions, if we don't incarcerate and deport, then what are we doing?
All of this is just meaningless if there's no enforcement -- and let's just wait and see how many $2,000 fines are handed out. Now, let's see how many English classrooms get filled up with these. They're not going to enforce any new law. They won't enforce current law. The same elites that pressed for the '86 change are at it again. It's all intended to appear like something is being done to stem illegal immigration when in fact it's not. The country gets roiled about it every 20 years. The country demands something be done about it and the elites in Washington say, "Okay, we're really serious about it this. We're going to handle it. We're going to fix it this time." Tom Sowell wrote yesterday, "We already subsidize these big agribusinesses."
That's one of the arguments for illegals. "Hey, we're keeping prices low. You know, we need cheap labor, entry-level wages. Americans won't do that work."
But we already subsidize agribusiness. We subsidize their water. We subsidize their products directly by stockpiling it. We pay them not to grow crops sometimes. He could have added -- he didn't say this -- ethanol fuel is a big payoff to them, the agribusiness, and now we're supposed to subsidize their labor. I wonder what the real true cost of a head of lettuce is -- and cheap food? Of course, that's something that we all need. That's not an option in life, and so everybody's interest in the governing levels is to keep the price of food as low as possible, since it's a necessary.
That's why all the subsidies are in there, but when it leads to silly excuses like this, then you have to question the whole thing. The problem is there already are pathways to citizenship. It's called following the law, and if we need more immigrants, then we can  increase the numbers legally -- and Congress can do that. Now we who oppose what they're doing in Congress are being called radical or mean-spirited or racist or sexist or whatever else. When is it so radical to demand that the very law Congress passes be enforced, and what is this silliness that Americans won't do these jobs? Somebody tell that to the West Virginia coal miners. Somebody tell that to the Americans, those lazy Americans in Iraq on the battlefield.
This notion that there are jobs Americans will not do is getting a little bit histrionic to me. I'm sick and tired of being told by these elites in Washington, these politicians how we all refuse to work. They seem to think we're all raised like Ted Kennedy or married into wealth like John Kerry. The American people work. They work damn hard. The economy and the numbers there prove it but yet we're told, "No, no, no! The Americans are lazy. They're uppity. There are certain jobs that they will not do."
Well, check the coal mines. Check the military. I don't see any illegals there.
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RUSH: I once fell for the argument, by the way, that there are "jobs Americans won't do," because it sounds right, but there's something behind that argument that's insidious, and it's this: it's a put-down. It's a put-down of people who are working in this country. Law-abiding, hard working, tax-paying Americans are being put down as Ted Kennedy-type sloths to justify what? To justify people coming here from other countries illegally and pandering to them because they fear that in a decade or so they're going to lose their votes.
I think some of these politicians need to get out of the Beltway and reacquaint themselves with their constituents (interruption). What, Mr. Snerdley? What's the problem? How can you reject anything I've said? What I have said is unassailable. It's unarguable. Plus, I'm the host. You've got (interruption). Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. He's talking supply and demand. You've got the word "illegal." This is a vicious cycle that has perpetuated itself and fed itself. One of the things this does also is it's a justification for keeping wages low. It's a justification for keeping wages low, perhaps artificially.
The whole thing here revolves around that Americans are being told, "You've got to let the illegals in and you can't argue with us about this because there's jobs out there that you won't do." I would think jobs Americans won't do are the dirty grimy tough ones and those are the jobs Americans do "do," but to put down work, period, is another thing about this argument that just runs awry. Americans, in a sense, are being told -- and I think they're fed up with it -- that they're a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings when they don't look at themselves that way at all. A couple audio sound bites here. Ted Kennedy, the Swimmer, yesterday on the Senate floor calls this the new civil rights movement. Number six, audio:
KENNEDY: We propose to end this system of exploitation and to right this historic injustice. We believe that immigrants, like women and like African-Americans before them, have rights in this country, and the time is ripe for a new civil rights moment. We believe that a nation of immigrants rejects its history and its heritage when millions of immigrants are confined forever to second-class status, and that all Americans are debased by such a two-tear system.
RUSH: So here we go. Now we have the modern equivalents of the civil rights leaders. These people are no different than Dr. King, no different than the early leaders of the civil rights movement. So all citizens of the world, regardless of citizenship, deserve the same rights as Americans paid for by Americans -- and if that doesn't bother you -- this incorporates every liberal argument they make on the economy. Here comes class envy, here comes guilt, here comes elitism. Now, the swimmer next explains, he was on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, and he tries here to explain why this bill of his is not amnesty.
KENNEDY: Amnesty, that -- you mean if they now pay a -- amnesty, as I mentioned before means forgiveness, and it means pardon. It means that they go to the front of the line. They don't go to the front of the line. They pay a penalty and they go to the back of the line. This is a crowd that works hard, plays by the rules, pays their taxes, and wants to make America a better country. What we're saying is you don't go to the front of the line, you don't go to the middle of the line, but you go to the end of the line. We have 11 years to find out if you're going to work hard, you're going to pay your taxes, and you're going to stay out of trouble.
RUSH: Okay, that's the swimmer's attempt to explain how it's not amnesty. He can't do it because it is. Rose in Beaumont, Texas, we'll go to you first on the phones. Glad to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Yes, sir. Hi. I just wanted to let you know that there is a lot of misinformation out there, and --
RUSH: There usually is. We try to deal with it here every day.
CALLER: And so the problem is this, that people are not understanding that there are people from all parts of the country -- different countries that have political problems that cause these people, these poor people that are not given the privileges that we have here in the United States, coming into these countries, and that's why we have the problem. So if we would send some sort of diplomacy over there to keep these people from having problems in their country, keep them away from ours, maybe that would -- |
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 RUSH: Basically what you're saying out there, Rose, is that we need to try to understand these people better.
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Is that right?
CALLER: Yes. We do certainly.
RUSH: That's right. We need to really understand. We need to understand their poverty. We need to understand their rage. We need to understand whatever it is, because only then will we be able to become a family of one peoples, understanding each other, loving each other, and singing kumbaya all afternoon as we patrol the border on both sides.
CALLER: Well, if you're Christian, it's something that Jesus Christ would do and I agree with that because you do go to different countries and solve problems there --
RUSH: No, no, no, no. I thought I understood Christianity until Hillary Clinton started defining it. Now I'm confused. If you want to look at and analyze it from that side, we can go both ways and not score any points either way. This is not a problem of not understanding them. This is not a problem of not feeling bad for them. It's not a problem of not understanding their plight. We have here a political situation.
Look at the ports deal. (Folks, I love the ports deal. We've got great ports deal news today, too.) But the fact of the matter is the people of this country were shocked. They were outraged. They were angry that we were going to let an Arab emirate company run the ports. People spoke out within three weeks, Congress said, "Okay. Nobody from any Arab country is going to have anything to do with our ports. We need to keep those ports secure." The same reaction to this immigration bill is occurring, and the same people are being ignored. The American people are being ignored on this because there is fear in Washington over votes.
So we get this recycled Simpson-Mazzoli from 1986, and none of this is practicably enforceable because there's no intent to enforce it. This is just pandering. We're all being insulted here, especially when we are told they're jobs Americans won't do. As I said, you know, we're not all a bunch of born into the life of luxury Ted Kennedy types. We don't all marry our money like John Kerry did. The American people work hard. Right, Snerdley? The American people work very hard, and to be told that there are jobs they won't do, especially in the midst of a roaring economy, is just a bit much. Stu in Tampa, you're next. It's great to have you on the program.
CALLER: Rush, thank you. It's a privilege to speak with you. I would like to meet you someday. Listen, I have a recommendation that would fit both the United States and Mexico. It will provide jobs for Mexicans, long-term public works project, and if President Fox is listening, consider this. Have the Mexicans build the wall. It will keep the costs down. Mexico is home to one of the largest cement and block companies in the world, which is a terrific company. It will provide jobs, and all of the offshoot businesses, the little taco stands -- and I'm not kidding, the taco stands -- the roads that need to be built. Let the Mexicans build the wall.
RUSH: Sort of like letting the prisoners build Folsom Prison.
CALLER: Well, it's 700 miles they're projecting the length of this wall to be. If they could do a half a mile a day, that would be a four or a five-year project. Look at what China is doing on the border of North Korea to stop all of the North Koreans from flowing into China, what did they do? They built a wall. |
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RUSH: Yeah, but you know something? In all candor, it's funny. I myself, even though you are the rank amateur and I'm the highly trained broadcast specialist, I have been laughing at what you said. But communist countries build walls, and they build walls to keep people out. I'm not sure I want to go that route. What you're illustrating, though, is the first and foremost thing that has to happen is border security. How in the world can you go bananas over the port deal on the basis that our ports are unsecured and we can't let an Arab company be in charge! Why, they'll sneak a terrorist in here to nuke and we will all die! Well, what about the southern border? There is no concern about the security there that even comes close to paralleling or equaling the hysteria, the tsunami of hysteria that happened with the port deal.
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RUSH: (NewsMax) "Vicente Fox, Mexican president, defending earlier comments where he insisted that the United States will be begging Mexico to send workers to alleviate a coming US labor shortage. He said, 'I dare say in ten years the US will be begging, will be pleading with Mexico to send it workers.'"
So he's got a crystal ball that says things are going to hell. He must know that the Democrats are going to win the White House within that period of time.
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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. |
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