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Posted on 11/23/2003 11:55:58 PM PST by Kepitalizm
LONDON -- Immigration in Britain, as in the United States, is a sort of subterranean political issue. Opinion polls regularly show that the great majority of Brits and Americans favor lower levels of immigration and stricter rules on entry, but the elites (Republicans and Democrats, Labor and Tories, Big Business and Big Labor) in both countries support higher levels and laxer rules -- and some even favor "open borders."
This produces an unstable hegemony of the elites. Legal immigration is now almost a million new arrivals a year and the many illegal immigrants are deported only if they have committed an additional crime. And because both parties are in agreement, these major national changes pass uncriticized. Every now and then, someone proposes to ease immigration restrictions too far -- whereupon the people wake up and growl. For instance, last year the Bush administration floated the idea of an amnesty for the approximately 3 million illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States.
This provoked a popular outcry, the administration backed off, and both parties are now seeking to solve the riddle: How do you grant an amnesty to illegal immigrants without granting an amnesty. (Answer: Describe amnesty as "earned" legalization, which is the argument now being used to justify the McCain-Kolbe-Flake bill before Congress.)
Something similar has just happened in Britain. Immigration levels there have been rising silently in recent years, but the public only began to take notice with the recent publication of figures showing that more than 150,000 immigrants had arrived last year. Then David Blunkett, the Home Secretary in charge of immigration law, remarked that there was no "obvious limit" to the number of "economic migrants" that Britain could comfortably absorb. As with the amnesty of Mexican illegals, this provoked an outcry. And the seeming consensus on Britain's need for immigration began to fray.
Anyone familiar with the U.S. debate on immigration would find the British debate eerily similar. As in America advocates of higher immigration, like Blunkett, argue (a) that it is needed for economic growth, (b) that it benefits the host community economically, and (c) that in an aging economy pensions and other entitlements will collapse without immigrants to pay into the system. In the light of international experience, all three arguments are invalid. Take each in turn:
(a) Japan had the highest rate of economic growth in the world for 40 years, roughly 1950-90, during which it had no immigration whatsoever.
(b) To be sure, immigrants raise the gross national product, as Blunkett argues, but the additional wealth they create goes mainly to themselves in the form of wages. The net additional wealth going to the native-born community is minuscule. In America the National Research Council estimated that it was between $1 billion and $10 billion in a multi-trillion dollar economy.
(c) As David Coleman, Oxford professor of demography points out about the U.N. report on immigration into Europe: "To keep the support ratio constant will require 13 million immigrants a year -- or 701 million people by 2050 -- by which time 75 percent of the European Union population would be of post-1995 immigrant descent."
It is not enough, however, for opponents of (almost) uncontrolled immigration to demonstrate that the arguments claiming that immigration is a good thing are largely fallacious. What those who favor less immigration also need to establish is that high levels of immigration have bad and dangerous social effects.
This runs up against the obstacle of political correctness -- in this case the feeling that we should not point to the bad effects of immigration in case we are mistakenly thought to be claiming that immigrants are bad people. As an immigrant myself, I certainly do not believe this. But the uncontrolled arrival of millions of people into a society can have ill and unexpected effects on a nation's economy and social structure. If that is so, we should at least know what those effects are -- even if we intend to do nothing about their root cause.
And there is an immigration component in virtually every major American social problem. It aggravates poverty, unemployment and welfare dependency. Almost all of the figures for these social ills are higher and grimmer because they are impacted by immigration.
In his regular column, National Data, on the Web site www.vdare.com., Edwin S. Rubenstein (a former colleague of mine on the magazine National Review) has demonstrated by careful analysis of official statistics that:
(a) Hispanic immigrants are "crowding out" lower-paid Americans, often themselves minority workers or earlier immigrants, in the job market because they are willing to work for still lower wages.
(b) Approximately one quarter of immigrant households receive major means-tested benefits compared to 16 percent of U.S. natives. Almost 60 percent of Dominican immigrant households receive such benefits.
(c) And the "poverty rate," which fell consistently until the early seventies when higher immigration levels kicked in, has since then been increased by the arrival of poor immigrants. Rubenstein estimates that 36 percent of the U.S. poverty population is directly attributable to the post-1965 immigration.
Such problems cannot be ignored indefinitely. And as they become better known, both in Britain and the United States, the elites will find it harder and harder to maintain their shaky control of the debate.
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What debate is he talking about? Anybody out there heard this being debated lately?
The problem is slowly being recognized by the people ... but as the man says, the elites who benefit from such treasonous policies are struggling to maintain their shakey control on the issue.
Thanks to ALL the FReepers who respond to the calls, time-and-again, to contact their legislative elites concerning this problem. I believe we are forcing the issue out into the sunshine.
North Carolina had the nation's fastest-growing population of immigrants in the 1990s, but a new poll suggests that many North Carolinians would be happy to see the new arrivals go home.
Three-fourths of North Carolinians think the United States admits too many legal immigrants, according to the poll commissioned by The News & Observer.
The Research 2000 North Carolina Poll was conducted for The News & Observer from Nov. 10 through Nov. 13. A total of 600 likely voters statewide were interviewed by telephone. Those interviewed were selected by the random variation of the last four digits of telephone numbers. An exchange cross-section was selected to give an accurate ac reflection of the state. Quotas were assigned to reflect the voter registration by county.
The margin for error, according to standards customarily used by statisticians, is no more than plus or minus 4 percentage points. This means that there is a 95 percent probability that the true figure would fall within that range if the entire population were sampled. The margin for error is higher for any subgroup, such as a sex or region.
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The poll confirmed what many undocumented workers know.
"Americans think that we come here to take away what belongs to them," said Jose Martinez, who left Mexico five years ago. "But we're just here to look for decent jobs -- something we can't find in our own country."
Martinez, 25, quit his job this year as a meat cutter at a hog slaughtering plant because of what he described as horrible working conditions. He now works odd jobs and lives in Lumberton.
The state's foreign-born population jumped 274 percent in the 1990s, according to the 2000 Census. More recent census estimates indicate that the flow of immigration has continued, with Latinos, including many from Mexico, making up the majority of the state's 480,000 foreign-born residents.
The census did not collect data on whether the immigrants entered the country legally, but a wealth of evidence from law enforcement agencies and other sources indicates that many did not, and that a large percentage of the undocumented immigrants are from Mexico.
"Even though they're obeying the laws, they broke one to begin with, so why should they be able to stay?" asked Ashley Board, a 17-year-old senior at Ravenscroft School in Raleigh who plans to vote in 2004. Board was among 600 North Carolinians questioned last week in the poll conducted by Maryland-based Research 2000.
Legal immigration to the United States climbed from 798,000 in 1997 to 1,064,000 in 2002, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. During the same period, annual legal immigration to North Carolina grew from 6,000 to 13,000.
The telephone survey included two questions about immigration. Asked about the level of legal immigration, 74 percent said it was too high. Asked whether illegal Mexican workers who otherwise abide by the law should be allowed to remain in the United States, 73 percent said no. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.
More of those polled might have answered yes to the second question if it had not used the word "illegally," said Jack Pinnix, a Raleigh attorney and immediate past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
" 'Illegal' connotes all sorts of unsavory images," Pinnix said. "If the question was phrased asking about people who are in the United States 'undocumented,' you might have gotten a different result."
Others attributed the anti-immigration sentiment to the state's bleak jobs market. North Carolina's unemployment rate has been among the nation's highest for much of the year, though it dropped to 6.1 percent in October, close to the national average.
"Jobs are leaving the state, and immigrants become the way of focusing frustration and anger over job losses," said Gunther Peck, an associate professor of public policy studies at Duke University.
Some frustration has reached Congress. Lawmakers are considering legislation to urge local law enforcement officers to arrest illegal immigrants; at the same time, other bills would legalize the status of hundreds of thousands of high school students and farmworkers who entered the country illegally.
North Carolinians' opinions about immigration are not unusual.
In the summer of 2002, a nationwide survey of 2,862 people found that 70 percent believed controlling or reducing illegal immigration should be a very important goal of government. The poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations also found that 55 percent of respondents favored cutting the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country.
A Zogby International poll in February 2002 showed that 63 percent of Americans would support stopping all immigration from countries suspected of harboring terrorists. The numbers were only slightly lower when respondents were asked about immigrants from other parts of the world.
"Since Sept. 11, there's a lot of insecurity all around," said Dani Martinez-Moore, a coordinator for the Network of Immigrant Advocates in the Triangle. "Part of me thinks that's what is behind this."
Ron Woodard of Cary, the founder of a Triangle group that supports immigration curbs, said he thinks immigration will remain a sore point for most Americans only until the U.S. government reduces the flow to roughly one-third of what it is today.
"If it's brought back into balance, people will again be looking at it as a positive thing," Woodard said.
Illegals are not otherwise law-abiding. If they work, which is illegal in itself, they either evade taxes by working in the underground economy or use forged documents to get a job.
" 'Illegal' connotes all sorts of unsavory images," Pinnix [a Raleigh attorney and immediate past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association] said.
Duh!
I was thinking the same thing, what debate? The voters/taxpayers/citizens are IGNORED by the "elites". If they were listening to us, the borders would have been closed, especially after September 11. They remain virtually open. Millions of illegal aliens have entered since that fateful day. Our President has been silent about it. We can only make our voices heard at the polls in '04, otherwise we're ignored. We're only here to pay the bills.
He hammered on it for years when editor of National Review, along with fellow Brit and [legal] immigrant Peter Brimelow, author of "Alien Nation." I suspect that's a major reason O'Sullivan got booted as editor.
Illegal immigration provides new voters for the liberal elite and cheap labor for National Association of Manufacturers, big Agriculture and U.S. Chamber of Commerce elites. Since the foregoing all have virtually omnipotent lobbying power, only a serious populist revolution will even catch their attention.
These wealthy members of the same club conspired over several U.S. administrations to establish a globalized economic system via NAFTA and GATT. With those agreements in place illegal immigration is to them a temporary annoyance. After it's "normalized" via some legislation of the kind the late Senator Moynihan called "boob bait for the bubbas," a gradualist attempt will be made to dissolve borders, at least in the EU and NAFTA countries.
This will all be done "for our own good" and we'll be given the same Hobson's Choice we had in the last election: a somewhat conservative candidate like Bush who's wobbly on immigration, against an Al Gore type who'd dissolve the borders and the Constitution the day he took office. This all depends, of course, on whether the popoulist frog decides to allow itself to be gradually boiled. My bet is the frog will croak, and not out loud.
I agree with this. Many of the immigrants (both legal and illegal) who come to the United States are racist.
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