Showing posts with label illegal immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illegal immigration. Show all posts

April 8, 2013

The mysterious epidemic of worker disabilty


Via Kevin Drum, the Wall Street Journal says:
Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist for J.P. Morgan, estimates that since the recession, the worker flight to the Social Security Disability Insurance program accounts for as much as a quarter of the puzzling drop in participation rates, a labor exodus with far-reaching economic consequences.

Thank goodness we let in all those illegal immigrants to do the jobs Americans are just too disabled these days to do. Who knew that working class Americans would suffer an epidemic of vague back pain and balky knees after decades of business, political, and economist elites conspiring to hammer down their wages through non-enforcement of immigration laws? Fortunately, our political, economic, intellectual, and moral betters somehow sensed that their fellow citizens would be getting more disabled in the future (apparently, arthroscopic surgery has been disinvented, or something), so our leaders brilliantly took action ahead of time to make sure America had an ample supply of unskilled foreign laborers to replace the Americans overwhelmed by this mysterious epidemic of disability. 

February 14, 2013

A President Rubio could put an end to all this divisiveness by just ordering a drone strike on John Tanton

For years, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been arguing that the only reason anybody in America has the slightest doubts about immigration is because of the malign influence of one man, a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton. 

Now, Sen. Marco Rubio is spreading the SPLC's line.

From the Washington Post:
Effort to change immigration law sparks internal battle within GOP 
By Peter Wallsten, Published: February 13 
A new battle has flared inside the Republican Party in recent days as supporters of more-liberal immigration laws wage a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit the influential advocacy groups that have long powered the GOP’s hard-line stance on the issue. 
The campaign, largely waged in closed-door meetings with lawmakers and privately circulated documents, is another sign of how seriously many establishment Republicans are pursuing an immigration overhaul in the wake of last year’s elections, in which the GOP lost Hispanic voters by an overwhelming margin to President Obama. 
Much of the party’s sharp language on immigration during the election campaign, which Republican strategists blamed for alienating Hispanics, was drawn from the research and rhetoric of the advocacy groups. 
Now, Republicans pushing the party to rethink its approach to the issue are accusing those groups — Numbers USA, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) – of masquerading as conservative. Critics say the groups and some of their supporters are pressing an un­or­tho­dox agenda of strict population control that also has included backing for abortion, sterilization, and other policies at odds with conservative ideology. 
“If these groups can be unmasked, then the bulk of the opposition to immigration reform on the conservative side will wither away,” said Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and a leading organizer of the effort. 
Officials from the groups say they are the victims of a smear campaign that unfairly characterizes their mission. They acknowledge that some key figures in their past held a wide range of views on population growth and abortion, as do some current members, but the groups accuse their critics of pushing guilt-by-association arguments to distract from the merits of the case for restricting immigration. 
The groups have provided the intellectual framework and grass-roots muscle for opposing legislation that would legalize millions of illegal immigrants. 
Well-funded and politically savvy, the groups produce research papers, testify at congressional hearings and appear frequently in the media to push for reducing immigration. Numbers USA reports that its members have inundated the office of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) with 100,000 faxes this year warning him that his central role in pursuing changes in immigration laws could damage his future political prospects. ...
Conservatives who are taking on the groups, including Rubio, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and officials of the Catholic Church, argue that the three organizations are motivated by far different philosophies than many of their Republican allies realize. Among those views: that population growth from increased migration threatens the environment. 
The Republicans orchestrating the campaign against the groups have long rejected their views on immigration, and liberal immigration advocates have long made a practice of attacking the organizations. Now, with such GOP leaders as House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) saying immigration legislation is a priority, some Republicans see an opportunity to loosen what they say has been the groups’ stranglehold on party orthodoxy.

Uh ... George W. Bush? Karl Rove? Grover Norquist? John McCain?

I'm fascinated by how impervious the world is to doing simple reality checks on assertions, such as by thinking briefly about the immigration views of recent Republican Presidents/nominees.

How exactly do Roy Beck and Mark Krikorian have a "stranglehold on party orthodoxy" compared to those guys who have all pushed more immigration? We immigration reductionists have managed to block disastrous initiatives by Bush and McCain by having better facts and logic, not by any stranglehold.
Rubio’s aides last week brought one of the organizers of the effort to undermine the groups, Mario H. Lopez, a party strategist on Hispanic politics, to a regular meeting of GOP Senate staffers, where Lopez distributed literature about the groups’ backgrounds and connections. Rubio also raised concerns about the groups’ leanings during a recent conference call on immigration with conservative activists. 
Rubio’s spokesman, Alex Conant, said the senator “has argued that some groups that oppose legal immigration should not be considered part of the conservative coalition,” adding that the “vast majority of Republicans strongly support legal immigration.” 
Kevin Appleby, director of immigration policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in an e-mail to The Post that “pro-life legislators should think twice about working with these groups, as their underlying goals are inconsistent with a pro-life agenda.” ...
The critics, however, argue that the three groups have misled conservatives. These critics point to reports on the FAIR and Numbers USA Web sites, for instance, that warn of environmental devastation from unchecked population growth, and they are circulating a 1993 report by CIS researchers sympathetic to contraception and the RU-486 abortion pill. 
In the latest issue of an anti-abortion journal, The Human Life Review, the Hispanic GOP strategist Lopez accuses the groups of “hijacking” the immigration debate for their own purposes. He argues that population-control advocates “have built, operated, and funded much of the anti-immigration movement in the United States.” 
“Those who seek to advance the pro-life cause should not allow themselves to be fooled by those whose work is ultimately diametrically opposed to the right to life,” Lopez writes. 
The article has created a stir in conservative circles. It ascribes the vision behind the groups to John Tanton, a controversial Michigan-based leader in the “zero population growth” movement, who co-founded FAIR in 1979 and later helped start Numbers USA and CIS. 
In a 2001 letter by Tanton being circulated as part of the current campaign, he laid out his idea to “move the battle lines on the immigration question in our favor” by convincing Republican lawmakers that “massive immigration imperils their political future.” The goal, he wrote, was to “change Republicans’ perception of immigration so that when they encounter the word ‘immigrant,’ their reaction is ‘Democrat.’ ” Organizers of the campaign against the groups found the letter at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, which houses Tanton’s papers.

And, boy, was Tanton ever wrong! Oh, wait ...
An aide to Tanton, now 78, said Tanton was unable to speak. But the aide, K.C. McAlpin, said Tanton was an “ardent conservationist” who was being targeted in a “sort of McCarthyism game that the far left has been playing and is now being played by some people who call themselves conservatives.” 

I've never met the man, but if the SPLC/Rubio line is right about his influence, we ought to add Dr. Tanton's face to Mount Rushmore.
The dispute has prompted some tense encounters in recent days. 
When word spread, for instance, that Rubio’s staff was bringing Lopez to the Senate aides meeting last week, other Senate offices contacted the three groups, each of which sent a representative. 
“It was awkward,” said one staffer, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting. The staffer described the critics’ tactics as “over the top,” saying the groups have been a “great resource” for data, research and expert testimony. 
Another testy moment occurred recently at the weekly conservative strategy session hosted by Norquist when Lopez stood to present his arguments. Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, spoke up to defend the credibility of the Center for Immigration Studies. 
“I haven’t heard folks take on the substantive arguments CIS is making and saying why they’re wrong,” said von Spakovsky, who declined to discuss details of what happened in the off-the-record meeting. “Instead you just get these scurrilous attacks.”

August 31, 2012

The latest anti-discrimination cause

In a New York Times op-ed, "Deportation Nation," law professor Daniel Kanstroom explains the horrors of America deporting aliens who are convicted of subsequent crimes. 
To be sure, some deportees have been convicted of serious crimes. But most are guilty of drug offenses, or misdemeanors like petty larceny, simple assault, drunken driving.

Kanstroom explains that we must stop deporting them because they often become victims of discrimination in their home countries:
In a study of Latin American deportees who had lived for long periods in the United States (on average, 14 years), the sociologists M. Kathleen Dingeman and Rubén G. Rumbaut found that deportees who had emigrated as children suffered the most. Deportees to El Salvador (a country many had fled during the civil war of the 1980s) encountered discrimination because of their accents, style of dress and California gang-themed tattoos. [Bolding mine]

Okay ...

August 30, 2012

Farm Report: Robbing in the Fields

John Carney writes in CNBC on the Phony Farm Labor Crisis that predictions of crops-rotting-in-the-fields doom for farmers because of a purported illegal alien shortage didn't quite come true:
Let’s start with California. The San Francisco Chronicle had warned: 
Farmers across California are experiencing the same problem: Seasonal workers who have been coming for decades to help with the harvest, planting and pruning have dropped off in recent years. With immigration crackdowns, an aging Mexican population, drug wars at the border and a weakened job market in the United States, the flow of migrants has stopped and may actually have reversed, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research firm that has been studying the trend. 
So what happened? 
Farm profits, what the Ag Department calls “net cash income,” in California rose from $11.1 billion in 2010 to $16.1 in 2011, an eye-popping 45 percent growth.

August 21, 2012

Oh, the humanity!

It never ends. From CNBC:
California Farm Labor Shortage 'Worst It's Been, Ever' 
By: Jane Wells

Actually, I think the proper punctuation is "Worst. Farm labor shortage. Ever."
There's a different sort of drought plaguing California, the nation's largest farm state. It's $38 billion agricultural sector is facing a scarcity of labor.

"This year is the worst it's been, ever," said Craig Underwood, who farms everything from strawberries to lemons to peppers, carrots, and turnips in Ventura County. 
Some crops aren't get picked this season due to a lack of workers. 
"We just left them in the field," he said. 
The Western Growers Association told CNBC its members are reporting a 20 percent drop in laborers this year. Stronger border controls are keeping workers from crossing into the U.S. illegally, and the current guest worker program is not providing enough bodies.  
"We have 100 fewer people this year," said Sergio Diaz, who provides workers under contract for growers. "We're having difficulty finding people to do this work." 
The lack of workers is forcing farmers to pay more.

Oh, the humanity! Those poor, poor farmers, having to pay their workers more.

Seriously, there's something Pavlovian about how effective for propaganda purposes is this mental image of "crops rotting in the fields" beloved by the PR people of the growers' associations. The reality is that the agriculture industry can't make use of every single vegetable or fruit grown, just as the lumber industry inevitably winds up with some unused sawdust. Each fruit or vegetable ripens at a slightly different time, and there are definite diminishing returns to paying for more picking sweeps through fields looking for optimally ripe ones. But, perhaps, humans have such folk memories of famines that we unthinkingly find horrifying the notion that profit maximizing farmers find it profit maximizing to not pick every single outlier, so we rush to meet their demands for more cheap immigrant labor.

Here's a question: You know how economists love to lecture non-economists about how the science of economics has proven that no such things as shortages can exist, absent price controls?

The Wikipedia article on "Economic shortage" explains:
In common use, the term "shortage" may refer to a situation where most people are unable to find a desired good at an affordable price. In the economic use of "shortage", however, the affordability of a good for the majority of people is not an issue: If people wish to have a certain good but cannot afford to pay the market price, their wish is not counted as part of demand.

And you know how economists are always making fun of articles quoting consumers complaining about shortages of stuff they want to buy but can't afford? Yet, these articles about the apocalyptic Farm Labor Shortage are an annual staple of journalism, but how many economists (other than labor economic specialists such as Borjas at Harvard or Martin at UC Davis) ever make fun of these boilerplate articles?

August 3, 2012

Edward Abbey: "Immigration and Liberal Taboos"

In 1988, the New York Times commissioned, then rejected an op-ed on illegal immigration from Edward Abbey (1927-1989), the acclaimed novelist and radical environmentalist. Abbey's "Immigration and Liberal Taboos" remains excellent reading today:
The only acceptable euphemism, it now appears, is something called undocumented worker. Thus the pregnant Mexican woman who appears, in the final stages of labor, at the doors of the emergency ward of an El Paso or San Diego hospital, demanding care for herself and the child she's about to deliver, becomes an "undocumented worker." The child becomes an automatic American citizen by virtue of its place of birth, eligible at once for all of the usual public welfare benefits. And with the child comes not only the mother but the child's family. And the mother's family. And the father's family. Can't break up families can we? They come to stay and they stay to multiply.

I'd tell you to read the whole thing, but then I couldn't mine it for good arguments myself.

July 12, 2012

All I know is what I read in the papers

We heard over and over again that Obama's Administrative Amnesty was a political masterstroke, but now the polls are finally in and the Washington Post reports "No Immigration Bounce for Obama." It turns out that -- What do you know? -- immigration is a bad issue for Obama, especially in swing states (in red above -- and, no, I don't know what the right half of the graph means.)

What does make a difference is the sheer racial change created by immigration. If the U.S. still had the demographics of 1980, Obama would likely lose as badly as Carter. As brilliant GOP strategic thinkers like Rove, Bush, and McCain argued, therefore the Republicans should speed up demographic change.

July 5, 2012

The view from the WSJ's "Open Borders" bunker

An anonymous commenter offers some insight into the level of empirical research and logical insight that the famous institutions that campaign for Open Borders have brought to analyzing the long-run effects of their policy proposal.
In 1996 I had a brief conversation with David Asman, currently with Fox News, but then with the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and someone (as he noted in our conversation) involved with the "There shall be open borders" editorials. 
I was one of the guests on a short lived and deeply stupid cable TV show Asman was hosting (Issues USA), and after the filming was done I took the opportunity to ask him about precisely your point: how many would come? He wasn't willing to spend much time talking about it (he was a busy man!), but what he did have to say was kind of..., um..., startling. He condescendingly informed me that people like me had nothing to worry about, because the number of people who would come to the U.S. under open immigration in fact wouldn't be many more than were already coming. 
How did he know this? Well you see, the Journal had organized a trip down to a section of southwest border for some of its people. And when he was down there he saw with his own eyes that this stretch of border, despite being totally unprotected, was not being flooded by huge numbers of illegal Mexican immigrants rushing north, as the alarmists would have us believe. In fact he didn't see anybody! So why, he asked me -- given that nothing was stopping all of Mexico from coming here illegally right now if they wanted to -- did I think they'd suddenly all start coming if we made it legal? 
Why indeed!

I drove the road along the Arizona-Mexico border in 2003. Similarly, I didn't see a single illegal alien crossing it. Yet, for some reason, I didn't conclude that nobody was crossing. I surmised instead, from all the piles of junk left by crossers, by the holes bashed in the 4 foot tall fence every 100 yards or so, by all the testimony of locals I talked to, by all the news accounts I read in the local papers, that the illegal crossers were using the brilliant ploy of sneaking in at night because that's when it's dark! But then I'm not WSJ Editorial Board timber, so what do I know?

July 3, 2012

Liberal hateaholics with poor reading comprehension skills

The online comments about this New York Times article were quite interesting: 
Tension for East Hampton as Immigrants Stream In 
By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS 
When one thinks of the Hamptons, what jumps to mind are masters of the universe and their mansions by the sea. But a strong, steady stream of immigrants has been flowing to the area for years, drawn by a service economy that demands hedges be trimmed and houses be cleaned. In the Springs, a hamlet in the town of East Hampton, where most of the houses are small and the year-round population is relatively large, the Hispanic population has tripled in the past 10 years — and tension has emerged. 
Some longtime residents of the Springs and similar areas complain that homes are being illegally crowded, that houses with half a dozen cars parked outside are a blight on the street, and that the many children living inside are overwhelming the local schools and causing property taxes to rise. ...
The pockets of tension are concentrated in year-round communities, where the immigrants, legal and illegal, tend to live alongside the landscapers and the contractors with whom they are competing for business. These areas are far less affluent than the southern end of town, where Manhattanites spend the summer by the ocean, in homes hidden behind 12-foot hedges. 
“South of the highway, the rich people, they don’t care,” said Ricardo Rodriguez, a carpenter from Colombia who has lived in East Hampton for 12 years. It is among “the working people, regular people like us,” he continued, where less welcoming sentiments can be found. “You can feel it.” 
Most of the houses on the leafy, winding roads of the Springs are small, well kept but simple. Pickup trucks and modest cars are parked in driveways under fluttering American flags. Home prices and rents are relatively low. Most Springs residents are white, but according to the 2010 census, 37 percent are Hispanic. 
Mr. Lynch and others who have raised the issue of crowded houses — at Town Board meetings or in property owner association newsletters — say it has nothing to do with race or ethnicity, but rather enforcement of existing codes that designate homes for single-family use. If a house is crammed with several families, they say, or occupied like a rooming house, that can hurt a whole street. Or when neighbors pack houses full of children, their critics complain of ending up shouldering an unfair portion of the school tax burden. 
“This is really about property values and the neighborhood,” said Carol Saxe Buda, who helped begin a group called Unoccupy Springs about a year and a half ago to address crowding. 
“A substantial number of illegally occupied homes reflect a certain community,” she added, referring to immigrants, but she emphasized that where the residents came from was never the reason her group singled out a home. The group’s members highlight only places that are, by their crowding, straining the local schools or threatening neighboring property values, she said. “We report houses that are problems," she said. “We don’t care who’s in them.” 
The East Hampton housing code allows no more than four unrelated people, or one family, to occupy a single-family home, and town officials acknowledge that crowding does exist. They receive a few complaints each week, most frequently in the Springs, and some of those do result in violations. And the deputy town supervisor, Theresa K. Quigley, said the Springs had some of the highest per-acre taxes around. 
Nonetheless, some residents, including Ms. Quigley, say the objections are more sinister. “The people who came to the Town Board insist there is nothing racial intended,” said Ms. Quigley, who was born and raised in the Hamptons. “They say they’re talking about overcrowding, but they’re talking about Latinos.” 

Interestingly, the initial commenters on this article were largely liberal hateaholics who raged against the racist white Republican one percenters in beachfront mansions depicted in the article as protesting against illegal immigration. Over time, though, the comments section filled up with reasoned rebuttals from immigration restrictionists pointing out the horrible reading comprehension skills the early comments displayed.

Yet, the bigger point is that the useful concept of the white rich and the diverse poor teaming up to squeeze the middle in the name of fighting racism (e.g., Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide handing out $700,000 subprime mortgages to strawberry pickers to get rich while battling redlining) is simply not a part of the conceptual vocabulary of all but the most sophisticated thinkers today.
This spring, some residents went to a Town Board meeting waving giant photographs of homes they said were over-occupied, Ms. Quigley recounted, and threatening to compile and publicize a list of every one of those homes they could find. Ms. Quigley made a comment to a person nearby comparing the sentiments in the room to the rise of Nazism. That comment was picked up by a microphone and it soon typhooned into a controversy. 
Last week, she refused to back down from the comparison. 
“How, how, how could a country do what they did?” Ms. Quigley, who has lived in Germany, asked of that country’s past. “I don’t have an answer, but I can tell you one thing: It’s a series of little steps. It doesn’t happen in a huge bang. And it happens by targeting a group for your problems.” 
East Hampton, she continued, “is a great place to live, but we have troubles.” 
“People tend to blame the Latino community for their troubles,” she added. “Doesn’t that sound a little familiar? Like blaming the Jews for troubles in Germany.” 
Fred Weinberg, a member of the Unoccupy Springs group who was at that Town Board meeting, said that as a Jewish man, he found the remarks extremely offensive, and he demanded Ms. Quigley’s resignation. She did not oblige or apologize. 

Where could Ms. Quigley possibly have gotten the idea that citizens petitioning their elected officials for enforcement of laws broken by illegal aliens is starting America down the slippery slope to Auschwitz? From reading New York Times editorials, quite possibly.
Today he continues to work on the issues of crowding, he said, though he prefers to work away from Ms. Quigley when possible. 
“I know there are people who probably are racist,” Mr. Weinberg said. “But it’s not me, it’s not Carol Buda, it’s not any of the people that I know who have been trying to work on this problem. We just want them, very simply, to enforce the law and protect our community.”

Well, lots of luck with that you, admitted allies of racists and, no doubt, proto-Nazis. The War on Racists is the most important thing in the whole world (except when its the War on Homophobes), so you'd better take about 20 or 30 years off to first purge all racists from the ranks of your supporters, before anybody respectable will listen to you.

Seriously, working class folks have to learn that the way you keep undesirable out of your neighborhood is by never ever mentioning them (unless they are white). No, you keep out people you don't want around by advocating for the environment. 

For example, a few decades ago, some developer wanted to put up working class housing in the Hamptons in an area that the Masters of the Universe considered too close to their summer houses. One day, a pond on the site was suddenly discovered to be home to a bucketful of a certain species of small fish (?) listed as endangered by the State of New York ... but not by the EPA because the fish was common in the Carolinas. In fact, it was so common down south that you could place an order over the phone with a Carolina bait shop to Fed Ex you a bucket full of the live fish, which you could then pour into the pond one evening.

June 25, 2012

Supreme Court's Arizona immigration decision: bad or disastrous?

The LA Times reports:
The Supreme Court’s mixed decision on Arizona’s tough immigration law gave both sides an opportunity to celebrate, criticize and, inevitably, point fingers. Above all, it underscored the tricky politics surrounding the emotional issue — for both parties — especially in the midst of a fiercely fought presidential campaign. 
President Obama offered qualified praise for the ruling, saying he was pleased the Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the Arizona law, including parts that would have made it a state crime for illegal immigrants to seek work or fail to carry proper documentation. 
But Obama, like many Latino activists, expressed concern the court upheld perhaps the most controversial portion of the state crackdown, a provision allowing police officers, making lawful stops, to check the immigration status of people who they suspect may be in the country illegally.

But that sounds more like the Best Case Scenario.

A commenter recently pointed out that there's no good reason for the Supreme Court to be based in Washington D.C. What, they don't have email these days? They have to go look up precedents in paper files only available in D.C.?


The Justices (other than Clarence Thomas, who loves RVing around the country) just get encapsulated in the D.C. Bubble. In particular, Washington D.C. based folks are a generation behind most of the rest of the country in understanding the impact of illegal immigration. White people in D.C. are all for it because, deep down, they see it as a way to push blacks out of D.C. 


Either move the Supreme Court permanently to, say, Kansas City, or make it move around the country every couple of years. 

June 21, 2012

Romney not clear on concept of 8.1% unemployment

From the WSJ:
Mitt Romney promised Latino leaders a long-term fix for immigration policy and short-term relief for immigrants in a speech Thursday that was notably softer in tone than when he was battling to win the Republican presidential nomination. 
In a calibrated attempt to attract Latino voters without alienating some in his own party, Mr. Romney spoke of bipartisan solutions he would pursue as president. He pledged ... to let those with advanced degrees remain in the U.S. ...

Now, that's some brilliant politicking, Mitt: With your speech to Latino leaders today, you've definitely picked up some of that crucial voting bloc of Hispanic American citizens who are closely related to illegal immigrants with advanced degrees. You just keep listening to what the WSJ and NYT tell you and you can't go wrong.

June 20, 2012

The Wisdom of Marco Rubio

Senator Marco Rubio (R-Cuba), prominent Vice-Presidential Timber, has written (according to Matthew Yglesias in "The Wisdom of Marco Rubio on Illegal Immigration"):
"Many people who came here illegally are doing exactly what we would do if we lived in a country where we couldn't feed our families," he writes in An American Son, which was released Tuesday. "If my kids went to sleep hungry every night and my country didn't give me an opportunity to feed them, there isn't a law, no matter how restrictive, that would prevent me from coming here."

Here's an interesting graph:

June 15, 2012

Obama's Amnesty

In the Daily Caller, Neil Munro explains:
Administration officials tried to head off public protest over their June 15 decision to not deport under-30 illegal immigrants by claiming that the de-facto amnesty is not a legal amnesty. 
“This is not amnesty — it is an exercise of [prosecutorial] discretion so that these young people are not in the removal system,” said President Barack Obama’s immigration deputy, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. ...
“Effective immediately, young [foreign] people who were brought to the United States… will no longer be removed from the country,” Napolitano said in the press conference. 
... The administration’s election-year amnesty move may grow far larger than advertised, because it can be used by foreign children who are now in the country when they reach the age of 15. Younger illegal immigrants “will be able to age into the process,” said an administration official June 15. 
It may also be exploited by other immigrants who will use the existing black-market in false documents to fake suitable work histories and ages. 
The new policy may also spur additional illegal immigration by people wishing to see their children immigrate into United States’ relatively high-wage economy. ...  
The potential for campaign-trail damage was highlighted by Napolitano’s June 15 press conference.
She portrayed the amnesty as a cost-saving program, not an amnesty or a bid for Hispanic votes in 2012.
But she did not take questions from reporters. 
Instead, two administration officials answered questions from selected reporters, including from the Spanish-language TV network, Univision and from The New York Times. 
The selected reporters did not offer skeptical questions about the scale and impact of the amnesty. The reporters also did not ask about its impact on American workers, especially low-skill workers whose wages and opportunities have declined for more than a decade amid the inflow of roughly 10 million illegal immigrants.

Neil then made himself the worst person in the history of the world by jumping in toward the end of Obama's speech announcing his amnesty-by-fiat to ask how this will help American workers. A visibly miffed Obama "explained" that "These young people are going to make extraordinary contributions ..." And who could possibly argue with that?

If you are a bad, bad person, you might object that illegal immigrants and their descendants aren't blank slates, that we have many decades of experience with them, and that the evidence from a couple of generations in Southern California is they mostly make wages lower, real estate costs higher, and public schools lousier for working and middle class Americans.

In contrast, they provide almost no competition whatsoever for elite Americans. For example, no Spanish-surnamed person who spent at least some of his or her youth in the United States has earned an Academy Award nomination in any category, no matter how minor, since the 1980s. That is extraordinary. That's something like an 0 for 3000 cold streak for the largest ethnic group in Los Angeles County. The closest thing to a Mexican-American getting an Oscar nomination in this century are the Weitz Brothers, whose maternal grandmother was a silent movie star from Mexico. But their dad was a fashion designer and race car driver from Berlin.

Look, if you find that, on the whole, illegal immigrants make life worse for you and yours, that just shows you are a loser who has failed to "insulate, insulate, insulate" yourself. So, why should anybody listen to a loser like you, or to anybody who speaks up for losers and no doubt has had Loser Cooties rub off on him? If you object to this unimpeachable logic about why you have cooties, that just shows you are incapable of nuanced thought.

June 5, 2012

"But is it good for the Americans?"

Peter Beinart, former editor of Marty Peretz's New Republic, is puzzled by a new poll of Jewish voters:
They’re a lot less enthusiastic about immigration. A slight plurality opposes “the U.S. government making it possible for illegal immigrants to become U.S. citizens.” On immigration, in fact, American Jews are slightly to the American Jewish leadership’s right. I think Steven M. Cohen, who conducted the poll with Samuel Abrams, has noticed this waning Jewish support for immigration before. It’s intriguing, and depressing, given that many Jews still valorize their Ellis Island roots. 
Not quite sure what explains this. I’d suspect that anti-immigrant sentiment is highest near the border and among the Anglo working class, since such populations most often compete with immigrants for services and jobs. But Jews aren’t well represented in either cohort. If you can crack the mystery of Jewish nativism, email us at info@openzion.com, and we’ll post your answer.

My wacko nutjob guess is that American Jews tend to be fairly patriotic, certainly more so than Jewish media figures and leaders of Jewish organizations. Thus, average Jews are more likely to ask "But is it good for the Americans?" instead of only concerning themselves with "Is it good for the Jews?" as their spokesmen assume they should. In particular, Ellis Island Kitsch, while still going strong in the press, has to be getting a little old in real life.

June 2, 2012

It's not even autumn, but ...

For years, going back at least to October 2006, every fall we read about the latest agricultural crisis caused by insufficient illegal infiltrator peasants. One harvest time, it's pears rotting in the field, the next it's kumquats. Just fill in the blanks on the press release. Each one-time-only outsized crop caused by fluke weather justifies a permanent change in the American population.

But last year, American farmowners enjoyed their most profitable year in history. So, this year, they aren't even waiting for fall to start agitating for lower wage workers. From Bloomberg News in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Farmers scrambling to find harvest labor

May 30, 2012

Economists v. Child Labor and Immigration Laws

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen links to a study of why child labor expanded so much during the laissez-faire era of the industrial revolution. The comments are mostly the usual libertarian chest-pounding, leading up to Roy Swanson's:
I got my first job when I was nine. Worked at a sheet metal factory. In two weeks, I was running the floor. Child labor laws are ruining this country.

Well played, sir. 

On second reading, I've come to believe this is a pitch-perfect parody of 21st Century libertarianism. Having never worked in a sheet metal factory, I couldn't say for sure, but I would guess that there are a lot of opportunities for sheet metal workers to lose fingers or even heads without adequate adult supervision.

[Update: Commenters have pointed out that Rob Swanson is the libertarian Tea Party government bureaucrat (the one who looks like Teddy Roosevelt) on the TV sitcom Parks and Recreation. Sorry about ham-handedly explaining the entire joke. But, at least, I did recognize it was supposed to be funny.]

When I was majoring in economics, history (especially of Britain), and business at Rice in the 1970s, child labor in Dickensian England was a major intellectual sore spot. 

The libertarians were just beginning their ascendance in the academy. Rice, a science / engineering-focused college in the booming oil capital of Houston, was unusual among elite universities because its faculty averaged less to the left than was the norm in the 1970s. While the economics department was increasingly libertarian, it was striking at the time that even the history department had two star converts to pro-market ideas in Allen Matusow and Martin J. Wiener, who is obscure in America but subsequently became hugely controversial in England in the early 1980s because of his influence on Thatcherism via Keith Joseph.

A major PR problem for laissez-faire ideas back then, however, was the extremely well documented history of a previous era when laissez-faire ideas had been dominant: in England in the first 3/4ths of the 19th Century. In particular, nobody who read about the era wanted to go back to not regulating child labor.

Since then, the Dickensian Era has become less of a problem for intellectual libertarians. People don't read Dickens as much. Nobody watches Oliver! the 1968 Best Picture winner (I played Oliver Twist's grandfather, Mr. Brownlow, in the St. Francis De Sales elementary school's 1970 production of Oliver!). Time passes and less and less is remembered.

Over the centuries, laissez-faire argumentation for low wages has shifted from insisting upon the iron necessity of child labor to the wonderfulness of open borders. But the combination of monetary interest driving intellectual arguments remains very similar. 

Perhaps the best critique of the ideological rigidity of laissez-faire England comes from Paul Johnson's 1972 A History of the English People. This preceded his famous conversion to neoconservatism in the brilliant Modern Times of 1983. But in 1972, Johnson was the last heir of Orwell in his English patriotic democratic socialism. In VDARE.com in 2007, I explained how Johnson's analysis could be applied to current debates over immigration:
We don't think of the British as being terribly ideological. But during the second quarter of the 19th Century, their justifiable national pride in developing economics for once overwhelmed the vaunted British common sense. A dogma based on a crude interpretation of the works of Malthus and Ricardo presumed that low wages were crucial to profits, just like the sophomoric economics of today's open borders crowd. 
Back then, the ruling class didn't fulminate over plucking chickens but over sweeping chimneys. 
Consider the fates of the little boys, from age four on up, who were widely employed by master chimney sweeps to clamber up inside long flues and knock down the soot, at horrific cost to their health. Paul Johnson writes in A History of the English People (p.285), “often they were forced up by the use of long pricks, and by applying wisps of flaming straw to their feet. They suffered from a variety of occupational diseases and many died from suffocation.” 
The ruling ideology of the age assumed that, as regrettable as this might be, the laws of economics required it. 
After all, how else would chimneys ever get swept? 
The first bill banning the employment of children under eight from chimney sweeping passed Parliament in 1788. But, like many immigration laws in America today, it was ignored. So was the 1834 act. 
Then, the greatest reformer of the Victorian Era, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, began his almost endless crusade to abolish child labor inside chimneys. Like William Wilberforce, the victor over the slave trade, Shaftesbury was a Tory, an evangelical Anglican, and a relentless parliamentarian.
In 1840, Shaftesbury carried a bill to regulate child chimney sweeps over ”resistance that can only be called fanatical”, in Johnson’s words. 
It also was not enforced. 
Three more of Shaftesbury’s bills failed in Parliament in the 1850s. He succeeded in 1864, but the legislation proved ineffective “due to a general conspiracy of local authorities, magistrates, police, judges, juries, and the public to frustrate the law. Boys continued to die…” including a seven-year-old who suffocated in a flue in 1873. 
Shaftesbury finally succeeded in passing effective legislation in 1875. 
And, of course, that winter everyone in Britain froze to death due to clogged chimneys. 
Oh, wait … sorry, that was in Bizarro Britain, where the reigning interpretations of economics actually applied. Rather like in Senator Kennedy’s Abnormal America, where nobody will be able to afford to eat chicken without the Liberal Lion’s amnesty and guest worker programs. 
In the real Britain, however, the master chimney sweeps quickly found other ways to clean chimneys. 
What we’ve learned since the early Victorian Era is that the world works in ways more responsive to intelligent effort than was imagined by Thomas Malthus: 
- High wages can often spur technological advances that more than make up for their costs. 
- The key to economic prosperity is not low wages but high human capital.
In contrast to Dickensian England, with its Scrooge-like obsession with cheap labor, Americans traditionally enjoyed high wages because the country was underpopulated relative to its natural resources. This inspired American entrepreneurs to invest in labor-saving innovations, which, in a virtuous cycle, allowed even higher wages to be paid. 
The most famous example: Henry Ford doubling his workers’ salaries in 1914 after inventing the moving assembly line. 
In the long run, the cheap labor obsession debilitated the English economy. After the brilliant innovations of the early Industrial Revolution, the English textile industry tended to stagnate. Paul Johnson explains: 
“Factories paid higher wages than domestic industries; all the same, they were very low, chiefly because most of the factory hands were women and children. Low wages kept home consumer demand down; worse still, they removed the chief incentive to replace primitive machinery by the systematic adoption of new technology.” 
And then there was the long run impact on Britain’s economic culture. Johnson writes: 
“State limitations of human exploitation came too late, and were too ineffective, to make the quest for productivity a virtue; the English did not discover it until the twentieth century, by which time the trade union movement had constructed powerful defenses against it.” 
Victorian Scroogeonomics helped engender its own nemesis. It drove the British working class far to the left of the American working class, leading to both the nationalization of major industries in the 1940s and a hatred of productivity improvements among unions, exemplified in the 1959 Peter Sellers’ movie I’m All Right, Jack.

May 24, 2012

Abe Foxman speaks

Although the New York Times hasn't yet gotten around to covering the recent pogrom in Tel Aviv against black "illegal infiltrators" (here's video footage of the riot -- not all that violent as far as race riots go), Abraham H. Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, issued the following statement today:
We are seriously concerned about the growing tensions in Israel over the issue of African migrants, and reports of lawlessness and violence committed by and directed against the migrants.  We call on all parties to work to calm the tensions, and welcome Prime Minister Netanyahu's condemnation of the inflammatory comments and the violence and his commitment to resolving this crisis responsibly.

While we recognize the complexity involved in properly addressing this issue, and sympathize with Israeli citizens whose personal security has been compromised by the lawlessness and violence of some migrants, we are disturbed by inflammatory public statements made by certain Israeli officials, some of which has veered into racism. These statements are counterproductive and only serve to further inflame tensions.

The role of Israeli law enforcement officials is vital in ensuring the safety of all, controlling lawlessness and violence and enforcing the rule of law.

It is imperative that reasonable solutions be found to confront these challenges, one that humanly treats the migrants while ensuring the security concerns of Israeli citizens are properly addressed.

A reasonable statement ...

Oddly enough, Foxman's tone regarding violent resistance to immigration in Israel today is more understanding and less harsh than his May 2, 2010 statement regarding nonviolent, democratic, legal resistance to immigration in America:
Arizona Law Endangers America's Immigrant Heritage 
One of the oldest debates in America has been on the issue of what the nation's immigration policy should be. Should it be fair and compassionate? Should it be restrictive? 
In the past, as now, nativism, bigotry and fear of competition from foreign workers dulled the collective American memory of its own immigrant history and democratic ideals. Then, as now, the drums of anti-foreigner slogans are beat in an effort to make the case for a restrictive immigration policy. 
... Today, unfortunately, Kennedy's "spacious society" is being closed in and darkness is enveloping Reagan's "shining city." There is no harmony and peace -- especially in Arizona. Instead, there is hate, fear, and xenophobia. 
Much has been said about Arizona's new law, which requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from residents who arouse suspicion. The police do not need probable cause to suspect a crime has been committed -- anyone who "looks foreign" can be stopped. The law virtually invites the police to harass and intimidate Hispanics and other minorities. Obviously, it discourages minority victims of and witnesses to hate crimes from coming forward and helping local law enforcement solve those crimes. It gives untrained state and local police officers the responsibility for enforcing immigration law even though such responsibilities interfere with their responsibility to keep the peace. The law even encourages people to sue the police if they believe immigration laws are not being enforced. 
Of course, the Arizona law was not enacted in a vacuum. The immigration debate has become a flashpoint for racists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other extremists who blame immigrants for all of our nation's problems. It is a very short distance from that sort of rhetoric to vigilantism. When mainstream figures start expressing the same bigotry, filling the airwaves and the Internet with hateful and incendiary talk, an atmosphere is created for incivility and pernicious legislation is not far behind. 
The Arizona law is probably unconstitutional, and will be challenged in the courts. But all of us have a responsibility to look in the mirror and say -- how could such a mean-spirited measure become law in this country? Do we really want our nation to resemble societies where anyone can be stopped on the streets at any time, at the slightest whim, and be asked for identification papers? 
The Arizona approach to addressing the current immigration crisis is the wrong approach. It happened at a time when our nation is deeply divided along partisan lines. The time has come for Congress to demonstrate bipartisan leadership, condemn xenophobia, and enact comprehensive immigration reform that has an appropriate balance of fairness, compassion, and security.  
Abraham H. Foxman is National Director of the Anti-Defamation League. He and his parents immigrated to the United States in 1950.

Is it really asking too much of Mr. Foxman that he someday attempt to view his fellow citizens in Arizona with some of the same understanding he applies to his fellow ethnics in Israel?

Latest Israel immigration news

From the top of the website of Haaretz, the left of center Israeli newspaper:


May 22, 2012

"Undocumented workers" in U.S. = "Illegal infiltrators" in Israel

From the Jerusalem Post:
Illegal infiltrators threaten Israel’s character as a Jewish and democratic country, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said at the beginning of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday. 
Calling the issue “very grave” and a threat to the “social fabric,” Netanyahu said, “If we do not stop the entry, the problem, there are now 60,000 illegal infiltrators; could easily grow to 600,000 illegal infiltrators. This would inundate the state and, to a considerable degree, cancel out its image as a Jewish and democratic state.” 
The prime minister spoke of the importance of finishing construction of the Egyptian border fence and working to send away “those [illegal migrants] who are already inside.” 
Netanyahu said the latter will be done in part by punishing employers who hire illegal migrants. 
The growing population of more than 50,000 illegal African migrants has become a hot-button issue, with the weekend editions of all three major Hebrew dailies featuring lead stories relating to the issue. 
A little over three weeks ago, African migrants were targeted in a series of Molotov cocktail attacks in south Tel Aviv’s Shapira neighborhood. In addition, there have been a series of sexual assaults in Tel Aviv over recent weeks that police say were carried out by African migrants. 
Also on Sunday, Interior Minister Eli Yishai (Shas) repeated his call to jail illegal African migrants, most of whom he said were involved in crime.

Netanyahu is at a peak of popularity and power within Israel at the moment. He recently called for elections, then called them off when a major opposition party, seeing the writing on the wall, agreed to join his coalition as subordinate partners. So, he's dealing from a position of strength here, with his team holding 96 of 120 seats in the Knesset.

Generally speaking, much can be learned from Israel about how an intelligent people govern themselves.

May 18, 2012

Philosophy of Open Borders: "Long Live Death! Death to Intelligence!"

From the New York Times, an op-ed by Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern who is the author of States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals. Professor Stevens argues that we should "open the borders" and "abolish inheritance" because "the entire body of laws around families and inheritance, embody societies’ collective flight from death." Okay ... My first thought, by the way, was that this op-ed was an elaborate hoax perpetrated upon the NYT by that commenter on my site who is always going on and on about how everybody he disagrees with is a death-loving Nihilist. But, a little research suggests this essay is not a parody, although my diligent Googling has also revealed that there may be more than one Jacqueline Stevens on the Internet at present. Either that, or there's only one Jacqueline Stevens and she is definitely one of the most well-rounded of contemporary intellectuals.
Citizenship to Go 
By JACQUELINE STEVENS 
CITIZENSHIP laws are in the news again. ... 
The real problem with citizenship laws is not their manipulation by lawmakers or entrepreneurs, much less by mythical “anchor babies.” The problem is more fundamental: the age-old, irrational linkage between citizenship and birthplace. 
From ancient Athens to South Sudan, birth to certain parents, or in a certain territory, has been the primary criterion for citizenship. The word “nationality” comes from the Latin nasci, or birth. America is no exception, notwithstanding the enlargement of citizenship to encompass non-Europeans and women. 
Archaic membership rules have made life miserable not only for Mexican migrants in the United States, but also for people who cannot persuade their governments to accept their claims of citizenship ... 
... The problem is not bad science, poorly trained officials or even ethnic hatred. The problem is the dubious reliance on birth for assigning citizenship. 
Why does the practice endure? ...
Citizens are created by politicians, the citizen-makers. And they are created because the nation, and hence birthright citizenship, exists to alleviate anxieties about death. 
Belonging to the nation or any other community by birth, including one’s family, sustains fantasies of immortality, as these groups persist after one’s own life has ended. Birthright citizenship, and indeed, the entire body of laws around families and inheritance, embody societies’ collective flight from death.

Libertarians and economists have long questioned the usefulness of national boundaries. In 1984, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page proposed adding a constitutional amendment: “There shall be open borders.” 
For some on the left, the abolition of birthright citizenship evokes the nightmarish prospect of a labor glut in wealthy countries, the global lowering of wages, and capitalism run amok. But greed and corruption have challenged good governance in all ages, not just in the modern capitalist era. Moreover, too many on the left overlook how inheritance laws perpetuate inequality, as well as the disparity in wealth among countries because of restrictions on migration. 
Karl Marx predicted that the demise of feudalism would mean that wealth would be created anew in each generation. Instead, intergenerational transmission of money and property remains the main culprit for inequality in wealth. Abolishing inheritance would help end inequality within countries; abolishing birthright citizenship would help end inequality among countries, by letting people move for greater opportunity. 
Impossible? Utopian? That was the response to those who proposed the elimination of slavery, a persistent feature for most of the world’s history and, like nativism, defended by some because its abolition would benefit Northern capitalists and increase factory exploitation. 
Instead of using birth for assigning citizenship, why not keep the boundaries of current countries, open the borders, and use residence to define citizenship, as the 50 states do? ... People should be free to move across borders; they should be citizens of the states where they happen to reside—period.

Back in 2005, I pointed out that about five billion people live in countries with lower per capita GDP's than Mexico's. Since almost a quarter of all Mexicans in the world now live in the United States, the implication from that example is that Open Borders would bring hundreds of millions of poor foreigners to the U.S., as was confirmed by a subsequent Gallup Poll in over 100 countries.

But, who cares about numbers? Anyway, crunching numbers to refute Open Borders enthusiasts is like breaking a butterfly upon the wheel.