5 myths about 5 myths about immigration

Yesterday's Washington Post published an article responding the Arizona's "get tough on illegals" law, written by an immigration expert named Diane Meissner,m titled "5 Myths About Immigration." Her list:

1. Immigrants take jobs from American workers.
2. Immigration is at an all-time high, and most new immigrants came illegally.
3. Today's immigrants are not integrating into American life like past waves did.
4. Cracking down on illegal border crossings will make us safer.
5. Immigration reform cannot happen in an election year.

She rebuts all of these, of course.

Here's what I had to say about it--which I hopes helps readers deal with friends who argue their side with propaganda instead of respectful dialog:

This article advocates amnesty for illegal immigrants, but because it does so with propaganda instead of reasonable arguments. Her chosen tack is the typical Don Rumsfeld press conference, where he asks the questions, answers his own questions, and thus maintains total control.

Right off the bat, she titles her piece “5 myths about immigration.” Yet this is a response to the debate about ILLEGAL immigration. So her first piece of propaganda is conflating legal with illegal immigrations, which pushes the propagandists’ own myth that all amnesty opponents hate all immigrants, and thus are knuckle-dragging xenophobes.

Hello, 95% of illegal immigration opponents are fine with LEGAL immigration.

This disrespectful approach is carried through with her first “myth:” where she refutes the claim almost nobody makes: that “immigrants take jobs from American workers.” Most reasonable people agree that immigrants with extraordinary skills contribute to America. The issue is whether we need more unskilled laborers when unemployment for American unskilled laborers—many of them Black and Hispanic—is pushing 20%.

Meissner concedes that low-skilled immigrants do drive down wages, but then pegs it at an absurd 1%--probably by conflating, again, legal with illegal labor. Because illegals, considered separately, drive down wages 5-25%, depending on job and locale. And that’s why Meissner’s little sleight of hand lumps them together with legals.

She them compounds her sins with pure Babbitry—claiming that endless growth from endless immigration will lift all boats..endlessly. News flash: every nation—even ours--only has so much arable land and drinkable water. And America’s population has QUADRUPLED since 1900. Now the strain is showing. Our infrastructure is crumbling. We’ve used technology to feed more and more people, and the price is coming due.

All that empty space you see flying coast to coast is waterless land. Irrigation takes water from one place it’s needed and moves it somewhere else, often producing salinization where it’s taken to and desolation where it’s taken from via the law of unintended consequences.

Overpumping is causing many porous aquifers to collapse—permanently, as in forever. Overdependence on agricultural chemicals (from fertilizers to pesticides) has polluted waterways (and created dead zone plumes extending 150 miles into the Gulf), as well as exhausting the soil and breeding superbugs

.

Plus the aging of our population is in part due to the postwar baby boom, an unnatural demographic distortion which will pass.

Her second “myth” is equally disingenuous: that immigration’s at an all-time high and mostly illegal. She says it was higher in 1890 as a percentage of the population—but it’s higher now in total numbers. And while this humongous recession has dampened illegal immigration, there are still many millions here. Meissner says they total “approximately 10.8 million,” but everybody’s guessing until we adopt a universal biometric ID system. Could be less, could be 20 million. Nobody knows. So she’s indulging in false precision, even with “approximately” tacked on.

Most importantly, she’s dissembling about the concentration of illegal immigration in the Southwest, whereas previous waves were less localized. She also notes the large number of legal Mexican immigrants, simultaneously ignoring how many of them came directly from previous amnesties of illegals, and from the fact that “family reunification” brought even more Mexicans here who had nothing to contribute to our economy.

Next she demolishes the “myth” that today’s immigrants aren’t assimilating like past waves did by claiming that it was claimed before, of others, and that the only thing holding them back now is our unwillingness to grant all the illegals amnesty.

However, the fact that something was said before and proven untrue doesn’t automatically make it so now. Nor does full enrollment in adult ed ESL classes mean the vast bulk are learning English. Meissner’s ignoring the simple fact that a Mexican in America can get by with little or no English, because they’ve set up a complete parallel society, from stores to TV stations to hearing “Empuje numero uno para Español” if you phone any government agency or large business, and even ballots (courtesy of multiculturalism run amok). Live here in the Southwest and you’ll see how it is.

Then she claims that all we need to do to secure the border from criminal aliens is grant visas “to meet the economy’s demand for workers” so the border patrol can focus on the real bad guys. Thus she perpetuates her own myth that illegals are coming here to meet an insatiable American job magnet.

Well, here are some statistics she, um, forgot: Mexico’s population exploded eightfold from 1900 to now, from 13.1 million to 111 million people—vastly more than Mexico can feed and employ.

This is not our fault—and until or unless our 20% unskilled labor unemployment rate vanishes, the only job magnet is amoral employers looking for cheap scab labor and Mexico’s ruling elites using us as a dumping ground for their excess campesinos.