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Open border fundamentalists seldom address
devastating arguments against their case. Maybe they can’t. But they
generally prefer to respond to philosophically limp positions.
Immigration fetishists seem to like advancing positions not worth a
straw.
The intellectually honest, however, will try to reply to a valid
opposing argument, no matter who makes it. Unless he can’t. Then he must
concede defeat. Alas, among the open-border claque, intellectual honesty
is as scarce as unskilled labor is abundant across the land. The scrappy
Tibor Machan is one exception. A scholar and a friend, Machan possesses
the intellectual energy and honesty to address the hitherto unchallenged
arguments I’ve put forward in opposition to mass immigration.
First some background. While he is no Tamar Jacoby (for one, he’s
prettier), Tibor has expressed, in a column for the Orange County
Register, doubts about the findings that, overall, immigrants cost
taxpayers more than they contribute. Jacoby just denies facts such as
those released by the National Academy of Sciences and relayed by the
Heritage Foundation. Accordingly, “each immigrant without a high school
degree will cost U.S. taxpayers, on average, $89,000 over the course of
his or her lifetime.” Having tallied the number of illegal and legal
low-skill, uneducated immigrants, the NAS has estimated that “in total,
all immigrants without a high school education could impose a net cost
on U.S. taxpayers of around one trillion dollars or more. If the cost of
educating the immigrants’ children is included, that figure could reach
two trillion dollars.”
It’s not clear why clever people consider these facts counterintuitive.
The immigration “reforms” of the 1960s launched an era of egalitarian
policies, which gave preference to Third World immigrants, who were then
selected not for their skill or education, but for their family ties to
a principal sponsor. Such a policy guaranteed the importation of masses
of poor, less accomplished, dependent individuals. A finding to the
contrary would be newsworthy.
Missing from the current debate about illegal immigration, argues
Machan, is a recognition that “the welfare state is the underlying
fundamental problem. Until that system is abolished, until a
revolutionary change occurs and no Peter is looted for the sake of any
Paul—whether poor, rich, legal or illegal—there will be no solution to
the illegal immigration problem.” In the column “Welfare State and
Illegal Immigration,” Tibor repeats an uncontested, standard libertarian
stance: “the immorality begins not with putting illegal immigrants on
the welfare rolls or transferring to them costly services at the expense
of American citizens. The immorality lies in the welfare state itself,
in the government’s policy of coercive wealth redistribution.”
The problem with so many libertarian formulations is that they do not
respect reality. Rather, they hold up the libertarian ideal, lament its
unattainablility, and refuse to debate the issue until the ideal is
achieved. That’s intellectually lazy. It’s also an affront to reality,
the rational man’s anchor.
And the reality is that the American welfare state is accreting, not
shrinking. The reality is that the more libertarians support the
importation of impoverished minorities, with a tradition of aggressively
manipulating the political apparatus to obtain property not theirs—the
more intractable the welfare state will become. How better to diminish
property rights and accelerate wealth distribution and, with it, the
death of the republic, than to add to the “union” each year the
equivalent of a New Jersey, powered by identity-politics, and peopled
predominantly by tax consumers seeking to indenture taxpayers?
Witness how, when thousands of non-voting illegal aliens poured into the
streets recently to demand their positive, man-manufactured, bogus
rights, their elected officials and El Presidente (Bush) came up with a
bill that would grant the protesters their wishes.
To the meat of my argument: From the fact that taxpayer-funded welfare
for nationals is morally wrong, as Machan rightly avers, why does it
follow that extending it to millions of unviable non-nationals is
economically and morally negligible? Or that it remotely comports with
the libertarian goal of curtailing government growth? How is this
stock-in-trade, truncated argument different from positing that because
a bank has been robbed by one band of bandits (welfare-dependant
nationals), repelling or arresting the next (welfare-dependent
non-nationals) is unnecessary because the damage has already been done?
This craven indifference to property proponents of mass immigration
extend to the lives snuffed out in crimes committed by illegal aliens.
Bob Clark, director of one of the most delightful films ever made, “A
Christmas Story,” and his 24-year-old son were both killed by a drunk,
unlicensed, allegedly illegal alien. Geraldo and Jacoby, the teletwits
of amnesty, both asserted that the illegality of the perp is irrelevant
to the crime. “It's not an illegal alien story; it's a drunk driving
story,” Geraldo noodled on “The Factor.”
Geraldo was serious, although he should not be taken seriously. So
here’s my next question: For the Geraldo/Jacoby crushingly stupid claim
to stick, they would have to demonstrate that had this drunk,
allegedly illegal alien been stopped at the border or been deported, his
victims would have nevertheless suffered the same fate. If you leave
the door to your home intentionally open (as Bush has), and advertise
your hippie habits around the hood (as Bush does), can you honestly
claim that the robbery, abduction, rape, or murder of your charges was
unavoidable? (And that you are unimpeachable?)
I’ll let professor Machan do the work libertarians won’t do.
©2007 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
June 15
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