Attack of the Open Border Elites (Ingraham)

You are scanning the newspaper headlines one day and one in particular catches your eye: “Rep. Pelosi Says Arrests of Bank Robbers ’Terrorizing’”

SAN FRANCISCO -- US House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi complained that in many instances, police and other law enforcement officers "terrorize" the bank robbers and other criminals they are attempting to arrest. "Breaking into people's homes, pointing guns at them, yelling 'Freeze!' – this is all very traumatic for people who are just trying to feed their families. It is true that technically these people are breaking the law, but what does that matter when compared to the damage being done to the psyche of these poor people?"

Well, okay—Nancy Pelosi actually made the comments above about the recent arrest of hundreds of illegal aliens working for Wal-Mart, but you get the point. Pelosi called on business leaders to pressure Washington to ease immigration law because, as employers, they depend "on some people who may not be completely where they need to be legally."

Yet such goofy liberal blather isn’t limited to liberals in Marin County. They have a lot of support from the editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal, who share a strong pro-illegal immigration sentiment.

Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of illegals continue to stream across our borders each year, the Journal bemoans our “stricter policing of the southern border” because it has “made matters worse.” (For whom? Illegals? Isn’t that the point of having immigration laws in the first place?) The Journal writes that “The price of an illegal crossing has tripled since 1995, and the average U.S. stay of an undocumented Mexican had climbed to nine years by the late 1990s from just three years in the 1980s.”

First, note the Journal’s usage of the politically correct term “undocumented Mexican,” instead of “illegal alien.” It may seem like a small point, but it has larger significance. Think of how the abortion movement used the “pro-choice” lingo to obscure the truth of what they were really advocating (i.e., the right to extinguish a life). Just the other day an official from La Raza went a step further, no longer referring to them as undocumented immigrants or workers, but rather “undocumented citizens.”

Before September 11th, the Bush Administration, cheered on by the Journal and La Raza, was ready to give Mexican President Vicente Fox a nice gift—a partial amnesty for the illegals living and working here, along with a “guest worker” program to allow other non-citizens to come and work here. The attacks forced the Bush Administration to put amnesty on the back burner. (They refuse to call it amnesty, preferring to call it “family reunification”) Amnesty would have been an impossible sell since we learned that the hijackers exploited the sloppy administration of visa system and the non-existent checks at our ports of entry.

So the “open border” elites cooled their jets for a while. But now the unholy alliance between conservatives who don’t want to offend businesses and liberals who don’t want to offend Hispanic voters is stronger and more vocal than ever. They feel enough time has passed, that the rest of us will just buckle into the pressure as they ram through policy after policy that weakens our immigration laws. Last week Utah Senator Orrin Hatch managed to get the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote 16-3 in favor of a bill called the Dream Act (who could be against that?!) that would allow states to give illegals in-state tuition rates at state universities. This was hardly covered by the mainstream press. Orrin Hatch apparently doesn’t care that in poll after poll, a strong majority of Americans say they want our immigration laws vigorously enforced. (How does giving incentives and benefits to lawbreakers accomplish that?)

The left-right coalition that don't want to enforce our current laws have proposed measures that would significantly weaken those laws. Arizona Senator John McCain is co-sponsoring the Border and Immigration Improvement Act. Sounds good in name only. It is yet another attempt to pass a “temporary worker program” that promises to "direct the flow of workers into a legal framework and aid the government in getting a better handle on who's here and who's crossing the border."

If you oppose in-state tuition for illegals or amnesty for illegals, and if you support prosecuting illegals, their smugglers, and their employers, the Journal and its liberal compatriots brands you “restrictionist” or xenophobic. Or worse.

American citizenship and legal residency here is supposed to be a very big deal. Millions of people spent a lot of time and money to get here by playing by the rules. Our country, especially now, was never intended to be open to anyone in the world who can slip through our porous borders. By their constant denigration of our immigration laws, liberals and libertarians are attacking the very concept of citizenship itself. How can we ask our fellow citizens to sacrifice and fight and die for this country -- much less serve on juries, vote, and take seriously the other duties of US citizens -- if anyone can have all the privileges of a citizen just by physically getting into the country, even illegally?

The rule of law becomes meaningless if we don’t enforce the law. Why should anyone ever obey our immigration laws when there is no benefit to doing so? Why do we bother to have Congress pass laws, if the elites of society can simply choose to ignore them?

On this issue we see American elites at their absolute worst—arrogant and indifferent to the concerns and beliefs of the average American, all the while slowly tearing at the fabric of our society. All in the name of cheap labor and potential votes.

What is it with immigration reform and conservatives?

With illegal immigration from latin american countries, the country club Republicans like the cheap labor and the leftist democrats that see a potential voter base. There seem to be some well meaning conservatives that think these immigrants are natural social conservatives and will add to the economy. Reality has not borne this out.

If you advocate closing the borders and severely restricting immigration then you are labled a racist. Well, my family came here from Cuba and my wife is from Mexico and we can both see the need to close the borders and kick a few hundred thousand people the heck out of the country.

What say you my "browner than thou" critics??? I am an American, my loyalty is not hyphenated.

The failure of many immigrants to assimilate is the problem. Victor Davis Hanson in his book "Mexifornia" details it quite well. And Professor Hanson is anything but a racist.

VDH on this same general topic:

There was a time, not so long ago, when we Americans understood that newcomers did not need to be taught in their own language in our schools. Even less did we believe that their children required special classes in ethnic pride or separate, race-based college graduation ceremonies. The very idea that a national lobbying group would call itself La Raza (The Race) — and have slogans such as: “For La Raza everything; for those outside La Raza, nothing” — would have seemed to us shocking, even chilling. We believed in American civic education for immigrants, which, combined with intermarriage, integration and popular culture, led to rapid parity for those immigrants’ children in terms of education, income and influence. Needless to say, in that earlier time, immigrants came to the U.S. from Mexico largely under legal auspices and in measured numbers that did not overwhelm our once formidable powers of assimilation.

What we see going on with Mexican immigration today is a tragedy, and it is not simply a result of the federal government abdicating its responsibility to control our borders (although the federal government has certainly done precisely that). The citizens of my state of California and others are also complicit in this tragedy. For instance, millions of us who used to cut our own lawns and clean our own houses now consider such tasks beneath us, as if America’s middle class has embraced as its birthright the culture and leisure once confined to an aristocratic elite. Suddenly our young people, our poor and our unskilled find jobs picking apples or laying tiles somehow demeaning. So-called dead-end jobs are no longer a rite of passage for our youth, but are deemed proper only for unskilled laborers from Mexico, whose toil, we are assured, keeps our produce, restaurants and hotels inexpensive.

The Economics and Morality of Illegal Immigration

Thus do we get in the habit of talking about illegal immigration in economic rather than in moral terms. But consider the situation from a moral perspective. Do we really expect hard-working youths from central Mexico to work 30 years in construction, hotels or the fields without marrying, having children, losing jobs or getting hurt? And how can such workers — without legal status, education or mastery of English — support a family on $10 an hour when most native Americans can’t do so on $20? Will we continue to shrug and say, “At least the money is better than in Mexico,” or, “None of our own people will do the work,” or, “They are going to drive anyway, so let’s give them driver’s licenses” — all the easy platitudes that justify the current chaos?

Unemployment is high and rising in California, but we are told that even more illegal workers from Mexico are needed. Can it really be the case that the free market can no longer operate to attract American workers through rising wages — even assuming an absence of a pool of unskilled labor? Meanwhile, many who ought to know better champion the employer’s right to hire whomever he chooses, and assure us that Mexican immigration poses no more of a problem for the U.S. than nineteenth century Italian immigration — as if they are unaware that multiculturalism did not exist in our schools in the nineteenth century, that we do not share an adjacent open border with Italy, and that Italian immigrants did not flood our country unlawfully as part of the national strategy of the Italian government.

Those who offer up these arguments are either blind to, or shy away from, the hard facts about the tragic cycle that is being perpetuated. The tragedy unfolds like this: Kids in their teens, at great peril, sneak into America from Oaxaca. They work hard for 30 years at roofing, picking, mowing, cleaning or cooking, and then often turn to state agencies when their backs give out or their jobs dry up. Meanwhile, their children too often grow up in the barrios, not with the stern family ethic of Mexico, but instead resentful that their poorly paid and uneducated parents won no security during their decades of hard work. Often these children grow accustomed to think better even of Mexico — which they have never visited — than of the U.S. In reaction, employers express disappointment that this second generation (which has mastered neither Spanish nor English) does not toil as hard and as cheaply as its parents. So at the same time that four out of ten U.S. resident students of Mexican heritage are not graduating from California high schools, and less than one in ten are graduating from college, employers welcome a new cohort of illegal teenagers.

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