One of the most frustrating aspects of the immigration monologue that’s unfolded over the past few years is the inability of one side-representing those who are committed to open borders and an uninterrupted stream of mass immigration-to acknowledge the legitimacy of the concerns expressed by their opponents, despite the fact that they constitute a significant majority of the American public. Perhaps the lack of a powerful, eloquent advocate for American interests who is a minority-yet is also liberal and has access to influential media and political circles within Washington D.C.-is responsible for this disconnect between reality as experienced by most Americans and the straitjacket of elite consensus on this topic. 

However, I think there are larger forces at work which serve to prevent open borders enthusiasts and beneficiaries from accepting the concept that there is a very large segment of the population that fundamentally disagrees with their political philosophy-and who do so not out of any ignoble or reactionary impulse. The cleavage between how these forces view themselves and their ideology and how the rest of America views them was nowhere more evident than at the screening of Two Americans, an anti-enforcement documentary critical of Joe Arpaio which was screened at New York Law School last month.

While we focused extensively on the film itself in my last post on this subject, we didn’t sufficiently address the post-film question and answer session, which included a panel filled with ACLU and AILA spokesmen that spent most of the allotted time advocating some form of legislative amnesty along the lines of what the Gang of Eight proposes. While I don’t object to the imbalanced nature of the discussion-the event was hosted by the ACLU-I was disappointed by the disingenuous-and at times, inaccurate-way in which the issues under discussion were framed.

Notwithstanding the meandering statement/jeremiad by the Puerto Rican gentleman seen in the photo above, there were several very incisive questions asked by audience members which were not addressed, or answered in a circumlocutory-if not misleading-manner. The evasive and/or misleading responses ranged from the answer of a representative of Bronx  Defenders who implied that illegal aliens living outside of New York City limits were being routinely detained and/or deported-neglecting to mention Governor Cuomo’s vitiation of Secure Communities-to the accusation by the filmmakers that Joe Arpaio was some sort of crypto-white supremacist-a slander that comes with the territory, unfortunately-because of a chapter in his latest book. Perhaps even more alarming  was the implication that the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform & Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of the same year were calamitous laws, even though the former vested immigration enforcement powers in the same local and state authorities that open borders advocates claim are not legally allowed to execute enforcement and detention procedures. 

The most irritating part of the immigration panel though was the way the participants constructed a meta-narrative that studiously ignored any facts that might have weakened the argument for the elimination of immigration enforcement. The most prominent example of this tendency was the intense focus on how much money the private prison industry has spent lobbying Congress, a meme that has been given prominent play throughout the media since discussion of the latest amnesty plan began in earnest. The not so subtle implication being that avaricious contractors for the prison industrial complex are attempting to increase punitive sanctions against future, non-amnestied illegal aliens. The fact that over a billion dollars has been spent lobbying Congress on immigration reform-almost all of it by actors intent upon enacting amnesty or carving out large subsidies for their industry in the form of cheap, imported labor, was completely overlooked by all members of the panel.

What’s more, when confronted with a relatively simple question, i.e. “do you favor abolishing any restrictions upon immigration into the United States,” they were completely unable to formulate a definitive response. Andre Segura-an ACLU attorney charged with monitoring domestic immigration laws-spent nearly five minutes filibustering this seemingly binary question. Of course, we’re under no illusions as to what the answer to that question is. However, we also know that responding forthrightly would not be politically advantageous to the supporters of mass immigration and amnesty, which is why they feel compelled to engage in immigration kabuki. After all, arranging summits featuring Potemkin conservatives and sacrificial lambs, demonizing a heretofore obscure scholar, and bankrolling a multimillion dollar advertising campaign confusing private profits with public good is much easier than engaging in an honest, substantive debate over this nation’s immigration policies.

One of the more admirable qualities of open borders libertarians is honesty about their intentions and  beliefs. They come right out and enunciate the principles they adhere to, sometimes in editorials published in national newspapers which are read by scores of Americans. Occasionally, they’ll write entire books expostulating their theory of why abolishing immigration controls is a swell idea. Regardless of the medium they use to disseminate their views-and however incompatible their solutions are with certain libertarian principles-they do not contour their message in order to deceive a public that vehemently disagrees with their perspective. The same can’t be said for open borders leftists-and their allies in the corporatist blob-who refuse to be held accountable for their actual  beliefs, just as the architect of the bill that irreparably altered the United States of America refused to be held accountable for the deception he and his allies in the press corps employed in order to enact it into law.

In the end, that is the most bewildering aspect of this “debate.” Instead of actually engaging in an honest intellectual exercise involving what the United States wants and needs out of an immigration system-and allowing each side’s arguments to stand or fall on their relative merits-we are forced into Chinese finger traps of race which are not only based upon false premises-like most of the left’s racial narratives-but are wholly irrelevant to the subject under discussion. The issue isn’t that Americans who support political leaders like Russell Pearce and laws like SB 1070 are hard-hearted xenophobes or crass political opportunities-as films like Two Americans would lead you to believe-but that illegal aliens-such as the ones profiled in this film-present unique problems that open borders enthusiast do not wish to address.

It turns out that it’s much easier to create cinematic bogeymen and craft sympathetic human interest stories involving undocumented migrants than it is to tackle a complex area of public policy that has been left to fester for decades. There are two sides to every story, even if only one enjoys the favor of our social betters. That’s the true lesson to be gleaned from the tale of Two Americans.

With a little under a month remaining until Election Day, the Obama campaign has transitioned into full-blown hispandering mode. This week’s symbolically potent, yet empty, exercise in  gestural politics entailed President Obama designating the home of former California labor leader Cesar Chavez a national monument. The ostensible purpose of this decision is to rally support among one of his party’s most reliable voting blocs, i.e. Hispanic Americans. Because even though they still decisively support the President’s reelection, that support does not always translate into votes, as other analysts have trenchantly observed.

What makes Obama’s trip to California so fascinating though is not the seemingly transparent play for votes among an ethno-linguistic group already inclined to vote for his reelection, but the figure he chooses to honor in pursuit of this goal. It should be remembered that as head of the United Farm Workers, Cesar Chavez was militant in his efforts to increase the wage scale of California’s poorly-paid and exploited agricultural workers. And despite the fact that his legacy has been appropriated by radical open borders socialist Dolores Huerta-a co-founder of the UFW-Chavez was most militant in his actions against illegal aliens and the guest-workers from Mexico large growers relied upon in order to depress wages.

While today he is looked upon simply as a totemic figure for the left, to be utilized for whatever cause du jour-including comprehensive immigration reform-requires his unique biography, Cesar-or, as our President prefers to call him, (SEE-ZER)-Chavez began his labor activism in response to the federal government’s bracero program. His opinion regarding mass immigration-at least with regard to the agricultural sector-was the polar opposite of the contemporary Democratic Party. His views on illegal immigration were identical to that of today’s Minutemen, and expressed in a much more militant manner, it should be noted.

One of the chief reasons that farmworkers in California achieved parity with skilled workers in the manufacturing sector was precisely because of Chavez’s political efforts at restricting the inflow of unskilled, foreign workers to the state. Unsurprisingly, the steep decline in wages for this same cohort of workers-and the one that’s followed-tracked with the opening of our borders, including successive amnesties and manipulation of existing work visa programs by large agri-businesses. Agricultural concerns which still don’t believe there are enough foreign-born farmworkers in this country, despite the evidence that mechanization and innovation has actually improved farming techniques in the state of California.

You would learn none of this, however, if you relied upon the dominant media narrative for information about Cesar Chavez’s career, or gathered a fragmentary picture of  his life from vacuous, politically expedient gestures like this new national monument, or the christening of a warship in his name. However, my point isn’t that the mainstream media selectively omits certain facts and/or opinions when it suits their political purposes-which is something most of you already know-or that leftist, open borders advocates are willing to hijack the legacy of an iconic figure in order to see their ideological beliefs into law.

I raise this issue because it speaks to a gaping hole in this nation’s historical memory. The fact that craven politicians-of every stripe-will lie with impunity in order to advance their agendas is nothing new. However, the notion that they can so easily manipulate the public in an age where access to information is quite literally at the fingertips of each and every American, should be profoundly disturbing to anyone who values our republican form of government.

If the philosophy of such an historic figure-who was alive less than two decades ago-can be willfully distorted-despite the abundance of evidence clearly establishing his views on this subject-in pursuit of a tendentious agenda, then what hope is there for engaging in an honest, open debate during this most contentious of presidential elections? If the American public is not able to differentiate fact from fiction, then what hope is there that it will make an informed decision as our country casts its ballots this November? As the great Spanish philosopher, poet, and novelist George Santayana once wrote, those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

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.

In my previous post, I described two presentations by post-graduate students invited to (New) Debates On Belonging, a workshop by the CUNY Graduate Center-seen above-devoted to exploring original research into the subjects of illegal immigration and the lives of illegal aliens within the United States. There were three other presentations that day, beginning with a discussion of the legal status and health of immigrants by Julia Gelatt of the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. 

 Ms. Gelatt’s research focused on immigrant-headed households in Los Angeles, as well as families led by parents who are illegal aliens. She divided her subjects into three distinct groups: legal immigrants, those families with mixed citizenship, i.e. where one family member was illegal while others were legal, and “undocumented,” which I will hereafter refer to as illegal. This research was grounded in the Los Angeles Family Neighborhood Study, which was a bilingual study undertaken from 2001-2002 and in 2005. She began with a clinical recitation of the numbers, e.g. 5.3 million children who have parents that are illegal aliens, 1 million children themselves who are not legal, the decline, from 1.5 to 1 million, in the number of illegal children,  and the one-third of Latinos who allegedly know someone who was deported from the country.

She then proceeded to describe how she believes assimilation theory plays into the health outcomes of these individuals. This theory purports to demonstrate a link between a parent’s immigration status and the well being of his or her child. She cited a previous study by Hirokazu Yoshikawa that found lower cognitive skills among children of illegal aliens, which is an observation that she hopes to extrapolate to other areas of  child development such as “externalizing” and behavioral problems among the children of illegals. Her focus relies upon studies of access to health insurance and medical care in Los Angeles County. She found access to the former limited among illegal aliens-who also had less access to welfare programs such as food stamps-but access to the former widespread, indicating that illegal status was not an obstacle to obtaining health care, as the many public hospitals in Los Angeles that have closed because of costs incurred treating illegal patients can attest to. 

My primary objection is to the underlying assumption of Ms. Gelatt’s presentation that it is the illegal status of these individuals that has resulted in health and behavioral problems among them and their family members, which even she undermined when she conceded that legal immigrant families also exhibited similar problems, albeit to a lesser degree. Left unaddressed is the ineluctable fact that many of these families-both legal and illegal-come from rural, undeveloped parts of Mexico and do not have the education and/or language skills necessary to adapt to life in a post-industrial, 21st century American metropolis. Although this subject is rarely touched upon in mainstream media outlets eager to portray California as a multicultural paradise, it has suffused life to such an extent that even reporters are reluctantly acknowledging the divide between traditional, American residents of California and newcomers who are both literally and figuratively aliens to the dominant culture and its mores. Although I’m certain that attributing these epidemiological problems to the immigrants themselves-rather than to what set of “documents” they do or do not have-would not endear Ms. Gelatt to her academic advisors, or to the institutions she’s seeking academic grants from, it would be a more open-minded, intellectually rigorous approach to the sociological problems she hopes to address. 

A presentation that I found much more compelling, both stylistically and substantively, was delivered by Bilesha Weeraratne, a PhD candidate in Economics at CUNY who has used a micro data-based approach to identify the population of unauthorized immigrants inside of the United States. In order to ascertain an accurate estimate of the number of illegal aliens living in the United States-and I should note that unlike all of the other speakers at this event she described them as illegal immigrants  rather than using the misleading euphemism undocumented-she used several important surveys as a frame of reference. 

One of these happened to be the Legalized Population Survey of 1989, which was a sample of over 6,000 illegal aliens who applied for legal permanent residence under the terms specified by the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986, known more widely by its shorthand, the Simpson-Mazzoli Act. The chief shortcomings of using the LPS, obviously, are that it does not include statistics from non-naturalized aliens who did not meet the criteria set forth by ICRA, and overlooks the estimated 10 to 11 million illegal aliens who have entered the country since Simpson-Mazzoli was enacted into law. In order to compensate for these shortcomings, Weeraratne used another data set culled from the American Community Survey (2009), which determines the number of estimated illegal aliens by subtracting the population of legal residents from the total foreign-born population. Again, this method is not  perfect, since it does not take into account those who have left the country but are not properly tracked. Perhaps this explains why-as the speaker pointed out during her presentation-existing DHS figures mischaracterize nearly 1 in 4 legal immigrants as illegal. Even researchers who are well-immersed in the minutiae of this issue-such as the Pew Hispanic Center-often come up with imprecise numbers because of dubious assumptions, e.g. the unsubstantiated belief that the occupational structure of the illegal community remains constant, notwithstanding our incredibly dynamic economy. That’s why Bilesha Weeraratne believes that her micro data based methodology-which doesn’t rely upon static assumptions or merely one data set-is the best way of arriving at a precise figure for the number of illegal aliens living in the United States. After listenning to her incredibly well-researched presentation, it’s hard to disagree with that belief. 

The final paper of the afternoon-and by far, one of the least persuasive in my eyes-was a joint presentation by Brian Levin and Paul Lagunes, both doctoral candidates in Political Science from Yale, which was entitled “Documenting The Undocumented.” Along with Ruth Dittelman, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology at the same university, they attempted to analyze the success of a New Haven program which gave illegal aliens a muncipal ID card called the Elm City Residence Card. After giving us a brief of overview of the political history behind Mayor John DeStefano’s decision to issue these ID cards-beginning with his unsuccessful run for the governorship of Connecticut-the presenters outlined the contours of their experiment, which entailed sending six males to different merchandisers in the state of Connecticut using both the Elm City ID Card and the Ameracard. The former being the “official” identity card issued as a means of documenting illegals-although, as pointed out during the presentation, it was available to legal residents-while the latter is a “fake”  card issued by a profit-seeking document mill. 

The point of the experiment was ostensibly to answer the question, “Are Latinos trustworthy?” In order to answer this question, the students picked both Latino and what they described as white males, all controlled for age, height, education, and other factors that might otherwise influence a retailer’s decision to discriminate-by asking for identification-against customers of Latino extraction. The findings were that the Latino subjects were 10 percent more likely to be asked for identification prior to making a transaction. The actual purchase comprised the second phase of this experiment, which was used as a barometer to compare the rates of acceptance for the “real” ID card issued by New Haven with that of the “fake” ID card. Lagunes and Levin found that the two cards were accepted at equal rates, leading them to conclude that the poor quality of the Elm City ID, and perhaps an insufficient public education campaign among local merchants, accounted for what they viewed as ignorance on the part of  those merchants. 

Leaving aside the pre-existing biases of these researchers, there are a number of problems with the both the methodology and conclusions of this study. First of all, “Latino” is a notoriously imprecise term, especially when it’s used to describe one’s race or ethnicity. The word Latino might describe the region in which one was born, or the language a person speaks, but it has no significance when it comes to finding examples of “racial profiling,” which was the intention of Lagunes and the co-authors of this paper. The fact that we couldn’t see photographs or video of the subjects they used for this experiment only further undermined their original hypothesis, in my opinion. 

Secondly, they didn’t seriously consider the possibility that the reason the Elm City Resident Card might not have been given any more credence than the Ameracard is because neither one is a truly legitimate, valid form of identification, regardless of what a city bureaucrat intent on undermining federal immigration law believes. This is illustrated by the fact that the person responsible in large measure for the New Haven card was working with the Mexican government to proliferate the notoriously fraudulent matricula consular. Although someone raised that very issue during the question and answer session that followed the final presentation, she was not given a satisfactory response. In fact, the question of this card becoming an invitation for New Haven to become a haven for breeder documents used by criminal aliens-and perhaps terrorists-which I posed was even more befuddling to Lagunes and Levin. The two had begun their presentation by asserting that there was such an overwhelming need for illegal aliens to be given “documents” in order to function in society that policies like that pursued by New Haven’s mayor were necessary. But when I asked them how New Haven could avoid becoming a beacon for illegal aliens seeking breeder documents-as is the case in states like New Mexico-they replied that the people seeking cards were living in New Haven, and that even this demand quickly dissipated. So which is it? They never seemed to resolve the contradiction.

Finally, and I found this to be supremely ironic given the context, the authors applauded the denial of a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request filed by opponents of the Elm City Resident Card that would have required the names, photographs and addresses of its recipients within New Haven. The same people agitating for a way to “document the undocumented” want to keep these poor, undocumented individuals stuck “in the shadows.” I have no doubt that if an open borders advocacy organization had filed suit to obtain similar information from a group of pro-enforcement, patriotic Arizonans opposing the recall of State Senator Russell Pearce their viewpoint on this particular “privacy” issue would have been worlds apart from the one they espoused during the Q&A session. 

 So the final part of this fascinating multi-hour workshop was disappointing. That said, I do think that the trip to Manhattan was a worthwhile endeavor, especially since it allowed me to learn more about the current state of social science research regarding the issue of immigrants living in America. To conclude, I’d have to say that while there are some very thoughtful researchers and academicians of this subject-such as the brilliant Bilesha Weeraratne-there is also much tendentious research pursued under the rubric of sociology, which was certainly on display at the CUNY Graduate Center this past week.  

This past tuesday I had the distinct pleasure of attending an Intelligence Squared debate whose subject is one that this website has addressed repeatedly in the past, although admittedly, not as often as I would have liked. The drive to thwart repeated amnesty proposals introduced throughout this past year has not given us the opportunity to address the innumerable problems presented by unfettered, mass (legal) immigration.

That’s why I relish the chance to explore the flaws of our current, post-1965 wave of immigration. Or, as the framers of the IQ2 debate phrased their resolution: Don’t Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses.

The title, although slightly cheeky, was appropriate, given the subject under discussion. I have to commend Congressman Tom Tancredo for using his opening statement to debunk many of the myths surrounding The New Colossus, the Emma Lazarus sonnet inscribed upon a plaque inside of the Statue Of Liberty. Contrary to popular opinion-at least, the opinion propounded by supporters of mass immigration-that poem has absolutely nothing to do with immigration, and was in fact penned in connection with the transatlantic fundraising campaign to erect the iconic statue in New York Harbor. The statue itself was designed with the intention of honoring American liberty by French liberals and republicans, not as a tribute to mass immigration; certainly not as a calling card for mass, unskilled, uneducated immigrants from the Old World.

After knocking down one of the chief rhetorical pillars of the pro-immigration mythos constructed by their opponents, Tamar Jacoby and Julian Castro, the current mayor of San Antonio, Tancredo and Secretary of State Kris Kobach proceeded to make the empirical case against our current, misguided federal immigration policies. While Jacoby attempted to justify low skilled immigration on the basis of economic expediency, i.e. it helps the large corporations, and their lobbyists, that are her organization’s chief benefactors, Mayor Castro attempted to limn the legal and political arguments in favor of unfettered immigration as he saw them.

The case by Jacoby is a familiar one, equally unconvincing today as it was when corporate lobbying outfits like the Chamber of Commerce, National Restaurant Association, and American Farm Bureau demanded the imposition of amnesty and guest worker programs opposed by the vast majority of Americans in years past. Secretary Kobach  made a convincing rebuttal to these tedious talking points that focused on the seven million jobs that illegal aliens occupy which could be filled by the over 14 million Americans who currently find themselves unemployed.  He also pounded home the ineluctable fact that low-skilled immigrants from poverty-stricken regions depress the wage scale of every industry in which they’re employed. The perfect illustration of this phenomenon is the meatpacking industry, which has been transformed from a relatively desirable, decently compensated, working class vocation into a way station for underpaid immigrant workers.

It was at this point that the philosophical gulf between the two sides came into stark relief, as Tamar Jacoby repeated the stale platitudes of the Chamber of Commerce and its allies, including the charges that immigrants do the jobs “Americans won’t do,” and that even those who were willing to allegedly demean themselves by embracing “menial” work would eventually quit those jobs once better opportunities for career advancement arose. In response to the affirmative’s citation of the Swift meat processing plant, which continued to thrive in spite of the immigration raids that stripped it of many “hard-working” illegal aliens, Jacoby asserted-with no supporting evidence-that the plant experienced a high turnover rate once it began to rely upon the labor of actual Americans.

Perhaps even more persuasive than the economic argument against our government’s current immigration policy, were the fiscal arguments which Mr. Kobach marshalled with aplomb. He rightly brought up the extremely high percentage of immigrant-headed households  that rely upon one or several different welfare programs, a percentage that outstrips even the large percentage of American citizens who now use those very same programs, according to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau. This was the pivotal moment of the debate from my perspective, with Kobach repeating the famous Milton Friedman quote declaring the mutual incompatibility of a welfare state with unfettered, unskilled immigration.

Even though the negative side attempted to refute the concrete data provided by Kris Kobach, prompting an hilarious exchange where Ms. Jacoby was asked if she thought that National Academy of Sciences was biased against immigrants, the negative fiscal impact of our current immigration pool is, as he said during the debate, indisputable. While conceding that using generous extrapolations of what immigrant families might contribute to the economy in the future-scenarios that are, as Tom Tancredo pointed out, so speculative as to be almost meaningless from an empirical perspective-might show some benefits from unskilled immigration, Mr. Kobach nevertheless provided a litany of devastating facts and figures-including referencing the astounding Robert Rector Heritage Foundation study on the potential costs of Comprehensive Immigration Reform-that, in my opinion, demolished the claims made by the opponents of the debate resolution.

Although Ms. Jacoby’s arguments were, as usual, entirely unconvincing, the other “con” debater, Mayor Julian Castro, made at least an appealing rhetorical case in favor of the post-1965 immigration status quo. While agreeing with Kobach and Tancredo that the vast majority of immigrants today are lower working class, Castro claimed that the dynamism of our economy-as well as the considerable skills these immigrants bring to this country-provided for extreme upward mobility among these same immigrant communities. Unfortunately, he did not address the main concern that the affirmative side expressed throughout the debate. Namely, that the uninterrupted flow of immigrants from the same unskilled, undereducated populace would inalterably change the culture and economy of this country.

It was on this point that I think Tom Tancredo truly hit his stride. While Mayor Castro invoked laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act as an illustration of the government straying from this country’s core tenets, the former Colorado congressman reminded him-as well the audience- that the current wave of  mass immigration from the third world is a relatively recent phenomenon that can be traced back to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the brain-child of the late Ted Kennedy, a doctrinaire liberal who used his time in the United States Senate to remake this country into a multicultural mosaic, not the melting pot it had traditionally been. He explained how each previous wave of immigrants-whether it was the Irish who came here in the wake of the great potato famine, or the Eastern Europeans who came at the end of the 19th century-was allowed time to assimilate into American society before being deluged with yet more immigrants from the same region and nation.

In the end, I think it was this argument that persuaded the vast majority of “undecided” voters to come over to the affirmative side. While superficially appealing, the arguments advanced by Jacoby and Castro were essentially contentless. They relied upon pulling the emotional strings of the audience, attempting to draw upon the nostalgia most people have for their ancestors-a common theme used by immigration enthusiasts and amnesty supporters is to draw an analogy between this aberrent wave of unrestricted immigration and previous periods of mass immigration. However, they ultimately did not succeed because the opponents of the evening’s resolution could not provide a compelling argument for keeping our doors open to millions of immigrants who do not possess 21st century skill sets, who are not able to support themselves independent of the American taxpayer, and who are entering a nation with a vast welfare state that did not exist in previous generations.

It was a masterful performance by both Kris Kobach and Tom Tancredo and a riveting discussion throughout. I highly recommend you watch the entire debate for yourselves though, and draw your own conclusions.

When the subject of illegal Palestinians living inside of Israel is broached, we more often than not view it through the prism of  terrorism directed against the Jewish state. Considering the collaboration between Israeli Arabs and Islamic terrorist organizations in the region, such as Hamas or Hezbollah, that’s not an altogether baseless concern.

We’ve also been told countless times of the alleged plight of Palestinians working inside of Israel illegally, often within the context of a broader condemnation of Israel’s construction of homes for citizens living on the West Bank.

What’s less frequently discussed are the problems posed by the large sub-population of Palestinian illegal aliens living within Israel on a daily basis. The gravity of this problem though was made apparent recently when an eleven year-old Israeli boy was habitually raped and tortured at the hands of four Palestinian men. As gruesome as this crime is, it reflects the enormous problems you invite into your country when you sanction the presence of hundreds of thousands-or in our country’s case, millions-of illegal aliens. Peruse New York tabloids from the past decade and you will find hundreds of criminal incidents that illegal aliens lie at the heart of, including one of the most notable cases, the brutal murder of acclaimed actress/director Adrienne Shelly by a nineteen year-old IA from Ecuador.

Nations can continue to ignore this problem-in order to reap the dubious benefits of access to a cheap supply of labor-or they can grapple with the enormous human cost of illegal immigration. As last week’s horrific revelations in Israel demonstrate, this is a problem that all Western nations must face, even if they are reluctant to do so.

One of the frustrating things about the open borders right-although this can just as easily be said of the open borders left, or center-is the rigid adherence to discredited arguments. A perfect example of this tendency is Jennifer Rubin’s response to the thoughtful post made by Peter Robinson, of the Hoover Institution, in response to her essay lamenting the dire straits the state of California currently finds itself in.

While acknowledging the partial culpability of public employee unions for California’s deep fiscal woes, something that pro-enforcement blogger Mickey Kaus has also pointed out, Robinson asks Rubin why she is reluctant to address the proverbial elephant in the room, i.e. the transformation of California into an oasis of immigrants, including millions of illegal aliens. It’s undoubtedly true that many of these newcomers  and their children have made invaluable contributions to the the state, from the second generation Vietnamese and Korean-Americans who excel in California’s public university system, to first generation immigrants like Sergey Brin, who has revolutionized the world as we know it. However, it’s also true that many other newcomers have brought the state to fiscal insolvency with their demands on education, health care and other budget items whose expense increases with each passing year. 

I wish that Rubin offered a persuasive counter-argument to Mr. Robinson’s concern, but in all honesty she actually makes a rather convincing case for curtailing the current wave of immigration, or at the very least, preventing more illegal aliens from settling in states like California. One of her chief reasons for embracing amnesty and supporting more immigration is a study cited by the director of  the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, who explains in his essay that,

The 1997 National Research Council study found that, although the fiscal impact of a typical immigrant and his or her descendants is strongly positive at the federal level, it is negative at the state and local level.

And who goes on to minimize these findings by claiming that the number of new job opportunities created by these immigrants-which are never specified-mitigate the enormous costs they incur from accessing state and local social services, primarily health care and public education. But perhaps even more troubling than Ms. Rubin’s flimsy justification for increased immigration is her  defense of the status quo, which amounts to a justification for the policies that have burdened California’s economy, strained the social fabric of the state, and introduced a host of problems that will only get worse if her philosophy continues to adopted in the future.  

 California has the highest number of illegal immigrants in the country. But that still amounts to just 6.9 percent of the population. We are a very, very long way from seeing the culture become “more Mexican than American.” The schools, as rotten as they are, teach some facsimile of American history, American literature, etc., as the mainstays of their curriculum. (And to its credit, California was among the first to take a stab at doing away with bilingual education.) Pop culture, much of which emanates from California, is “American.”

There you have it. Only seven percent of the population is illegal, the wretched system of public education offers a facsimile of American history, and pop culture-whatever that phrase implies-is uniquely “American,” although the fact that American is enclosed in quotation marks makes me think Rubin’s malleable interpretation of the concept underlying the word renders it virtually meaningless. 

If that’s the best argument that can be marshaled in favor of open borders, then, to paraphrase a  supporter of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, “build the darn fence already!”