Posted on 07/19/2006 9:28:43 AM PDT by AppleButter
Americans are aware that their political class may not always act in their best interest. This belief is enshrined in the American character, its laws, and the very philosophy underpinning the U.S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers crafted things so that the "knaves" will be forced to abide by the will of the people, but they warned that their "natural progress" is to find ways to remain in power and increase that power at the people’s expense. They therefore also urged eternal vigilance, spiritedness, and the occasional revolt of the people.
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others got it right—the knaves have, by and large, behaved, and their actions largely reflect in some way the will of the American people. Americans do not need to engage their politicians in an uncivil way—as happens most elsewhere—since the ballot box, the media, and other constitutional tools largely suffice. Indeed, the American political system works remarkably well. However, there are a handful of topics where the elites do not act in the interests of those they govern. Of these, the most notorious is the contentious issue of immigration. Why are politicians so keen on mass immigration while the common American is not? This has perplexed analysts.
When I aided the foreign relations of presidential candidate and president-elect Vicente Fox back in 1999 and 2000, I met with almost 80 U.S. congressmen and senators during numerous trips and at several events. With just over 50 of them, my colleagues and I spoke about immigration in some depth, as it is one of the important bilateral topics. My findings were reported in a Backgrounder published by the Center for Immigration Studies called "Politics by Other Means."1 It is a dense and academic paper, but the basic finding was: Indeed, American politicians are overwhelmingly pro-immigration, for a variety of reasons, and they do not always admit this to their constituents. Of those 50 legislators, 45 were unambiguously pro-immigration, even asking us at times to "send more." This was true of both Democrats and Republicans.
These empirical findings seemed to confirm what some analysts without that level of access termed as a political "perfect storm" of widespread political-elite support for immigration despite its general unpopularity with the average American. The paradox is that immigration is the only issue (perhaps besides trade policy) that represents a notorious discrepancy between elite and popular opinion in the United States.2 But this contradicts the established conventional wisdom of a representative democracy such as the United States. If mass immigration from Latin America has debatable benefits for the United States as a whole, if a majority of the American people is against it, and if immigrants cannot vote until they become naturalized (which can take years after their arrival), why would nine-tenths of the legislators we spoke with be so keen on increasing immigration?
Before these encounters, I believed that it was a problem of either diffusion of responsibility, "creeping non-decision," or collective rationalization with those legislators, but that was dispelled the more of them we met. Most of them seemed to be aware of the negative or at least doubtful consequences of mass immigration from Latin America, while still advocating mass immigration.3
The familiar reasons usually discussed by the critics were there: Democrats wanted increased immigration because Latin American immigrants tend to vote Democrat once naturalized (we did not meet a single Democrat that was openly against mass immigration); and Republicans like immigration because their sponsors (businesses and churches) do. But there were other, more nuanced reasons that we came upon, usually not discussed by the critics, and probably more difficult to detect without the type of access that we, as a Mexican delegation, had.
Their "Natural Progress"
Of a handful of motivations, one of the main ones (even if unconscious) of many of these legislators can be found in what the U.S. Founding Fathers called "usurpation." Madison, Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and others devised a system and embedded the Constitution with mechanisms to thwart the "natural" tendency of the political class to usurp power—to become a permanent elite lording over pauperized subjects, as was the norm in Europe at the time. However, the Founding Fathers seem to have based the logic of their entire model on the independent character of the American folk. After reviewing the different mechanisms and how they would work in theory, they wrote in the Federalist Papers that in the end, "If it be asked, what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer: the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America …"4 With all his emphasis on reason and civic virtue as the basis of a functioning and decentralized democratic polity, Jefferson speculated whether Latin American societies could be governed thus.5
While Democratic legislators we spoke with welcomed the Latino vote, they seemed more interested in those immigrants and their offspring as a tool to increase the role of the government in society and the economy. Several of them tended to see Latin American immigrants and even Latino constituents as both more dependent on and accepting of active government programs and the political class guaranteeing those programs, a point they emphasized more than the voting per se. Moreover, they saw Latinos as more loyal and "dependable" in supporting a patron-client system and in building reliable patronage networks to circumvent the exigencies of political life as devised by the Founding Fathers and expected daily by the average American.
Republican lawmakers we spoke with knew that naturalized Latin American immigrants and their offspring vote mostly for the Democratic Party, but still most of them (all except five) were unambiguously in favor of amnesty and of continued mass immigration (at least from Mexico). This seemed paradoxical, and explaining their motivations was more challenging. However, while acknowledging that they may not now receive their votes, they believed that these immigrants are more malleable than the existing American: That with enough care, convincing, and "teaching," they could be converted, be grateful, and become dependent on them. Republicans seemed to idealize the patron-client relation with Hispanics as much as their Democratic competitors did. Curiously, three out of the five lawmakers that declared their opposition to amnesty and increased immigration (all Republicans), were from border states.
Also curiously, the Republican enthusiasm for increased immigration also was not so much about voting in the end, even with "converted" Latinos. Instead, these legislators seemingly believed that they could weaken the restraining and frustrating straightjacket devised by the Founding Fathers and abetted by American norms. In that idealized "new" United States, political uncertainty, demanding constituents, difficult elections, and accountability in general would "go away" after tinkering with the People, who have given lawmakers their privileges but who, like a Sword of Damocles, can also "unfairly" take them away. Hispanics would acquiesce and assist in the "natural progress" of these legislators to remain in power and increase the scope of that power. In this sense, Republicans and Democrats were similar.
While I can recall many accolades for the Mexican immigrants and for Mexican-Americans (one white congressman even gave me a "high five" when recalling that Californian Hispanics were headed for majority status), I remember few instances when a legislator spoke well of his or her white constituents. One even called them "rednecks," and apologized to us on their behalf for their incorrect attitude on immigration. Most of them seemed to advocate changing the ethnic composition of the United States as an end in itself. Jefferson and Madison would have perhaps understood why this is so—enthusiasm for mass immigration seems to be correlated with examples of undermining the "just and constitutional laws" they devised.
One leading Republican senator over a period of months was advising us, through a mutual acquaintance, about which mechanisms to follow and which other legislators to lobby in order to ensure passage of the amnesty proposal. In the meantime, he would speak on television about the need to "militarize" the border. This senator was recently singled out by a taxpayer’s advocacy group as a leader in "pork"-related politics.
Bill Richardson, who had served in Clinton’s cabinet and later became governor of New Mexico, kindly stopped to speak to our delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. He commented favorably to us: "What do Hispanics want? Fully funded government programs!" The Economist mentioned about his state:
New Mexico is a poor place, with one of the highest proportion of people living on food stamps … Its political tradition also long had a Latin American feel, based around a padrón system of clients and bosses. The bosses ran grocery stores, gave you credit, helped you if you needed a job. And all you had to do was vote for the Democrats … New Mexican politics is still about jobs, contracts and personal loyalty, not ideology. And Mr. Richardson personifies this.6
Trailer-park poverty combined with a cult of personality, where government initiatives regularly bear the governor’s name, as they would with some Latin American potentate (the governor is half Mexican himself), prevails in a state that is 40 percent Hispanic, including Hispanics already many generations in the United States.
Those that have come out supporting amnesty are also associated with other attempts to undermine the Jeffersonian and Madisonian model of democracy. Sen. Arlen Specter, for instance, a leading supporter of amnesty, years ago proposed another bill that would have changed the outcome of elections based on quotas, whereby electoral outcomes could be changed by a federal judge.7
MORE
Anchor babies are the target of the left. They know that baby juanita and juan are going to vote in rewards for padre and madre when they become eligible to vote. The anchor baby vote will be the death of the U.S.
A lot of anchor babies are already voting. The real downside is that a lot of these anchor babies' parents were granted amnesty years ago. The past 20 years worth of anchor babies are getting ready to vote and when the scamnesty goes through, we will be done. They will all be legal and elligible to vote. The republican party is a hollow shell. It's there just for looks, like the foam on a beer, it is all fluff and no substance.
I meant to add something else to my previous post to you.
'to increase the role of government in society and the economy'.
With the increase of illegals 4.4% (average) and 7% unemployment in some areas, I'm not sure how the government thinks they will be able to create jobs for everyone.
............The same can almost be said of USA!
There's a reason for that, they are deliberately trying to emulate them.
It is an historical fact that the ruling class of just any society fear the middle class and seek ways of curtailing the growth and power of a middle class. The genius of the American system uptil LBJ was that it encouraged a ruling middle class! Unique in all history. Well it has taken the elite 200 years but they have finally figured out how to kill the American middle class and it uppity Constitution.
We need to prevent this.
What about filing suit? Too bad the ACLU represents the illegals. /sarcasm
We need a good Constitutional lawyer. If we can present a reasonable case outlining various ways that the government (all branches) is abandoning its constitutional duties, the court could stop the bill long enough for more organized resistance to develop against it.
Usurpation is always with us. Take note of who is attempting to usurpt what. It's going to be a lengthy list.
They want people that don't think. We used to joke or comment about how the dems wanted to keep blacks on the plantation. Little did we know that it was both parties that wanted to keep all of us on the plantation.
BUMP!
We don't even have to wait that long. 2008
Anyone out there have a plan to make 30+ million future republicans and their dependents materialize out of thin air?
Instead why not try and preven tthe present scam and force the government to deal with the lawbreakers already in our country?
You're absolutely right, of course and it is an assault on the taxpayer/citizens. It is also discriminatory of other nations whose people try to immigrate lawfully and it disenfranchises American citizens that could be doing those jobs. Let's face it, if we didn't have 20-30% of our paychecks going to taxes, we too could afford to work for lesser wages.
What happens when scamnesty goes through? Does the government really think that the illegals WANT to keep those jobs? No. They don't really want those jobs either, but, just like American citizens that used to do those before they were taken by illegals, those jobs are for people that are in between jobs, or even new to the work force like teenagers, or people that are just traveling through. Some people still like to drift around and 'find themselves'.
At any rate, once legalized the newly legal immigrants are going to *gasp* want to get better jobs and being legal they will need to start paying taxes and OH MY that paycheck is going to dwindle and not be enough. They will need better paying jobs, like the 4-7% of already unemployed citizens.
So, the newly legal immigrants move up and another flood of illegals start to poor over the border to fill the openings left in 'jobs that Americans won't do BS' category.
It's time to end the cycle.
No disrespect intended, but I think we are perilously close to the point of no return.
"So, the newly legal immigrants move up and another flood of illegals start to poor over the border to fill the openings left in 'jobs that Americans won't do BS' category."
You forgot to mention the criminal activity that so many illegal aliens engage in. I suppose they're committing crimes that Americans won't commit.
They're getting their wish, thanks to our government who allows it.
If anyone is interested in seeing a typical "work camp" of illegal aliens in California, you know, those people who gather our crops, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBHs0sETasY
Be sure to have an old pan ready, it will make you sick.
We really need to try and prevent it. Make a list of all the ways in which it is unconstitutional and discriminatory.
If anyone is interested in seeing a typical "work camp" of illegal aliens in California, you know, those people who gather our crops, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBHs0sETasY
Be sure to have an old pan ready, it will make you sick.
______
Thanks, I'll get my barf bag and check it out.
Any suggestions on how to go about doing that?
You're right, that's something else would could point out. Anyone else stealing someone else's identity by using their social security numbers would be in deep trouble, yet the government turns a blind eye to illegals that do it. Identity theft should be punished not rewarded.
Yes I do.
What's your suggestion?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.