Sunday, April 02, 2006
The Constitution Party on the Immigration Bill
This came yesterday, courtesy of Al Hafer (thanks). Good and truthful information. If this bill passes, we are in danger of losing this country within ten years, if not sooner. Then, of course, there is no prosperity for anyone, American or Hispanic.
The Constitution Party is strongly opposed to the weak immigration bill the U.S. Senate is proposing. It is clearly amnesty for millions of illegal (law breakers) Hispanics. Let your voice be heard! Write, call ,FAX your Senators and Congressmen. Terrorists and drug criminals are now walking across the Mexican border unimpeded. We are being invaded and the Federal Government is laying down on the job. Do something before it is too late.
NOTE: To unsubscribe from this SC Constitution Party E-mail list reply to this E-mail and put the word "Unsubscribe" in the Subject line.
PHONE YOUR 2 SENATORS AND TELL THEM THAT A VOTE FOR THE JUDICIARY BILL ON THE SENATE FLOOR WILL SADDLE THEM WITH A GIANT AMNESTY RECORD THE REST OF THEIR CAREERS.
What happens later today is anybody's guess, but many are guessing that the Kennedy/Specter Judiciary bill (with amnesty and 30 million more permanent immigrants the next decade) will come up for a first vote today.
The idea will be to add it as an amendment to Majority Leader Frist's less damaging immigration bill. (We also oppose Frist's bill because its enforcement provisions are tied to doubling annual legal immigration.)
1. TESTIMONIAL FROM A FIRST-TIME PHONER -- SHE DID IT EASILY. NOW, HOW ABOUT YOU?
"Normally, I am just a faxer. I have never found the nerve to actually call a Senators office.
"BUT, that all changed today. I think what did it was watching Sen. Dick Durbin on C-Span. He actually had the nerve to say that we should welcome illegal immigrants because they probably made our breakfast this morning, watched our children in daycare, took care of our elderly parents in nursing homes, manicured our lawns and took care of the greens where we play golf.
"Can you believe this guy? Is he for real? The ultimate elitist. Boy, myself and millions of others must be missing out. We get up every morning, fight for our jobs and work for lower and lower wages with fewer benefits (if benefits at all.) In my household, I do not work because it would cost us more for daycare than my wages. So we struggle to get by. Nursing homes for elderly parents? It's 5,000 a month for a decent one. Be real. I am so angry I cannot see straight.
"Needless to say, I called Sen. Durbins office and thanked him for throwing the American worker down the tubes. I then called Sen. Bidens office and told them I would no longer support him for a Presidental run, in fact I would no longer support the Democratic Party.
"My last step today was to unregister as a Democrat and re-register as an Independent. A donation to your great organization is coming shortly."
----------Jeanette, Colorado
3. U.S. HOUSE MEMBERS WILL CHALLENGE SENATORS TODAY
**MEDIA ADVISORY**
Tancredo, More than 20 House Members to Tell Senate: No Amnesty
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Chairman of the 94-member House Immigration Reform Caucus and nationally-recognized leader of immigration reform, will join more than 20 House Members to tell the Senate that their current immigration proposals which include amnesty are unacceptable and will not pass the House.
Expected to join Tancredo are Reps. Beauprez, Brown-Waite, Campbell, Cubin, Culberson, Deal, Trent Franks, Gingrey, Goode, Hayworth, Istook, Walter Jones, Steve King, Kingston, McHenry, Pence, Tom Price, Rohrabacher, and Dave Weldon.
4. WASHINGTON TIMES COLUMN HAS THE DATA YOU NEED FOR PHONING
Mexican illegals vs. American voters
By Tony Blankley
March 29, 2006
It is lucky America has more than two centuries of mostly calm experience with self-government. We are going to need to fall back on that invaluable patrimony if the immigration debate continues as it has started this season. The Senate is attempting to legislate into the teeth of the will of the American public. The Senate Judiciary Committeemen — and probably a majority of the Senate — are convinced that they know that the American people don't know what is best for them.
National polling data could not be more emphatic — and has been so for decades.
Gallup Poll (March 27) finds 80 percent of the public wants the federal government to get tougher on illegal immigration.
A Quinnipiac University Poll (March 3) finds 62 percent oppose making it easier for illegals to become citizens (72 percent in that poll don't even want illegals to be permitted to have driver's licenses).
Time Magazine's recent poll (Jan. 24-26) found 75 percent favor "major penalties" on employers of illegals, 70 percent believe illegals increase the likelihood of terrorism and 57 percent would use military force at the Mexican-American border.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll (March 10-13) found 59 percent opposing a guest-worker proposal, and 71 percent would more likely vote for a congressional candidate who would tighten immigration controls.
An IQ Research poll (March 10) found 92 percent saying that securing the U.S. border should be a top priority of the White House and Congress.
Yet, according to a National Journal survey of Congress, 73 percent of Republican and 77 percent of Democratic congressmen and senators say they would support guest-worker legislation.
I commend to all those presumptuous senators and congressmen the sardonic and wise words of Edmund Burke in his 1792 letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe: "No man will assert seriously, that when people are of a turbulent spirit, the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them with something substantial to complain of." The senators should remember that they are American senators, not Roman proconsuls. Nor is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee some latter-day Praetor Maximus.
But if they would be dictators, it would be nice if they could at least be wise (until such time as the people can electorally forcefully project with a violent pedal thrust their regrettable backsides out of town). It was gut-wrenching (which in my case is a substantial event) to watch the senators prattle on in their idle ignorance concerning the manifold economic benefits that will accrue to the body politic if we can just cram a few million more uneducated illegals into the country. ( I guess ignorance loves company.) Beyond the Senate last week, in a remarkable example of intellectual integrity (in the face of the editorial positions of their newspapers) the chief economic columnists for the New York Times and The Washington Post — Paul Krugman and Robert Samuelson, respectively — laid out the sad facts regarding the economics of the matter. Senators, congressmen and Mr. President, please take note.
Regarding the Senate's and the president's guest-worker proposals, The Post's Robert Samuelson writes: "Gosh, they're all bad ideas ... We'd be importing poverty. This isn't because these immigrants aren't hardworking, many are. Nor is it because they don't assimilate, many do. But they generally don't go home, assimilation is slow and the ranks of the poor are constantly replenished ... It is a conscious policy of creating poverty in the United States while relieving it in Mexico ... The most lunatic notion is that admitting more poor Latino workers would ease the labor market strains of retiring baby boomers ? Far from softening the social problems of an aging society, more poor immigrants might aggravate them by pitting older retirees against younger Hispanics for limited government benefits ... Moreover, it's a myth that the U.S. economy 'needs' more poor immigrants.
"The illegal immigrants already here represent only about 4.9 percent of the labor force." (For all Mr. Samuelson's supporting statistics, see his Washington Post column of March 22, from which this is taken.) Likewise, a few days later, the very liberal and often partisan Paul Krugman of the New York Times courageously wrote : "Unfortunately, low-skill immigrants don't pay enough taxes to cover the cost of the [government> benefits they receive ? As the Swiss writer Max Frisch wrote about his own country's experience with immigration, 'We wanted a labor force, but human beings came.' " Mr. Krugman also observed — citing a leading Harvard study — "that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration. That's why it's intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants 'do jobs that Americans will not do.' The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays — and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants." Thusly do the two leading economic writers for the nation's two leading liberal newspapers summarily debunk the economic underpinning of the president's and the Senate's immigration proposals.
Under such circumstances, advocates of guest-worker/amnesty bills will find it frustratingly hard to defend their arrogant plans by their preferred tactic of slandering those who disagree with them as racist, nativist and xenophobic.
When the slandered ones include not only The Washington Post and the New York Times, but about 70 percent of the public, it is not only bad manners, but bad politics.
The public demand to protect our borders will triumph sooner or later. And, the more brazen the opposing politicians, the sooner will come the triumph.
So legislate on, you proud and foolish senators — and hasten your political demise.
5. COLUMN YOU CAN USE FROM CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Does immigration bill cross the line?
March 28, 2006
BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN
The U.S. Senate has begun what is likely to be a long debate on immigration reform. The House of Representatives, responding to the anxieties of most Americans, recently passed a bill that would reduce illegal immigration by placing sanctions on employers who hire them and by improving border security. Of course, it is already against the law to hire illegal aliens and to enter the country illegally. So this simple but necessary measure essentially tells the U.S. government to enforce existing laws.
That is too much for the Senate. Responding to the pressure of corporate America and the White House for cheap labor and to demands from ethnic lobbies and labor unions for cheap recruits, senators are likely to insist that any enforcement legislation include amnesty for the 11 million illegal immigrants already here and admit more legal immigrants by a "guest-worker" program and other methods.
WHAT AMERICANS THINK
59 percent say they oppose allowing illegal immigrants to apply for legal, temporary-worker status, an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found.
62 percent say they oppose making it easier for illegal immigrants to become citizens, a Quinnipiac University poll said.
Three-fourths say the United States is not doing enough along its borders to keep illegal immigrants out, a Time magazine poll found.
In other words, the Senate thinks as follows: In order to have fewer immigrants, we must admit more of them. In order to halt illegal immigration, we must legalize it. And in order to enforce the law, we must reward those who have broken it.
Until very recently the advocates of this upside-down logic -- Senators Kennedy and McCain, President Bush, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, various pro-immigration "experts," and almost all the nation's editorial writers -- maintained that immigration of all kinds, illegal and legal, was not a problem at all. It was a benefit from which all Americans and the U.S. economy gained enormously.
So the federal government simply stopped enforcing the 1986 law some time around, say, 1987. By 2004, though, everyone knows that most of the 11 million illegals hold undercover jobs, exactly four employers nationwide were fined for employing them. Four.
In recent years, however, the evidence has been mounting -- and the voters have been noticing -- that many Americans, mainly unskilled workers on lower incomes and their families, were harmed by the competition of immigrants willing to work for much less. A study by Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies shows that between March 2000 and March 2005 only 9 percent of net new adult jobs went to native-born Americans.
One comparison of Camarota's is especially striking: the number of adult immigrant workers with a high school degree or less increased by 1.6 million while unemployment among their American counterparts increased by nearly one million -- and the number of discouraged Americans who left the labor force altogether rose by 1.5 million.
The impact of this low-wage immigrant competition has been especially severe on black Americans. According to a recent New York Times report: "The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990s. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20s were jobless -- that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts."
As statistics show, there are no occupations in which immigrants form the majority of workers. So Americans actually do the jobs they allegedly won't do. Illegal immigrants, despite their impact on wages, are less than 5 percent of the U.S. work force and only between a quarter and third of workers even in those industries most dependent on them. And their disappearance -- as suggested in the pro-illegal immigration movie, "A Day Without Mexicans" -- would result not in the seizing up of the U.S. economy but in the automation of some jobs, the export of others, and an increase in wages for low-paid Americans, including legal and assimilated Hispanic immigrants already here.
For low-paid immigrants, mainly but not entirely Mexican and Hispanic, are among those who suffer from continuing high levels of unskilled immigration. As Robert Samuelson has argued in his Washington Post columns, our immigration policy is a recipe for importing poverty: "Since 1980 the number of Hispanics with incomes below the government's poverty line (about $19,300 in 2004 for a family of four) has risen 162 percent."
Most Americans benefit only slightly, if at all, from the low-wage competition it brings. A survey of recent economic research on immigration by a Cambridge economist and an Oxford demographer concluded with dry British understatement: "The claim that U.S. prosperity has been driven by immigration, as opposed to driving it, appears to lack any academic support."
As these facts have become indisputable, the pro-immigration lobby has switched from simply defending uncontrolled and illegal immigration to arguing that it can only be controlled by being legalized.
That is, of course, the argument used to justify the 1986 amnesty. The tough enforcement measures promised in return for that amnesty resulted in the 2004 prosecutions of four employers. Since 1986 the United States has been admitting about one million immigrants each year through expanded legal channels. But these legal immigrants, far from being a substitute for illegal ones, were a magnet for them. They sheltered newcomers from home, found jobs for them, and provided a sea in which 11 million of them could swim undetected by the law. If past experience is any guide, adding more legal immigrants via a guest-worker program or higher quotas is likely to increase the number of illegals as well.
This time, we're told, the federal government really means to crack down on illegal border crossings and scofflaw employers. Terrific! But why wait until a guest-worker/amnesty bill goes through? After all, the additional tasks these bills impose on the Homeland Security bureaucracy (processing millions of new legal and existing illegal immigrants) will actually get in the way of enforcing a crackdown. Passing the House bill ASAP would enable us to calm and control the situation while working out a sensible long-term immigration policy.
Such a policy must address not only the economic well-being of Americans but also their social and national solidarity. When half the flags waved at rallies to defeat the House bill over the weekend are Mexican, then immigration may be helping to create a divided bicultural society at best -- or a second nation at worst -- within the United States. And having arrived here by breaking our laws, that second nation evidently feels empowered to intimidate us into changing them to suit its power and interests.
The Constitution Party is strongly opposed to the weak immigration bill the U.S. Senate is proposing. It is clearly amnesty for millions of illegal (law breakers) Hispanics. Let your voice be heard! Write, call ,FAX your Senators and Congressmen. Terrorists and drug criminals are now walking across the Mexican border unimpeded. We are being invaded and the Federal Government is laying down on the job. Do something before it is too late.
NOTE: To unsubscribe from this SC Constitution Party E-mail list reply to this E-mail and put the word "Unsubscribe" in the Subject line.
PHONE YOUR 2 SENATORS AND TELL THEM THAT A VOTE FOR THE JUDICIARY BILL ON THE SENATE FLOOR WILL SADDLE THEM WITH A GIANT AMNESTY RECORD THE REST OF THEIR CAREERS.
What happens later today is anybody's guess, but many are guessing that the Kennedy/Specter Judiciary bill (with amnesty and 30 million more permanent immigrants the next decade) will come up for a first vote today.
The idea will be to add it as an amendment to Majority Leader Frist's less damaging immigration bill. (We also oppose Frist's bill because its enforcement provisions are tied to doubling annual legal immigration.)
1. TESTIMONIAL FROM A FIRST-TIME PHONER -- SHE DID IT EASILY. NOW, HOW ABOUT YOU?
"Normally, I am just a faxer. I have never found the nerve to actually call a Senators office.
"BUT, that all changed today. I think what did it was watching Sen. Dick Durbin on C-Span. He actually had the nerve to say that we should welcome illegal immigrants because they probably made our breakfast this morning, watched our children in daycare, took care of our elderly parents in nursing homes, manicured our lawns and took care of the greens where we play golf.
"Can you believe this guy? Is he for real? The ultimate elitist. Boy, myself and millions of others must be missing out. We get up every morning, fight for our jobs and work for lower and lower wages with fewer benefits (if benefits at all.) In my household, I do not work because it would cost us more for daycare than my wages. So we struggle to get by. Nursing homes for elderly parents? It's 5,000 a month for a decent one. Be real. I am so angry I cannot see straight.
"Needless to say, I called Sen. Durbins office and thanked him for throwing the American worker down the tubes. I then called Sen. Bidens office and told them I would no longer support him for a Presidental run, in fact I would no longer support the Democratic Party.
"My last step today was to unregister as a Democrat and re-register as an Independent. A donation to your great organization is coming shortly."
----------Jeanette, Colorado
3. U.S. HOUSE MEMBERS WILL CHALLENGE SENATORS TODAY
**MEDIA ADVISORY**
Tancredo, More than 20 House Members to Tell Senate: No Amnesty
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Chairman of the 94-member House Immigration Reform Caucus and nationally-recognized leader of immigration reform, will join more than 20 House Members to tell the Senate that their current immigration proposals which include amnesty are unacceptable and will not pass the House.
Expected to join Tancredo are Reps. Beauprez, Brown-Waite, Campbell, Cubin, Culberson, Deal, Trent Franks, Gingrey, Goode, Hayworth, Istook, Walter Jones, Steve King, Kingston, McHenry, Pence, Tom Price, Rohrabacher, and Dave Weldon.
4. WASHINGTON TIMES COLUMN HAS THE DATA YOU NEED FOR PHONING
Mexican illegals vs. American voters
By Tony Blankley
March 29, 2006
It is lucky America has more than two centuries of mostly calm experience with self-government. We are going to need to fall back on that invaluable patrimony if the immigration debate continues as it has started this season. The Senate is attempting to legislate into the teeth of the will of the American public. The Senate Judiciary Committeemen — and probably a majority of the Senate — are convinced that they know that the American people don't know what is best for them.
National polling data could not be more emphatic — and has been so for decades.
Gallup Poll (March 27) finds 80 percent of the public wants the federal government to get tougher on illegal immigration.
A Quinnipiac University Poll (March 3) finds 62 percent oppose making it easier for illegals to become citizens (72 percent in that poll don't even want illegals to be permitted to have driver's licenses).
Time Magazine's recent poll (Jan. 24-26) found 75 percent favor "major penalties" on employers of illegals, 70 percent believe illegals increase the likelihood of terrorism and 57 percent would use military force at the Mexican-American border.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll (March 10-13) found 59 percent opposing a guest-worker proposal, and 71 percent would more likely vote for a congressional candidate who would tighten immigration controls.
An IQ Research poll (March 10) found 92 percent saying that securing the U.S. border should be a top priority of the White House and Congress.
Yet, according to a National Journal survey of Congress, 73 percent of Republican and 77 percent of Democratic congressmen and senators say they would support guest-worker legislation.
I commend to all those presumptuous senators and congressmen the sardonic and wise words of Edmund Burke in his 1792 letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe: "No man will assert seriously, that when people are of a turbulent spirit, the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them with something substantial to complain of." The senators should remember that they are American senators, not Roman proconsuls. Nor is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee some latter-day Praetor Maximus.
But if they would be dictators, it would be nice if they could at least be wise (until such time as the people can electorally forcefully project with a violent pedal thrust their regrettable backsides out of town). It was gut-wrenching (which in my case is a substantial event) to watch the senators prattle on in their idle ignorance concerning the manifold economic benefits that will accrue to the body politic if we can just cram a few million more uneducated illegals into the country. ( I guess ignorance loves company.) Beyond the Senate last week, in a remarkable example of intellectual integrity (in the face of the editorial positions of their newspapers) the chief economic columnists for the New York Times and The Washington Post — Paul Krugman and Robert Samuelson, respectively — laid out the sad facts regarding the economics of the matter. Senators, congressmen and Mr. President, please take note.
Regarding the Senate's and the president's guest-worker proposals, The Post's Robert Samuelson writes: "Gosh, they're all bad ideas ... We'd be importing poverty. This isn't because these immigrants aren't hardworking, many are. Nor is it because they don't assimilate, many do. But they generally don't go home, assimilation is slow and the ranks of the poor are constantly replenished ... It is a conscious policy of creating poverty in the United States while relieving it in Mexico ... The most lunatic notion is that admitting more poor Latino workers would ease the labor market strains of retiring baby boomers ? Far from softening the social problems of an aging society, more poor immigrants might aggravate them by pitting older retirees against younger Hispanics for limited government benefits ... Moreover, it's a myth that the U.S. economy 'needs' more poor immigrants.
"The illegal immigrants already here represent only about 4.9 percent of the labor force." (For all Mr. Samuelson's supporting statistics, see his Washington Post column of March 22, from which this is taken.) Likewise, a few days later, the very liberal and often partisan Paul Krugman of the New York Times courageously wrote : "Unfortunately, low-skill immigrants don't pay enough taxes to cover the cost of the [government> benefits they receive ? As the Swiss writer Max Frisch wrote about his own country's experience with immigration, 'We wanted a labor force, but human beings came.' " Mr. Krugman also observed — citing a leading Harvard study — "that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration. That's why it's intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants 'do jobs that Americans will not do.' The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays — and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants." Thusly do the two leading economic writers for the nation's two leading liberal newspapers summarily debunk the economic underpinning of the president's and the Senate's immigration proposals.
Under such circumstances, advocates of guest-worker/amnesty bills will find it frustratingly hard to defend their arrogant plans by their preferred tactic of slandering those who disagree with them as racist, nativist and xenophobic.
When the slandered ones include not only The Washington Post and the New York Times, but about 70 percent of the public, it is not only bad manners, but bad politics.
The public demand to protect our borders will triumph sooner or later. And, the more brazen the opposing politicians, the sooner will come the triumph.
So legislate on, you proud and foolish senators — and hasten your political demise.
5. COLUMN YOU CAN USE FROM CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Does immigration bill cross the line?
March 28, 2006
BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN
The U.S. Senate has begun what is likely to be a long debate on immigration reform. The House of Representatives, responding to the anxieties of most Americans, recently passed a bill that would reduce illegal immigration by placing sanctions on employers who hire them and by improving border security. Of course, it is already against the law to hire illegal aliens and to enter the country illegally. So this simple but necessary measure essentially tells the U.S. government to enforce existing laws.
That is too much for the Senate. Responding to the pressure of corporate America and the White House for cheap labor and to demands from ethnic lobbies and labor unions for cheap recruits, senators are likely to insist that any enforcement legislation include amnesty for the 11 million illegal immigrants already here and admit more legal immigrants by a "guest-worker" program and other methods.
WHAT AMERICANS THINK
59 percent say they oppose allowing illegal immigrants to apply for legal, temporary-worker status, an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found.
62 percent say they oppose making it easier for illegal immigrants to become citizens, a Quinnipiac University poll said.
Three-fourths say the United States is not doing enough along its borders to keep illegal immigrants out, a Time magazine poll found.
In other words, the Senate thinks as follows: In order to have fewer immigrants, we must admit more of them. In order to halt illegal immigration, we must legalize it. And in order to enforce the law, we must reward those who have broken it.
Until very recently the advocates of this upside-down logic -- Senators Kennedy and McCain, President Bush, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, various pro-immigration "experts," and almost all the nation's editorial writers -- maintained that immigration of all kinds, illegal and legal, was not a problem at all. It was a benefit from which all Americans and the U.S. economy gained enormously.
So the federal government simply stopped enforcing the 1986 law some time around, say, 1987. By 2004, though, everyone knows that most of the 11 million illegals hold undercover jobs, exactly four employers nationwide were fined for employing them. Four.
In recent years, however, the evidence has been mounting -- and the voters have been noticing -- that many Americans, mainly unskilled workers on lower incomes and their families, were harmed by the competition of immigrants willing to work for much less. A study by Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies shows that between March 2000 and March 2005 only 9 percent of net new adult jobs went to native-born Americans.
One comparison of Camarota's is especially striking: the number of adult immigrant workers with a high school degree or less increased by 1.6 million while unemployment among their American counterparts increased by nearly one million -- and the number of discouraged Americans who left the labor force altogether rose by 1.5 million.
The impact of this low-wage immigrant competition has been especially severe on black Americans. According to a recent New York Times report: "The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990s. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20s were jobless -- that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts."
As statistics show, there are no occupations in which immigrants form the majority of workers. So Americans actually do the jobs they allegedly won't do. Illegal immigrants, despite their impact on wages, are less than 5 percent of the U.S. work force and only between a quarter and third of workers even in those industries most dependent on them. And their disappearance -- as suggested in the pro-illegal immigration movie, "A Day Without Mexicans" -- would result not in the seizing up of the U.S. economy but in the automation of some jobs, the export of others, and an increase in wages for low-paid Americans, including legal and assimilated Hispanic immigrants already here.
For low-paid immigrants, mainly but not entirely Mexican and Hispanic, are among those who suffer from continuing high levels of unskilled immigration. As Robert Samuelson has argued in his Washington Post columns, our immigration policy is a recipe for importing poverty: "Since 1980 the number of Hispanics with incomes below the government's poverty line (about $19,300 in 2004 for a family of four) has risen 162 percent."
Most Americans benefit only slightly, if at all, from the low-wage competition it brings. A survey of recent economic research on immigration by a Cambridge economist and an Oxford demographer concluded with dry British understatement: "The claim that U.S. prosperity has been driven by immigration, as opposed to driving it, appears to lack any academic support."
As these facts have become indisputable, the pro-immigration lobby has switched from simply defending uncontrolled and illegal immigration to arguing that it can only be controlled by being legalized.
That is, of course, the argument used to justify the 1986 amnesty. The tough enforcement measures promised in return for that amnesty resulted in the 2004 prosecutions of four employers. Since 1986 the United States has been admitting about one million immigrants each year through expanded legal channels. But these legal immigrants, far from being a substitute for illegal ones, were a magnet for them. They sheltered newcomers from home, found jobs for them, and provided a sea in which 11 million of them could swim undetected by the law. If past experience is any guide, adding more legal immigrants via a guest-worker program or higher quotas is likely to increase the number of illegals as well.
This time, we're told, the federal government really means to crack down on illegal border crossings and scofflaw employers. Terrific! But why wait until a guest-worker/amnesty bill goes through? After all, the additional tasks these bills impose on the Homeland Security bureaucracy (processing millions of new legal and existing illegal immigrants) will actually get in the way of enforcing a crackdown. Passing the House bill ASAP would enable us to calm and control the situation while working out a sensible long-term immigration policy.
Such a policy must address not only the economic well-being of Americans but also their social and national solidarity. When half the flags waved at rallies to defeat the House bill over the weekend are Mexican, then immigration may be helping to create a divided bicultural society at best -- or a second nation at worst -- within the United States. And having arrived here by breaking our laws, that second nation evidently feels empowered to intimidate us into changing them to suit its power and interests.
