Answers to an Aussie on Illegal immigration

Well-intentioned citizens of other countries get their information about American immigration issues through the lenses of frequently biased anti-American reportage. Anyone who watches BBC news regularly will know what I mean.

I got a long comment on my last illegal immigration entry from an Australian reader. I'll copy most of it here, followed by my answers. Americans, note that I'm keeping the invective down and the factual/logical refutation up.

Remember that observers such as this one mean well, and we shouldn't ignore this fact in our responses.
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1) The United States has enjoyed massive immigration from the moment of independence. America's history is one of people arriving on their shores and crossing their borders. Back in the 19th century there arose the "know nothings" who were scared to death of too many Germans Irish Catholics immigrating to the US. Has the US been destroyed by these 19th century immigrants? Or have they helped the US? The US in the future may have a far more tolerant attitude towards Hispanic illegals than is being expressed now. Hispanic immigrants are about as much a threat as Irish Catholics were in the 19th century, ie: not much.

Answer: Every nation on Earth is a nation of immigrants historically, except for Kenya and thereabouts. America’s history is simply more recent than many, and perhaps more heterogeneous.

But the fact is that America is most assuredly not a nation of immigrants: the vast majority of living Americans were born here, as is true of most citizens of most other countries. At the same time America does have the biggest legal immigration program on Earth, both in total numbers and probably per capita as well.

I was born not just in America but in California, making me a native American by definition, and a native Californian as well (that’s pertinent to this debate because California is Ground Zero for illegal immigration to America, Arizona’s current tsuris notwithstanding). By the same token my spouse is also a native of both America and of California. Her maternal great-grandparents immigrated here legally from Europe. I may have had some immigrant ancestors from the 19th century wave of immigration, but my family history is less chronicled than hers. However, I also have some American Indian ancestry that goes back at least 10,000 years.

The “know nothings” opposed growing Catholic influence in the 19th century. To me their opposition has been historically validated, due to the Catholic Church’s aggressive, politicized opposition to every form of birth control, directly contributing to the world’s overpopulation crisis. It also institutionalizes blind obedience to a theological dictatorship and preserves numerous distortions in early Christianity, brought in during the Roman Empire’s waning centuries. Other Christian sects also promote blind obedience, but few call their leader infallible.

But beyond that, it’s just as big a mistake to misapply the lessons of history as it is to fail to learn from them. Just because 19th century German immigrants may have helped America in the long run doesn’t mean Mexican immigrants will or won’t today. Both their demographics and our circumstances differ in significant ways. Inferring from American 19th century experience that all immigration is always good under all circumstances is indefensible.

You’ll have to be more specific and show how those circumstances match current ones to make such an argument stick. Only they don’t match—not by a long shot.

It’s like saying that because Saudi young male adult airline passengers didn’t hijack aircraft in 2000 proves that they were no threat on 9/11.

2) The US and Mexico have a shared history. The Western states were once part of Mexico until they were forcefully taken by the United States. It was the Spanish who named the major cities on the West Coast such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and others - all Spanish names. Whatever immigration reform occurs must occur on both sides of the border. The US must work with Mexico and not against Mexico.

Answer: If we return the Southwest to Mexico, will they turn around and return it to the Indian tribes they stole it from earlier? Then will the Navaho give back most of their territory to the Hopi, and the Hopi to the Anasazi? Will the Mexican government then return Mexico itself to the Indians they stole it from? Or, more exactly, since a majority of Mexicans are mestizos, will those whose DNA is, say, 51% Spanish or more return to Spain? Or does any Indian blood qualify to let them stay? In which case I can stay, since I’m 3/32 Cherokee (though I’d have to move out of California, being neither Chumash, Miwok or other original Californians).

Will the Aussies then give Australia back to its aborigines? Will its Anglo-Saxons return to Britain, or join their Brit Anglo-Saxon cohorts in returning to Germany, leaving their isles to the Celts? Then will all the Aryans in Europe go back to the Middle East? And since most humans today have mixed DNA, what do we do? This is an impossible demand. Basically we just have to take our borders and populations today as a given and go forward from there. Historical claims create infinite regresses and solve nothing.

2b) “The US must work with Mexico and not against Mexico.” What possible reason could be proffered to support this assertion? We surely have a shared history. So did the Third Reich and Poland. So would you, in late 1939, have insisted that “Poland must work with Germany” and not against it?

When you say “whatever immigration reform occurs must occur on both sides of the border,” you gloss over the fact that Mexico is a sovereign nation, and has consistently refused to cooperate, since remittances from Mexican citizens working in America is Mexico’s second-largest source of foreign currency, and since Mexico is using America as a safety valve for its overpopulation crisis.

We can’t make Mexico cooperate short of invading and conquering it. Is that what you’re recommending?

The plain fact is that the interests of Mexico’s ruling elite are in direct opposition to American interests.

Or perhaps you think we should regularize our immigration laws? I’d be happy to support adopting Mexico’s immigration laws and practices, which are, like those of most nations, quite harsh—even draconian.

And you can be certain that Mexico would refuse to adopt America’s vastly softer laws.

Mexico is our neighbor, but it is not our friend. The average Mexican holds strongly anti-American views, and the average Mexican immigrant to the US considers himself Mexican, not even Mexican-American, even if he holds American citizenship.

Adjacency guarantees nothing. Neither does shared history. France and Germany have plenty of shared history—that didn’t keep them from fighting war after war over the space of just one century. Even today there’s no love lost between people of these countries.

3) Any law that is broken often and with impunity is a law whose very existence is questionable. Mexicans have been illegally entering the United States for well over a century and they have not been a "threat" to the US in that time.

Answer: It is a legal principle that you can challenge laws that haven’t been enforced, or which have been enforced in a discriminatory fashion. It is also true that historically Mexicans have wandered back and forth over the American border with impunity, and weren’t generally considered a threat (Pancho Villa being a big exception).

The fallacy here is that the actually numbers involved were miniscule until recently. The entire population of Mexico in 1900 was about the same as the number of Mexican citizens living here illegally today, and considerably smaller than the number of Mexican-Americans living here legally.

So you’re equating surf to a tsunami. Scale matters, and here the scale is staggering. Los Angeles, America’s second largest metro area, is half Mexican today. It was, like, 1% in 1940. If Sydney’s demographics had flipped from, say, hardly any Philippinos to half today, Aussies would have plenty to say on the matter—particularly if those Philippinos were drawn nearly exclusively from Philippino peasants from the countryside, most them speaking no English, and lacking any job skills except for menial labor.

4) Maybe the answer is to have an open border - allow anyone to freely cross between the US and Mexico. This system works well in the European Union - Spanish people can leave their home country and settle in the UK and look for work without any sort of permit or passport. Moreover, many from the UK have done just that by moving to Spain! Anyone who is a citizen of a European Union country can move and live in and become a citizen of another European Union country. This has not led to massive immigration problems there. If the US is concerned about Mexico's southern border and illegals entering there from Guatemala or Belize, the length of the border is quite small and easy to police, unlike the one between the US and Mexico.

Answer: The open border argument would work if the neighboring countries had compatible culture, language, education, and affluence. We have this with Canada, and only need any kind of border control to control non-Canadians trying to get here over that border. However, none of these things hold true with Mexico.

Half—HALF—of Mexico’s population (the peasant half, unfortunately) has said they want to move to America. If the border were opened most of them would, and we’d then have something like 70 million manual laborers here competing for unskilled jobs against Americans now suffering from around 20% unemployment in this job sector.

I couldn’t think of anything more destructive to America’s own working poor, to our cities, to our infrastructure, and to our English-speaking society. One out of five Americans would then be a Mexican peasant, but that’s not really accurate, because they’d mostly settle where they have been settling—in the Southwest. Here they’d be the majority by a solid margin. So the politics would be their politics, structure to favor their interests.

For us to advocate this would be culturally suicidal.

5) The fertility rate of Mexican women is only slightly higher than the comparable figure in the US (2.34 children per Mexican woman, 2.05 in the US). The fertility rate of both nations has dropped in recent decades. Even if open borders were introduced there is no real threat of a Mexican population explosion to dominate the US.

Answer: you’re using misleading figures. The fertility rate of Mexican women in toto is irrelevant. It’s the fertility rate of Mexico’s bottom half—its peasantry—that matters, because 99% of immigration from Mexico comes from this cohort.

And their fertility rate is staggering—including unwed teen mothers—as demonstrated by their reproduction patterns in this country, which shows the most rapid reproduction of any substantial slice of the American population. That’s how they went from .5% of the American population in 1940 to over 14% today, exceeding even that of Blacks.

So it’s true that “there is no real threat of a Mexican population explosion to dominate the US” because it’s already a reality—especially since, as I keep saying, it’s concentrated in the Southwest, which is turning into America’s Quebec. Today the most-viewed TV station in Los Angeles doesn't broadcast in English--only in Spanish. And already the California state legislature doesn't dare pass any laws that Mexicans would object to.

6) If Americans want more Mexicans to stay in Mexico, then the US government should involve itself in helping their southern neighbour to grow economically and socially. NAFTA has certainly helped in this regard.

Answer: Again, Mexico is a sovereign nation with zero interest in advice from America. They want money and visas—not advice. They hand out comic books to illegal immigrant wannabes, giving them advice on how to avoid the American border patrol and contact Mexican consulates, which work tirelessly across America to help illegal aliens from Mexico get money and jobs and welfare benefits (especially through anchor babies).

Mexico doesn't want advice especially since it's grotesquely overpopulated (from 20 million in 1940 to 111 million today), meaning our first advice should be for them to adopt China’s One Child policy, along with financing planned parenthood clinics throughout Mexico offering free abortion, sterilization, and condoms—all forbidden by Mexico’s dominant religion. That’s what Mexico needs but it's not about to listen to anyone telling them this.

It also needs a revolution so its tiny ruling clique quits stealing most of the country’s GDP for itself. What do you think that clique would think of our helping Mexico do that?

We could quit subsidizing American agribillionaires, and legalize hard drugs for adults. That would help Mexican farmers and economically cripple Mexico’s drug lords who have harmed Mexican society so much. But as long as there are five times as many Mexicans as Mexico’s ecological and sociological carrying capacity can support, any help aside from population reduction and revolution is likely to be futile.

The best thing we can do for Mexico is adopt a universal biometric ID and offer to help Mexico set up one itself. With this we could make it impossible for Mexican citizens residing here illegally to get work or access social services, thus bottling up Mexico to solve its internal problems instead of using us a s a safety valve. All they've done with that safety valve so far is...not change.

I should add that I speak Spanish, have lived in Mexico, have a relative who taught Mexican anthropology at the University of Mexico, have traveled in Mexico fairly extensively, have scuba dived in Mexico, and have a degree in sociology. I've traveled in 17 countries on four continents.

Hardly the CV of a “know-nothing.” I’m just realistic.

And part of that realism is recognizing that every sovereign nation on Earth has the right to decide who gets to live within its borders--how many, and with what national, racial, educational, occupational, religious, and legal background--or any other criteria they choose to apply. It's racist to make some of your citizens second-class citizens. It isn't racist to choose who gets to come to your country, however, as long as legal residents and citizens are all treated the same way.

America is one of the world's most successful nations in its ability to assimilate large numbers of immigrants. Part of this has been sheer luck--we're a rich country, and, for example, we've done well so far with Muslims (one just won the Miss USA contest) because we've gotten mainly middle class, educated ones with good job skills, and we've utilized those skills. Europe has gotten hidebound, xenophobic Muslim peasants, with predictable results.

We've also done well by dispersing immigrants throughout the country, preventing large permanent non-American enclaves from persisting--except with Mexicans in the Southwest, whose numbers are now large enough to form stable monocultural, Spanish-speaking areas wherein you don't need to learn anything about American culture or language to get by, except for your legal and welfare rights.

We don't need more peasants of any country or race, and especially not Mexican ones. Mexican doctors, lawyers, engineers, divemasters, chemists, sure. Come on down. Peasants--stay home. We have a huge unemployment problem with American peasants. Why burden them more?