The Economist's advice for Arizona: surrender.

The Economist wrote a particularly fatuous editorial against Arizona's immigration law.

Here's my response:

The London & Los Angeles metro areas both have about 13 million residents. Over the past 70 years London has gotten a lot more multicultural, with the white English-descended majority progressively leavened by people of many nationalities, races & ethnicities. Surely British foodies rejoice at this.

Now imagine if, over the past 70 years, so many people had come from just one demographic slice of one foreign country that today, half of London was, say, Spanish.

But not doctors/lawyers/art history professors/engineers. Just unskilled laborers with less than a secondary education.

And say that this group speaks little or no English, & now doesn’t need to, because with half the city Spanish-speaking, with store signs in Spanish & shopkeepers who also speak Spanish, with many TV & radio stations broadcasting only in Spanish—including the most popular one in London; with ballots in Spanish & official signs in Spanish, & a city government that rushes to accommodate Spanish-speakers in every way imaginable.

Add that in this scenario the Spanish government has told these Spaniards that the UK is historically a part of Spain, so those who are here in London illegally…aren’t.

So they parade through town in vast numbers—hundreds of thousands on occasion—waving Spanish flags & demanding their rights; even telling fellow Londoners that on every October 12 (Spain’s National Day), only the Spanish flag is to be shown—displaying the Union Jack in London on that day would be “disrespecting” Londonia’s Spaniards [something like this just happened here in California].

Moreover, suppose these Spaniards reproduce at four times the rate of other Brits, & demographers project that Spaniards will become a majority of voters in southern England in a few decades.

Now suppose the Economist’s editors then chime in & demand that Brits accept all this with a smile—that the movement of all these Spaniards into London metro is as inevitable as plate tectonics; that the displacement of modern multicultural Britain by large monolithic Spain barrios is also inevitable, & virtuous, really. To object would be racist, & so one may safely ignore the complaints of anyone so churlish as to prefer their own varied culture to the monolithic one that’s displacing it.

Would the Economist make such cavalier assumptions and recommendations to we who live in the Southwest if this scenario were playing out in England?

In 1940, 0.5% of Americans could claim Latino heritage. Now it’s 14% & growing rapidly. But this underestimates the situation greatly, because that migration is concentrated across the American Southwest. Here in California, it’s growing so fast that by 2050 a majority of voters will people who describe themselves as Mexicans.

I challenge any Brit who claims to love his country to say he’d be happy with England becoming transformed like this—particularly when that domination is in the hands of another country’s least educated, least skilled, & least cultured cohort.

Nor do they love the country they’ve invaded. They say we’re the illegals here in the Southwest, so if we don’t like illegals we should go.

This Economist editorial treats Americans’ complaints about all this with equal contempt, as if our distress & our arguments aren’t even worth discussing—only what is to be done with such knuckle-dragging yobs as us.

Does anyone at the Economist know what’s been going on in Mexico over the last century? Its population has exploded--from 13.1 million in 1900 to 20 million in 1940 to 111 million today, plus perhaps 12 million more illegals here.

This is America’s fault how? They did this themselves, and no we don’t need their unskilled labor. Today one out of five American unskilled laborers (many of them Black or Latino) is unemployed. What kind of job magnet is that? We need skilled immigrants.

And as for the 12 million illegals—the Economist believes we’re morally & practically obligated to give them legal residence. As if “we” lured there here. We assuredly did not. Union-busting corporatists did, with government collusion, against the will of the American people.

Ronald Reagan tried amnesty in 1986. It triggered a tidal wave of new illegal immigration.

What we do need is a universal biometric ID database, enabling us to actually know who’s here, & to make it impossible for trespassers to make a living here or access social services here. Then many will self-deport.

And Arizona's law--which simply applies federal immigration law at the state level--is a start.