It turns out that Arizonans aren’t the only ones concerned about the avalanche of illegal aliens and low-wage, unskilled immigration to the United States. In fact, residents of East Hampton have gradually but inexorably begun to resist the tide of day laborers and foreign workers living in their midst. As I’ve spotlighted recently on this site, there is a very talented documentary film-maker who has chronicled the growing tensions between Long Island communities and the “undocumented” who live within them.

The New York Times alludes to this director, Dennis Michael Lynch, in an article exploring the political dynamics that have led to a socio-economic and ideological battle between those that want to keep a permanent underclass and those who prefer to preserve the stability and prosperity of an established Long Island hamlet. Of course, the default position of the former is that politically engaged New Yorkers who wish to maintain their town’s civic identity and shore up its rapidly dwindling property values are this generation’s answer to the NSDAP. From the New York Times article,

Ms Quigley added that it may be easy to blame minority groups like Latinos for the problems in Springs and East Hampton. ‘Doesn’t that sound a little familiar?’ she asked,’ Like blaming the Jews for troubles in Germany.’

Ms. Quigley’s demogogic, hysterical ad hominem shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed the debate-if it can even be described as such-surrounding the implementation of SB 1070 over the past two years. Godwin’s Law notwithstanding, the instinctive emotional spasm of vitriol with which open borders fetishists greet any opposition to unfettered immigration is well documented. It serves both as an illustration of how intellectually bankrupt the opponents of immigration enforcement and sensible restrictions remain, as well as a revelation of how crucial the perpetuation of the failed status quo is to their political identity.

Fortunately, the followers of American Rattlesnake know better. Which is why I urge you all, once again, to watch They Come To America, a groundbreaking documentary which poses the pointed questions that have been consistently ignored by mainstream propaganda organs such as the New York Times. It’s a film that exposes the long-lasting impact of a defective immigration policy which prioritizes the “rights” of illegal aliens over the lives, safety, and economic well being of American citizens.

One of the more obnoxious political phenomena this election cycle is the continued fixation of the media upon placing voters into specific taxonomic, ethnic boxes. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the press corps insist upon classifying all potential voters who hail from Spanish-speaking countries into the same amorphous, unitary bloc, regardless of the variant cultures and/or beliefs present within this “group.” A good antidote to this blinkered perspective is provided by Fausta Wertz, a respected blogger and writer who focuses primarily upon Latin American politics. She’s gone to the trouble of republishing her 2006 essay which illuminates the misconceptions that have gone into creating what she describes as the Hispanic mirage.

The only way to get past an illusion is to dispel it, and the best way to do so is by discovering the truth.

To listen to the Democratic Party, Latinos have political tunnel-vision, caring only about immigration issues.   Latinos, like the rest of their fellow Americans, care about a broad array of issues.
A quick look at the Univision homepage bears this out.  That may be a bad example — a quick look at the Univision homepage suggests Latinos are obsessed with women in bikinis.

Fox News has just released a poll of American Latino voters, and the results are worthy of careful consideration.

Latinos’ first concern, like the rest of us, is the state of the economy.  They care about immigration, but more from a personal point of view:

“The question for most Latinos is not whether they want more immigration or less immigration,” said Allert Brown-Gort, associate director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. “It has to do not so much with the (candidate’s) stance on immigration, but the attitude that Latinos perceive that Republicans have of Latinos when they talk about immigration.”

And while Latinos currently support some amnesty programs like the DREAM Act, they are also against open borders:

In the poll, many Latinos showed support for enforcement of immigration laws – 56 percent say that having “open borders” would be detrimental to the United States, hurting the economy. Slightly more than 30 percent differ, believing open borders would help the economy.

As American Rattlesnake has documented, getting tough on violators of immigration laws is a winning political strategy, even in states with a large Latino population.

The Fox News poll is a valuable snapshot of the current mood of the 12 million Latino voters in this country, and worthy of direct perusal by American Rattlesnake readers.

Are the Republicans doomed? The pollsters at Latino Decisions point out that the Hispanic vote in Arizona was overwhelmingly against immigration hardliner Jan Brewer when she ran for re-election.

And that is where the doomsaying falls apart. Jan Brewer was an accidental governor, gaining the office when her predecessor left office early. She faced a popular Democratic opponent in Terry Goddard.

And Jan Brewer won. She won big. She played Ronald Reagan to Terry Goddard’s Walter Mondale.

And she owed it all to being tough on immigration enforcement. Before she signed SB 1070, nobody knew who she was. After she signed it, she became a political figure of national importance. And she managed to do it in a state with almost twice as many Hispanics as the national average.

The American people aren’t all stupid.  They know what’s in their best interest.  While the Hispanic-American vote might go Democratic, the overall American vote favours strong immigration enforcement.

Strong immigration enforcement wins elections, nationally and locally, in March and in November.

One of the most persistent divides between traditional conservatives and their libertarian/anarcho-capitalist counterparts involves a fundamental philosophical disagreement about immigration. While most conservatives view immigration primarily through the lens of preserving American culture by only accepting those immigrants who are assimilable and will tangibly benefit our society in the future, a view expressed repeatedly during debates over illegal immigration in this country, many libertarians view the subject in an altogether different light. For them, the question is not so much whether a particular cohort of immigrants will be an asset to the United States but whether we have any right to prevent them from settling in this country in the first place, which many answer in the negative.

Libertarians extol the primacy of individual rights, which in this case entails the right to emigrate from your country of birth whenever you so desire-something that I don’t think any conservative would take issue with-and to immigrate to whatever country you want to live and/or work in for an extended period of time, which is where the divide between the two camps emerges. Libertarians view the issue as one of freedom of association-and by extension, contract-wherein willing employers, such as large agribusinesses and meatpacking plants, seek out willing employees coming from nations with under-performing economies that can’t meet the personal and financial needs of their citizens. They believe that the nexus between trade and unfettered migration is inextricable, if not completely self-evident, and that the two can not be severed if a nation hopes to grow its economy. While this may well be true as a matter of law, there are numerous holes in this thesis intellectually, which opponents of open borders-even anarcho-capitalists such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe-have exposed through well-researched arguments of their own.

However, underlying the debate over whether immigration and settlement is a natural right is the assumption that all libertarians/anarcho-capitalists agree on the immigration issue, which is not as much of  a given as it would seem on the surface of things. One of the things that I’ve attempted to do with American Rattlesnake is debunk commonly held assumptions about immigration issues, and the assumption that libertarians all subscribe to Gary Johnson’s point of view is one that needs to be reexamined. There are many libertarians and  anarcho-capitalists who recognize both the practical difficulties and existential problems inherent in society based upon unfettered immigration, especially one with the vast social welfare apparatus of the United States. One of the chief exponents of the view that welfare programs need to be curtailed in order to solve the immigration problem is Gary Johnson’s opponent in the Republican presidential race, Congressman Ron Paul. Paul has repeatedly emphasized the need to do away with the generous, taxpayer subsidized social welfare programs that-while not serving as the initial magnet-provide incentives for illegal aliens to extend their stay in this country indefinitely. The population density of legal immigrants is also heavily correlated with the availability of welfare benefits. Even acclaimed economist Milton Friedman, who held a rather benign view of immigration in general, emphasized the incompatibility of a welfare state with unfettered immigration.

The same opinion is held by many libertarians today, including self-professed constitutionalist Andrew Napolitano, who views Arizona’s landmark immigration law primarily through the prism of the Constitution’s supremacy clause and potential violations of the 4th Amendment via racial or ethnic profiling by law enforcement officers. I’m not sure that the Constitutional objection to statewide laws is dispositive, because-as Andrew McCarthy has pointed out repeatedly in National Review-there is no precedent for prohibiting states from enforcing laws that are consistent with federal statutes. Furthermore, if we look to the broader issue of legal immigration, there’s nothing to suggest that the men who drafted the United States Constitution supported the sort of unfettered immigration we have endured since passage of the Hart-Celler Act fundamentally altered this nation’s demographic destiny. This is a concept that is seldom grasped by arm-chair commentators on immigration these days, whose default option is to repeat the platitudinous-not to mention, factually incorrect-bromide that we are a “nation of immigrants.” What they neglect to mention is that most this nation’s founding fathers would have been implacably opposed to the present lassez-faire system of immigration, a fact that Thomas Woods-as anti-statist an individual as you’ll find among academics-expertly limns in this Human Events column published during the height of the amnesty debate in Washington D.C.

Yet, even if we were to concede that there’s no firm historical or Constitutional foundation for this nation’s current open borders policies, can it not be argued that there is a compelling moral case for the views espoused by those at the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Cato Institute, Reasonoids, and other trendy, beltway cosmotarians? You would definitely think so if you took their arguments at face value. The notion that we have no moral basis for barring certain immigrants from entry into the United States is certainly widespread in certain libertarian circles, but I don’t believe that makes the idea, ipso facto, libertarian. Julian Simon, in a 1998 essay published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, articulated the perspective felt by many that individual autonomy takes precedence over other “public” goods, including our national borders. In an anarcho-capitalist reality, nation-states would not exist, therefore deciding who should or should not be admitted to your nation would be a moot point.

But while it might seem logical that freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of contract-and at its most essential level, the individual him or herself-are all prioritized over the wishes and feelings of citizens who have a vested interested in preserving the character of their nation, there are those that don’t think these competing values are necessarily mutually exclusive. In a persuasive essay written for Lew Rockwell several years ago, N. Stephan Kinsella made a very compelling argument that while the disposition of property in our society is unjust-insofar as the state has no right to expropriate land that rightfully belongs to individuals-so long as that property is entrusted to the state it has a responsibility to act as caretaker for the rightful owners. In this case, it has the responsibility to prevent the ingress of people that citizens do not want to welcome into their country. While those who are opposed to communitarianism in even its most minimal form might reject Kinsella’s public pool analogy, I think he makes a convincing case that some prophylactic measures need to be enforced to prevent the exploitation of your property-even if it’s already been subjected to theft by the state.

There are many cogent arguments against the current trendy libertarian support for open borders, several of them outlined by the first presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party, John Hospers, in paper published by the Journal of Libertarian Studies over a decade ago entitled A Libertarian Argument Against Open Borders. The concluding paragraph of the essay is especially perceptive in its analysis of the problem:

Occasionally, we hear the phrase “limousine liberals” used to describe the members of the liberal establishment who send their children to expensive private schools while consigning all the others to the public school system, which educates these children so little that by the time they finish the eighth grade they can barely read and write or do simple arithmetic, or make correct change in a drug store. It would be equally appropriate, however, to describe some other people as “limousine libertarians” —those who pontificate about open borders while remaining detached from the scenes that their “idealism” generates. They would do well to reflect, in their ivory towers, on whether the freedom they profess for those who are immigrants, if it occurs at all, is to be brought about at the expense of the freedom of those who are not.

This passage describes, in a nut shell, the quintessence of cosmotarianism, and why most Americans-and even some in the libertarian movement-continue to reject it. I could post the most meticulously researched George Borjas journal article, the most statistically devastating backgrounder from the Center for Immigration Studies, or the most irrefutable essay by Mahattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald. And although all of these sources are invaluable in the fight to define the terms of this debate, they wouldn’t hold a candle to the self-evident fact that none of the greatest exponents and defenders of open borders, be it Tamar Jacoby, or Jason Riley, or Nick Gillespie, abide by their own exhortations. None of these individuals partake of the glorious mosaic which their unyielding ideology has done so much to create.

You won’t find many Reason Magazine editors or Cato Institute scholars living in Bergenfield, New Jersey, Maywood, California, or Eagle Pass, Texas. Why, you might ask? Because they would rather pass off the tremendous costs of their bankrupt philosophy onto ordinary Americans than to admit that they might just be wrong. These people are insulated from unfettered immigration’s worst effects, including chronic unemployment, violent crime, and environmentally devasting pollution from Arizona to California and throughout the country. They have the luxury of ignoring the impact of this country’s changing demographic profile while promoting the patently absurd notion that our open borders are a boon to all but the small percentage of high school dropouts.

What’s more, they make the equally ludicrous assertion-outlined in the Caplan speech above-that importing millions of unskilled, uneducated immigrants, who will be dependent upon costly government services, from quasi-socialist nations will expand this nation’s economic liberty. Forget the fact that we now enjoy less economic freedom than our northern neighbors, a development concurrent with the greatest expansion of immigration in this country’s history, the entire premise underlying this concept is flawed. You do not build a prosperous, 21st century, post-industrial society around foreigners from countries with low human capital. And the amount of time, energy and economic resources that need to be shifted in order to improve the educational prospects and earning potential of these immigrants, e.g. the billions funneled into ESL programs each year, is so cost prohibitive that it outweighs whatever benefits can be gleaned from such an arrangement.

Another seeming inconsistency in the archetypal libertarian solution to our immigration problem is the reluctance of most libertarians to support any sort of relief for American taxpayers who are tasked with paying for millions of illegal aliens and immigrants who are dependent upon costly social services. Particularly, public schooling and emergency health care. Invoking Friedman’s argument once again, we find that while many libertarians will concede that dependency upon welfare programs is a bad thing they will do nothing to limit access to these programs by illegal aliens or permanent residents. To the contrary, if any such bill-which is immigration neutral-is proffered, they will stalwartly oppose it. Just ask new Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who supports the DREAM Act, despite the fact that taxpayers would be subsidizing the in-state tuition discounts of its recipients. Paleolibertarian writer Ilana Mercer deftly skewers  purported libertarians who routinely call for the abolition of the welfare state while adding a proviso that excludes immigrants and illegal aliens from the fiscal demands of their libertopia.

True believers in liberty, like Mercer and the late Murray N. Rothbard, recognize the inherent contradiction in persuading your fellow Americans to reject the embrace of the state while simultaneously welcoming millions of non-Americans into the country who prefer a larger and more intrusive government in almost every respect into our society. They realize that the banal platitudes used to support unfettered immigration are grossly inaccurate, if not transparent lies. They also realize that the interests of the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, the Farm Bureau, and the hospitality industry do not necessarily coincide with the interests of the free market, and that to a large extent our current immigration policy is another form of corporate welfare, which putative libertarians would be quick to denounce in any other context. The time-saving, productivity-increasing technological innovations that would normally be welcomed by these same individuals are rejected by those who apparently think pre-industrial stoop labor is the best method of improving  our agricultural production. Finally, they recognize that the  utopian, globalist conception of freedom-where people living in Gabon or the Hadhramaut have just as much say in how we are governed as American citizens living in New York-contravenes the distinctively American, Constitutional, federalist, representative republic designed by this nation’s founding fathers.

In short, the issue before the house is not whether it is an abandonment of principle for libertarians to embrace sensible immigration restrictions, it’s why institutional libertarians representing organizations like the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation have stifled an honest, open intellectual debate about this subject. Even as the negative repercussions of our government’s devotion to open borders become harder to ignore for all but the most oblivious, the gatekeepers of respectable opinion on this subject continue to narrow the parameters of discussion to their own narrow, ahistorical perspective. I don’t expect that to change any time in the near future, but those of us who want an intellectually honest debate about the most important issue of our time can at least begin to clarify its terms, if for no other reason than to educate those novices interested in how mass immigration has impacted our society who are asking themselves how they should view these changes from a liberty-oriented perspective.

Once again, our nation’s courageous legislators have failed to address the pressing issue of illegal immigration. This time, they come from the great state of Nebraska, where the Senate Judiciary Committee tabled a bill that would have required police to verify the legal status of suspected illegal aliens.

What’s more, the prospect of any proactive steps towards immigration enforcement has been deferred for the rest of the year! While I suppose this action is preferable to the blatantly illegal bill recently enacted in Utah, it still demonstrates a lack of political will on the part of this nation’s officeholders.

Is this hesitancy related to recently released Census statistics showing a boom in Nebraska’s latino population? If so, I think it’s a grave miscalculation on the part of that state’s politicians. As I’ve discussed repeatedly on this site and elsewhere, there are many Americans of Hispanic origin who want our borders to be secure and who are refusing to embrace the idea of wholesale amnesty for people who have violated the law, regardless of their ethnicity or nationality.

Our nation’s elected officials were elected to lead, not to follow the whims of the crowd or the dictates of political correctness. That’s why this decision by Nebraska’s politicians is so exasperating. They had an opportunity to forge ahead in a direction that would have been beneficial to their constituents, yet they chose to pass it up for fear of alienating people who are not even legally registered voters in their state. It bespeaks a cowardice that has become all too familiar to those of us who have watched this issue unfold on the national stage over the past decade. Hopefully, others won’t be as timid as the legislators in the Cornhusker State.

An interesting story in yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor looks at the electoral prospects of former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who is looking to to succeed long-time Chicago mayor and political boss Richard Daley.

The writer makes a number of interesting points about the difficulties Emanuel faces in reassuring Hispanic voters that he is in their corner. Now normally, if he were to emulate the Daley model of incorporating ethnic voting blocs into his campaign he would simply lay on the patronage. Promise visible Latino political leaders jobs in his administration, lard up the campaign payroll with Hispanics-and since he’s a prodigious fund raiser, this task could be easily accomplished-and generally spread the wealth/bribes around.

Unfortunately, Emanuel confronts a unique problem that most aspiring pols in Chicago don’t have. Namely, as a national leader of the Democratic Party he was forced to craft policy positions that would appeal to that broad middle of the nation’s electorate that generally shuns the radical, racially divisive solutions proposed by open borders maximalists like Luis Gutierrez. So, as this article describes, he gave other House Democrats freedom to vote for a tough, enforcement-only immigration bill devised by Rep. Sensenbrenner. On the other hand, the accusation that he could have single-handedly persuaded recalcitrant Senate Democrats-who provided the decisive margin of defeat for the DREAM Act-to support amnesty doesn’t seem to be grounded in anything more substantive than wishful thinking.

In the end, I doubt that the anti-Emanuel forces among Hispanic activists in the city of Chicago can prevent him from assuming office in a Democratic primary that is increasingly looking like a coronation. As the article points out, Emanuel is already lapping his closest Latino opponent among Latino voters who’ve declared a preference, and I doubt that anything said or done between now and the election will change that. Rahm has too much name recognition, too much money, and too many influential backers among the Daley and Obama machines for his campaign to be derailed at this point in time.

Most importantly-and this is something Hispanic political activists are loathe to acknowledge-there are simply not enough pro-amnesty, anti-Emanuel, Hispanic voters in the city to prevent Rahm Emanuel from becoming the next mayor of Chicago. As much as demagogues like Congressman Gutierrez might like to claim that they hold the keys to The Kingdom, the truth is that they are not the ones who control the levers of political power in this country. The open borders lobby has quite consciously made itself an insular, Mexican-centric, ethnically monolithic special interest group. And in order to thrive politically in a city like Chicago, you need a patchwork of ethnic constituencies-most of whom share neither your passions nor your enemies-to support your candidacy.

And that is why Rahm Emanuel will be Mayor Emanuel, and why Luis Gutierrez will have to come to him with his begging bowl when everything is said and done.

One of the most troubling aspects of the current debate over immigration and national borders-other than the usual epithets lodged against those of us who care about our nation’s sovereignity, and the absurd postulations made by those attempting to convince us of the wisdom of open borders, esto perpetua, is the closed nature of the debate. The open borders lobby doesn’t want to engage in a genuine debate over the value of unfettered immigration to this country. It doesn’t want to even entertain the notion that 1.5 million immigrants per annum might be a tad much for America to assimilate-assuming that it’s the mission of these newcomers to assimilate, an assumption most of the lobby categorically rejects. The only thing to be discussed is how many more should be admitted and naturalized, and how much we can expedite the process.

The discussion over the DREAM Act’s immiment passage  is a perfect illustration of this skewed dialogue, which is really nothing more than a monologue carried on by the advocates of open borders-who see this as a “down payment” on future, more inclusive, amnesties. And there is no voice more reflective of this tendency to drown out contrary points of view than Latina Lista, a blog run by a “syndicated journalist,” something I had never heard of until I stumbled upon her site, which pops up whenever you search Google for late-breaking news about immigration reform. Focused almost exclusively upon the wonder of Latino immigrants and celebrating the accomplishments of illegal aliens from Latin American nations, the balance of Ms. Trevino’s time is consumed with demonizing those benighted few who don’t share her fanatical devotion to open borders and her prioritization of race/ethnicity over patriotism.

Of course, you can’t comment upon her blog entries because that would leave open the possibility that she would have to defend her radical, pro-amnesty views, which is something that I can’t imagine her welcoming. Ms. Trevino has a standing invitation to debate the merits of unfettered, mass immigration and amnesty for tens of millions of illegal aliens-both policies I deduce she supports without reservation-on American Rattlesnake. We welcome people with differing viewpoints-in fact, I would venture to guess that most of the people who come across this site on a daily basis disagree with my philosophy, vis-a-vis, borders and immigration enforcement-and don’t feel the need to shut down debate in order to prevail in the war of ideas. 

So whenever you are ready, Marisa, feel  free to drop by and give us a piece of your mind. Something tells me we’ll be waiting a very long time. 

One of the interesting things about conventional wisdom is that very often it turns out to be based upon assumptions that are false. A case in point being the widespread misconception that all Americans whose family origins lie in Latin America and the Caribbean are reflexively pro-mass immigration and in favor of amnesty, when in fact most of these people have more nuanced views on the subject.Just as some Hispanic Americans view newcomers to this country as family or compatriots, others view them as economic competitors,  as the results from this Pew Hispanic Center survey illustrate. Also, it would appear that the Latino community-insofar as such a set of linguistically and ethnically diverse groups can be said to constitute a single community-has also soured on the de facto amnesty illegal aliens in this country currently enjoy.

Mark Krikorian has some interesting observations about this poll-and a link to his organization’s own poll on the subject-over at NRO. Of particular interest is his exploration of the inherent flaws in Pew’s methodology, which neglects to include an attrition through enforcement option for potential survey-takers to choose from, relying instead upon a black-and-white choice between wholesale deportation of illegal aliens or de jure amnesty. Despite this flaw, the results from the Pew Hispanic Center are worth examining more closely. They have the most accurate data on this subject, even if their aims are misguided from my point of view.