Posted on 05/18/2008 9:31:35 AM PDT by governsleastgovernsbest
The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has long been an indispensable voice of conservatism. As President Bush said in 2003 in awarding the Medal of Freedom to editorial page editor Robert L. Bartley shortly before his death, he—and by extension his editorial page—has been "a champion of free markets, individual liberty and the values necessary for a free society."
But there is one area in which the editorial page's policy diverges strikingly from conservative orthodoxy, and that is on the matter of immigration. To varying degrees, the paper's editorialists have inveighed in favor of a more flexible attitude toward immigration. That tendency reaches its apotheosis in the recently-released book by WSJ editorial board member Jason Riley: Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders.
Riley appeared on this weekend's Journal Editorial Report show on Fox to discuss his book with host Paul Gigot and make the case that borders should indeed be opened. Riley seemed surprisingly passive in the defense of his controversial proposal, and I personally came away unpersuaded. Here was the exchange.
View video here.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...
Open border ping to Today show list.
Just wait until the first dirty bomb goes off in America, or a first big disease plague is traced to illegals.
Have you ever seen dysfunctional, malfeasant politicians tap dance???
Hey, I’m all for a policy of “Open Borders, No Benefits”, but the Democrats won’t have it. Can’t have hordes of hard-working Poles and Czechs and Taiwanese swarming over here and living conservative lifestyles - no, any new immigrants have to be Net Benefit Consumers who know which party butters their bread. ;)
They started this junk a couple of years ago. That’s when I cancelled my subscription.
Open borders are a laudable goal. We can talk about it when Mexico decides to join the first world.
When the WSJ board members tear down the fences to their private estates, get rid of personal body guards and let us have full access to their homes and property whenever we want and wherever we want, then even I'll support open borders.
The WSJ editorial page is famous for its fiscal conservatism, but less so for its social conservatism. I don’t believe they are especially pro-life, for instance.
Amnesty is a money issue. They stand with big business and the Chamber of Commerce in wanting cheap labor, and the hell what it does to the country.
It must be said that this is very short-sighted, because if the country goes down the tubes, so will big business. What good is it to have cheap labor if the country is overrun with gangs and the government starts behaving like a Latin American dictatorship?
Which it will, if the balance tips far enough.
The WSJ is a mouthpiece for the country club GOP business owner who has made his millions on the backs of illegal immigrants and the taxpayers that pay their benefits (healthcare, education, insurance, etc, etc.). F- them!
OK. Let them in - right into the military as a “pathway to citizenship.”
The stat is that illegals are killing 25 NATIVE BORN folk a day.
And there’s the economic cost to the welfare, school and medical systems (which are already in technical bankruptcy).
My niece is an OB/GYN who took her pre-med at HAAAAVVAAAAADDD! Needless to say, she emerged from that experience a FLAMING, BLEEDING HEART LIBERAL.
Upon completing her medical training at yet another liberal university, she interned at a hospital near the border in San Diego.
It was there that a mystical transformation took place: She began to connect the heavy deductions from the GROSS EARNINGS for which she busted her butt for as many as 72 virtually sleepless hours in a row with the taxis and jalopies regularly sliding to the curb in front of the ER.
Many of them contained pregnant illegals who won the race to deliver their babies HERE. She caught many of those “anchor babies” who, under the current — and ERRONEOUS — interpretation of the 14th Amendment were IMMEDIATELY NEW AMERICANS. The mother – who, obviously, could not care for the child if she were back in her native land — could not be deported now even if the INS and the political bosses WANTED her deported . And as the mother of a new US citizen, the woman could remain here for about as long as she cared to – and that was usually for life.
Most of those patients were welfare recipients and the deliveries were charity cases: The bill for the hospital’s – and HER services – were routinely spread over the bills of those who DO pay. And what the other users of those facilities don’t cover went back to the taxpayers.
And since my niece was now a taxpayer, they were costing HER.
And while she may not exactly be a libertarian, today she’s now a LOOONNNNG way from Haaaavaaaaaad.
And just so the bleeders who might see this don’t think me some sort of ethnocentric bigot, I submit this problem is MORE than just about illegals.
Before my oldest daughter was born at University Hospital in Cleveland in 1967, I sat in the main lobby as welfare mother-to-be after welfare mother-to-be shuffled through the door to the maternity ER for THEIR free deliveries.
Before WE could take OUR daughter home, I had to cough up over 3 grand. And that was a great deal of dough in 1967, especially for a guy just out of the USAF.
As I wrote the check, I remembered the magazine article I’d recently read by a hospital administrator from Massachusetts who admitted that all US hospitals practiced a form of medical Marxism, spreading the costs of care for indigents over the bills of those who DO pay for care. Given the move to socialism here, it probably will never be otherwise: Not counting Byzantine complexity and confusion, government produces – and has — NOTHING unless it first takes it from some PERSON. SOMEBODY ALWAYS PAYS.
Look, I have a big enough problem paying for the 3rd and 4th generation slackers and welfare bums who were BORN here.
It’s time we stopped paying for those who were not.
That’s fine—they can all live at Mr. Riley’s house and he can foot all the food/medical/living expense bills for them, what say you???
D’oh. We HAVE open borders. For LEGAL immigrants. Good grief.
And they can't put a dollar value on a law-abiding, disease-free, socially harmonious society. If they ever get their open society and they can no longer move about with impunity, trusting that they or their family members won't be kidnapped or raped, one wonders if they'll realize only then what they've lost.
Sad to say, with their inability to see anything beyond its material worth, the WSJ board has become a capitalist self-parody.
Sadly, my friend, there isn't one thing that "We the People" can do to these people to make them pay in a meaningful way. Sure, we can throw them out of office, but they leave with their pensions intact, free to go back to whatever lives they lived before congress.
They can reek misery and strife on the American People, dust off their hands, and say that they tried as hard as they could. They would, to a man, blame it on their constituents, saying that the stupid people didn't understand what wonderful benifits that they could have had.
I want a way to make someone who inflicts great damage on us to pay....jail, death senetnce(no chance), or as a minimum, putting them in stocks so people can publicly riducule them and throw rotten eggs and tomatoes at them.
I’m happy I subscribe to IBD.
Just another one of Grover Norquist's puppets-on-a-string.
I saw a little bit of this interview, and it left me screaming at the TV. Mr. Riley was insisting that the Hispanics coming across the Mexican border are learning to speak English. Bullbleep! I don’t know where Mr. Riley lives, but I’m guessing it’s not in a border state. I challenge him to come live in Texas for a few years and see what he says about it then.
This guy was on with Lou Dobbs the other night. As could be imagined, things did not go well.
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