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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17736
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2016 3:15 pm    Post subject: Immigration Reply with quote

Interesting essay from conservative Victor Davis Hanson:

Quote:
Elites Support Mass Illegal Immigration While the Working Classes Suffer
May 12, 2016 11:44 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Support for, or opposition to, mass immigration is apparently a class issue, not an ethnic or racial issue. Elites more often support lenient immigration policies; the general public typically opposes them.

At the top of the list are Mexico’s elites. Illegal immigration results in an estimated $25 billion sent back in remittances to Mexico each year. The Mexican government worries more about remittances, the country’s No. 1 source of foreign exchange, than it does about its low-paid citizens who are in the U.S., scrimping to send money back home. Remittances also excuse the Mexican government from restructuring the economy or budgeting for anti-poverty programs.

Mexico sees the U.S. the way 19th-century elites in this country saw the American frontier: as a valuable escape hatch for the discontented and unhappy, who could flee rather than stay home and demand long-needed changes.

American employers in a number of industries — construction, manufacturing, hospitality, and others — have long favored illegal immigration. Low-wage labor cuts costs: The larger the pool of undocumented immigrants, the less pressure to raise wages. That was why Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers in the 1970s occasionally patrolled the southern border in its vigilante-style “illegals campaign” to keep out undocumented immigrants while opposing guest-worker programs.

Moreover, the additional social expense associated with millions of undocumented workers — in rising health-care, legal, education, and law-enforcement costs — is usually picked up by the public taxpayer, not by employers.

Ethnic elites also favor lax immigration policies. For all the caricatures of the old melting pot, millions of legal immigrants still rapidly assimilate, integrate, and intermarry. Often within two generations of arrival, they blend indistinguishably into the general population and drop their hyphenated and accented nomenclature. But when immigration is mostly illegal, in great numbers, and without ethnic diversity, assimilation stalls. Instead, a near-permanent pool of undocumented migrants offers a political opportunity for activists to provide them with collective representation.

If the borders were closed to illegal immigration, then being Hispanic would soon be analogous to being Italian-, Greek-, or Portuguese-American in terms of having little prognostic value in predicting one’s political outlook. The continual flow of indigent new arrivals distorts statistics on poverty and parity, prompting ethnic elites in politics, journalism, and higher education to seek redress for perennial income and cultural imbalances. Offering affirmative action to a third-generation Hispanic American who does not speak Spanish apparently is seen as one way to help thousands of recently arrived impoverished immigrants from Oaxaca, Mexico, find parity.

High-income American elites likewise have largely favored illegal immigration for a variety of predicable reasons. The professional class likes having low-wage “help” to clean the house, cook meals, help take care of kids and elders, and tend the lawn. Such outsourcing usually is not affordable for the middle and lower classes.

Elites have ways of navigating around the downsides of illegal immigration. They can avoid crowded schools and low-income neighborhoods, and they can easily pay the higher taxes that can result from illegal immigration.

Support for lax immigration policies also offers psychological penance for essentially living a life of apartheid. An elite can avoid living in integrated neighborhoods or sending his children to diverse schools, but he can square that circle by voicing theoretical support for immigrant amnesty and sanctuary cities.

We see such hypocrisy from proponents of loosened immigration policies such as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Univision personality Jorge Ramos, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Who does not benefit from mass illegal immigration? Mostly the poor, minorities, and the lower-middle class. They are not employers, but rather compete with undocumented immigrants for low-wage jobs. They usually clean their own houses and do their own yardwork. They cannot afford to send their children to a different school when theirs becomes overcrowded. They cannot afford the increased taxes needed for social support of millions of new arrivals.

Donald Trump tried to demagogue illegal immigration along ethnic lines. But the issue is not where illegal immigrants come from or who they are, but rather their effect on the struggling working classes already here, comprising all ethnic and racial backgrounds.

Prune away the rhetoric and the issue becomes simple: Elites profit from high-volume illegal immigration, while most other U.S. citizens support immigration only when it is legal, measured, and diverse.


Seems to be confirmed by news today that Tesla's factory is being built by imported workers earning $5/hour:

Quote:
Entering the country with questionable visas, the workers are increasingly showing up in the Bay Area where companies can save a bundle on cheap imported labor. Gregor Lesnik was among more than 100 of those workers, quietly here from Eastern Europe, earning as little as $5 an hour to build a new high-tech paint shop at Tesla's auto plant in Fremont -- until he plunged 30 feet to the factory floor. Now, his whistle-blower lawsuit is exposing the hidden workforce expanding Tesla's factory.


So let's look for a minute at Trump's playing to concern about immigrants, and examine potential solutions. I think that many in this country, left and right, see undocumented workers as an economic force that reduces wages for American citizens. To be sure, that was the purpose when Reagan pulled together the last immigration reform package. Reagan was determined to undermine the political power of unions, particularly farm workers unions, and crafted a compromise for expressly that purpose.

The idea of building a wall, like so many of Trump's utterances, doesn't pass the giggle test or dwell in the land of physics. To give just a few examples that I know about, it is physically impossible to seal the border with a wall along the Rio Grande or Tijuana Rivers, much less along the many steep canyons between the US and Mexico. Anyone in their first year of engineering or geography can see that. But what would work is enforcement of the hiring practices of the major businesses that hire undocumented workers with impunity. Like with drugs, as long as the demand is high, the supply will be there.

Trying to identify undocumented workers is a massive task, with perhaps 10 million or more in the Country. With due process requirements and the paperwork involved, it would take a dramatic increase in the Federal government. Consider that the US deported something more than 400,000 in 2014, the highest number in any year, and scale up accordingly.

The task of identifying companies who take advantage of undocumented workers--the Tesla contractors, and Trump's Florida enterprise, is dramatically easier. According to this, there are only about 7,000 such companies:

Quote:
Who is primarily responsible, who are the guilty parties that are facilitating this steady inflow of illegals into our country? Well, arriving at the answer to that question is not the least bit difficult. Those responsible, the guilty parties, are none other than the huge number of U.S. companies that clearly break existing laws by hiring these illegal workers. I saw one estimate that indicated that there are over 7,000 of these companies.

http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/08/19/prosecute-us-companies-who-hire-illegal-immigrant-workers-to-the-fullest-degree/

Hanson gets part of the reasoning right--many on the left have a humanitarian position about immigration, favoring policies that provide sanctuary to those threatened by violence in their home countries, and empathy to those who have been here for decades.

It the Republicans were committed to reducing immigration, rather than using it as a wedge issue, they would have supported and developed a compromise immigration effort that increased enforcement against businesses who hire non-citizens without green cards, and provided a path for eventual citizenship for those who have been here for many years.

Expecting the elites like Trump, who have flaunted the laws, to fix the problem is to jump headlong into magical realism. Trump probably has no idea that that literary concept migrated here from South of the border.
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9288

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2016 3:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If we were to allow everyone who seems threatened by violence into our nation there would be billions of people living here in the next decade. Moreover, members of ISIS are threatened with violence. Shouldn't we let them in?

Trump has identified the problem. He may not have articulated the solution properly, but he's fighting for all Americans.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2016 5:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

MalibuGuru wrote:
If we were to allow everyone who seems threatened by violence into our nation ...

I'm threatened by violence. I demand mac's home as a safe house ... plus his daughter, food, car, health care insurance, dog, life's savings, graduate degree, job, and anything else that might make me feel more secure.

See how that works?

But I gotta hurry, because that world class insanity STOPS on Jan 23 when President Trump picks up HIS pen.

Sorry, but I don't know how else to put it besides ... F-ing bleeding heart San Fran, sanctuary city, uber-whacko idiocy!
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2016 5:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mac, you hit the problem squarely highlighting Americans and American businesses that hire illegal immigrants. While Republicans howl about a building wall, and any other kind of nonsense they can dream up, they never seem to be able to address the true problem of Americans hiring illegals.

How foolish can Republicans get? Lining up behind Trump and some impossible dream, without addressing the real problem, proves just how clueless and stupid the Republican voter is. I can't fathom why they can't see the picture, and demand that Congress pass legislation to provide the necessary funding and jobs to stem the hiring of illegal immigrants.


Last edited by swchandler on Sun May 15, 2016 5:45 pm; edited 1 time in total
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9288

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2016 5:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have a feeling the wall is a metaphor for enforcing existing laws. E Verify would take care of most of the problem.
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2016 5:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You're right Bard, but why can't the Republicans in Congress put it off? I don't really think that President Obama is standing in the way to get it done.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2016 8:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

MalibuGuru wrote:
E Verify would take care of most of the problem.

I'm infinitely less worried about what e-verify does control (workers) than I am about what it has nothing to do with (criminals and unearned welfare sponges). Until we get a POTUS who does not read from his teleprompters to a graduating class, "It's not the inner city drug dealers who are at fault; how ELSE are they going to earn a living?", the problem will only get worse.


Last edited by isobars on Mon May 16, 2016 8:17 am; edited 1 time in total
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pueno



Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Posts: 2807

PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 5:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mr. Fickshun wrote:

I'm infinitely less worried about what e-verify does control (workers) than I am about what it has nothing to do with (criminals and unearned welfare sponges). Until we get a POTUS who does not read from his teleprompters to a graduating class, "It's not the inner city drug dealers who are at fault; how ELSE are they going to earn a living?".

Good to see that Mikey's still nucking futs.

.
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jp5



Joined: 19 May 1998
Posts: 3394
Location: OnUr6

PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 9:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

pueno wrote:
Mr. Fickshun wrote:

I'm infinitely less worried about what e-verify does control (workers) than I am about what it has nothing to do with (criminals and unearned welfare sponges). Until we get a POTUS who does not read from his teleprompters to a graduating class, "It's not the inner city drug dealers who are at fault; how ELSE are they going to earn a living?".

Good to see that Mikey's still nucking futs.

.


You expected something different? Welcome back pueno.
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pueno



Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Posts: 2807

PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 2:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

jpbassman wrote:

You expected something different? Welcome back pueno.



Thanks... I drop in now and then just to see if anything has changed.

Nothing has.

I admire your stamina.

.
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