Where are the Fault Lines in Our Society--Immigration????

[wingman]

The Dangers of Our United States Immigration Policies"




Richard D. Lamm, former governor of Colorado, writes this article on immigration, in which he lists five grave concerns about the United States continuing it present immigration trend. Lamm is director of the Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues at the University of Denver. The article appeared on the website of the Rocky Mountain News.

***
On Immigration

Should illegal aliens have driver's licenses, amnesty, welfare, and the right to move their families to the U.S.? Illegal aliens are, as is often pointed out, ''good, hard-working people who just want the American dream.'' But is that the end of the argument?

The trouble with that level of analysis is that there are billions of ''good, hard-working people'' and their dependents in the world who would love to come here, and obviously we can't take them all. We are also a nation of laws, with our own unemployed and underemployed, and our nation needs to come to some enforceable consensus on what our policy should be on people entering the country illegally.

Polls show that more than 70 percent of Americans object to illegal immigration, and we run a serious risk of a backlash against all immigrants if we don't reach some consensus on this issue. Polls also show that there is no issue in America where there is a bigger gap between public opinion and opinions of the media and other ''elites.''

Reasoned dialogue is rare and issues of immense importance to America's future are not being discussed or even debated.

Public policy requires us to be wise enough to appreciate cumulative effects. We already have approximately 10 percent of all Mexico living in the U.S. either legally or illegally. We owe it to the future to have a candid debate on the demographic impact of a mass migration of this magnitude. Consider:

1. We are a nation built on law. It almost sounds old-fashioned in contemporary America to ask that people obey the law. But when we start deciding which laws to obey and which to ignore, we start down a dangerous path. There are millions of potential immigrants patiently waiting in their home countries to immigrate here, playing by our rules. Illegal immigrants ''jump the line.''

2. As every house needs a door, every country needs a border. By turning a blind eye toward illegal immigration, we are encouraging countless numbers of these people to attempt to sneak into America. I spent a night with the Border Patrol in California, and was amazed to find people from India, Bangladesh, Iran, Egypt, Africa and China among the people detained.

3. Illegal immigration hurts America's poor. Illegal immigrants compete for the jobs our own poor need to start to move up the economic ladder. A study by The Center for Immigration Studies finds: ''Mexican immigration is overwhelmingly unskilled, and it is hard to find an economic argument for unskilled immigration, because it tends to reduce wages for (U.S.) workers.'' The study goes on: ''Because the American economy offers very limited opportunities for workers with little education, continued unskilled immigration can't help but to significantly increase the size of the poor and uninsured populations, as well as the number of people on welfare.''

4. We are told that illegal immigration is ''cheap labor,'' but it is not ''cheap labor,'' it is subsidized labor. The National Academy of Sciences has found that there is a significant fiscal drain on U.S. taxpayers for each adult immigrant without a high school education. Illegal immigration is something that benefits a few employers, but the rest of us subsidize that labor through the school system, the health-care system, the courts and in other ways that this form of labor imposes. With school spending of more than $7,000 per student per year, even a small family costs far more than a low-wage family pays in taxes.

5. America is increasingly becoming, day by day, a bilingual country, yet there is not a bilingual country in the world that lives in peace with itself. No nation should blindly allow itself to become a bilingual-bicultural country. If it does, it invites generations of conflict, tension and antagonism. America has historically demanded that its immigrants be self-supporting and English-speaking to join our polity. We vary from that rule that made us '''one nation, indivisible''' at great risk to America's future. Today, when over 40 percent of today's massive wave of immigrants is from Spanish-speaking nations, people can move to America and keep their language, their culture and their old loyalties. If the melting pot doesn't melt, immigrants become ''foreigners'' living in America rather than assimilated Americans.

6. Our social fabric risks becoming undone. It is important to America's future that we look at how Mexican immigrants are doing. Too many of our Hispanic immigrants live in ethnic ghettos. Too many are unskilled laborers, too many are uneducated, too many live in poverty, too many are exploited, too many haven't finished ninth grade, too many drop out of school. The Center for Immigration Studies issued a report last year, which found: ''Almost two-thirds of adult Mexican immigrants have not completed high school, compared to fewer than one in 10 natives not completing high school. Mexican immigrants now account for 22 percent of all high school dropouts in the labor force.''

But what is most disturbing is that second and third generations don't do much better. Again, the study from The Center for Immigration Studies: ''The lower educational attainment of Mexican immigrants appears to persist across the generations.'' A recent report from the center shows that two-thirds of Mexican immigrant workers lack even a high school education; as a consequence, two-thirds of Mexican immigrant families live in or near poverty. The question has to be asked: By tolerating illegal immigration are we laying the foundations for a new Hispanic underclass? A Hispanic Quebec?

 

[rock jock]

Taxes

 

[geekWithA.45]

The Coming Political Axis Shift

From Robin Good Fellow

Money Quote: (But read the whole thing)

I predict that by 2010 the big political issues will be drug legalization, gun rights / control, big government vs. (truly) small government (with the difference in proposed sizes being in the neighborhood of a factor of 2, if not more, and a similarly dramatic difference in proposed levels of government power and regulation), public vs. private services (especially K-12 schools), and probably a renewed debate on immigration (namely, how much we should allow). That's just a guess, but I am very confident that a major "axis shift" is in the works. It's bound to be quite interesting times politically for the next few years.

Minor commentary on it at my blog: http://geekwitha45.blogspot.com/2003_04_27_geekwitha45_archive.html#93573879

 

[longeyes]

Someone explain to me why we need to be "more competitive," in terms of lowering "excessive wages" when it comes to domestic service jobs? If we were importing skilled, educated labor the better to compete with foreign competitors, one might be able to make an argument for it. We don't need to drive down wages in industries that are basically Americans selling to other Americans.

Meanwhile, here Victor Davis Hanson in today's Wall Street Journal opining on this topic:

El Norte
The case against Bush's immigration plan.

BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Monday, January 19, 2004 12:01 a.m.

SELMA, Calif.--President Bush's recent proposal to grant legal status to thousands of Mexican citizens currently
working in the U.S. under illegal auspices seems at first glance to be a good start--splitting the difference
between open and closed borders, and between amnesty and deportation. Politically it was a wise move on the
eve of a Mexican state visit to grant some concessions to Vicente Fox. After all, the president of Mexico cannot
ignore the $12 billion in worker remittances sent his way--and he can either encourage or discourage millions more
of his citizens to head north in lieu of needed radical reform at home.

Yet the proposed legislation, even if it should pass in Congress, will create more problems than it might solve--the
fate of all such piecemeal legal solutions to systematic problems of illegality. Once the U.S. government--not to
mention the Republican Party--commits its good name and legal capital to regulate, rather than end, the current
chaos, a number of contradictions will arise that will only make things either more embarrassing or, in fact, worse.

First, what about the hundreds of thousands of workers who either cannot or will not participate? Will illegal
immigrants outside the program be stopped at the border, requiring more guards or an extensive wall? Or once
here, are they now to be deported without their requisite papers? Will we see a return of the old green
immigration vans, the "Migra" patrols of my youth that used to scour central California to pick up illegal residents
for immediate transit back to Mexico? Are we to establish two alternate universes: some employers who bring in
workers legally, and others who follow the old non-system of paying largely cash wages to workers who show up
at the local lumberyard parking lot or hotel lobby?



The proposed solution also assumes that illegal immigration is fuelled solely by too many jobs in the U.S. and too
few workers. Yet thousands of other Mexicans come north as preteens, or when they are aged or sick. The
impetus that brought them here was not necessarily always immediate employment, but understandable
amelioration from a bleak landscape of central Mexico where they cannot be sure of finding food, housing or health
care. Despite Hispanic activists' complaints that "illegal alien" is somehow pejorative, it is far more accurate
nomenclature than their inexact use of the politically correct "undocumented worker"--when thousands currently
are not at work, nor did they merely forget to do the necessary paperwork before leaving home.

After the debacle in California of first, passing, and then abruptly rejecting legislation granting drivers licenses to
illegal residents, we learned of the perils of applying a little bit of the law to a whole lot of illegality. Parents of
American citizens wondered why their teenage, soon-to-be drivers would need to produce U.S. birth-certificates
when those here illegally did not. Airline security agents worried whether a California driver's license would draw its
authenticity from anything other than an often fraudulent Mexican ID card.

Indeed, one of the causes of the growing furor over the present system of non-enforcement is the perception
that many illegal residents actually receive preferential treatment over Americans. For example, students here
illegally from Mexico and enrolled at public California universities pay about a third of the tuition costs that
American citizens from out-of-state are charged--on the dubious and narrow rationale that the immigrants or their
parents are all on official payrolls and thus always have had California income taxes and fees deducted from
paychecks.

Supporters of the proposed law say that something is needed since Americans simply refuse certain backbreaking
jobs in construction, agriculture, hotels and restaurants. But such understandable pessimism rests on many
questionable suppositions. It assumes, for instance, that the traditional remedies of the free market for scarce
workers--mechanization and increased wages--ceased to work around 1980; that it is hard to sleep or dine out or
find a cut lawn in an Iowa or Maine where there are not tens of thousands of illegal workers; that the experience
of guest-workers in Germany and France provides encouraging analogies for importing cheap labor, that
Californians or Texans once did not do most of their own work before the influx of industrious aliens; and that it is
economically beneficial and morally sound to use foreign workers when millions of Americans remain unemployed.

We forget that there is a life cycle for the typical teenage worker from Oaxaca, whose backbreaking labor is said
to be essential for the economy. For a laborer of 18, it may be a good bargain for all involved--but for too many
people, after 30 years without education, English, and legality, too often these jobs turn out not to be entry-level
or rite-of-passage, but remain dead-end, and thus catastrophe ensues when an aging, unskilled worker is injured,
laid off, ill or the sole breadwinner of a large family. Only the public entitlement industry--health, housing,
education and maintenance subsidies--can come to his rescue to provide some parity with Americans that his job
or former job could not. His employer in the meantime looks for a younger, healthier, and foreign, successor. Thus
the tragic cycle continues.

It is not only uneconomical in the long run to bus in impoverished laborers from Mexico, but also amoral to traffic
in human capital. We praise the bracero program of the 1960s, but I remember it somewhat differently: When
harvests here in the San Joaquin Valley ended, deposited wages in Mexico were often stolen, while not all guest
workers wanted to return home.

Nor can illegal immigration be looked at in a vacuum; certainly not in an age of growing ethnic chauvinism that
sees unassimilated and often exploited workers in the shadows as an oppressed constituency needing group,
rather than individual, representation. Ethnic studies, separate college-graduation ceremonies predicated on race,
bilingual education, state-supplied interpreters and power groups like La Raza ("The Race")--all these are
force-multipliers to massive illegal immigration, and thus present us with not merely a problem of labor and
economics, but a litmus test of the viability of the melting pot itself.



Instead of squabbling over piecemeal legislation in an election year, rolling amnesties or a return of braceros, we
might as well bite the bullet and reconsider an immigration policy that worked well enough for some 200 years for
people from all over the world. Reasonable advocates can set a realistic figure for legal immigration from Mexico.
Then we must enforce our border controls; consider a one-time citizenship process for current residents who have
been here for two or three decades; apply stiff employer sanctions; deport those who now break the law--and
return to social and cultural protocols that promote national unity through assimilation and integration.

In the short term, under such difficult reform, we of the American Southwest might pay more for our food, hotel
rooms and construction. Yet eventually we will save far more through reduced entitlements, the growing
empowerment of our own entry-level workers (many of them recent and legal immigrants from Mexico), and the
easing of social and legal problems associated with some eight million to 12 million illegal residents.

More importantly still, our laws would recover their sanctity. Without massive illegal immigration, Americans would
rediscover their fondness for measured legal immigration. At a time of war, our borders would be more secure. And
we could regain solace, knowing that we are no longer overlords importing modern helots to do the jobs that we,
in our affluence and leisure, now deem beneath us.
Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming"
(Encounter, 2003).