Politics Blog

The Note’s got a Saturday edition. Will they have a Sunday edition too?

UPDATE: Yep!

Remember that entertaining ad the Club for Growth started running against Dean in Iowa a few days ago? You can watch the video at the Club’s web site.

I think we’ve flogged the immigration issue to death. My position should be abundantly clear by now: If the president’s suicidal immigration “reform” policies are rammed through Congress by Republican leaders too stupid to appreciate their supporters, then I will be forced to reconsider my support for the president’s re-election bid.

If even one percent of Republicans feel the same way I do, then the president will be looking at a 30,000-vote deficit in Florida. Republican leaders should think about that when deciding what course of action they will pursue.

For now, I will continue to support the president on the assumption that this is merely political posturing and that the whole thing will be quietly killed in Congress.

I’ve been devoting a lot of space to this issue and I’m sure my regular political-junkie readers need their insidery-politics fix. Our regularly scheduled programming will resume now.

The president’s suicidal immigration “reform” proposal makes two key assumptions:

1. “Guest workers” are needed to do “jobs that Americans won’t do.”

2. The illegal immigrants already here cannot be practically deported and America’s borders cannot be secured against illegal immigration.

Both these assumptions are false.

The we-need-guest-workers assumption is patently untrue. Before 10 million illegal immigrants came here in the nineties, our economy ran just fine without them. And opening up America’s market for low-skilled jobs to foreigners would hurt the most vulnerable Americans - the poor and the unskilled. There are five billion people living in countries poorer than Mexico and they will be lining up to be “guest workers.” (In fact, Hispanic “guest workers” will be swamped by a tide of Chinese and Indian “guest workers.” I doubt if that will win the president many Hispanic votes.) Such “guest worker” programs have been tried in Europe for decades and they’ve led to incredible racial and ethnic strife, creating a racial underclass of menial laborers who live in crime-ridden, culturally-alienated urban neighborhoods.

Similarly, the president’s assumption that we can do nothing about illegal immigrants already here is flawed. There’s a simple, easy, cheap, humane way to deport the lot of them and secure our borders against most illegal immigration.

However, let’s set all this aside for a moment and buy the president’s assumptions. Let’s assume that “guest workers” are needed and that illegal immigrants cannot be deported. What about the mechanics of the president’s plan? Reader Keith Curtis, who blogs at Reagan Country, sent in a defense of the plan emphasizing its strongest features. His arguments and my rebuttals are below.

“Bush has stepped up border enforcment. This prevents the problem from getting worse. 1000 new border agents, 40% increase funding. Perhaps in the new bill, this value will increase yet again.“

To secure a border of the length we share with Mexico, we’ll need 100,000 agents. We don’t even have a tenth of that number and the border will remain porous unless we make it very uncomfortable for illegal immigrants to remain in the US. 1,000 more border agents is a sop that means very little.

“It will have a one-time process to document everyone and give them a 3 year work permit. This allows us to understand the situation.“

When it comes to illegal immigration, there are no “one-time processes.” Every “one-time” amnesty will lead to yet more illegals coming here from around the world in hopes of yet another “one-time” amnesty. The 1986 amnesty proved my point by creating a staggering increase in illegal immigration.

“Employers must now do a better job with hiring people. The risks of hiring undocumented people will go up, and the ability for illegals to get jobs will go down.“

Employers already face penalties for hiring illegals. What’s missing here is a mechanism for validating documents. As I’ve noted below, illegal immigrants give employers fake SSNs. The employers look the other way, claiming plausibly that there was no way for them to know the SSN was fake, thus avoiding the employer penalties that were put in place in 1986. All that’s needed to hold employers accountable is a validation system that employers can use, like the one I proposed in my simple two-step solution.

“If someone loses a job, then they must leave. Now that everyone currently here is documented, it becomes easier to make this happen.“

If they won’t leave now, when they’re undocumented, why would they leave then, when they’re undocumented? They’d get a fake SSN and continue working.

“Their social security money will be available to them when they return to their own nation. Finally a financial incentive for them to return.“

Yeah, but only when they retire, by which time President Chelsea Clinton will have given them amnesty.

“Illegals are currently stuck in America. Currently if they leave, they cannot come back. By granting them the ability to leave and return if they have a job, there is a chance they will head back.“

No way. Not when they know there’s yet another amnesty coming.

All of Keith’s arguments are calculated to convince conservatives that the Bush immigration “reform” proposal will reduce illegal immigration. I have a far simpler solution that will accomplish the same thing; but it requires you to renounce the president’s first assumption - that we need low-skilled, poorly-educated immigrants to do the “jobs Americans won’t do.”

This really is a debate about just how much immigration America can take. I favor keeping immigration at reasonable levels (and I say that as a non-white recent legal immigrant.) At reasonable levels of immigration, immigrants are forced to assimilate into the American mainstream and adopt the American culture (yes, there is such a thing.) At very high levels of immigration - like the de facto illegal immigration we’re experiencing, or the legal immigration the president proposes - immigrants will not need to assimilate. They will cluster in immigrant enclaves, which will create a racial underclass of low-skilled, poor menial laborers who’re culturally alienated from the rest of the country. That is a volatile recipe for the sort of racial and ethnic strife you usually see in countries other than the United States.

Most people supporting the president’s suicidal immigration “reform” plan claim they’re doing so because there’s no way to deport the 8-12 million illegal aliens already here. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a simple, cheap, easy, two-step solution to solve the problem:

Step 1: A fake Social Security number is necessary to get a job. Implement a computerized system for employers to check if a Social Security number is valid and matches the name provided by the employee.

Step 2: Crack down on employers who employ illegals. Once you throw a few high-profile executives in jail, employers will become sticklers for checking Social Security numbers using the new computerized system. That’ll force illegal immigrants to “deport” themselves because they’ll be utterly unable to find work.

So why isn’t this solution being implemented? Because, the last time the Social Security administration sent out letters to employers listing invalid Social Security numbers, there was an uproar from employers who depend on cheap illegal-immigrant labor.

In solving the problem of illegal immigration, what’s lacking is not the means, but the will. There is a cheap, simple, easy, effective solution. But it isn’t being implemented by Republicans beholden to business interests and Democrats looking to grow their vote base.

If you ever doubted that Democrats cheat to win elections, read this piece by Byron York on the vote fraud in South Dakota that cost John Thune a Senate seat by 524 votes in 2002.

Most people supporting the president’s suicidal immigration “reform” plan claim they’re doing so because there’s no way to deport the 8-12 million illegal aliens already here. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a simple, cheap, easy, two-step solution to solve the problem:

Step 1: A fake Social Security number is necessary to get a job. Implement a computerized system for employers to check if a Social Security number is valid and matches the name provided by the employee.

Step 2: Crack down on employers who employ illegals. Once you throw a few high-profile executives in jail, employers will become sticklers for checking Social Security numbers using the new computerized system. That’ll force illegal immigrants to “deport” themselves because they’ll be utterly unable to find work.

So why isn’t this solution being implemented? Because, the last time the Social Security administration sent out letters to employers listing invalid Social Security numbers, there was an uproar from employers who depend on cheap illegal-immigrant labor.

In solving the problem of illegal immigration, what’s lacking is not the means, but the will. There is a cheap, simple, easy, effective solution. But it isn’t being implemented by Republicans beholden to business interests and Democrats looking to grow their vote base.

If you ever doubted that Democrats cheat to win elections, read this piece by Byron York on the vote fraud in South Dakota that cost John Thune a Senate seat by 524 votes in 2002.

Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who’s influential in Iowa Democrat circles, has ended his agonizing and has decided to endorse Howard Dean! This couldn’t have come at a better time for Dean. Coming as it does a week before the caucuses, it’ll give him a final boost that could let him win Iowa and, thence, the nomination.

I’ve been predicting the possibility of a Dean nomination since Dean was a nobody back in February last year. Starting in June, I even urged my readers to donate to Dean so that President Bush could crush him in the general election. Now that a Dean nomination is so close, I’m having regrets.

Perhaps it would have been better to have a centrist Democrat nominee who would have forced President Bush to tend to his conservative base. Instead, the Democrats will probably choose Dean, who will leave the entire middle to Bush, letting him tack left and ignore conservatives by pushing policies like his suicidal immigration “reform” program.

But we conservatives will not roll over. When the president proposes policies that are insanely liberal and insanely unpopular, the very least we can do is draw a line in the sand and force the president to change his mind about crossing it. If this is a game of chicken we’re playing with the president, we will not be the first to blink.

Everything you always wanted to know about the Iowa Democrat caucuses and were afraid to ask is here.