by R.E. Hannay
* Libertarians whose rallying cry is liberty, and who equate that with open borders.
Our country is rapidly becoming a divided welfare state, a situation deliberately planned and executed by the Democrats and their liberal allies in the news media and elsewhere to create a large dependent electorate. After only five years of Obama’s drive to create a dependent nation, it is clear the result is economic stagnation, chronically high unemployment and destruction of our personal and business incentives to innovate, risk capital and labor to start and expand businesses, leading inevitably to stagflation. Part of their plan involves legalizing the millions of illegal immigrants and adding them to the Democrat voter registrations. The paradox is that most immigrants come here seeking opportunity, not to get caught in the Democrats’ dependency trap, but many do.
The periodic drives for some kind of amnesty for illegal aliens masquerades under the label Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Immigration reform is clearly needed, but not in the form being proposed again. The discussion is mainly about what to do with the millions of illegal aliens here now, and their proposed solutions are to legalize the illegals and promise to control the border at some unspecified future time. Even if the illegal aliens were legalized in some present or future way, that would not solve the problem. The most important needed reforms are to reduce the numbers of future immigrants, to restore real control of immigration and immigrants, change the demographics of new immigrants and restore welfare reform to return unskilled and permanent-welfare Americans to productive work.
The genius of America has been its melting pot, but the melting pot is broken. Earlier immigration was fragmented, people coming from many different places with many different languages and cultural heritages. Immigrants came seeking an opportunity society and wanted to be Americans. They arrived in waves, with enough time between waves to absorb them. They brought what was needed then for the building of our nation, mostly manual labor. Eventually they learned English, gained employment and were absorbed into the great American melting pot: e pluribus unum – out of many, one.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened the floodgates, permitting all legal permanent immigrants to bring in their families. The bill's proponents promised it would not affect the demographic mix or increase the number of new immigrants. These assertions proved to be wildly inaccurate. Current immigrants come overwhelmingly from the Third World, primarily Latin America, and the number coming annually is about seven times what it was then.
Family reunification became the rallying cry of the open-borders advocates, crowding out most skilled immigrants who would have contributed to our economic growth. Jeb Bush wrote, “By 2011, about one million immigrants were granted legal residence [annually]. Sixty-five percent were extended family members of citizens, typically many children and elderly people, crowding out all but 13 percent who were admitted for work purposes, vs. 70 percent in 1970. There are 250 applicants for every visa available under the 50,000 diversity slots. The effect of the family reunification policy is there is almost no waiting line; poor relatives and refugees get almost all the slots.”
One aspect of our immigration trend is rarely discussed publicly: What has the United States been, what do we want it to be, and how do we accomplish that? What kind of immigrants have made America prosperous and special? This has always been a land of opportunity, of people who planned and strived for a better future and were rewarded for achievement. America’s opportunity society is being smothered by the anti-business, hyper-regulatory Obama Administration, aggravated by the flood of poorly educated, unskilled Latino immigrants who are not being assimilated the way diverse, mostly European immigrants were in the past.
We need skilled immigrants in a post-industrial, technical, information society, not the monolithic horde of one-language, poorly educated, unskilled Latinos we get now. They are direct, hungrier competition for our own unskilled labor force during a time of chronically high unemployment. While most other immigrants are being assimilated at historic rates, Latino immigrants tend to value their Hispanic identity above being American. They cluster in Spanish-speaking enclaves and inner cities whose economies are based on drugs, gangs, crime and welfare. Meso-Americans have different cultural patterns and values from European and Asian immigrants. Writing in The New Republic, liberal Martin Peretz said, [Mexico is] “a Latin society with all of its characteristic deficiencies: congenital corruption, authoritarian government, anarchic politics, near-tropical work habits, stifling social mores, an anarchic counter-culture and increasingly violent modes of conflict.”
First generation Latino immigrants are mostly unskilled but they usually are good workers when they can find jobs. The second generation have similar high school-dropout rates and then many just join gangs in the barrios and have no jobs. With their typically high birth rate and continuing immigration, our Latino population is expanding rapidly. They are a divisive, monolithic nation within a nation.
The reason for the Democrats’ continuing drives for more Third World immigrants, legal and illegal, is that they mostly vote for Democrats. Some states permit illegal aliens to get driver licenses. A Rasmussen survey dated October 7, 2013 found that 68 percent of Americans oppose drivers’ licenses for illegal aliens, who can use the Clintons' motor-voting laws to obtain licenses. In other states it is easy to enable illegal voting with readily available fake documents.
We are an increasingly divided nation, with a deliberately divisive president and administration. We are well on our way to Balkanization, a future Yugoslavia with racial warfare between blacks, browns and whites. In the 2010 U.S. census, California had an Hispanic population of 32.4 percent, Arizona 25.3 percent, New Mexico 42.1 percent and Texas 32.0 percent, while the West as a whole was 24.3 percent. Our neighbor Canada is also a seriously divided nation with an estimated French population of only 24 percent and it is confronted continually by the Quebec sovereignty movement. The Washington Times reported, “There is currently a movement among many Mexican-Americans called Reconquista that seeks to establish a sovereign Hispanic nation in the region of Northern Mexico, Baja California, California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Some analysts believe the significant demographic shift in the American Southwest may result in a de facto reconquista."
A common myth says the United States stole its southwestern states from Mexico. The facts are clear. Mexico had a claim to that territory for only 24 years, from 1821 to 1845. Before that it belonged to Spain, then France, then Spain again, and in 1821 Mexico declared its independence from Spain, including our Southwest. In the 1840s a border dispute between Mexico and the Territory of Texas escalated into a war between the United States and Mexico. Eventually, during the war, an 1848 treaty was made in which the U.S. paid Mexico $15 million for most of the land of our southwestern states and also assumed the responsibility to pay large unpaid claims of Americans against Mexico for damages caused by Mexican civil strife. More land was acquired five years later in the Gadsden Purchase. Mexico offered to sell us all of Baja California and Sonora, including the deep-water port of Guaymas, for $15 million, but our Congress declined the offer. Mexico then proposed a sale of land only to the present border for $10 million and that sale was completed. Now Mexicans, their school books and advocates are calling both sales a theft and are conducting an invasion of the United States by immigrants, largely illegal ones.
Truly comprehensive immigration reform needs to concentrate on changing the numbers and demographics of immigrants, on effective enforcement of our immigration laws, control of who is in our country, and restoration of our previously successful welfare reform.
Immigration policy needs to focus on immigrants' skills rather than family relationships. Immigrants should be selected by their ability to produce needed goods and services that contribute to the economy. Our current family reunification policy takes most of the available immigration slots, many of them being children and older people, preventing immi
gration of educated, skilled individuals and adding welfare dependents. We are also wasting the opportunity to employ talented foreign students who have completed studies in our universities. Their education is frequently subsidized by taxpayers, endowment funds and scholarships, but we often throw away that investment by not granting them visas to stay here to work after graduation.
Canada and Australia had similar problems, getting the wrong kinds of immigrants. Salim Mansur, a University of Western Ontario political science professor said, “We are reproducing ghettos of immigrants and migrant workers and diluting Canada’s traditional values to accommodate immigrants who will not integrate.” That is exactly the situation with Latino immigrants in the United States. Several years ago, to get more suitable immigrants Canada instituted a merit policy, giving points for younger applicants, for a good education and needed job skills, and for English literacy. Between 1991 and 2011, U.S. visas granted for economic reasons fell from 18 percent to 11 percent, while Canada’s soared from 18 percent to 67 percent. We take Latin America’s uneducated poor while Canada and other countries get an ethnic mixture of the best and brightest immigrants.
Based on good results, in August 2013 Canada tightened their criteria because they had many Third World immigrants who had high rates of unemployment and low incomes. Jason Kenney, Canada’s immigration minister until July 2013, said,” The government worries about the deepening ethnic enclaves and Canada’s immigration overhaul is taking a hardheaded approach to the multi-culturism that had been a hallmark of Canadian policy.” Canada’s new guide says they will not tolerate conflicting foreign cultures and practices, gives more points than before for English fluency, weighs how closely applicants’ qualifications match Canada’s occupational needs, and gauges so-called adaptability factors. The new guide emphasizes Canada’s historic ties, such as to Great Britain. Unemployment of Pakistanis aged 15 and older is 13 percent, compared with 4.5 percent for Britons in Canada. Family reunification, which now dominates U.S. immigration policy, is not an eligibility criterion in Canada.
The European Union is famous for its open-borders policy. Now Britain and France, centuries-long opponents on everything but a love of French wine and women, are united in concern about how migration is changing the face of Europe. Francois Hollande, the French premier, says, "The social dumping of the poor from Eastern Europe poses a threat to the economic and social fabric of France." The UK's prime minster has promised to persuade his European counterparts to end the "vast migration from poor to rich countries."
Currently we have no effective federal enforcement of our immigration laws. President Obama enforces only the immigration laws he chooses, the rest only half-heartedly or not at all. J. Christian Anderson: “There’s only one problem — we have a president with a demonstrated record of ignoring “get tough” immigration laws already on the books.” His policy of stopping the deportation of illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. before they were adults is a blatant abuse of executive power, essentially enacting the primary goal of the Dream Act legislation that was defeated by Congress in 2010. He has instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) not to detain immigration criminals unless they have committed a major crime. They are already criminals by being in the country illegally, and so are any persons, businesses, organizations, or local governments that assist or knowingly encourage illegal aliens. Ref. Title 8 Sec. 1324, 1325 & 1326 of the U.S. Code and Sec. 274 of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act,
Accordingly to the president of the union representing ICE personnel, enforcement is a joke. Under Obama’s policies ICE agents are required to accept any claim of legal residency without proof. Morale among ICE agents is at an all-time low and many agents feel the administration is actively working against them. Chris Crane, president of the National ICE Council, in testimony before the House Immigration Subcommittee in early February, 2013: “The message [to the world] is we don’t enforce our laws. Come on over. And, if you get caught, just lie to us.” After first legalizing the 11 million illegal aliens, Congress’s Gang of Eight proposals rely heavily on border control and enforcement, building and patrolling a fence through remote, rough country the same distance as from San Diego to Chicago. But a new poll by Pulse Opinion Research found widespread skepticism about promises that the government would enforce immigration laws after an amnesty, with many broken promises since the 1986 “one-time” amnesty.
Effective enforcement and border security need to be restored but those alone will not solve the problem. We also need to reestablish control of immigrants within our country. Half of the illegal aliens now in the U.S. came in legally but abandoned their destinations or simply overstayed their visas. During last year’s Supreme Court oral arguments on the federal lawsuit against Arizona for enforcing federal immigration laws that were being ignored, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “It seems to me the federal government just doesn’t want to know who is here illegally.” The solution isn't just closing the border, virtually an impossibility; it is closing the doors of workplaces to illegal aliens.
No nation can control what goes on within its borders, including terrorism, unless it has an effective way to know who is in the country, what their citizenship status is and, if they are not U.S. citizens, where they are. Now the government has no way to track or identify such criminals. As discussed earlier, that requires some kind of central database and a secure identification system for each person in the country, one that cannot be counterfeited. The present E-Verify system is voluntary and is used only to check on new applicants for employment. In order to establish real control, a central data base with biometric identification needs to be used to check on all employees, with employers made responsible for checking.
A popular argument among pro-amnesty supporters is that Americans won’t do the jobs immigrants will. Why should they? We pay people not to work and then say we need more unskilled immigrants to do the work Americans don’t want to do. Why work for low wages and pay taxes when they can live well on welfare and unreported income? In January, 2013 the Senate Budget Committee reported that in fiscal year 2011 the average U.S. household below the federal poverty line received benefits from food stamps, housing support, child care, Medicaid and other benefits at the annual rate of $61,320, tax-free. In 2012 half the births in the U.S. were paid by the taxpayers under Medicaid. Policies that discourage citizens from working and encourage illegal immigration are irrational, unfair to productive, tax-paying citizens and are an economic and social disaster.
Another argument asserts that agriculture would collapse without foreign labor, but already half of that labor force are legal Americans. There is already a guest-worker program available to farmers but they don’t use it. They would have to plan ahead to obtain permits, provide housing, decent wages and working conditions, so they just hire readily available illegal aliens when they need them. When Australia stopped tolerating illegal farm labor, the result was more mechanization, less stoop labor, higher wages and skill levels of fewer farm workers, and a successful transition. Our major obstacles are our outrageous welfare and unemployment programs. Analysis has shown that even doubling the wages of our agricultural workers would increase the retail prices of most food products by a small amount. Most food costs are added after products leave the farm.
Many Republicans seek Latino votes by promoting amnesty, but surveys have shown that many legal immigrants resent the job competition and the taxpayer-funded free schooling, medical care and other benefits the illegals receive. John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Jeff Flake and other Republicans who believe legalizing illegal aliens will buy votes are mistaken. Democrats would gain almost all the votes from another amnesty program and that is why they fight for it.
All independent surveys have shown that most Americans, including those of Hispanic origin, want reduced immigration. They recognize that the poor are the ones most likely to be hurt by more immigration, while the middle and upper classes gain from having che
aper unskilled employees available. Despite this, the white majority mostly remains silent, intimidated by special interests ready to accuse them of racism for any opposition to minority demands. There is strong resistance to effective immigration reform from members of Congress pandering to big-donor businesses employing cheap illegal labor, from the Democrats who get most of the Latino votes and from strong lobbying by immigration lawyers and advocates, multi-cultural liberals and open-borders libertarians. The public continues to express dissatisfaction with the illegal immigration situation, but powerful lobbyists and the career politicians pandering to their cheap-labor business supporters have strong clout in Washington, D.C. And so, the flood of unskilled legal and illegal immigrants continues.
Mark Steyn points out the unconstitutional burden on the states: “Big-government centrists don’t mind about the costs Undocumented America imposes, because in the main it imposes them on states, cities and school districts and thus makes previously self-sufficient branches of government even more dependent on central authority. This is a recipe for civil strife, if not ultimately, civil war.”
This is not a call to stop immigration. It is a plea to reduce the numbers of immigrants to historic levels, to move toward restoration of our traditional ethnic diversity, to limit the demographics of new immigrants to individuals with needed education, occupational, and language skills, and to establish and strictly enforce laws and mechanisms to stop the employment of illegal aliens, present and future. It is an alternative to the current comprehensive immigration reform proposals that are based primarily on border security, an impossible dream, and on legalizing and rewarding the illegal aliens here now, repeating in some form the mistake of the “one-time” 1986 amnesty. That did nothing but grant amnesty to almost 3,000,000 illegals and set the stage for the admission of the present 12,000,000-plus additional invaders and more in the future. Our career politicians are either slow learners or they are simply involved in their perpetual search for votes.
Every American should consider what the United States has been, the most successful and prosperous nation in history, with a mostly European work-ethic culture, and what it would require to prevent our continuing now on the path to becoming a truly divided, stagnant welfare state. Those who see the problem need to tell their legislators and the White House to stop playing politics with immigration policies and enforcement. Our country is mired in immigration mud. Tell your Congressmen to stop the pandering and restore our sovereignty. Forget telling Mr. Obama. He has a terminal hearing disease and welcomes all illegal aliens, including Muslims.
GUN CONTROL
There are three main issues in the gun control hysteria being brought up again by the anti-gun people not wanting to waste another crisis – another school shooting – to cry again for anti-gun legislation.
Their primary argument concerns protecting children, since that is a more emotional issue than self-defense, hunting and target shooting. The number of children killed in vehicles and other accidents is many times higher than gun incidents, but they usually don’t occur in spectacular single incidents. The National Rifle Association has proposed armed guards in every school. Many schools are large and the ability of one armed guard in a school to learn of an incident, identify the location, get to the scene quickly enough to stop it and do so without shooting other students in the process, is doubtful. Criminals can always use silencers on their weapons. The enormous expense of one or more full-time guards in every school in the country during school hours would not solve the problem. A psychopath who knew schools had a guard could board a school bus, select a school ball game or other event held elsewhere and do his thing.
Airline pilots have the option to carry guns, and many do. The same program could be offered to schools. There are an estimated 300 million privately owned guns in the US, and many of the owners are former military personnel, hunters or target shooters who use guns safely. Those who choose to participate could be approved, briefed on procedures concerning how to handle emergencies, and serve as a citizen defensive militia in schools and elsewhere as appropriate. Within every school it is likely that more than several teachers, aides, counselors, administrators and maintenance personnel are competent gun owners who would want to participate. If a nut doesn’t know who may be armed, his Rambo dream may disappear, and if it doesn’t, he may disappear in an event.
Places like Chicago, Washington D.C. with prohibitions on private gun ownership have higher crime rates. Criminals will always be able to have guns, and if guns are taken away from law-abiding citizens by government fiat, guess who wins? The response time by urban police to a crime scene is said to average about fifteen minutes. The response time of an armed citizen is the time it takes to draw his weapon. The deterring effect on criminals of not knowing who is armed is much more effective than quadrupling the police force, and preventing people from being able to defend themselves is absurd as well as unconstitutional.
Another issue is the Second Amendment. In their attempts to outlaw guns, the gun control people claim the Second Amendment was meant to permit guns only for a regulated militia. Before and after the adoption of the Second Amendment, many of the founders discussed the dangers of tyranny from inside, a government taking unconstitutional control of its citizens, and of the need for citizens to be able to protect themselves from tyranny. A typical statement was made by Benjamin Franklin: "It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority". Switzerland is the most peaceful country in Europe. Its last, almost bloodless war was in 1847. Every healthy Swiss male ages 20 to 30 has had military training and keeps a government-issued gun in his home, as do many others with private weapons.
It is obvious that Barack Obama and his merry band of tax-and-spend politicians, limousine liberals and liberal news media are doing everything possible to take political control from the states and the people and vest it in a fascist control center in Washington, D.C. The greatest ultimate deterrent to their socialist/fascist effort is an informed and armed citizenry, willing and able to defend liberty.
James Jaeger:
History has demonstrated time and again that, to the degree citizens are unarmed, government suppression and tyranny are inevitable. The Founders of the United States knew these lessons well. This is why the U.S. Constitution not only grants American citizens the "right to keep and bear arms" – but the duty to be well-organized as state militias reporting to their respective governors. But this duty, as well as the militia, is often misunderstood. As a result, a "gun-control lobby" has been steadily eroding the original intent of the Founders by passing illegal gun control "laws," funding a standing global army and destroying the 300-year-old militia system established by We The People.
The true story is simple: With an estimated 300 million guns in the United States, if the government were somehow able to take all guns from the good citizens, the criminals would still have guns and know that the public was unarmed. When the UK, Australia and Canada outlawed guns, crime soared. The record is clear. Guns don't cause crime, they prevent it.
RACIAL PROFILING AND PREJUDICE
It is fashionable now in liberal circles to criticize any form of "prejudice" as naughty or despicable behavior. While the term connotes bias and closed-mindedness, some prejudice is just the inevitable result of experience and common sense.
All humans and natural creatures are guided by what could be called prejudice – just previous experience. That is nature at work. Animals learn how to hunt and survive from parental teaching, observation and experience. Humans learn which actions succeed and which do not, which experiences and human contacts are pleasant or effective and which ones to avoid.
Naturally, if people have been told repeatedly that Jews are crafty, the English are stuffy and Scots are stingy, that will influence their view of such people, unless experience proves those stereotypes to be false. If one has had repeated contacts with rude New Yorkers or with persons who announced that they were "good Christia
ns" but who turned out to be liars and cheats, those experiences are bound to affect future opinions of New Yorkers and noisy "good Christians."
The older people get, the greater is their tendency to be closed-minded, particularly when their experiences in certain situations have been consistent over many years. Unfortunately, such adults can, and often do, brainwash spongy young minds forever with their own prejudices. If young Irish children are taught that all Ulster Irish are murderers and heretics, or if Southern white children are taught that blacks are inferior, those ideas may never change completely despite subsequent experience to the contrary. As a result, group prejudices tend to change not by years, but by generations. There are exceptions. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was a Ku Klux Klansman as a youth but later became a judge and champion of civil rights. It was said that as a youth he dressed in white robes and frightened black people and later put on black robes and frightened white people.
As Justice Black demonstrated, one needs an open mind to learn from experience. What is needed is a sort of healthy skepticism of new situations when they seem to resemble previous ones, with good and bad experiences providing a cautionary clue to what we may encounter. Everyone who makes repetitive appraisals of individuals comes to develop and use subconscious instincts. The credit manager reviewing applications, the interviewer of job applicants, the cop on the beat -- all develop an intuition based on experience that becomes important in their decision-making. A good cop can spot potential trouble in one person out of a crowd. If a disproportionate number of crimes in an area have been committed by people of a certain age, sex, dress, general appearance or skin color, those people should get a disproportionate amount of scrutiny by police, security personnel and a cautious public.
According to Jared Taylor, U.S. government statistics show that more than ninety percent of interracial crime in this country is committed by blacks against whites. The report found blacks arrested for murder at about nine times the rate of whites. California collects statistics on Hispanic crime rates and found them arrested for murder two to three times more often than whites. When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of crime-ridden New York City, his police chief initiated a policy of stopping and frisking suspicious-looking persons, resulting in a drastically lower crime rate that has continued to today. Unfortunately their far-left new mayor has promised to cancel that practice, ensuring a return to a high crime rate. World terrorism is almost all done by Muslims. To tell the police and security personnel to ignore such patterns, not to use "profiling" in screening people and investigating crimes, is asinine and irresponsible.
Much of what the liberals now call “racism” is merely about conservatives criticizing the taking of money from the more productive and successful people to give to the less successful. Black economist Thomas Sowell asked, "What is your fair share of what someone else has worked for?" Racial demagogues like Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson and many liberals accuse the white majority of racism, but their efforts to secure preferential treatment based on race are racist themselves and are a major cause of the current racial animosity, along with the divisive race-baiting of such as Jackson, Al Sharpton and Obama’s anti-white books and political actions.
Many who would criticize a physician who failed to advise more careful screening of black males for cardiovascular disease and prostate cancer will also object if young black males are checked more closely for possible criminal activities. Economist Walter Williams quotes a black Washington, D.C. taxicab commissioner’s safety advisory to 6,800 cab drivers: “Refuse to pick up dangerous looking passengers,” which she described as a “young black guy…with his shirttail hanging down, baggy pants, unlaced tennis shoes.” Dr. Williams, also black, advises law-abiding blacks who are offended to “direct their anger at those blacks who have made black synonymous with high crime and not the taxi driver or pizza deliverer who might fear for his life or the policeman trying to do his job.” He goes on to say, “Attempting to explain profiling doesn’t require one to take a position for or against it any more than attempting to explain gravity requires one to be for or against gravity.”
After September 11, the geniuses in Washington jumped in to protect us. They "improved" airline security by making the same, often incompetent security people federal employees, raising their wages and making them much more difficult to fire, telling them to search carefully the well-dressed white people but do not -- repeat not -- risk criticism or lawsuits for "racism" by singling out Arabs or anyone else who looks like a terrorist! That is profiling!
The November 19, 2001 Department of Transportation’s Guidance for Screeners and Other Security Personnel says, "It is illegal…to discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex or ancestry." The predictable result, with the ACLU and other legal vultures waiting outside the courthouse, is the surest way to avoid being hassled at airports is to look like an Arab or otherwise suspicious person. The federal rules do not permit an airport screener to interview two persons of the same ethnic group at one time – that would show prejudice! If ten belligerent Arabs march in, TSA can only detain two of them to question.
Eighty-six–year-old retired Marine General Joe Foss, our ranking fighter ace and former South Dakota governor, was detained for 45 minutes at the Phoenix airport because he was carrying his Congressional Medal of Honor to show the cadets at West Point, where he was speaking. The medal, inscribed on the back to Foss by the President, was a weapon, the guards said. He had to remove his cowboy boots three times as well as his belt and necktie, the razor blades were removed from his toilet kit, and he almost missed his flight.
Despite the obvious fact that terrorists now come largely from the ranks of radical Muslims, the bleeding hearts on the left are so anxious to blame the bad old United States for most of the world's problems that they leap to the defense of any Muslim who hasn't already been caught trying to kill someone. Similarly, with most crime in America committed by young black males, explain the logic in not using that fact in crime control. These defenders of everything anti-American, many of them academics, are fostering terrorism and crime by outlawing racial profiling, essentially mandating protection for possible criminals, and many timid Republicans join the Socialist/Democrats in their deadly game of protecting possible criminals.
Viva profiling!
PART II: ECONOMIC ISSUES