The Manhattan Project Of Illegal Immigration (America has an ambitious nation-building project)

National Review ^ | 01/03/2010 | Victor Davis Hanson

[SeekAndFind]

We all are familiar with the debates surrounding illegal immigration: absolute versus flexible laws; amnesty versus deportation or earned citizenship; closed versus open borders; entitlement dependency versus work no one else will do.

We also know the debates over the causation of this perfect storm that has resulted in 12 to 15 million illegal aliens residing in the United States. Was it the Right’s desire for cheap labor or the Left’s wish for more constituents, or both?

Was it abetted by the middle-class habit of wanting inexpensive nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners, and facilitated by the professional Latino elite’s dream of remaking American demography, with the ensuing careerist windfalls?

Of course, there was a desperate Mexico’s tripartite aim of obtaining billions in remittances, exporting what it apparently considers a bothersome poor, and winning a loyal expatriate population that seems to like Mexico all the more the farther it is distant.

The sloganeering and mytho-history were necessary relish: Illegal aliens only do the work others won’t do; the borders crossed indigenous peoples rather than they the borders; aliens are instead “undocumented workers,” who all work and who forgot their documentation at the border; America’s own poor are not hurt by the driving down of wages.

But lost in all of this talk is the real mystery at hand. The United States — ad hoc, often nonchalantly, without much debate or discussion — is currently engaged in one of the largest, most ambitious attempts at foreign aid and nation building in its history, one far more costly and daring that what is going on in either Afghanistan or Iraq. That such a project is not legal, much less approved by our lawmakers, and is funded largely by local and state governments, does not mean that it is not a project nonetheless.

Quite simply, America in almost instantaneous fashion has chosen to take in millions of the poorest citizens of one of the poorer nations in the world in an attempt to transmogrify them into middle-class suburbanites within a generation. That may not be the explicit description of our undertaking, but it surely is one arrived at empirically. And it is a multifaceted political, economic, cultural, and social effort that involves tens of millions of Americans at all levels of society and is proving to be the near salvation of Mexico.

Under the old protocols of legal immigration, we assumed that the world’s poor arrived here, struggled, learned English, assimilated, instructed their children in the exceptionalism of America, and achieved parity — but often not until the third generation. All that — both the methodology and the results — is obsolete today. In short, those who lived in near-18th-century poverty in Oaxaca can become statistical proof of America’s supposed racism and oppression in a nanosecond by simply crossing the border illegally. That they were poor and ignored in Mexico is considered almost natural; that they are still poorer than others after coming a foot north of the border and spending a second on U.S. soil becomes proof of the failure of America itself.

Take away illegal immigration, and in terms of assimilation, intermarriage, integration, income, and general well-being, the so-called Latino population is not all that much out of sync with the rest of America. Factor in millions of Mexican nationals, and we apparently have a massive problem that calls for Manhattan Project–like remedies, with all of the interested parties predictably participating.

Almost all university race-based research — and it is considerable — seeks to discover disparities in longevity, health, housing, and general quality of life, and it finds them, those responsible for them, and the government programs needed to address them. Such studies make no distinction in legal status. A recently arrived Mexican national from Jalisco who delivers a baby without much prenatal care is just as much proof of America’s “broken” health-care system as if she were an American citizen without health insurance. The failure to reach utopian results is as widely lamented as the near impossibility of the task of such massive assimilation is neglected.

Indeed, sometimes this holistic effort at continuing the influx of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens is truly mind-boggling. An unstable Mexico survives in part on tens of billions of dollars of remittances, its second-largest source of foreign revenue. To maintain that precious income stream, the Mexican government has adopted strict diplomatic protocols: (a) do everything possible to ensure that nearly a million Mexicans at least try to leave each year; (b) do not praise the generosity of the American host, but constantly suggest that its motives for trying to close its borders are selfish, racist, or worse; (c) open consulates and establish outreach programs to promulgate the narrative that expatriate Mexican nationals are patriotic colonists who, by leaving their homes, have rightly made the construct of borders irrelevant; (d) never mention the ensuing remittance revenue nor the cost to the U.S. economy of losing nearly $50 billion a year to Latin America nor the subsequent need of federal, state, and local governments to provide housing, food, and education subsidies to Mexican nationals to enable them to send cash home.

So for this landmark project to continue, certain perspectives have to be maintained. Racism is not found among the mostly white Mexico City elites who cynically export indigenous peoples from Mexico’s interior in a modern-day sort of helotage. Instead, the real bias lies with the American host that provides work and services without much audit, but fails to ensure near-instant parity with the American middle class.

For the new arrival, there is a vague sort of ideology that he senses he must embrace. In simplified and rather crude terms it goes something like this: Drop hostility for the Mexican government that failed you. Adopt a sense of noble tribal solidarity in which you work hard and receive less than your American counterparts, reflective largely of illiberal prejudice. React with charges of racist insensitivity to any suggestion that an alien in a host country should always investigate means of achieving lawful residency, always try to avoid imposing entitlement costs on the host taxpayers, and always show gratitude as a guest to the host. That parity is difficult to achieve when the new arrival is without English, a high-school diploma, or legality is unmentioned.

Indeed, one of the most baffling aspects of the project is this disconnect between rhetoric and reality. We suspect that illegal aliens, who so bravely have fought to come to U.S. soil, appreciate the differences between the economic, legal, political, and social landscape in America and its counterpart in Mexico. I say “suspect” because we almost never hear from illegal aliens or their spokespeople blanket and unqualified praise of the United States, its Constitution, its history, and its present system, which does something that Mexico apparently does not.

During the recent DREAM Act frenzy, when a few Mexican students in American universities came forward to announce that they were here illegally, we heard almost no reasons why in the abstract they wished to remain in the country they had traveled to — and why under no circumstances were they willing to return to the country where they were born. Indeed, had supporters of the DREAM Act praised the dignity of the United States, its economic robustness, its historical role in the 20th century of defeating totalitarianism, its rule of law, or its meritocratic system rather than postured that America “had to” adjust its protocols to the desires of the illegal immigrants, the DREAM Act might well have passed.

Of course the illegal alien believes that his labor is underappreciated; of course the host believes that his generosity is taken for granted. Tragically, the ultimate arbiter of that debate is the reality that Mexico wishes illegal immigration to continue and America now does not.

In sum, illegal immigration from Mexico into America is the most radical attempt at nation building on the world scene today, theirs and ours. Stranger still, its narrative assumes a general inability or unwillingness to explain why millions leave Mexico and do not wish to return there, why they so like this supposedly oppressive country and wish to stay — and why admission of that fact is apparently neither necessary nor wholesome.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

[ClearCase_guy]

We cannot absorb endless amounts of immigrants. Mexico has a lot of people. China has 1.4 billion people. The world cannot all come to America.

So, what is the plan to stop the influx? A plan to better manage the influx is not the point. We need to stop 1 billion people from coming here.

Managing the influx really well is actually counter-productive to our long-term stability (unless we want to be a nation of 1.5 billion people).

[Guyin4Os]

We cannot absorb endless amounts of immigrants

We can absorb a lot more than we are absorbing now, provided that they come here legally. We have plenty of room for immigrants who love the United States and wish to follow the law to get here. Legal immigrants often become much better Americans than many left-wingers who are born here.

[ransacked]

Our corrupt gov’t enables illegals with a wink/nod by issuing them tax id numbers in lieu of SSN’s.

[ClearCase_guy]

Immigration managed through a defined legal process is a positive good.

Just about any discussion you hear about the 30 million illegal immigrants currently in this country will completely ignore the notion of a legal process or anything being well managed. The establishment just wants to throw up their hands and say "Make 'em citizens!"

We need to stop the unmanaged flow. Then we can talk about the many real virtues of legal immigration.

[HiJinx]

Ping!

[mo]

The RinoCrat Oligarchy ...and the bankers..have decided that about 1.182 billion peons and peasants laboring “out there” in flyover country ought to do the trick.......

http://www.numbersusa.com/content/nusablog/cbreiter2/august-17-2009/us-population-track-1182-billion.html

[Diogenesis]

* 83% of warrants for murder in Phoenix are for illegal aliens.
* 86% of warrants for murder in Albuquerque are for illegal aliens.
* 75% of those on the most wanted list in Los Angeles , Phoenix and Albuquerque are illegal aliens.
* 24.9% of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals
* 40.1% of all inmates in Arizona detention centers are Mexican nationals
* 48.2% of all inmates in New Mexico detention centers are Mexican nationals
* 53% plus of all investigated burglaries reported in California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Texas are perpetrated by illegal aliens.
* 71% plus of all apprehended cars stolen in 2005 in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California were stolen by Illegal aliens or "transport coyotes".
* 47% of cited/stopped drivers in California have no license, no insurance and no registration for the vehicle. Of that 47%, 92% are illegal aliens.

---

Open Borders Creates Severe Health Concerns: Illegal Immigration Brings Diseases to US
While political and verbal posturing shamelessly continues by Mr. Obama and associates
in the border saga, an on-going border “war” rages. Not only are brave law
enforcement professionals at risk by standing in the gap between illegal aliens, drug
thugs, escaped and released criminals, terrorists, mentally ill, and America’s well-being,
but an insidious health crisis is also flowing across the southern border of America.

Hospital Emergency Departments in border cities are having to battle with new strains of
antibiotic resistant infections, and diseases America basically eradicated many years ago;
diseases like: tuberculosis, pneumonias, staph, parasitic Chagas disease, and leprosy.
Some American cities have prided themselves in becoming “sanctuary cities” opening
their communities to any and all illegal aliens.

Chagas: A devastating parasite that was primarily relegated to Latin America; now prevalent in Los Angeles, California and spreading.

Cysticercosis: Latin America brainworm, and as The Wall Street Journal reported, “In recent years, as the immigration population has spread…
cysticercosis has cropped up in states that have never had to deal with it before, including Iowa, Ohio, Missouri and Oregon.”

Necrotizing fasciitis: Basically a flesh-eating bacterium.

Leprosy: Difficult to believe, but health officials in Maryland, Florida, California,
Louisiana, Texas, New York City, Hawaii are having to battle this heinous disease.

Bedbugs: New strains which are resistant to fumigation.
The New York Times reported, “…bedbugs are spreading throughout New York City like a swarm of locusts…even in top addresses on Park Avenue, Riverside Drive and Helmsley Park Lane.”
These bugs are terrible, they hurt, they suck your blood, and they leave discoloration and soreness. They are spreading into hospitals!

Toxocara roundworm parasite: Can cause blindness and epilepsy.
This parasite is on a dramatic increase, and is being found in many playgrounds.
Multiple hospitals in Los Angeles are reporting rapid increases of seizures and other neurological events caused by tapeworms and related parasites.

[jmacusa]

I hate Mexico and it’s people. They inhabit the richest land in Latin America and instead of making Mexico the jewel of Latin America they’ve taken this gift from God and turned their land into a corrupt, lawless pest-hole they can’t run away from fast enough. They’ve made it a place where their politicians steal everything in sight and blame the United States. I’m damned sick of listening to their pugnacious whinning that we ‘’stole’’ this country from them and they have a ‘’right’’ to barge in here and myself and every other America is supposed to just shut up and keep paying taxes to support these ‘’undocumented workers’’. BS! We’re a sovereign nation, not a boarding house, we have laws and if they are going to be constantly undermined then soon we’ll be like Mexico. Damn them all to Hell!

[Alberta's Child]

The simple truth here is that an economy like ours that is built primarily on consumer spending will always need more consumers to keep it afloat.

This, by the way, is exactly why so many banks were hell-bent on extending mortgages to illegal immigrants over the last 10-15 years -- and why the U.S. government turned a blind eye to these inherently risky loans even as the banking system began to collapse.

[radpolis]

Even if we gave all the illegals citizenship tomorrow, who can trust the government to enforce the immigration laws of the future?

The government will just do the same thing over and over again.

If we can’t defend our national borders, then why are we defending the borders of other countries abroad if territorial integrity doesn’t mean a damn thing to the elites?

If the rule of law means nothing, why have any laws at all?

Illegal immigration has nothing to do with race, but facing it forces us to examine who we are as a people.

Do we defend our sovereignty, territorial integrity and laws or do we descend into a formless polyglot with open borders and tolerate lawlessness?

[neverdem]

We cannot absorb endless amounts of immigrants. Mexico has a lot of people. China has 1.4 billion people. The world cannot all come to America.

Some people seem to think it's still the 1890s, when millions of unskilled and uneducated who couldn't speak English could get work in all the factories waiting for them. Some of those factories are now in Mexico. And this current "great recession" was triggered by bad debt, just like the Great Depression. Some folks can't figure out that times have changed.

End the Immigration Lottery - In an era of global conflict and economic difficulties, it makes no sense to choose new Americans based on dumb luck.

We have Selective Service as a backup should an all volunteer Armed Forces prove inadequate. Between the terrorist thread and a quite lame economy, it's high time to select our immigrants, IMHO.

[Guyin4Os]

We cannot absorb endless amounts of immigrants. Mexico has a lot of people. China has 1.4 billion people. The world cannot all come to America.

Relax. Nobody is talking about the entire world coming to America. However, we do have lots of room for immigrants who come here legally. We have to have a system that limits the number of legal immigrants who come in annually so that we can properly assimilate them and help them to become American citizens.

But before that can be implemented, we need to get control of the inflow of ILLegal immigrants. On that we can all agree.

[Once-Ler]

Some people seem to think that a million abortions a year has no effect on the economy. Border-patriots seem to think that the working class slobs who wash dishes and toilets are going to be birthed by wealthy American parents. They believe college educated Americans will be satisfied with changing semen stained bed sheets in a Motel-8. They believe that a Big Mac SHOULD cost $10 to protect a job for an American drug addicted felon with a criminal record of theft.

They are wrong. Americans are not procreating and we are limiting legal immigration to below sustaining levels. Without illegal immigration our population would shrink. This country is vastly under developed and can support at least 5 times its current population with no trouble. Want proof? Take a drive through the mid west.

Most anti-immigrant sentiment is not well thought out logic. It is a shallow bumpersticker which reads "what part of illegal don't you understand?" It is driven by ignorance, and fear that American socialist programs intended for American parasites will be drained by illegal parasites...I say Boo-F***in'-Hoo.

Thanx for the ping

[Hardastarboard]

President 0bama and the fascist, economically illiterate swine who make up the elites of the Democratic party chronically, reflexively hate business and do everything they can to tear it down and throw up road blocks. The only thing they WON'T do is require strict verification of residency for employees, and grievously punish offending businesses for violations.

Please see my tag line for how I feel about immigrants bringing their children here illegally.

[haroldeveryman]

“We have to have a system that limits the number of legal immigrants who come in annually so that we can properly assimilate them and help them to become American citizens.”

Exactly. It’s a matter of controlling our borders so that immigration takes a form that is in the best interest of the United States.

The uncontrolled immigration that Obama wants (which he justifies as compliance with “Human Rights”) is just part of the left agenda of deconstructing the United States by breaking its economy and culture.

What we lack and need now are productive professionals and skilled workers who can fill real jobs and start businesses. If some of them them happen to come from Mexico, that’s OK too.

[redpoll]

It is maps like that one which makes me glad to be living in the upper left corner.

[lentulusgracchus]

Border-patriots seem to think that the working class slobs who wash dishes and toilets are going to be birthed by wealthy American parents.

No, they don't. Not even close. You're trolling.

Anyone else want a piece of this FROBL troll?

[wolfcreek]

You need to add *Pro-illegal Alien* and *Pro-open borders* to you tag.

[WOSG]

We have over one million legal immigrants and half a million illegal immigrants.

To fix illegal immigration:
Secure the border, deport criminal illegal aliens, end in-state tuition for illegal aliens, require eligibility for workers and for those in school, have state and local police check status of all people detained, and say NO to amnesty.

To fix legal immigration:
End birthright citizenship, end family chain migration, focus our immigration on ‘best and brightest’ who can and will work, eliminating welfare for immigrants. Make it so that no more than 10% of immigrants can come from any one country.

“Relax. Nobody is talking about the entire world coming to America. “
The open borders extremists claim ‘nobody is illegal’, so their logic prevents forbidding anyone from coming.

The correct viewpoint on the contrary is to insist that a civil society in America requires a working system of immigration, and a working system requires reasonable limits on immigration.