Star Parker: GOP Needs Tough Love, Not Abandonment

World Net Daily ^ | October 14, 2006 | Star Parker

[Paul Ross]

GOP needs tough love, not abandonment

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By Star Parker, World Net Daily, October 14, 2006

A survey just released by the Pew Center shows that 51 percent of Democrats are enthusiastic about voting in 2006 as opposed to 33 percent of Republicans. This is almost a mirror image of what the picture looked like in 1994.

A Pew Center poll also shows a precipitous drop in support for Republicans and the Bush administration among white evangelicals. It's now a little over 50 percent, whereas in 2004 it was closer to 75 percent.

Given the realities staring us in the face, none of this is a surprise. I know that these polls reflect the facts accurately just from reading my mail.

Republicans and conservatives are fed up with their party and their representatives. But can it be that anything is better than what we now have?

I've gotten letters telling me that I've sold out, because I've written that we should not abandon the Republican Party because at least there is a chance of fixing it. What do we gain by allowing Democrats, who are wrong on everything, to regain power, just to express anger at wayward Republicans?

I'm as mad as everyone else. In fact, I think I've been madder – and mad longer – than everyone else.

I've been arguing for years that although the current administration pays lip service to traditional values, it has missed the central point that limited government is the other side of the same coin as traditional values.

Big government and a moral, traditional and genuinely free society simply cannot go together. It's worth remembering the observation of British historian Lord Acton that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The correlation between the amount of power that we put in the hands of politicians and the tendency of those politicians to become corrupt is a human reality, not a partisan one. We can expect it from Republicans as well as Democrats.

Given the failure of the current Republican regime to limit government and to actually find reasons to grow it, what we're seeing today should come as no surprise.

Nevertheless, I still will argue that we shouldn't take our eye off the ball. Conservatives need to stay focused on what we, and all Americans, need – traditional values and limited government – and continue to push positively toward this end. Despair is no answer and will only make things work.

With all the comparisons to 1994, it shouldn't be forgotten that Republicans ran in 1994 on a positive agenda – the Contract with America. Americans voted for something in '94.

I'm adding nothing new to point out that there is no Democratic agenda in 2006. There are only Democrats looking for power and trying to grab it by taking advantage of Republican incompetence. Unfortunately, not a challenge.

We ought to think back further than 1994 and go back to 1976 when Jimmy Carter was elected president. There are a lot of similarities between what is happening now and the picture then.

The country was still traumatized by the aftermath of the Vietnam War, by having a president resign as result of the Watergate scandal, and what was then called the "energy crisis."

Carter was elected to bring fresh air to Washington. He sold himself as a man of the people who would bring decency back to Washington. Fed up Americans voted for him in hope that he would indeed bring back the fresh air that they wanted to breathe.

Unfortunately, like all so-called populists, what Carter really believed in was government and not people. To deal with our energy problems, he created a new Department of Energy. To deal with our education problems, he created a new Department of Education.

Four years later, we had double-digit inflation, 20 percent interest rates, a doubling of energy prices and Americans held hostage in Iran.

The country had to go through even greater trauma than it was in before the 1976 election to open the door for the Reagan era four years later.

Do we have to go through this again? Is the only path to electing Republicans who really believe in traditional values and limited government to throw out the current rascals, lock, stock and barrel, and elect Democrats who will show us how bad things really can get?

There is no question that current Republican leadership has lowered the bar, but let's not forgot just how free this country is. We ultimately get the leadership that we want and are willing to tolerate.

I think conservatives let our elected Republican officials off too easy these past years by tolerating an excessive growth of government that itself was symptomatic that there was a problem.

The answer is to get refocused, clarify our principles and fix the party.

The question is if we'll have to do it sitting on the sidelines while the Democrats turn what is bad into what is worse.

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[Paul Ross]

Ping.

Stil searching for honest men, I'm afraid...

[gcruse]

If you don't think Pelosi will be running the senate, then you are lacking in political knowledge. PELOSI will be next in line to be Majority Speaker.. If the Democrats win the Majority, who do you think will be the new Leader?? P E L O S I ............Duh

Duh, yourself, mom. I'll stand by my political knowledge that Pelosi is a congresswoman, not a senator.

http://www.house.gov/pelosi/

[Nav_Mom]

hahahahahahahahahaahahah
I stand corrected.
I'll slink away now (with a red face)
Thats what I get for typing angry.

[B4Ranch]

It is great to see that your lights are getting brighter. Of course you realize that those who haven't located their dimmer switch will call you a conspiracy theorist, don't you.

[Paul Ross]

Did you ever see this report, Why Borders Cannot Be Open?

Very well-reasoned and forthright in its analysis:

This is the html version of the file http://www.populationenvironmentresearch.org/papers/Colemanmigration.pdf.
G o o g l e automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.
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International Union for the Scientific Study of Population.

XXIV General Population Conference, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Plenary Debate no 4. Friday 24 August 2001

Why borders cannot be open

1. A more moderate position.

Let us start with something on which we can all agree. That is that some degree of

international migration, in both directions, variable over time and space, is normal for any

modern society in peacetime. In free societies, borders are never totally closed. Neither have

they ever been in peacetime; the caricature of ‘Fortress Europe’ exists only in the imagination

of migration enthusiasts. No fortress lets out a million people per year, or lets in up to two

million each year, as Western Europe has over the last decade.

People wish to move, for their own benefit, for all sorts of reasons; for better pay, to join a

spouse or a parent, to benefit from more welfare or security. Receiving societies can benefit.

For example, demand for labour may indeed be more easily satisfied if people can be

recruited from abroad. At other times, however, the same country will export labour rather

than import it. Most developed countries do both at once. That is natural in view of the ups

and downs of economic cycles, international differences in economies and labour markets,

and frictional forces in economic systems.

Whether migrants always benefit the population that is expected to receive them is quite

another matter, however. The only unequivocal beneficiary of migration is the migrant.

Whether their movement benefits the people in the country of destination all depends on

circumstances. That is why borders cannot be fully open, just as in peacetime they cannot be

fully closed. Most legal international migrants both to the US and to Europe in recent decades

have not been labour migrants but spouses, dependants, relatives, students, asylum claimants,

for whom demand is less clear. Many enter illegally or on various short-term pretexts seeking

to stay and improve their position by any available means. And even the economic benefits of

labour migration, once uncritically acclaimed, are less clear than they were (Borjas 1996,

Wardensjo 1999) and may well in some cases be negative when all costs are considered. Too

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easy an access to immigrant labour can create distortion and dependency in an economy. Any

large modern society which finds that it in some way ‘needs’ constant flows of immigrants,

always inwards, over a long time, is suffering from problems with its society or labour market

or economy which it ought to rectify by reforming itself, not depending on the rest of the

world.

More generally, the idea of fully open borders is hardly compatible with the principle of the

nation state or the coherent identity of its society, the existence of which depends on

controlling its membership and its boundaries. The level of migration must be for each

society and for its electorate to decide, rather than some uniform international migration

order, for social and political reasons even more than economic ones. In this respect it is like

any other major measure affecting a society and its well-being. Let those who want open

borders open theirs. Others who take a different view can then see what happens.

2. Open borders an extreme proposition; a kind of free market fundamentalism..

‘Open borders’ is urged as a parallel to ‘free trade’, as though people were goods. But goods

do not go where they are unwanted, goods have no rights or feelings, goods do not reproduce

or vote, goods can be sent back or scrapped when no longer needed. Immigration concerns

people, not objects, and consequently (depending on its scale) its political and social

importance is potentially much greater than any economic effects it may have. The inability of

economic models to accommodate political, social and cultural effects underlines the fact that

immigration policy is far too important a matter to be left to economists.

All areas of human activity have safeguards and regulations because markets are imperfect. It

would be a very harsh world without them. Absolutely free movement of people is no more

possible that is absolute free trade. Trade is never free, only free-er, and ‘free trade’ always

depends on negotiated conditions. ‘Free markets’ in goods are very far from a free-for all. All

trade and open markets are limited by conditions on labour and quality and safety in order to

protect citizens, workers and customers: health and safety regulations, environmental

regulations, consumer protection legislation. Throughout society freedom of action is

constrained by considerations of welfare and the rights of others, to protect citizens from the

imperfections of markets. That is why we have insurance for health and unemployment and

welfare arrangements to protect people from old age, illness, hazards, misfortune, and forces

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to maintain the law and security. Similar conditions must apply to migration to protect

citizens and society in general from its adverse effects.

3. Argument should not be dominated by economics or the interests of business.

Liberal arguments in favour of uncontrolled migration tend to give first place to business

interests and economic criteria, even though on other matters liberal critics are usually in the

forefront of attempts to control the excesses of capitalism. In no other area of public policy

are we urged to believe without doubting whatever business has revealed about its supposed

labour needs, and to give it all it wants. Business interests however are short-term. Easy

immediate access to labour will always be preferred to the costs of training and capital

investment for the longer term. In the nature of economic cycles, yesterday’s essential labour

can often become, as the defunct factories and mills of Europe have shown, today’s

unemployed. Employers who demanded immigrant labour are not held to account for this or

required to contribute to subsequent costs of their unemployed former workers. Few things

are more permanent that temporary worker from a poor country. If business were made

responsible for the lifetime costs of their migrant labour in the same way as they must now

deal with the lifetime environmental costs of their products, perhaps enthusiasm for labour

migration might be moderated and make way for longer-term investment in capital-intensive

restructuring.

Countries are, after all, not just a set of economic levers. We no longer accept the argument

that ‘what is good for General Motors is good for the United States’ in any other area of

policy and should not in respect of migration either. Societies are not workshops where

anyone can drop in, do some work, if they like, do nothing if they like. They are, however

loosely, communities of people with shared values, commitments, identities, origins and

aspirations.

4. Economic arguments for the general benefits of a no- borders world are

unsatisfactory

Let us set aside these broader issues for a moment and consider the economic arguments.

According to elementary economic theory, uncontrolled migration is always beneficial

because labour is then enabled to flow from countries with abundant cheap labour and little

capital to high wage areas where labour is scarce but capital abundant. Free migration is

expected to equalise the ratio of capital to labour everywhere, until an equilibrium is reached

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where wages have equalised and capital efficiency is maximised. Net migration then ceases.

In the process wage inflation has been checked and output maximised and global average

income raised.

However these simple assumptions are seldom satisfied. Poor counties with population to

spare greatly outweigh destination countries. Compared with the latter, their populations are

effectively infinitely large. The equalization of wages expected from this process means lower

wages in the receiving countries. Elementary political theory and practice tells us the wage

reductions so welcome to economists and employers are distinctly unattractive to employees

and electorates. Most migrants do not bring capital with them, in addition many move for

reasons little connected with the labour market. So instead, the votaries of migration now

spend much effort assuring us that the theoretically ‘desirable’ macro-economic deflationary

consequences of migration (i.e. reducing wages) cannot actually arise, but that all can benefit

from higher incomes. The latter argument is looking increasingly threadbare as evidence

mounts that the effect is divisive. Previous immigrants, and the poorer sections of society,

suffer adverse consequences while the middle class may enjoy cheaper services from migrant

labour.

The ‘segmented labour market’ (e.g. Cain 1976) provides another escape clause; that some

jobs will not be done by locals and must be done by immigrants. However one of the reasons

why locals will find some jobs unattractive is because it is mostly immigrants who perform

them. If employers can pay immigrant, not local wages, they thereby become dependent on

perpetual immigrant labour, in some cases illegal. The concept of segmented labour markets

finds little empirical support on a large scale. Where such segmented markets do exist they

tend to be a function of excessively low wages, insufficient capitalisation of the function in

question or excessive levels of employment protection in the regular economy running hand

in hand with illegal immigrant employment. The suggestion that some unattractive jobs must

in future be done by foreigners implies a permanent ethnically distinct underclass. That notion

should be contrary to the principles of any society which favours equality of opportunity and

opposes ethnic or racial discrimination.

5. Conventional economic assessments of migration are incomplete

Theory apart, what can empirical analyses of the economic effects of migration tell us? Quite

often these analyses come to favourable conclusions about the economic consequences of

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large- scale migration or at least of the absence of serious deleterious effects. Benefits are

particularly obvious in specific new growing sectors of the economy, usually involving high-

skill professional or managerial workers. But the process is often two-way, between countries

in the developed world. The overall net effect of all migration is usually judged to be

relatively weak compared with other economic factors. For example a recent careful but

limited analysis of the fiscal effect of immigration in the UK (Gott and Johnson 2002)

concluded that the costs were £28.8 billion, the benefits £31.2 billion and the net benefit was

the difference between these two large numbers, namely £2.5 billion. This marginal benefit

however explicitly excluded various costs which are known to be higher than average for

immigrants; the additional costs of education, of crime and prisons, and the fiscal drain of

remittances, the sums (well over £1 billion) spent on asylum claimants. A recent Danish study

(Schultz-Nielsen 2001) distinguished between Western and non-Western immigrants,

estimating a net cost for the latter.

Whether net cost or benefit, the effects amount to only a small percent of GDP either way,

which must be discounted on a per caput basis by the increase in population occasioned by

immigration. For example even if the results of the UK study noted above are taken at face

value, the £2.5 billion fiscal gain from immigration comprises just 0.25% of the 2000 GDP of

£944.7 billion. Furthermore this is actually less than the contribution of net immigration to

UK population growth (0.31%), so that per caput GDP is apparently made lower as a

consequence of immigration. The US National Research Council (Smith and Edmonston

1997) concluded that all immigration (legal and illegal) added between $1 billion and $10

billion per year to a US economy growing at $400 billion per year, and of course also adding

about 0.5% per year to population growth. All studies point to the differential impact of

immigration on the poorer and richer elements of the host society, and the benefits arising

from highly educated immigrants compared to the costs of those with little education.

It seems perverse to imagine that the economic dynamism of the US is somehow mostly due

to immigration, as enthusiasts for migration to Europe have claimed. The reverse seems closer

to the truth. Immigration to the US is high because it has one of the most dynamic economies

in the world, with low levels of welfare and regulation and a high tolerance of inequality,

plenty of space, and relatively open to immigration (most of which is non-economic).

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6. Externalities of immigration

On the whole, economic analysis only considers factors which economists can easily measure.

Externalities which may be difficult to measure, politically embarrassing or politically

incorrect tend to be ignored: the Home Office report cited above is a typical case. The easier

elements are the level of income and of taxes paid set against welfare, unemployment and

pension costs; The more difficult elements include the costs of education (often complicated

by language difficulties and novel cultural needs), the costs of regeneration of urban areas or

of new building for immigrant populations, which otherwise could have been demolished. In

general in Europe, crime levels and public order problems are more severe among the ethnic

minority populations of recent immigrant origin (Smith 1994), particularly in respect of street

crime, and syndicates involved in drugs, prostitution and the trafficking of illegal immigrants

in which asylum claimants appear to be particularly involved. Statistics on offences and on

incarceration make this reasonably clear but the associated costs are never included in cost-

benefit analyses. Particularly in the English-speaking world a large and pervasive ‘race

relations industry’ has grown up employing in the UK tens of thousands of people and

consuming the time of many more others, concerned with integration and re-training

programmes, of equal opportunities and ethnic target enforcement, numerous legal

proceedings, ethnic monitoring. This too has seldom if ever been costed; it is a counterpart of

the even bigger ‘migration industry’ (Salt 2001).

More strategically, migration distorts economies and creates dependence on further migration.

It allows obsolete low-wage, low-productivity enterprises to continue in poor conditions,

which otherwise would have to raise the wages of their workers, introduce more capital

intensive processes or export the function to the countries where it could be performed more

cheaply for everyone’s benefit. For example the textile mill towns and foundry towns of

Northern England, unmodernised and failing in the 1960s, which were able to struggle on for

a further decade before finally and inevitably closing, thanks to the availability of immigrant

labour. Those towns now have substantial and fast-growing badly-integrated ethnic minority

populations with high levels of unemployment and segregation, and in 2001 suffered serious

race riots. Britain’s inadequate nationalised National Health Service has depended for

decades, uniquely in Europe, on foreign doctors and nurses. Their availability has permitted it

to survive as Europe’s most under-funded and inadequate health service offering poor

conditions to its staff and a poor service to its patients. As a result of this dependence on the

supply of medical personnel from overseas, UK medical training has accordingly fallen to a

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level quite inadequate to supply medical personnel from domestic resources, and necessary

radical reform has been deferred.

7. Empirical record of immigration

In Europe, the long-term record of immigration is not very encouraging. High skill workers

recruited through work permit or moved by inter-company transfers bring undoubted benefits

(Dobson et al. 2001). Otherwise the record of mass migration is very mixed. Most

immigrants, to Europe or to the US are not workers; up to 80% of immigrants to Europe in

recent years and about 75% of those to the US. Many who do not enter as workers may

nonetheless work, of course, but they do not do so as a result of any evaluation of the needs of

the labour market and their skills are usually of a low level. Consequently the level of

unemployment of foreign (continental Europe) or ethnic minority populations (in the UK), in

the second as well as in the first generation, is usually at least double the national average.

Furthermore, workforce participation rates are typically lower than the national average: at the

extreme just 20% and 30% among Bangladeshi and Pakistani women in the UK (Sly and

Thair 1999). Although there are a number of successful ethnic minority and foreign

populations, in general their skill and workforce situation leads to a concentration of poverty

and other negative measures among these groups. Traditional cultural norms - variously large

family size, non-working wives, lone-parent households, high teenage fertility can make the

solution of poverty more intractable (Berthoud 1998) .

Cultural diversity created by post-war immigration in societies formerly more homogeneous

societies used to be regarded as a problem requiring a difficult process of acculturation or

assimilation on the part of immigrants. Now, at least in the English-speaking world, multi-

cultural policy requires such diversity to be (officially) ‘celebrated’ as a permanent cultural

asset to which the host society must adapt, although its benefits beyond a wider range of

ethnic restaurants for the middle classes, and new kinds of pop music for youth, appear to be

rather hard to specify. Critics of multicultural policy, however, claim that it helps to preserve

the isolation and segregation of immigrant populations and the perpetuation of new social

divisions in Western society which may be associated with serious conflicts of interest and of

loyalties.

.

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8. Security problems

Problems of security have been highlighted since the atrocities of September 11

th

2001, with

the painful realisation from opinion surveys in some European countries that substantial

proportions of immigrant populations, including the young of the second generation, do not

side with their host society in recent conflicts, do not disapprove of the actions of al-Qaeda

and that a minority even applaud them. Even before those events threw problems of security

and national solidarity into such sharp focus, mass migration had already imported into

Western countries conflicts from other parts of the world, with separatist and revolutionary

movements (Kurds against Turks, Sikhs against Indians) complicating domestic and foreign

policy in new ways.

9. Immigrants as demographic salvation?

What about the future labour force and the problems of population decline and population

ageing in a developed world where birth rates are low and survival long? Surely it is

convenient that immigration pressures should be so high just when, it is claimed, Europe’s

populations are beginning to ‘need’ more immigrants to rescue them from population ageing

and preserve the ‘potential support ratio’ of people of working age to pensioners, as a UN

report has recently suggested (UN 2000, 2001)?

In fact population ageing is inevitable; it has no ‘solution’ although with suitable reforms it

can be managed as long as the birth rate does not fall too low. Longer lives and fewer babies

will eventually give all mankind an older population structure, forever. Today’s relatively

favourable support ratios in the developed world are a passing inheritance of the 20

th

century

(Coleman 2002). To preserve the present ratio of people of working age to pensioners in the

European Union (about 4:1) up to 2050 would require an average of 13 million additional

immigrants per year every year to 2050, by which time the population would have more than

tripled to over 1,228 million (about that of China), with a further doubling before 2100. Even

a rise in births to the replacement level of about 2.1 children, a more desirable outcome which

would not inflate population, could only restore the ratio to about 3:1. However given a

reasonable birth rate, much can be done to ameliorate the effects of an unavoidable decline in

support ratio by non-demographic means; improving workforce participation, discouraging

early retirement, reforming pensions schemes and productivity and above all by moving

retirement age gradually upwards.

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Turning to the labour force, reductions in the size of the working-age population are projected

for the medium term for most European countries, and much sooner for some. However, the

European Union has the lowest level of employment of persons of working age of any major

economic group of countries world wide- scarcely 62%. In Spain and Italy only about 53% of

the working age population is actually in work. There, rigid job protection, high

unemployment and high levels of illegal immigration have co-existed for years. Reforming

Europe’s rigid labour markets. its excessive levels of ‘social protection’, its damaging pattern

of early retirement and its vulnerable pay-as-you-go pension schemes is clearly politically

very difficult. The future of the EU depends on becoming more productive, and easy access to

the short-term expedient of additional migrant labour will only delay and further complicate

essential reform. Given moderate rises in workforce participation expected by Eurostat, only

Italy will show a smaller working age population in 2020 than in 2000 (Feld 2000). After that,

other measures will need to be taken. Changing conditions so that women will feel able to

produce the number of children which they consistently say they want (at least two) is first

priority on grounds of welfare, gender equity and the long-term future of the population.

Immigration can ‘preserve’ population size if that is thought to be important, indeed at the

moment immigration is so high that it has promoted population growth in some European

countries to a level which some find undesirable, because of pressure on housing and land.

10. Long-term effects of mass migration - ethnic replacement.

In the end, any level of net immigration into a country with below-replacement fertility will

eventually replace the original population with one of immigrant origin. Even with the United

States’ high fertility, white non-Hispanics are officially projected to become the minority

shortly after 2050. Populations of immigrant origin of about 30% of the national total and

rising are projected before that date in Denmark and in Germany. How far this ethnic

replacement is thought to be a problem must reside with the electorates concerned. But on

present trends that is the indicated outcome, and much sooner for some major cities with large

immigrant settlement.

11. The long run

In the end we are all going to have to learn to do without the short-term expedient of large-

scale migration and address instead the more difficult long-term solution of problems. In

retrospect , the present situation will come to be regarded as highly transient. Today’s

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situation whereby a minority of receiving countries taking in surplus population from poor

sending countries with high population growth may be typical of the first part of the 21

st

century but it will not long remain so (Lutz et al 2001). Towards the end of the century

populations of more and more countries are likely to stabilise or even to decline and the world

will start running out of potential migrants. We will have to learn then to live on limited

labour supply in exactly the same way that we will have to learn to live on limited natural

resources, and husband our own demographic resources, not depend on those from elsewhere.

The closeness of the parable to sustainable development is clear. The world will not forgive

the developed countries today, in the vanguard of the human experiment of living without

population growth, if they throw away the chance to reform their society and productivity

because of a preference for the short-term convenience of immigration

12. Conclusion

Migration has its place in every civilised society and can bring benefits to individuals and to

the society as a whole. But like all other human activities it must be kept subject to law, not

become a free-for-all, and organised or limited according to democratically-expressed

preferences of the society being affected by it. Free movement of goods and free movement of

people are not parallel cases. It is regrettable that some economic liberals appear to be

incapable of seeing the difference between goods and people, and that some political liberals

cannot acknowledge a distinction between citizens and foreigners. Those who promote large-

scale migration seldom have to live with its consequences. Even Adam Smith admitted that

people were the most difficult baggage to transport over borders. Only those in favour of

unbridled capitalism, those who put the short-term interests of employers before anything

else, those who cannot see that a society’s boundaries must be protected, can be in favour of

‘open borders’.

Selected references.

Berthoud, R, (1998) The Incomes of Ethnic Minorities, Essex, Institute for Social and

Economic Research

Borjas, G. J. (1999). Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy.

Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Cain, G. (1976). "The Challenge of segmented labor market theories to orthodox theories. A

survey." Journal of Economic Literature: 1215 - 1257.

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Coleman, D.A. (2002) Replacement Migration, or why everyone is going to have to live in

Korea: a fable for our times from the United Nations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal

Society B 357, 583 - 598.

Dobson, J., Koser, K., McLaughlan, G. and J. Salt (2001) International Migration and the

United Kingdom: Recent Patterns and Trends. London, Home Office.

European Commission (1998). Demographic Report 1997. Luxemburg, Office for Official

Publications of the European Commission (Part 1 deals with future labour force matters).

Feld, S. (2000). "Active Population Growth and Immigration Hypotheses in Western Europe."

European Journal of Population 16(3 - 40).

Gott, C. and K. Johnson (2002) The migrant population in the UK: fiscal effects. London,

Home Office.

Lutz, W., Sanderson, W. and S. Scherbov (2001) The End of World Population Growth.

Nature 412, 2 august 2001 543 - 545.

Martin, P. and J. Widgren (2002). "International Migration: Facing the Challenge."

Population Bulletin 57(1): 3 - 40.

Salt, J. (2001). The Business of International Migration. International Migration into the 21st

Century. Essays in honour of Reginald Appleyard. M. A. B. Siddique. Cheltenham, Edward

Elgar: 86 - 108.

Schultz-Nielsen, M. L. (2001). The Integration of non-Western immigrants in a Scandinavian

labour market: the Danish experience. Copenhagen, Statistics Denmark.

Smith, J.P. and B.Edmonston (eds) The New Americans: Economic, Demographic and Fiscal

Effects of Immigration. Washington DC, National Academy Press.

Smith, D. J. (1994). Race, Crime and Criminal Justice. The Oxford Handbook of

Criminology. M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner. Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1041 - 1117.

Sly, F., T. Thair, et al. (1999). "Trends in the Labour Market Participation of Ethnic Groups."

Labour Market Trends December 1999: 631 - 639.

United Nations (2000). Replacement Migration: Is it a Solution to Declining and Ageing

Populations? New York, United Nations.

United Nations (2001). United Nations Expert Group Meeting on Policy Responses to

Population Ageing and Population Decline, New York 16-18 October. New York, United

Nations.

Wadensjö , E. (1999) Economic Effects of Immigration. in Coleman, D. A. and E. Wadensjö

(1999). Immigration to Denmark: International and national perspectives. Aarhus, Aarhus

University Press.

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D.A. Coleman,

Department of Social Policy and Social Work

Barnett House, Wellington Square,

Oxford OX1 2ER United Kingdom

david.coleman@socres.ox.ac.uk

http://www.apsoc.ox.ac.uk/oxpop/

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[B4Ranch]

I don't need their approval to sleep at night knowing that we have been deceived by the Republican Party.

[B4Ranch]

Yes, I breezed through it a few years ago. I wish a copy had fluttered across Bush's desk.

[texastoo]

This is a good thread.

IMO, the Republican party is very worried about this election. I wouldn't be surprised to see them lose the senate but retain the house. Right now Bush is into photo ops for the grassroots any way he can get them. He even had a photo op with conservative talk radio hosts.

IMO, there is a whole lot of anger in the conservative base. In 2004, the conservative base was basically told by Carl Rove not to speak of illegal immigration. Now 2 years later and many more illegals in this country sucking up welfare, free hospitalization, crowding schools, ect. people are very angry.

People are also angry that they are told that it (the SPP) is on the internet. This is just an excuse for the whitehouse not to have to talk about it. Many people don't have computers and not all people are political junkies.

There is no reason for not announcing this policy with the OAS'

http://www.state.gov/p/wha/rls/rm/2006/73727.htm

excerpt...

the Bush administration has doubled its official foreign assistance since coming into office ($862,452,000 in FY2001 to $1,819,423,000 in FY2005), and the figure has tripled since 1997 ($681,426,000).

excerpt...

Remittances are another Summit success story: a total of $60 billion is expected to flow to the region in 2006, with over 75% coming from the United States. Our efforts with Mexico, working with banks in both countries, dropped remittance costs by up to half. We need to expand programs to channel remittances into investment in local poor communities.

Each year the figure in remittances increases along side the increase in illegal aliens.

[Paul Ross]

It is great to see that your lights are getting brighter.

Why thank you.

Of course you realize that those who haven't located their dimmer switch will call you a conspiracy theorist, don't you.

Yes. But, I would mention that even such esteemed luminaries as David Horowitz and Robert Locke doesn't flinch at calling it that: The Open-Borders Conspiracy. And after the Guest Worker Amnesty debacle, those deploying those deprecations have been winnowed down to those who are irrebuttably NOT CONSERVATIVE.

All real conservatives explicitly reject the Open Borders travesty. See Schlafly, and Michelle Malkin. And the hirelings who apparently still try to defend it by denial of existence, can't very well argue that Vincente Fox and his hand-picked successor didn't push non-stop for Open Borders.

As from this PBS report of Vincente Fox in 2000 Opening Borders
Or the phony libertarians as here: For Open Borders. and here
And notoriously pimping for it, the Wall Street Journal. And not just the News Division. Open Nafta Borders? Why Not?

Most of these are pre-911 opinions. Isn't it interesting that they have not been modified for the most part even one iota since 9-11, with the exception of the throw-away "security" justification asserted without any logic or substance.

To me, it looks like Vincente Fox got everything he has wanted. Just not totally in the open.

[B4Ranch]

>the hirelings who apparently still try to defend it by denial of existence,<

But life is soooo much easier for them when wearing those blinders from the truth.

[A. Pole]

[...]
More generally, the idea of fully open borders is hardly compatible with the principle of the nation state or the coherent identity of its society, the existence of which depends on controlling its membership and its boundaries. The level of migration must be for each society and for its electorate to decide, rather than some uniform international migration order, for social and political reasons even more than economic ones. In this respect it is like any other major measure affecting a society and its well-being. Let those who want open borders open theirs. Others who take a different view can then see what happens.

Open borders an extreme proposition; a kind of free market fundamentalism.. "Open borders" is urged as a parallel to "free trade", as though people were goods. But goods do not go where they are unwanted, goods have no rights or feelings, goods do not reproduce or vote, goods can be sent back or scrapped when no longer needed. Immigration concerns people, not objects, and consequently (depending on its scale) its political and social importance is potentially much greater than any economic effects it may have. The inability of economic models to accommodate political, social and cultural effects underlines the fact that immigration policy is far too important a matter to be left to economists. [...]

Great find!

[Paul Ross]

At the risk of triggering an internal donny-brooke, I feel we do need to educate a good chunk of the Base still, at least ideaologically. Consistent with this above-noted critique by the British economist, I think Robert Locke has correctly identified a problem "behind our lines" as indicated here:

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March 14, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative

Marxism of the Right

by Robert Locke

Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake.

There are many varieties of libertarianism, from natural-law libertarianism (the least crazy) to anarcho-capitalism (the most), and some varieties avoid some of the criticisms below. But many are still subject to most of them, and some of the more successful varieties—I recently heard a respected pundit insist that classical liberalism is libertarianism—enter a gray area where it is not really clear that they are libertarians at all. But because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill is a kind of commonplace “street” libertarianism, I decline to allow libertarians the sophistical trick of using a vulgar libertarianism to agitate for what they want by defending a refined version of their doctrine when challenged philosophically. We’ve seen Marxists pull that before.

This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.

The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.

Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.

Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be comically inefficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the factory that emitted it and sue?

Libertarians rightly concede that one’s freedom must end at the point at which it starts to impinge upon another person’s, but they radically underestimate how easily this happens. So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it.

Libertarians in real life rarely live up to their own theory but tend to indulge in the pleasant parts while declining to live up to the difficult portions. They flout the drug laws but continue to collect government benefits they consider illegitimate. This is not just an accidental failing of libertarianism’s believers but an intrinsic temptation of the doctrine that sets it up to fail whenever tried, just like Marxism.

Libertarians need to be asked some hard questions. What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners? What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society? What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?

In each of these cases, less freedom today is the price of more tomorrow. Total freedom today would just be a way of running down accumulated social capital and storing up problems for the future. So even if libertarianism is true in some ultimate sense, this does not prove that the libertarian policy choice is the right one today on any particular question.

Furthermore, if limiting freedom today may prolong it tomorrow, then limiting freedom tomorrow may prolong it the day after and so on, so the right amount of freedom may in fact be limited freedom in perpetuity. But if limited freedom is the right choice, then libertarianism, which makes freedom an absolute, is simply wrong. If all we want is limited freedom, then mere liberalism will do, or even better, a Burkean conservatism that reveres traditional liberties. There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties.

Libertarianism’s abstract and absolutist view of freedom leads to bizarre conclusions. Like slavery, libertarianism would have to allow one to sell oneself into it. (It has been possible at certain times in history to do just that by assuming debts one could not repay.) And libertarianism degenerates into outright idiocy when confronted with the problem of children, whom it treats like adults, supporting the abolition of compulsory education and all child-specific laws, like those against child labor and child sex. It likewise cannot handle the insane and the senile.

Libertarians argue that radical permissiveness, like legalizing drugs, would not shred a libertarian society because drug users who caused trouble would be disciplined by the threat of losing their jobs or homes if current laws that make it difficult to fire or evict people were abolished. They claim a “natural order” of reasonable behavior would emerge. But there is no actual empirical proof that this would happen. Furthermore, this means libertarianism is an all-or-nothing proposition: if society continues to protect people from the consequences of their actions in any way, libertarianism regarding specific freedoms is illegitimate. And since society does so protect people, libertarianism is an illegitimate moral position until the Great Libertarian Revolution has occurred.

And is society really wrong to protect people against the negative consequences of some of their free choices? While it is obviously fair to let people enjoy the benefits of their wise choices and suffer the costs of their stupid ones, decent societies set limits on both these outcomes. People are allowed to become millionaires, but they are taxed. They are allowed to go broke, but they are not then forced to starve. They are deprived of the most extreme benefits of freedom in order to spare us the most extreme costs. The libertopian alternative would be perhaps a more glittering society, but also a crueler one.

Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.

The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. Libertarianism itself is based on the conviction that it is the one true political philosophy and all others are false. It entails imposing a certain kind of society, with all its attendant pluses and minuses, which the inhabitants thereof will not be free to opt out of except by leaving.

And if libertarians ever do acquire power, we may expect a farrago of bizarre policies. Many support abolition of government-issued money in favor of that minted by private banks. But this has already been tried, in various epochs, and doesn’t lead to any wonderful paradise of freedom but only to an explosion of fraud and currency debasement followed by the concentration of financial power in those few banks that survive the inevitable shaking-out. Many other libertarian schemes similarly founder on the empirical record.

A major reason for this is that libertarianism has a naïve view of economics that seems to have stopped paying attention to the actual history of capitalism around 1880. There is not the space here to refute simplistic laissez faire, but note for now that the second-richest nation in the world, Japan, has one of the most regulated economies, while nations in which government has essentially lost control over economic life, like Russia, are hardly economic paradises. Legitimate criticism of over-regulation does not entail going to the opposite extreme.

Libertarian naïveté extends to politics. They often confuse the absence of government impingement upon freedom with freedom as such. But without a sufficiently strong state, individual freedom falls prey to other more powerful individuals. A weak state and a freedom-respecting state are not the same thing, as shown by many a chaotic Third-World tyranny.

Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.

This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better. 
_________________________________________________________

Robert Locke writes from New York City.

March 14, 2005 Issue

[Paul Ross]

Ping. FYI.

[GOP_1900AD]

RE: "We ought to think back further than 1994 and go back to 1976 when Jimmy Carter was elected president. There are a lot of similarities between what is happening now and the picture then."

The times we are in are reminding me more and more of the second half of the 70s, minus the inflation. In terms of geopolitics and in terms of the dumbed down masses wanting to see more of a nanny state, the reminder is absolutely certain. Carter nearly set us up to be conquered outright by the East Bloc. I fear we'll be there again, soon.

[Paul Ross]

I also liked this find:

Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, Washington DC.

No. Borders are essential to nationhood. They are the line between "us" and "them". Without 'them' there can be no 'us', precluding the possibility of social solidarity.

"Even in a purely economic sense, the idea of open borders is a pernicious one"

Aristotle wrote that each virtue has two corresponding vices, one marked by an excess of the characteristic related to the that virtue, the other by an insufficiency.

Denunciations of xenophobia or chauvinism are appropriately widespread, but an open borders policy is a function of the other vice, insufficient national feeling.

The analogy to common ownership of property is compelling: if everyone owns everything, the experience of socialist societies shows us that no one is responsible for anything.

Likewise, if all men have an equal claim to my affections, without regard to borders, then no man is my brother.

Even in a purely economic sense, the idea of open borders is a pernicious one. Free movement of people is different from the free movement of goods because people are not goods.

When we import a plastic toy from Malaysia, we import only the labour used to make it. When we import Malaysians, we import complete human beings, with all their dreams and preferences, their strengths and weaknesses.

In short, we change our society in a way that the free movement of goods cannot. Such change may or may not be a good idea, but it is not comparable in any way to the trade in goods.

[B4Ranch]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1719499/posts?page=92#92

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1719499/posts?page=95#95

[RobRoy]

The only way I can exhibit tough love, other than keying a republicans car, or firebombing campaign headquarters, is to not vote republican. I choose the latter.

[janetgreen]

The answer is to get refocused, clarify our principles and fix the party.

The current administration and its sycophants have abandoned conservatives. A big change is badly needed, but none of them will listen to those who elected them, i.e., the American people.

[taxed2death]

"The last time the Dems took over the House, they kept it for 40 years."

Tell me again what have the pubs done other than squander one opportunity after another in the last 6 years.

[glock rocks]

"Some neoconservatives these days argue big government is OK so long as it is conservative big government representing values in which they believe. Big government is not OK. Every inch the government grows, the same inch is taken from the liberties of the people, starting with the basic liberty of spending your own money the way you choose rather than the way the government chooses to spend it for you. Massive programs inevitably have unintended consequences; government, though necessary for many purposes, is no more a precision instrument for constructive social change than a sledgehammer is for brain surgery."

--Jay Ambrose