November 8, 2006
Pickin' at Scabs
I respectfully suggest that the populist wing of ThreeSources -- well, everybody not named "jk' -- takes the opportunity to do a little immigration soul-searching today.
First, I would direct you to the news pages (not those crazies on the Ed page) Hispanic Voters Shift Allegiance to Democrats
In fact, just months after House Republicans used a crackdown on illegal immigrants to energize their party's conservative base, Hispanic voters responded yesterday at the voting booth, shifting decisively toward Democrats.Exit polls showed more than seven in 10 Hispanics voted Democratic in races for House seats. Meanwhile, some 27% voted Republican -- an 11-percentage-point drop from the prior midterm election in 2002.
This is a loser guys. Besides Hispanics, it offends the business community, free-marketeers, and damages religious vote. The same article points out that that GOP advantage among religious voters is reduced.
My uber-liberal niece is working for Catholic Charities in California. She's about as religious as JohnGalt but told me that she has found one thing to agree with the Church on: California Catholics have taken an anti-Tancredo position as a moral issue (of course, they're right).
Exhibit B is TCS Daily's Walls Are For Losers. Nathan Smith remembers the Ming Dynasty's Great Wall, The Maginot Line, the Berlin Wall, and points out:
Republicans had held the House of Representatives for twelve years. After the fence bill was signed, they lasted just twelve days before the voters gave them the boot. Of course immigration wasn't the only, or the main, issue; Iraq was. Nonetheless, the "walls are for losers" pattern has claimed another scalp. Meanwhile, even the Republican Senate, which, before the fence bill, hardly anyone thought was even in play, looks at present writing like it may have fallen to the Democrats.
Can we chase away the fastest growing minority group, the business community, an important swing constituency, and ideological fellow travelers? Yes. But can we replace them with Pat Buchanan/Lou Dobbs/Bill O'Reilly angry pitchfork warriors? I say that 's a bad trade.
UPDATE: Okay, I'll add something from those crazies on the WSJ Ed Page. Here's John Fund in Political Diary:
This summer, as polls showed GOP House incumbents increasingly in trouble, the talk in closed-door meetings of GOP members was that the party needed to use opposition to illegal immigration to deflect voter anger on other issues. "The issue is a magic carpet to victory for us," was the memorable way one anti-immigration member put it. Later that same month, the House GOP pushed through a bill that authorized the building of a massive border fence without adding a sensible guest-worker program to provide a legal means for needed workers to enter the country.Immigration Posted by jk at November 8, 2006 12:37 PMWell, the returns are in and the strategy was a clear failure. GOP candidates who ran almost exclusively on the immigration issue lost in districts that President Bush easily carried in 2004. The most surprising loser was Rep. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona, who wrote a book on immigration called "Whatever It Takes" and yet managed to lose a district Mr. Bush won with 54% of the vote two years ago. Another Arizona GOP candidate, former state legislator Randy Graf, did ride the immigration issue to a plurality win in the GOP primary only to lose badly in a Tucson district last night that Mr. Bush had won with 53%.
The biggest bellyflop on the immigration issue came in Indiana, where Rep. John Hostettler, the hardline chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, lost by a stunning 22 points in a district that gave John Kerry only 38% of its votes just two years ago. "Immigration has never been an issue that brings people to the polls in single-minded desire to vote on that one issue," says political analyst Michael Barone, co-author of the Almanac of American Politics. "Voters end up having other concerns, and anti-illegal immigration polling numbers are more often than not political fools' gold."
When a business acquires an unfair advantage over its competitors via illegal means, that market can no longer be said to be free. If certain businesses are basing their profits on illegal aliens providing labor at below cost and they are lobbying the government to keep the status quo, I do not see that as being much different from the steel industry lobbying for protections they should not have either. In both cases, the market is tilted and no longer free. Frankly JK, I have never understood exactly what it is you want in terms of immigration. Do you want a permeable border with all the national security risks that implies, in order to protect people willfully breaking the law or do you want a well-ordered guest worker program where labor comes through the front door legally?
Posted by: sugarchuck at November 8, 2006 2:51 PMAs to the moral position of your niece and the Church, are you suggesting that allowing a deluge of illegal immigrants into the country and allowing them to stay, ahead of the many thousands who wish to immigrate and play by the rules is a moral position? I have always taken you as a "rule of Law" kind of guy and I don't understand your willingness to risk our security, give unfair advantages to those who employ illegal labor over those that follow the law and deny a rightful place in line to those who come to our shores and wait lawfully to become citizens. The law matters and until it is changed to accommodate something more to your liking I suggest you advocate for new legislation and not extra legal means to accomplish your goals. I don't know of any of us, in the populist wing not named JK, who wish to shut Mexicans out of the work force, or shut out anyone else for that matter, but the anarchic status quo is a threat to our nation, dangerous for those who wish to enter illegally and it undermines the rule of law when some are more equal than others when it comes to claiming their place in our country.
I might also add that immigration was not such a big deal in Minnesota and Democrats still knocked the snot out of us.
I absolutely want a lawful and regulated border.
I don't think that enforcement-only will work without a level of spending, aesthetic disturbance, and human rights infringements with which few in our country would be comfortable. Thirty foot barbed wire fences and shoot-em-on-sight will not fly; much less extreme measures will not be effective.
What would be effective is to provide legal means and improve border security at the same time. Like an engineering problem, reduce the pressure and reinforce the barrier. I am open to any combination of guest-worker, path-to-citizenship, and increase in Visas that will accomplish this. I'll let the politicians decide.
We could have HAD SOMETHING JUST LIKE THIS THIS YEAR and celebrated it as a legislative win. That would have helped in Minnesota, where good people want to see other people treated well and in Arizona where people want to see laws enforced. Instead, the Tancredoites said "no deals, no compromise!" and the Republicans ran on one more unsolved problem.
We haven't looked too much at morality of immigration around here. Bastiat says just law must be avoidable and understandable. I don't think it is avoidable to watch your family starve in squalor when you can go 100 miles north, sneak under a fence, and make a living wage from somebody who wants to employ you. I think this "lawbreaking" is akin to stealing a loaf of bread for your starving family -- only you're buying it from somebody who wants to sell it!
Posted by: jk at November 8, 2006 4:25 PMI'm not trumpeting the status quo at all. I think we would have something more economic, more humane, and 1000 times safer if the Tancredoites had followed the lead of the President and created compromise comprehensive immigration reform in a Senate-House conference.
Won't fly with who? OK, I am not suggesting any kind of shoot em on sight policy but if it takes a thirty foot fence with barbed wire, or some other combination of bricks, mortar and cyberfencing, then so be it. It's not just the guy looking for a loaf of bread I'm worried about, it's the guy coming in after him who is looking to cause us harm. The very meager efforts at border control now in place have cut illegal entry dramatically. We should follow up on this. When the fence is up and solid we can let those looking for better lives walk through the gate.
Posted by: sugarchuck at November 8, 2006 4:36 PMInvoking terrorism prevention to prevent the crossing of Mexican workers is specious. We've apprehended much scarier people coming over the Canadian border, yet the good people of Minnesota still don't see a thirty foot barbed wire fence in International Falls as an election issue.
The half-measures you suggest that make it harder will increase the price, profit, and danger of a coyote-aided crossing for the bread customer. You can fly in from the EU, get a visa at the Saudi Embassy, or drive across from Canada.
Posted by: jk at November 8, 2006 4:52 PMAgain, I am not sure what it is, exactly, that you want. You say you want a lawful and regulated border, yet it must be porous enough to allow enough coyote activity to keep human trafficking safe and affordable and unguarded enough to allow those in dire economic circumstances to walk across in search of work. This doesn't sound lawful and regulated to me. This sounds like what we have now. Going back to Reagan we have had laws on immigration and policy galore and those laws have been breached some 12,000,000 times. This time we should enforce the laws we have, place a very muscular emphasis on border security and then create the policy to allow for legal immigration. I might add that if 12,000,000 illegal aliens had come through Minnesota from Canada I'd be all for putting a fence up there too.
Posted by: sugarchuck at November 8, 2006 7:56 PMI'd add that I am not invoking terrorism to prevent the crossing of Mexican workers. I am invoking terrorism to prevent the crossing of... terrorists. That we have other holes in the system is no reason not to close this one. As long as we can't control our border there is no hope of a guest worker program or any type of workable amnesty. People will enter illegally and wait for the next amnesty to roll around. I very much believe in the words on the statue of liberty. I want us to be the shining city on the hill. I just want those who come to obey the laws, use the front door and sign the guestbook.
I want the same things as you, sc. I think the way to get there is to have a legal program of guest workers or heightened immigration that supplies enough workers to fill available jobs. By enough, I suspect I mean about as many as come today, just making them sign the guest book.
If you give somebody a legal, rational way to register and come legally, nobody will use coyotes at all. This will also give us the economic and moral reason to pursue strict enforcement. Institute a guest worker and you can build all the fences you want.
Without a legal way to come here and work, stricter enforcement will just make it costlier and less humane for those who will continue to cross to feed their families.
Then, the border is controlled, the economy keeps humming, and border authorities can pursue terrorists instead of agriculture workers.
Posted by: jk at November 8, 2006 9:20 PMGo Sugarchuck! You've done a good job carrying the flag for we "populists" is it? But JK makes a rational case for whatever it is he's making a case for as well. (I say "whatever it is" because he's willing to "let the politicians decide." This reminds me of the famous scientific proof with reams of complicated mathematical equations followed by the phrase, "then a miracle occurs" immediately prior to the answer.)
No, JK, we are not "populists." For one thing, if our position is so popular then how can you claim it cost the GOP their jobs? The positions we've taken on individual immigration related topics are based upon principle, not populism. Immigrants should be subject to our nation's laws just as citizens are, and immigrants must not disenfranchise citizens by voting in our elections without first becoming citizens.
And then there are the entitlements. I think I can speak for all of us (the principled wing) in saying government enabled handouts to citizens are as wrong as those to immigrants, but the existence of the former makes it impossible to eliminate the latter - not operationally, but politically.
So the people who support mass immigration into our welfare state are those who are not harmed by the added burden: Democrat politicians and business interests already accustomed to a workforce partially supported by the state. The strange bedfellows we know so well.
I am on record supporting elimination of quotas for legal immigration, yet I opposed the Senate "compromise." I did so because of it's emphasis on a path to citizenship (i.e. enfranchisement) for ALL of them, it's seemingly endless list of new government expenditures, and the absence of truly innovative solutions to the entitlement question. I saw nothing in the compromise that would create a new paradigm for immigration and equal justice under law in this country.
What do I want? Any plan I conceive is hampered by the social welfare state in which we live, but here are some key points.
- Unlimited immigration for identifiable non-criminals.
- Social Security numbers and Green Cards issued at no cost at border crossing centers, linked to individuals biometrically.
- No limit on time of stay in country.
- Issuance of the same documents to illegals already here on demand, subject to the same identification and criminal requirements.
- Immediate deportation of undocumented aliens after a grace period following implementation of the new system. Say, 12-18 months.
- Immediate deportation of documented aliens upon conviction of a crime (or other sentence appropriate for the act) said crimes to include false identification or multiple identities, said deportation to be irrespective of minor children of the offender. (If the kid must be yanked out of school because mom screwed up then so be it. "Objective and avoidable" laws must also be inescapable.
- Minimum wage laws applied (or abolished) equally for citizen and non-citizen workers.
- Biometric voter ID cards required to vote. (This is a debate in itself and I reserve the right to flop around on it for a while.) The crux here is, "only citizens vote."
- An objective and lengthy "path to citizenship" for all documented immigrants willing to learn English, renounce all other citizenships, and swear allegiance to the flag and the constitution.
That ought to about do it.
Posted by: johngalt at November 9, 2006 1:37 PM | What do you think? [7]