New York Times immigration editorial+my response

Here's the editorial:

The Road to Dystopia

New York Times Editorial March 13, 2008

The search for a silver bullet to slay illegal immigration continues. Hard-liners are turning the country upside down looking for it.

They are looking in Washington, where Senate Republicans last week offered more than a dozen bills to further enshrine mass deportation as the national immigration strategy. It is a grab bag of enforcement measures that will be useful for tough-talking campaign commercials, but will not actually solve anything.

Republicans and some Democrats in the House are trying to force a vote on a bad bill called the SAVE Act, which among other things would force all workers, including citizens, to prove they have a right to earn a living — a bad idea compounded by the notoriously bad state of federal government records.

The error rate in just one database, the Social Security Administration’s, is believed to be more than 4 percent, making it likely that many thousands of Americans would face unjust firings and discrimination, and waste a lot of time and effort trying to clear their names.

The harsh-enforcement virus has spread far beyond the Capitol. In states like Oklahoma, laws have been enacted to force illegal immigrants further underground, off official registries and into anonymity, by denying them identification like driver’s licenses. In a growing number of states and counties, politicians are offering up police officers to the federal government for immigration posses. From Prince William County, Va., to Maricopa County, Ariz., officers who pull people over for minor traffic infractions are checking immigration papers, too.

Many law-enforcement professionals say this is reckless and self-defeating, because it sends a deep, silencing chill into immigrant communities. Citizens and legal residents will inevitably be hassled for looking Latino. And it is expensive; Prince William’s new law is expected to cost $26 million over five years, plus a few million more to outfit police cars with cameras, as a hedge against lawsuits.

Maybe some people do not mind that immigration zealotry is sending the country down a path of far greater intrusion into citizens’ lives, into a world of ingrained suspicion, routine discrimination and economic disruption. Is that what we want — to make the immigration system tougher without fixing it? To make illegal immigrants suffer without any hope of ever becoming legal, because that is amnesty?

Could it be that tightening the screws relentlessly on illegal immigrants, even if some citizens suffer in the process, is all for the greater good?

Which is — what exactly? To drive a large cohort of workers out of a sputtering economy? To take more people off the books? To prop up the under-the-table businesses that inevitably evade such crackdowns? To worsen wages and working conditions for all Americans, since nobody works more cheaply and takes more abuse than a terrified, desperate immigrant?

This is a country that runs on routine amnesties. Where would the courts be without plea bargains, or state budgets without periodic tax forgiveness? Are illegal immigrants the one class of undesirables for whom common sense, proportionality, discernment, good judgment and compassion are unthinkable?

It is frightening to think that this country’s answer could be an emphatic yes.

Here's my response:

Actually what's frightening is to think that this country's leading newspaper could produce an editorial as hostile to our own country—especially its most vulnerable citizens—as this one. It's not that the New York Times editorial board members are false to my principles. It's that they're false to their own principles.

I'm certain they agree with H.L. Mencken's mission statement for good journalism (beyond a commitment to factuality): "To comfort the afflicted—and afflict the comfortable." Yet in their tunnel-visioned advocacy for illegal aliens (that's the legal term, folks—look it up), they comfort the wealthiest 1/2% of Americans and Mexicans, who profit most from illegal aliens' scab labor, and afflict the most afflicted Americans—the poor Blacks, Whites, Asians and Latinos with just high school diplomas or less. Those are the ones whose wages have been driven down by 8-20% (depending on industry and region) by being forced to compete with illegal alien labor. And there's not a single labor category where Americans won't work for a living wage. Moreover, it's the schools those blue-collar Americans attend that are being flooded with semiliterate peasants who can't even speak Spanish grammatically, much less English. It's the ERs those blue-collar Americans can't get into now because they're flooded with illegal aliens who use them for primary care. It's the neighborhoods poor Blacks in LA live in that are being ethnically "cleansed" of Blacks by Mexican and Salvadorean gangbangers. It's the Southwest that's being turned into a homogeneous Mexican barrio, not Greater Manhattan where the NYTimes editorial writers live and work.

Fact is, the New York Times' staffers and their families and friends aren't affected by this massive invasion. Which makes their patronizing contempt for those who are understandable, albeit despicable. Unfortunately it also confirms everything the right wingnuts say about the "MSM," exemplified by the NYTimes. Which is especially unfortunate for the 40% of Democrats who, like me, do have some sympathy for blue collar Americans.

A few specifics:

"mass deportation as the national immigration strategy"

No one is advocating mass deportation--certainly no one in the U.S. Senate. So the New York Times is knowingly lying when they say this...and in doing so they cross the line from advocacy to propaganda of the sort they decry when right wingers do it.

"force all workers, including citizens, to prove they have a right to earn a living"

I had to prove my citizenship the last time I applied for a job, back in 1999. How is this onerous? Illegal aliens don't have a right to earn a living in the country they're in illegally. By what sort of cracked logic is it wrong for wrong to be wrong? If I moved to any other country I'd have to prove I had a right to earn a living there before I could earn a living. Any. Other. Country. Why should the U.S. be an exception to an otherwise universal feature of sovereign nations?

"bad state of federal government records"

The New York Times' logic is that if the Social Security Administration's records err by, as they claim, 4%, then you can't use those records for anything. By that logic we should abandon federal recordkeeping since it isn't perfect. So when someone applies for Social Security the application should be accepted without a confirmation in the records? That's insane. Remember what happened when FEMA doled out payments to Katrina victims without checks? Literally billions of taxpayer dollars went into the pockets of con artists. Moreover, one reason why Social Security records are imperfect is identity theft by illegal aliens that hasn't been tracked down--largely because the federal government hasn't enforced rules regarding ID theft and hasn't required government agencies to cooperate in order to track this down. Talk about getting it backwards.

"driver’s licenses"

The New York Times wants us to give illegal aliens drivers' licenses, or we'll "force them further underground." Well, yes, any crime you prosecute drives the criminals "further underground." By the NYTimes' logic we should then legalize all crimes--otherwise we're driving the criminals underground. And communities with high crime rates won't want to cooperate with police. Of course if we legalize everything we won't need police. Then everyone can come out and play in the sunlight--rapists, con artists, drug dealers, bank robbers...don't you with the NYTimes were running the government?

Isn't is wonderful how privileged, isolated pundits issue prescriptions for the common good from their towers? I could take the rest of this editorial apart, but isn't it obvious how intellectually lazy and hypocritical it is?