The FOLLY of MASS Immigration!!

FOLLY OF FREE MASS IMMIGRATION

by Mark Steyn


Almost every claim made for the benefits of mass immigration is
false. "Sober-minded economists reckon that the potential gains
from freer global migration are huge," writes Philippe Legrain in
Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. "The World Bank reckons that
if rich countries allowed their workforce to swell by a mere
three percent by letting in an extra 14 million workers from
developing countries between 2001 and 2025, the world would be
$356 billion a year better off, with the new migrants themselves
gaining $162 billion a year, people who remain in poor countries
$143 billion, and natives in rich countries $139 billion."

$139 billion? From "a mere" 14 million extra immigrants? Wow!
As Christopher Caldwell points out in his book Reflections on the
Revolution in Europe, the aggregate gross domestic product of the
world's advanced economies for the year 2008 was estimated by the
International Monetary Fund at close to $40 trillion. So an extra
$139 billion works out to an extra, er, 0.0035. Caldwell compares
the World Bank argument to Dr. Evil's triumphant announcement (in
the film Austin Powers) that he's holding the world hostage for
one million dollars!!! "Sacrificing 0.0035 of your economy would
be a pittance to pay for starting to get your country back." As
for that extra $139 billion divided between the inhabitants of
all the world's "rich countries," that works out to less than
what the U.S. Government spent in 2010 on unemployment insurance
($160 billion).

So much for the economic argument in capitalist terms. In welfare
terms, Europeans were told they needed immigrants to help prop up
their otherwise unaffordable social entitlements: in reality,
Germany's Gastarbeiter ("guest workers") are heavy on the Gast-,
ever lighter on the--arbeiter. Turkish immigrants have three
times the rate of welfare dependency as ethnic Germans, and their
average retirement age is fifty. Foreigners didn't so much game
the system as discover, thanks to family "reunification" and
other lollipops, that it demanded nothing of them. Entire
industries were signed up for public subsidy. Two-thirds of
French imams are on the dole. Does the World Bank set their
welfare checks on the debit side of that spectacular 0.0035
economic growth? Or does that count as valuable long-term
investment in the critical economic growth sector of incendiary
mullahs? A dependence on mass immigration is neither a goldmine
nor an opportunity to flaunt your multicultural bona fides, but a
structural weakness.

"Moderate" Republicans often say that the party base represents a
declining demographic (too white) and that the GOP needs to do
more to reach out to Hispanics and other fast-growing segments of
the population. The argument would seem to assume that this
dramatic demographic shift is an entirely natural development.
Why, after all, are white guys in decline and Hispanics on the
rise?

Because the governing class decided, with the 1965 immigration
act and much that has followed, that that's the way its going to
be. In the not entirely likely event that the GOP could persuade
Hispanics to vote in overwhelm ing numbers for small government,
the Democrats would look elsewhere for new clients-Muslims, say,
maybe from Somalia, a nation which, in barely more than a decade,
has transformed the welfare profile even of such backwaters as
Lewiston-Auburn, Maine. "Moderate" Republicans would then argue
that the party's white-Hispanic base was now stagnating, and that
the GOP needs to do more to reach out to Lewistan-Auburnistan.
The problem with dissolving the people and electing another is
that you'd have to be a genius to pull off such a transformation
without any unintended consequences. On the scale and speed with
which much of the West has attempted it, you quickly reach a
tipping point, in which the cultural capital of a functional
nation state has been exhausted and what follows is ... something
else. The particular nature of America's mass illegal
immigration is almost consciously designed to fracture the
republic, and lead to enormous tracts of the country becoming
entirely dysfunctional. For the corporate right, undocumented
immigrants mean cheap labor. For the statist left, they mean
dependents-and cheap votes. For sentimentalists in between, it's
an act of ethnocultural penance: hence, the Cinco de Mayo
observances in schoolhouses up and down the land. The left are
right. Big Government centralists don't mind about the costs
Undocumented America imposes, because in the main it imposes them
on states, cities, and school districts-and thus makes previously
self-sufficient branches of government ever more dependent on
central authority. And just as Big Government doesn't care about
the impact on local government, Big Business doesn't care about
the impact of illegal labor on small business. This is a recipe
for civil strife, if not, ultimately, civil war.

The corporate right wanted open borders for cheap workers in part
because the statist left has made American workers too expensive:
you can ship manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor overseas, but
it's not so easy with hotel chambermaids and seasonal
agricultural workers. Meanwhile, the statist left favored open
borders as a way of importing voters: untold millions of poor,
ill-educated people with little English would need government
services, and untold hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats would
need to be hired to service them. And so Big Government grows its
base. Most illegal immigrants arrived in the Southwest, where
states are not red like the Old South nor blue like the
Northeast, but kinda purple - 50/50 congressional districts and
Senate seats where a few anchor babies here and English-as-a-
Second-Language programs there and the Democratic Party can tip
the demographics permanently in its favor. In such a world, what
happens when the economy nosedives and you have competing groups
of poor whites, poor blacks, and poor Hispanics chasing ever
fewer jobs and crushing the welfare system through sheer numbers?
The left was smarter than the right: the business class told
itself it was importing hardworking families who just want a shot
at the American Dream. But welfare mocks the Ellis Island
virtues, upending them as easily as the shattered Statue of
Liberty Charlton Heston stumbled across in the sands of a ruined
planet. In an America with ever bigger government and ever
poorer people, the dependency rationale for illegal immigration
will win out over the business rationale. Seventy percent of
births at the San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton,
California, are the so-called "anchor babies" born to illegals.
In related news, by 2010 Stockton's school district had a deficit
of $25 million .66 Same thing at Dallas General: 70 per cent of
newborns are "anchor babies." Seven out of ten isn't any kind of
"minority"; it's the dominant culture of America's tomorrow.

As for "racist" Arizona, the majority of its schoolchildren are
already Hispanic. So, even if you sealed the border today, the
state's future is as a Hispanic society: that's a given. Maybe
it'll all work out swell. The citizenry never voted for it, but
they got it anyway. Because all the smart guys bemoanng the
irrational bigots knew what was best for them.

To the coastal Eloi, "undocumented immigrants" are the unseen
Morlocks who mow your lawn while you're at work and clean your
office while you're at home. (That's the real apartheid: the
acceptance of a permanent "undocumented" servant class by far too
many "documented" Americans who assuage their guilt by pathetic
self-serving sentimentalization of immigration.) But in border
states illegal immigration is life and death. A few days after
Arizona passed its new law, I gave a speech in Tucson for the
Goldwater Institute, and a lady came up to me afterwards to talk
about the camp of illegals that's pitched up on the edge of her
land, a few miles from downtown, but where the Federal Government
has posted highway "Danger" signs warning the public that travel
beyond this point is "not recommended." My audience member had no
choice in the matter: she's not passing through; this is her home
- and, if the Government of the United States is now putting up
signs explaining that its writ no longer runs, they didn't think
to warn her ahead of time. So she lies awake at night, fearful
for her children and alert to strange noises in the yard.

President Obama, shooting from his lip, attacked the Arizona law
as an offense against "fairness."" But where's the fairness for
this woman's family? Because her home is in Arizona rather than
Hyde Park, Chicago, she's just supposed to get used to living
under siege? She has to live there, while the political class
that created this situation climbs back into the limo and gets
driven far away from the intimidation, and the cartel hits, and
the remorseless ebbing of U.S. sovereignty. The fetishization of
the Undocumented is a form of class warfare waged against poor
whites by Eloi elites who don't have to live with the
consequences of the socioeconomic experiments they impose on
others.

As for "the jobs Americans won't do," most of them would be more
accurately categorized as the jobs American employers won't hire
Americans to do - because, in a business culture ever more
onerously regulated, the immigration status of one's employees
has become one of the easiest levers for controlling costs. Why
would this change? After all, as the official unemployment
climbed to 10 percent and the non-college-educated unemployment
rate hit 15 percent and the unofficial rate among blacks and
other groups rose even higher, the rote-like invocations of "the
jobs Americans won't do" was affected not a whit. If Americans
won't do them (or won't be hired to do them) even at a time of
high unemployment, maybe that's the problem that needs to be
addressed. Instead, to solve an artificially created labor
shortage, the U.S. government deemed U.S. immigration law
unenforceable and illegitimate. And so the armies of the
Undocumented will swell exponentially as Mexico dissolves into a
murderous narco-state feeding ever greater northern habits. What
is happening on the southern border is the unmaking of America.
..........