When it comes to illegal immigration, conservatives don't understand liberals' motives

To conservatives:
In comment threads you call liberals stupid, anti-American, cynically trolling for Latino votes.

It's more complicated than that.

There are groups--ethnic, racial, religious--that were persecuted once--and not just by others. By the authorities. By the law. Blacks, Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, to name a few. And many more in a somewhat grayer area--basically, anyone who looked/acted different than the majority--people with various handicaps, people who are extra bright or extra slow, even redheads (in England, where they're called Gingers), or just people who are homely or have too many zits, or are extra shy.

Plus there are individuals who may have been none of the above, but who had terrible, tyrannical family lives--usually a father who saw himself as the god almighty of his household, but sometimes a mother like that. Or whose parents treated them abusively because they were alcoholics or dopers.

Such people often develop a hatred of oppression and an identification with whoever they perceive as the underdog.

And those whose tribal identity (religious/ethnic/racial/national) is historically linked with persecution get a double of this underdog-o-philia.

They become liberals, who see what they see as oppression for any as oppression for themselves.

So they defend crazy people as "alternatively mentally enabled" and press lawsuits to get them out of the nuthouses and onto the streets. They argue that homosexuals have the same right to be married as anyone else. And they demand amnesty for illegal aliens.

I'm not saying my armchair psychology here is the only motive liberals have about illegal immigration. But I've known such people for many decades, and it fits what I've seen as an underlying motive, apart from other aspects.

And with those who have, as a group, suffered from government oppression, they may feel that they have to defend what they see as everyone's civil rights in every situation, or they fear that they'll lose their own rights.

I'm against amnesty for illegals myself. So none of this is a justification for amnesty.

I just think it's really, really helpful to understand what makes your opponents tick.

Pulitzers for propagandists?

Today's New York Times features a rant by their Supreme Court reporter (and Pulitzer Prize winner) Linda Greenhouse, titled "Breathing while undocumented," about--surprise--Arizona's new get tough on illegal immigrants law. Here's my response:

However you feel about illegal immigration, you should object to Linda Greenhouse trying to sway you with propaganda instead of persuasion. For example:

1. She calls Arizona a “police state,” thus equating it with the regimes of Burma, North Korea, & Iran. This isn’t just hyperbole—it’s a grotesque insult to the political prisoners of real police states, trivializing their plight by the comparison.

2. She equates Arizona’s proof of legal residency requirement with the Soviet Union’s rigid internal passport system. But we all have to show valid ID all the time—to buy something with a check or credit card, if a cop asks for it, if we’re carded in a bar or a liquor store. And when you travel abroad you have to show your passport in a variety of circumstances, pretty much daily.

Soviet internal passports were part of a system that decreed where legal citizens could live or even travel. Arizona places no such controls on legal residents, so it isn’t comparable--and again belittles those who suffered under totalitarian oppression.

3. She redefines illegal aliens as “undocumented” people. Iillegal alien” is the term you see in all legal documents. Ot clearly denotes their illegal status—which in this country is a misdemeanor--a crime. Not a felony, but a crime nonetheless. Redefining them as “undocumented” is a legal fiction that purposely obscures their status as petty criminals, & equates their status with yours if you’d lost your driver’s license & a cop stopped you & asked for your ID. In that instance you’d be “undocumented.” Otherwise it’s a legally meaningless term.

Suppose Linda Greenhouse took a vacation, came home & discovered me living in her home. She orders me out. I say “Why? I’m just undocumented.” Think she’d call the cops & have me arrested?

Not one country on Earth has laws allowing you to enter their country on the excuse that you’re “undocumented.” Why do Leftists want America to be the sole exception?

Besides, the term implies that these people just dropped out of the sky. But these people are—every single one of them—citizens of another country. A country they were born in, mostly with documents from that country. So they aren’t “undocumented” at all.

Calling them undocumented is a framing device—a way to tilt the conversational playing field in your favor. Instead of arguing that they have a right to be here, leftists like Greenhouse use words like this to slip the assumption in without bothering to make a case for it. To be fair, right wingers do the same thing (“activist judges” comes to mind) all the time.

It’s yet another example of how ideologues have more respect for their ideas than for you as an individual; they believe sliming you is justified by their noble ends, forgetting how ex-Communist Emma Goldman observed that “the means reveal the ends.”

4. She claims that it is illegal to treat an illegal alien as if they’re illegal, in the name of civil liberties, calling it “a new crime of breathing while undocumented.” Um, a trespasser is a trespasser as long as they’re trespassing. Actually, legally they’re still guilty of the crime of trespass even if they leave where they trespassed—just as you’re guilty of speeding even if you slow down later.

Of course what she’s implying with that cutesy turn of phrase is that Arizona cops will stop anyone who looks Mexican & lock ‘em up if they can’t prove they belong here. That is illegal, but it’s not what the law actually says, & it’s not what Arizona police departments say they’ll do.

Which is to look for people who look like they’re smuggling or being smuggled. Like a Ford Econoline van stuffed with 20 ragged men, women & children, along with backpacks & milk jugs full of water. Or a file of 50 such people in the middle of the desert, half a mile north of the border. Or a residential house with 50 such people camped out inside it.

Now if they look Mexican and/or don’t speak English, that’s another clue. But mainly it’s situational—which is what cops do if they’re trying to do their job & stop crime.

5. She calls this an “anti-immigrant spasm.” Here she conflates legal & illegal immigration. Again, no argument supporting that assumption, making it a classic dirty trick.

6. She refers to a 1975 Texas law as “a law to deprive undocumented immigrant children of a free public education.” But you could as easily call it “a law to require citizens of other countries not here legally to obtain social services—including educational ones—from their own country.” Here again, Goodman’s language presumes that illegals dropped out of the sky, absolving their own countries of any responsibility for them.

Finally, she never mentions that the primary reason Mexicans come here illegally is Mexican overpopulation (from 13.1 million in 1900 to 111 million to day, an eightfold increase). Leftists avoid this fact because it’s not America’s fault…so it can’t be true.

What Mexico needs isn’t an American overpopulation escape valve—it needs China’s one child law.

Start immigration arguments with verifiable facts

Whether you favor or oppose illegal immigration, you must admit the truth of the following facts:

1. Mexico's population in 1940 was around 20 million.

2. Mexico's population in 2000 was over 100 million.

3. Mexico's population growth has not come from immigration to Mexico--it has come from Mexicans having many, many babies. Mexico's dominant religion is Roman Catholicism. The Catholic church fiercely opposes the use of any form of birth control device or drug, including condoms. Catholic social policy dominates Mexico.

4. America's Latino population in 1940 was 1/2 of 1%. Which means, among other things, that the American Southwest was not populated by Mexicans when the Americans arrived. It was populated by American Indians, such as Navaho, Hopi, Puelo, Plains Indians etc.--for whom the few Mexicans there were no more or less than foreign invaders.

5. America's Latino population today is over 14%--more than self-identified blacks at this point. Much of that huge increase stems from two previous amnesties, which at the time were presented as the last amnesty ever, because new enforcement provisions would prevent further illegal immigration. In each case what ensued was real amnesty coupled with fake enforcement. The last such amnesty was in 1986.

6. America is in the depths of its worst recession since the Great Depression.

7. Unemployment for American unskilled laborers is over 20%, and promises to remain so for the foreseeable future. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment for Hispanics who are American citizens is 13%; for blacks, 15%; for teenagers, 26%. Most Mexican illegal immigrants are unskilled laborers. Liberal economist Paul Krugman states that large unskilled immigrant populations always drive down wages for unskilled labor--by around 5-25% today, depending on job and location.

8. Over the last decade Californians had a chance to vote on several initiative measures that sought to restrict government benefits to illegal aliens and make English California's official language. California has a substantial majority of Democrats (i.e. relative liberals). Yet these measures passed, and exit polls indicated that they had the support of around a quarter of Hispanic Americans as well as about 40% of Democrats.

Those are the facts, all of which can be verified independently. And they show that many assertions about illegal immigration are canards. Starting with the so-called American "job magnet."

Mexicans want to move to America because there are too many Mexicans. Mexicans weren't sneaking into America in 1950, despite a booming American economy, because there weren't yet too many Mexicans for Mexico's economy to accommodate. Few people want to leave their town, their country, their culture for a foreign one.

Of course now they don't have to. California has become Mexifornia. For example, the most-watched TV station in Los Angeles (American's second-largest city) only broadcasts in Spanish. Nearly all legal materials, signs, commercial customer support phone systems etc. are delivered in Spanish as well as English. Many storefront signs are in Spanish only. You can live your whole life in Mexifornia without having to speak a word of English. And of course, by law, all ballots are delivered in Spanish as well as English. Many radio and TV stations broadcast only in Spanish.
And from being a miniscule minority in California in 1940, Mexicans with American citizenship will be a majority of the state's population by 2050, as long as it continues to increase at the present rate.

Now it's one thing to welcome in thousands or even millions of people from one foreign country/culture. It's another for one of those foreign immigrant groups to become the majority in your state, making everyone else, combined, a minority.

That's the conquering of one country by another--a (mostly) unarmed invasion.

And it makes any American supporting this invasion...well, what do you call someone who works to help a foreign country conquer one's own country?

The NY Times weighs in on illegal immigration again

Good grief, another New York Times' shortsighted editorial pandering to every special interest group but working class American citizens. See it at:

http://www.nytimes
.com/2008/04/17/
opinion/17thu1.html
?ref=opinion

My comment:

The NYT editorial board members surely don't think they dwell in an ivory tower, spooling out lofty proposals utterly divorced from gritty reality. No ivory tower thinker does, after all. They all imagine themselves veritable cynosures of sound thinking.

Yet nowhere in this anti-anti-immigration screed did they note the havoc being wrought in the Social Security Administration by illegals' rampant identity theft. People retiring today are discovering they can't start collecting until the SSA figures out who they are when there are several--sometimes many--people claiming to be you.

I can assure you that for people ensnarled by others' theft of their identity, this isn't a problem that can wait for endless committee meetings to hash things out. Meanwhile a MILLION illegal aliens flood across our borders every year--in part because our gummint has given them hope of yet another amnesty, like the one in 1986.

Imperfect as things are, doing nothing while we strive for perfection has a huge downside for the American workers the NYT board puports to adore: Chamber of Commerce types are using the availability of innumerable illegals to drive down blue-collar wages and strangle the unions.

The NYT board usse Orwellian GoodSpeak throughout, of course, referring to illegal aliens as "undocumented workers," and all opponents of illegal immigration as "Minutemen."

In their tower, I suppose they think that these illegals just dropped out of the sky, and that every single one of them is a worker.

Neither is true, but it's effective propaganda, hiding the indisputable fact that every single person in the United States is a citizen of a country. I'm a citizen of the United States. The vast majority of illegal aliens are perfectly documented citizens of Mexico, with smaller but still substantial numbers from parts south, such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras etc.

And for every hard-working person there's a passel of relatives collecting welfare, stuffing the schools with children who aren't even literate in Spanish, and stuffing the ERs with patients, since they don't have doctors...all on the taxpayers' dime. Meanwhile they send much of what they make out of the country--which also hurts our economy.

The only people who profit from their presence are the bosses and the Catholic Church, which brazenly interferes with our society and our laws in order to fill its churches with far more doctrinaire, obedient members than most American Catholics have proven to be.

Of course these illegals aren't stuffing the schools or hospitals or churches that the NYT editorial board member use.

Out of sight, out of mind.

And the board dismisses out of hand the supposed argument that illegal aliens will self-deport en masse if they can't find work here. This is a hyperbolic straw man argument, since nobody has said they would. We've said that if they can't work here they'll leave our country no faster than they came, one by one, very reluctantly.

Of course it would go a lot faster if we adopted a universal biometric ID, as one advanced country after another is discovering it must do.

Underlying the NYT editboard aguments seems to be the philosophy that if it's hard to enforce a law you should just surrender. It would sure simplify our burdened court system if we applied that principle to a raft of crimes.

Anyone liking that school of thought needs to spend some quality time in a country with little or no rule of law. Nigeria, perhaps. Or Somalia.

Worse yet, the NYT editboard seems to live purely in the now. It wants amnesty for the illegals already here. Many claim that's 10 or 12 million people. But nobody knows, since we don't have a universal biometric ID yet. It could be 20 million, as some are now estimating.

And then what? Same as in 1986--millions upon millions of Mexicans and others will start moving to El Norte. That's how America's Latino population zoomed from .5% in 1940 to over 14% today: through illegal immigration and a succession of amnesties, along with a stunning birthrate--highest by unmarried teens of any ethnic group BTW.

And once more, with the NYT's help, Mexico's ruling elites will continue to dictate America's demographic composition and overall population size, as well as continuing to outsource their home-grown population crisis to America, along with outsourcing their social services infrastructure to us.

So how did a left-wing outfit like the NYT edit board become a tool of America's and Mexico's ruling classes?

I look forward to an editorial on THAT subject.

Loaded language and the unspoken opposite

Every political label delivers its opposite silently.

If I'm pro-choice, you're anti-choice. If I'm pro-life, you're pro-death. If I'm a "person of color" you're either a colorless person or, if "colored," a traitor to your, um, color. If I'm pro-immigrant, you're anti-immigrant, even if you're only anti-illegal immigrant, even if you're really only against the ultrarich who benefit from illegal alien labor.

I don't have to say it in so many words. It's a stealth attack on the other side's honor and integrity--and it also preloads the argument in favor of your side's loaded questions and proposals.

These labels extend to dressing up bills and initiatives with similarly loaded terms. If my bill is called "No child left behind" then you want to leave children behind.

The only honest response is to not allow your opponent to use these terms that stack the deck, even if those terms are now in common parlance. "Master race" was in common parlance in Germany in the 1930s. That didn't make it right. Moreover, you have to give up whatever advantage you may get from using your own side's loaded words. If you do feel you must use some of these loaded terms, tack "so-called" in front of them like Malcolm X did.

This use of loaded terms is so common, so pervasive, that it's tempting--really, really, tempting--to just give in. All I can say to that is it's actually fun to challenge them all the time--as long as you show your willingness to give up your side's loaded terms as well.

One caveat: not all political terms are loaded, but most are. You could argue that "pro-choice" and it's unspoken antonym "anti-choice" are accurate and thus defensible. But an anti-abortion activist would argue that you're against the "unborn child" having a choice. But then you can challenge "unborn child" which is an oxymoron actually, since if a fetus gets "born" too soon you just get a dead fetus, not a born child. That's what a "miscarriage" is. Which is another loaded term, by the way, because there's nothing "mis-" about it. It's usually a woman spontaneously aborting a nonviable fetus. Period.

I would defend "illegal alien." It's the legal term, for one thing. And its antonym is "legal alien," the correct term for someone who's in this country legally. And that isn't pejorative. So this one doesn't fit the model of a term that carries a stealth load of propaganda against the other side.

You can't hear the loudest voice in the immigration debate

The illegal immigration debate has three sides: one for amnesty for illegals, one for denying illegals entry, employment, and social services, and one for the status quo. The first two don't matter, even though they're the only ones you hear about in the news--both the mainstream media and alternative news sources.

The third only speaks in private, and only to lawmakers and elected officials, and it represents only a few thousand Americans. But they're also the richest Americans, and the largest contributors to campaign coffers. This group wants a steady flow of illegals so they can drive down wages for blue-collar work and bust the unions. They don't want them legalized; nor do they want them stopped.

You don't need access to those private conversations to figure out whether what I'm saying here is true. Just look at the news. You see lip service paid to public pressure groups for and against illegal immigration, but the people keep coming, in enormous numbers. It's ridiculous to say that we can't stop this. Just have the National Guard guard the nation--deploy them across the southern border, with rules of engagement appropriate to the fact that most illegal immigration is now managed by the drug cartels, using militias armed with automatic weapons. And have employment filtered through a national biometric ID--also well within our technical capabilities now. But everything gets slow-walked if it's even tried. Look at Bush's pathetic "efforts" to build a border fence mandated and budgeted by Congress. Look at the draconian federal prosecution and incarceration of border agents Ramos and Campeon--guaranteed to demoralize other Border Patrol officers. There are numerous other examples.

So don't let anyone tell you this is a two-way debate...well, except it is: the public debate, which provides the illusion of representative democracy, and the private non-debate, which is really just marching orders issued by the wealthiest Americans to their dedicated, hardworking servants, otherwise known as Congress and the Executive branch.

I don't understand how some people hate their own culture

When my spouse and I were in Indonesia a few months ago, one thing I noticed was how much the people loved their own culture. The Balinese, for example, swim in their culture. They love their Hindu religion, their family compounds in their home villages, their extended families, their island.

I like the Balinese--and their island--a lot. They're a great people and it's a great place. And they like Americans and America--we're their favorite visitors (along with the Japanese). However, the Balinese affection for us doesn't mean they want to turn Bali into America, or that they want a million Americans to move there. A few, sure. No prob. But not so many that their island becomes transformed into Balimerica. Despite their dependence on the tourist trade, they've worked hard to retain their cultural identity--and they've succeeded. Actually, the biggest imposition on the Balinese comes from Indonesia's Islamic officialdom, who have built imposing mosques around Bali, out of which blast the Muslem call to prayer through giant loudspeakers day and night. The Balinese hate it--hate the sheer acoustic imposition, hate the religious arrogance and intolerance it represents, hate their own helplessness to do anything about it.

It just floors me that so many illegal alien advocates show zero comprehension of these basic cultural facts. People. Like. Their. Own. Culture. And even when they welcome change, they just about never welcome seeing their own culture shoved aside and replaced with another one.

Why do so many amnesty advocates not get this? Why do some even go so far as to root for their own culture's demise?

When I was a college commie I knew a bunch of people like this. I figured they must have had tyrannical fathers, and they'd come to associate their country with Bad Dad. But that's just armchair psychologizing. I really don't know. Maybe I should get it. All intellectuals have to make their peace with their own society, because to some degree we'll always be strangers in our own land. Nevertheless I get it. I get Thanksgiving turkey dinner (even though I also love mole poblano [which was originally made with turkey of course]). I get Christian hymns and dreidels, even though I'm neither Christian nor Jewish. I get Ford F150 pickup trucks, even though I own a VW van. I get the Star Spangled Banner (which I can sing, unlike many Americans, despite its wide range, as long as it's transposed a bit). Do these people not get all this? Do the trappings of our culture fill them with fear and loathing?

Or are they like Neville Chamberlain seeking Peace in Our Time, without reckoning the long-term damage they're promoting?

None of this has any bearing of the validity of their arguments or ours. But it does have a bearing on the framework within which those arguments take place. If they place no value on our society--or even actively dislike it--then of course they should cheer on this invasion. Or if they reject nationality (without, of course, giving up the enormous benefits they derive from theirs) and the very idea of borders, then again they should cheer on this invasion. And any arguments my side would be irrelevant, since they all stand on different premises.

So let's argue premises--once those opposing America's identity and culture and sovereignty give up the benefits they derive from all that.