Ted Kennedy, one of the architects of the Great Society’s disastrous 1965 Immigration Act ~ilana

The nationwide illegal-alien rallies this month have been touted by Ted Kennedy as a victory for democracy. “The country has spoken, and today the Senate listened,” Kennedy crowed audaciously (emphasis added). What makes the apparently no-longer-soused Senator assert that the in-your-face, anti-American specter sweeping the nation—if anything more French than American—represents the nation?

What we saw unfold are special-interest politics, likened by Loren E. Lomasky to “Hobbes’s war of all against all, albeit by democratic means.” The winner in an election is certainly not the fictitious entity referred to as “The People,” but rather the representatives of the majority. Do these elected representatives at least carry out the will of the majority? Hell no! The majority has little say in the business of governance—they’ve merely elected politicians who’ve been awarded carte blanche to do as they please. The tyranny exercised by well-entrenched minorities over unorganized majorities,” in Lomasky’s words, now that’s the Hobbesian democracy Kennedy has exulted.

As soon as open-border enthusiasts such as Kennedy, one of the architects of the Great Society’s disastrous 1965 Immigration Act, discover that, like most legal immigrants, I’m an immigration restrictionist, they tell me to go back whence I came (Canada and before that South-Africa and before that Israel), the idea being that I’m not suited to join “the nation of immigrants.” I’ll save them the effort: I fully agree that Americans have little use for me. I’m a troublesome scribe with a love of the English idiom and an annoying attachment to the American ideas of limited government and self-governance. You wouldn’t want to import too many such subversives, who’ll agitate for a return to the values that made this place great, if only fleetingly. A word of caution, however, before you send the spouse packing. Squeaky clean, screened-to-the-hilt, highly-skilled newcomers like him will become increasingly essential in subsidizing America’s immigration free-for-all.

Mind you, people of early American probity, to paraphrase Mary McGrory, are carefully weeded out by contemporary America’s immigration policies. These select for low moral character by rewarding unacceptable risk-taking and law-breaking—an undesirable feature that’ll be further refined by the imminent passing of the amnesty bill. An example should clarify what I mean by “select for low moral character”: Most of our South-African friends, all highly qualified, upstanding family men and women, have opted to go to Australia or the UK. Why? Well, legal immigrants to the U.S. don’t “wait their turn,” as the uninformed pointy-heads keep chanting. It is usually their qualifications that, indirectly, get them admitted into the country.

The H-1B visa, for one, is a temporary work permit—and also a route to acquiring legal permanent resident status. However, if one loses the job with the sponsoring company, the visa holder must leave the U.S. within ten days. What responsible, caring, family man would subject his dependents to such insecurity and upheaval? As I say, most of the people we know would never contemplate breaking the law by remaining in the country illegally. And not because they’re dull or unimaginative (an “argument” I’ve heard made by Darwinian libertarians, who praise immigration scofflaws for their entrepreneurial risk-taking, no less). But because they have the wherewithal—intellectual and moral—to weigh opportunity costs and plan for the future, rather than say “mañana”  to tomorrow and live for today. Unhip perhaps, but certainly the kind of people America could do with.

Another peculiarity of the policies being discussed is the emphasis on family reunification, as opposed skills relevant to the American economy. Other countries, like Canada, look to the occupation, facility with the official language, age, and education of the candidate. Not the United States. Since 1965, with no real debate or voter participation, Congress replaced the national-origin immigration criterion (which ensured newcomers reinforced the historical majority) with an all-nations-are equal multicultural quota system, which effectively resulted in an emphasis on mass importation of people from the Third World. The new influx was no longer expected to acculturate to liberal democratic Judeo-Christian traditions. With family ‘reunification’ superseding all other considerations, immigration has become an economic drain—as demonstrated, for example, by Harvard’s George Borjas.

There’s another corollary to privileging Third-Worlders: If ever we were to import our family, we’d add two or three, elderly, English-speakers to the nation. Small extended families, however, are not the norm among most immigrant families. Birth rates being what they are in the Third World, one qualified legal immigrant from, say, Africa is a ticket for an entire tribe. The initial entrant—the meal ticket—integrates and pays his way; the rest remain, more often than not, unassimilable and welfare dependent. With millions of new arrivals each year, the problem of overcrowding in major cities cannot be overlooked.

The exclusive emphasis of late on border security in the immigration debate has helped open-border advocates immeasurably. Everyone (and his dog) currently concurs that we have no problem with legal immigration, only with the illegal variety. It’s now mandatory to pair an objection to the invasion of the American Southwest with an embrace of all forms of legal immigration. The sole emphasis on border security has, in all likelihood, entrenched the status quo—Americans will never assert their right to determine the nature of the country they live in and, by extension, the kind of immigrants they welcome. The security risk newcomers pose is the only permissible topic for conversation.

What would this round-up be without a good-news immigration story? You can all breathe easy. Guess who U.S. immigration law enforcers apprehended at the Canadian border and stripped of her American permanent residency with an intimidating display of machismo? My daughter! The Bandido is finally at bay.

Yeah, “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande,” el presidente, once thundered. He forgot to mention that they do stop with the documented residents of the United States.

©2006 By Ilana Mercer

    WorldNetDaily.com

     April 28

* Image credit.

The post The Immigration Scene appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Recently, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao announced her “Skills to Build America’s Future” initiative. This is a “nationwide outreach and education effort designed to attract young people and transitioning workers to the key occupations of the (near) future: skilled trades.” This initiative, understandably, was proclaimed with little fanfare.

While President George W. Bush looks toward Mars, Chao hardly can be proud of her decidedly pedestrian prophecy that “construction laborers, operating engineers, carpenters, ironworkers, cement masons, bricklayers, truck drivers and many other construction-related crafts are among the trades expected to see the greatest demand in workers over the next six years.” (This demand will be filled, I predict, by “guest workers” i.e., illegal aliens awarded shiny new government permits.)

Telling America’s young people that the best they can hope for is a career as a tradesman certainly casts a pall over an administration given to grandiose planning and posturing. Essentially, the mathematically precocious youngsters with aptitudes for science, engineering or accounting must be yanked down to earth. Reaching for the stars in the America of the future will be the exclusive province of American Idol participants. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest Employment Situation Summary, Chao’s future is now.

For all the din sounded over the addition of 308,000 jobs to the economy in March, the government-fed news filters failed to mention which job sectors were surging. Sure enough, it transpires that employment opportunities are optimal in construction, retail trade, food services, social assistance and (naturally) government. As economist Paul Craig Roberts ,a rare independent thinker on the issue, observes: “Only labor involved in non-traded goods and services is safe from foreign substitution.” In other words, young Americans had better learn to live by their hands lest their livelihoods be “outsourced.”

If President Bush intends to revive the U.S. space program, engineers will be at a premium. Yet the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers USA (IEEE-USA) the world’s largest technical professional society representing more than 225,000 electrical, electronics, computer and software engineers reports that “American high-tech firms shredded 560,000 jobs between 2001 and 2003, and expect to lose another 234,000 in 2004.” This contraction cannot be dismissed as the nadir of the dot-com correction. The jobless rate for electrical and electronics engineers was, in fact, lower in 2002 (4.2 percent) than in 2003 (6.2 percent).

Meanwhile, the Computing Research Association’s Taulbee’s Survey found that total enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs in computer science and computer engineering fell 19 percent in 2003, a factor it attributes to “the decline in the technology industry and the moving of jobs offshore.” (Curiously omitted are the impacts of the H-1B and L-1 work visas.) College administrators are already hip to Chao’s future. For example, San Francisco State University is considering the closure of its engineering school. Indeed, today’s college graduates cannot even expect to find entry-level jobs in the high-tech industry, warns entrepreneur Rosen Sharma. Sharma heads a Silicon Valley start-up that “could not survive without outsourcing.” Nevertheless, he fears for America’s future. “As a father, my reaction is different than my reaction as a CEO,” he admitted to Time.

Pay no attention to such Chicken Littles, the high-tech-industry lobbyists counter. Outsourcing is good for America, they claim. Their studies employ the “impregnable” science of econometrics to prove that outsourcing high-tech jobs creates more jobs than it kills. One such study, commissioned by the Information Technology Association of America, predicts 317,387 such jobs will materialize by 2008. The study’s premise, however, begs the question, as it assumes the new jobs are and will be as good as the old (vanished) ones.

Why, they’ll be even better, brags economist and outsourcing enthusiast Catherine Mann. She also labors under the illusion that only bottom-rung jobs are vanishing, playing Pollyanna to a doubting Thomas, Ron Hira of IEEE-USA. Hira confessed to Washington Post readers that he, an industry insider, has no idea what shape the “new” putative high-value jobs will take. “Is it nanotech, biotech, bioinformatics?” Of one thing he is certain, however: “Other developing and developed countries are targeting those very same industries and jobs.”

Thankfully, author Virginia Postrel has located America’s burgeoning (and indubitably “dynamist”) occupations. She faults the Bureau of Labor Statistics for not recognizing the rise of spa-related personal services e.g., manicure and massage therapy for the powerhouse growth industries they are. Of course, if Postrel is to remain faithful to the central thesis of her first book that all change is always good she is obligated to remain, like Mann, a Pollyanna, despite the new employment reality.

©ILANA MERCER
Insight On the News
May 11, 2004

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In making their case for a free-for-all immigration policy, open-border libertarians usually confine themselves to insipid sentimental arguments. This manipulative fare is easy to dismiss. After all, saying that immigrants are only seeking “a better way of life” in our country or that immigration is an American tradition hardly constitutes a valid justification for laws that are manifestly antithetical to the welfare and rights of Americans.

Immigration lawyer Gregory Siskind is one such specimen. Siskind, who claims his work is inspired by his libertarian beliefs and Jewish faith, to boot, traffics in H-1B visas. These are temporary work permits, which are also a route to acquiring legal permanent resident status. The out-of-control H-1B visa program has become an example of crony capitalism in action—it’s tantamount to a taxpayer subsidy for hi-tech corporations.

Siskind claims his work benefits the economy. As his immigration muse, he touts the man who monkeys with our money, Alan Greenspan. Predictably, Greenspan is as hip about immigration as he is about inflating the money supply. That Siskind credits the Fed chairman with “ensuring that America thrives” ought to cast doubts on any judgment he makes about the value to the economy of his H-1B work, much less on his libertarian bona fides.

Far worse is Jim Rogers’ paean to open borders published by the Future of Freedom Foundation, an organization that generally doesn’t countenance falsehoods. In support for his open-border position, Rogers claims falsely that the United States has huge shortages of computer specialists, software and other engineers. Our Mr. Siskind, for his part, hazards that advocates of limited immigration or a moratorium on work visas wish to “shut down the country’s borders to protect the economic well-being of the few.”

As few as 172,000? That’s the official number of unemployed high-tech professionals who are, if we are to believe Siskind, acting as spoilsports. Computer software engineers lead the way with 62,000 unemployed! Indeed, these figures, available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the U.S. Department of Labor, put paid to the untruths spread by immigration fetishists. Unemployment among electrical and electronics engineers reached seven percent in the first quarter of 2003!

Yet the current cap of H-1B visas stands at 195,000, and immigration lawyers like Siskind are lobbying Congress to keep the new arrivals coming. In 1992, the allowable number of H-1B visas was 65,000, but due to pressure, Congress increased the number of incomers first to 115,000 and then to its current level. “Since the H-1B cap was raised to 195,000 visas a year in 2000,” reports the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-United States of America (IEEE-USA), unemployment among American engineers and computer scientists has jumped from 65,000 to 114,000 in 2001 to 166,000 in 2002 to its current unequalled high.

Yes, correlation is not causation. But you have to admit the correlation is a strong one. And it is further strengthened by the fact that during the same time span, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, cheered on by the likes of Siskind and the congressional cockroaches, had approved a total of “529,000 new and renewal H-1B visa petitions from U.S. employers.” Talk about treason! American governments are unique in their efforts to displace their own population, while at the same time training it in the art of silent suffering—the locals are guaranteed to go quietly into the night, mouthing mad mantras about immigration’s blessings.

The sheer volume of unemployed, highly skilled people in the fields of science and engineering must give pause. This “may not be a short-term cyclical phenomenon,” ventures Dr. Ronil Hira of the IEEE-USA, but a result of much more fundamental changes in the U.S. economy. Even theoreticians who refuse to adapt abstracted economic models to reality must concede that America’s best and brightest young people will be unlikely to pursue careers in science and engineering anytime soon, not if they want to eat.

Professionals like electrical engineers and computer scientists have an added problem. Most of these fellows make their living via the economic means. The political class and its sycophants—immigration lawyers and activists—utilize the political means to earn their keep. As libertarian economist Murray Rothbard reminded, these “are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth”—the economic means is honest and productive, the political means is dishonest and predatory…but oh so very effective. 

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
July 2, 2003

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