We Should Live - Ben Bateman

John Derbyshire’s latest audio commentary is one of his best, because he’s talking about a subject with which he’s very familiar: immigration. Derbyshire was born in England, took a Chinese bride, entered the US as a ‘temporary’ worker, and both are now US citizens. His best points are:

• If we were to grant entry to every person in the world who wanted to move to the United States, then our nation of 300 million would gain several hundred million more people, if not one or two billion. This would change our country beyond all recognition.
• We already have a guest worker program. In fact, we have six. Why would a seventh fix everything?

Ann Coulter’s column is titled “Importing a Slave Class“:

Apparently, my position on immigration is that we must deport all 12 million illegal aliens immediately, inasmuch as this is billed as the only alternative to immediate amnesty. The jejune fact that we “can’t deport them all” is supposed to lead ineluctably to the conclusion that we must grant amnesty to illegal aliens — and fast!

I’m astounded that debate has sunk so low that I need to type the following words, but: No law is ever enforced 100 percent.

We can’t catch all rapists, so why not grant amnesty to rapists? Surely no one wants thousands of rapists living in the shadows! How about discrimination laws? Insider trading laws? Do you expect Bush to round up everyone who goes over the speed limit? Of course we can’t do that. We can’t even catch all murderers. What we need is “comprehensive murder reform.” It’s not “amnesty” — we’ll ask them to pay a small fine.

If it’s “impossible” to deport illegal aliens, how did we come to have so much specific information about them? I keep hearing they are Catholic, pro-life, hardworking, just dying to become American citizens, and will take jobs other Americans won’t. Someone must have talked to them to gather all this information. Let’s find that guy — he must know where they are!

How do we even know there are 12 million of them? Why not 3 million, or 40 million? Maybe we should put the guy who counted them in charge of deporting them.

And she makes a familiar point:

The great bounty of cheap labor by unskilled immigrants isn’t going to hardworking Americans who hang drywall or clean hotel rooms — and who are having trouble getting jobs, now that they’re forced to compete with the vast influx of unskilled workers who don’t pay taxes.

The people who make arguments about “jobs Americans won’t do” are never in a line of work where unskilled immigrants can compete with them. Liberals love to strike generous, humanitarian poses with other people’s lives.

Something tells me the immigration debate would be different if we were importing millions of politicians or Hollywood agents. You lose your job, while I keep my job at the Endeavor agency, my Senate seat, my professorship, my editorial position or my presidency. (And I get a maid!)

The only beneficiaries of these famed hardworking immigrants — unlike you lazy Americans — are the wealthy, who want the cheap labor while making the rest of us chip in for the immigrants’ schooling, food and health care.

These great lovers of the downtrodden — the downtrodden trimming their hedges — pretend to believe that their gardeners’ children will be graduating from Harvard and curing cancer someday, but (1) they don’t believe that; and (2) if it happened, they’d lose their gardeners.

Michelle Malkin points out what appears to be widespread anti-American hatred in Mexico, or at least some very ugly incidents about which no one seems upset:

Do you remember what happened in Guadalajara in 2004 during an Olympics qualification soccer match between the U.S. and Mexico? Let me remind you:

The boos nearly drowned out “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and a few dozen fans chanted “Osama! Osama!” as the United States was eliminated by Mexico in Olympic men’s soccer qualifying.A loud anti-American crowd hollered as Mexico beat the United States 4-0 Tuesday night in the under-23 tournament, claiming a berth in the Athens Olympics. Mexico had already eliminated the U.S. baseball team from Olympic contention.

As U.S. players left the stadium for their bus, several fans — some clutching beers — chanted “Osama! Osama!” in reference to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Police in riot gear had to protect the American players. Bags of urine were tossed at the US team.

Just a tiny minority of America-haters, right? Wrong. Throughout the week-long festivities leading up to the Miss Universe pageant last night, Miss USA, Rachel Smith, was booed and heckled.

. . .

Ms. Smith, who fell during the evening gown competition but recovered gracefully, was subjected to hatred again last night during the Top Five interviews, when hecklers in the audience launched into chants of “Mexico, Mexico” and disrupted her entire interview. The two hosts of the pageant, Vanessa Minillo and Mario Lopez, did nothing to chastise the crowd for the rudeness shown to their fellow American.

At least the hecklers didn’t yell “Osama.” Or maybe the microphones just didn’t pick it up this time.

Meanwhile, as Heather Mac Donald points out, the White House continues to attack opponents of mass amnesty as “nativists.”

Yeah, we’re the nativists.

***
Update: A diehard Miss Universe follower e-mails me that another Miss USA, Kenya Moore, was booed in Mexico during the 1993 pageant.

Pageant blogger Sophie Evans notes that Rachel Smith was booed throughout the entire program last night

More flashbacks:

Go back to March 2005, when Mexico beat the U.S. 2-1 in a World Cup qualifier…

Some Mexican fans responded by chanting “Osama! Osama!'’…For Mexico, the game was a measure of revenge for the United States’ 2-0 win in the second round of the 2002 World Cup, a game that dented national pride. But that match was played in South Korea, not Mexico, where the Tricolores are 54-1-4.

A large banner in the upper deck proclaimed: `”El Gigante No Ha Muerto,'’ or “The Giant Is Not Dead Yet.'’ There was booing and whistling during “The Star-Spangled Banner'’ and derisive chants whenever Kasey Keller took goal kicks.

I quote extensively today not just out of laziness, but also because these points need hammering over and over: 1) An open borders policy would flood our country with unimaginable numbers of uneducated unskilled poor people, limited only by the cost of transportation, which is declining. 2) The point of an open borders policy is to transfer wealth from poor Americans to rich Americans. 3) A large proportion of those immigrants actively dislike America, some of them openly hate it, and a few will be terrorists.

I try to imagine what the reasonable arguments are for the open borders position, but I keep coming up short. I merely observe that uncontrolled immigration is detrimental to our country’s long-term future, and the responses seem to be:

1. “You’re an evil racist bigot.” The ad hominem argument.
2. “The USA is an evil country, and deserves to be harmed.” The far left argument.
3. “It may be bad for the country, but it’s good for my pocketbook.” The big business and liberal elite argument.
4. “It may be bad for the country, but it gets my party more voters.” The Democrat argument.
5. “It’s not bad for the country. Labor is a commodity like any other, and preventing its free flow harms us just like any other tariff.” The libertarian argument.
6. “These immigrants are solid, hardworking people, doing jobs that Americans won’t do, trying to achieve the American dream. We are a nation of immigrants. It would be un-American to slam the door on the fingers of the next generation of wretched refuse, yearning to breathe free.” The emotional argument.

Only the last two have any merit. The libertarian argument sounds great, as all libertarian arguments do. And that argument might even be reasonable—if we lived in a libertarian country. But we don’t. We live in a welfare state, with all sorts of tax-subsidized health care, welfare benefits, retirement benefits, and so forth. And that welfare state isn’t going away any time soon, so the libertarian argument might be correct, but is currently irrelevant.

The emotional argument is what has won the day in the past. But it relies on the public’s ignorance of history. The great waves of immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries were very, very different from what Pres. Bush is trying to push today. For starters, it was lawful immigration. Remember that famous poem by Emma Lazarus about immigration, with the huddled masses yearning to breathe free? She wrote that poem while contemplating the Statue of Liberty, which is on Liberty Island right next to Ellis Island, which was the major immigrant processing center. Simply put, those previous waves of immigrants were legal. They were also pressured to learn English and assimilate into our culture. And they weren’t entering a welfare state. And we had a lot of empty space out west that needed settling.
Those of us who are opposed to open borders aren’t against immigrants. I’m all in favor of immigrants. But we can’t take them all, so we have to keep some of them out. We should have laws on which may enter the country, and which may not. Those laws should favor the immigrants who will help our country most. At a minimum they should should be net tax payers, not receivers. And we already have this sort of immigration. Doctors, computer programmers, and all sorts of other smart and skilled people flock to our country every year, and we welcome them. Maybe we should have more of them; that’s a perfectly acceptable topic of debate. But demanding a massive influx of unskilled uneducated poor people is precisely the opposite of a rational immigration policy.