Arizona Roundup

Interesting remarks on the Arizona law dealing with their illegal alien problem.

President Obama speaking in Ottumwa, Iowa, April 27, 2010:

One of the things that the law says is local officials are allowed to ask somebody who they have a suspicion might be an illegal immigrant for their papers.  But you can imagine, if you are a Hispanic American in Arizona -- your great-grandparents may have been there before Arizona was even a state. But now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed.  That’s something that could potentially happen.

Ralph Peters, "Border Disorder," New York Post, April 29, 2010:

More people now die violently on our southern border than in Somalia, Yemen or even Afghanistan. But Washington doesn't know what to do about Mexico. So Washington does nothing much. Our ruling class simply doesn't feel the pain. So the DC elite demonizes Arizona's desperate effort to shove the narco-revolution's disorder back across the border. Murdered ranchers, overwhelmed emergency rooms and soaring crime rates in our border states mean less to the White House than a terrorist detainee's claims of abuse. Our governing elite pretends that illegal immigration, torrential crime where illegals cluster, overcrowded prisons, Mexico's narco-insurgency, legal cross-border commerce and the drug trade are separate issues, to be addressed discreetly. ... And Arizona's "discriminatory" new state law empowering police to pursue criminal aliens? Should Phoenix let the rule of law collapse because Washington prefers political correctness to public safety? In DC, it's about politics. In Arizona, it's about survival.

George Will, "A law Arizona can live with," Washington Post, April 28, 2010:

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund attacks Gov. Jan Brewer's character and motives, saying she "caved to the radical fringe." This poses a semantic puzzle: Can the large majority of Arizonans who support the law be a "fringe" of their state?...

The fact that the meaning of "reasonable" will not be obvious in many contexts does not make the law obviously too vague to stand. The Bill of Rights -- the Fourth Amendment -- proscribes "unreasonable searches and seizures." What "reasonable" means in practice is still being refined by case law -- as is that amendment's stipulation that no warrants shall be issued "but upon probable cause." There has also been careful case-by-case refinement of the familiar and indispensable concept of "reasonable suspicion." 

New York Times editorial, "Stopping Arizona," April 30, 2010:

A fight is brewing over Arizona’s new law that turns all of the state’s Latinos, even legal immigrants and citizens, into criminal suspects. ... The statute requires police officers to stop and question anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant. ... Federal law requires noncitizens to carry documents but does not empower police officers to stop anyone they choose and demand to see papers. Arizona’s attempt to get around that by defining the act of standing on its soil without papers as a criminal act is repellent. ... Is our core belief still the welcome and assimilation of newcomers? Arizona has given one answer. It’s time for Mr. Obama to give the other.

NRO Symposium, "Appraising Arizona," April 28, 2010:

Leo Banks (writes for the Tuscon Weekly) says that, in Arizona, "American citizens are living under siege — burglaries, home invasions, intimidation, and recently a cold-blooded murder — from illegal aliens and drug smugglers." Linda Chavez on the other hand, says, "crime in Arizona has gone down consistently from 1990 to the present — at the very time that illegal immigration was going up dramatically — and the violent crime rate in the state is lower than the national average, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Moreover, the flow of illegals into the U.S. generally and into Arizona specifically has also gone down dramatically over the last two years, partly as result of better enforcement and partly because of the weak economy."

James Gimpel -- "[I]f the vast majority of the Arizonans who support this law were racist, something like it would have been passed 30 or 40 years ago, before illegal immigration became associated with rising crime and fiscal and economic problems. Did Arizonans wake up last month and suddenly notice that some Mexicans have a different skin tone? I don’t think so. The fact is that Arizonans have been incredibly gracious and tolerant for a very long time now. It is only with the rising drug trade along the border, mixed with the state’s present economic strain, that they have begun to question the warm welcome they have customarily extended our southern neighbors." (James G. Gimpel is a professor of government at the University of Maryland, College Park.)

Kris Kobach -- "The Arizona immigration bill is a big step in the right direction. As someone who helped Senator Pearce draft it, I am admittedly biased. But I can say with certainty that it was drafted to withstand legal challenge. ... Contrary to misstatements by the critics of Arizona’s law, it is a measured and reasonable law that simply makes a state violation out of what has been a federal crime for 70 years — the failure of an alien to carry required registration documents. It does not conflict with federal law in any way. For that reason, it will withstand a preemption challenge."

"Polls show that 70 percent of Arizonans support the new law. The overwhelming majority of Americans in the other 49 states share Arizonans’ basic point of view: enforce immigration laws more vigorously, protect American workers against illegal competition in the workplace, and don’t even think about amnesty." (Kris Kobach is a professor of law at the University of Missouri (Kansas City) School of Law and former counsel to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.)

Professor Kobach also has an op-ed in the New York Times defending major objections to the law entitled, "Why Arizona Drew the Line," (April 29, 2010) .

Mark Krikorian -- "The explosion of illegal immigration in Arizona — where fully one-third of the uninsured are illegals and the state spends nearly $2 billion a year educating the children of families headed by illegals — demanded a response." (Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies)

Heather Macdonald (City Journal) -- "For years, any hint of immigration enforcement has triggered loud complaints from illegal-alien advocates about the stress that the mere possibility of detection places on illegal aliens’ peace of mind. For the illegal-alien lobby, there is a right not just to be in the country illegally, but also to be free from any nervousness that might be caused by one’s illegal status. ... SB 1070 demonstrates that Americans in states with high rates of illegal entry continue to reel under the health-care, education, and law-enforcement costs imposed by unrestricted entry from Mexico."

Scott Rasmussen -- "[W]hile seven voters out of ten say border enforcement is a higher priority than legalizing undocumented workers, most also favor a welcoming immigration policy. Nearly six out of ten say we should allow anyone in except criminals, national-security threats, and those who want to take advantage of the welfare system. By the way, Republicans are a bit more supportive than Democrats of a welcoming immigration system."

Jonah Goldberg, "Arizona's Ugly but Necessary Immigration Law," NRO, April 28, 2010:

I agree that there’s something ugly about the police, even local police, asking citizens for their “papers” (there’s nothing particularly ugly about asking illegal immigrants for their papers, though). There’s also something ugly about American citizens’ being physically searched at airports. There’s something ugly about IRS agents’ prying into nearly all of your personal financial transactions or, thanks to the passage of Obamacare, serving as health-insurance enforcers. In other words, there are many government functions that are unappealing to one extent or another. That is not in itself an argument against them. The Patriot Act was ugly — and necessary.

Rich Lowry, "Hysterics Against Arizona," NRO, April 27, 2010 (Lots of good stuff; read it all):

The police already have the power to stop illegal aliens, a power the Arizona courts have upheld; they already can ask about someone’s legal status...; and they already can detain illegal aliens. The Arizona law strengthens these existing authorities. Will they be abused? Upon signing the law, Arizona governor Jan Brewer issued an executive order for a training program on how to implement it without racial profiling. No matter what her intentions, of course, it’s unavoidable that Latino citizens will be questioned disproportionally under the law; nationwide, 80 percent of illegal aliens are Latino, and the proportion in Arizona must be higher.

"Mexico's Population: When the Ninos Run Out," The Economist, April 22, 2010:

Mexico’s birth rate, once among the world’s highest, is in free-fall. In the 1960s Mexican mothers had nearly seven children each (whereas women in India then had fewer than six). The average now is just over two—almost the same as in the United States. The UN reckons that from 2040 the birth rate in Mexico will be the lower of the two. ... Mexicans are rapidly aging. This trend, which took a century in Europe, has happened in three decades, Mr Welti points out. In 1980 the average Mexican was 17 years old; he is now 28. At the moment, one in ten Mexicans is aged 60 or over; within three decades, the figure will be almost one in four. (On this subject, also consider the links you find here.)

Where I live, it may not be obvious who all the undocumented aliens are, but it is perfectly obvious who some of them are. Early in the morning, they congregate at the corner waiting for work to come along. As Grover Norquist says in the NRO forum on this subject, "I wish more Americans had that get up and go." They ride bikes. Sometimes they are men in their late twenties on children's bikes. But I respect them for their sacrifice and hard work. They don't bring crime to our town, not that I'm aware. They seem like nice people. I make eye contact and greet them with "good morning" when we cross paths. All the same, if they have come here illegally, and if it's this obvious who they are, regardless of how polite and productive and otherwise law abiding they are, we must consider their apprehension and extradition the right thing to do. Having said that, however, it is equally obvious that their presence here and the demand for their labor indicates that the channels for legal immigration to this country need to be much wider and more easily accessible.


I am an immigrant, now a citizen, though I was always what they called "in status," i.e., legal. But while I was a permanent resident, I was required by federal law to carry my green card with me at all times. I didn't have a problem with that. If massive Canadian illegal immigration, painfully expensive resulting burdens on state government services, and widespread Canadian gang activity meant that law enforcement officers on occasion would pull me over (for whatever reasonable cause I was generating at the time), I would be fine with that too. I would thank them for their work and feel shame on account of the trouble my countrymen were causing my host country.

The Way Forward--Maybe

This assessment is by turns optimistic and sobering. Tony Blankley holds up Benjamin Disraeli, who used conservative principles to figure out how to ride the wave of change in England. That's the optimistic part, which shows it is possible to pull off something like what Republicans are going to need to do.

But he also warns there is no getting around addressing the burgeoning Hispanic population. This is sobering because even though there are strong conservative touch points available in this population--their family values are strong, their faith is strong, their strong work ethic is typical of immigrants of all sorts--the hard left has been at work these past decades here as well. La Raza has many Latinos thinking they are merely taking back what racist Americans took from them, and they do not recognize any such status as "illegal immigrant". I would expect an immigration bill in Congress fairly soon that recognizes a large percentage of illegal immigrants here now as citizens, which will buy their loyalty for generations. I don't know how Republicans can outbid Democrats on this while adhering to any notion of the nation state that we are familiar with. I wouldn't be surprised to see a new influx of illegals based on the prospects for citizenship--which in a down economy will prominently feature welfare benefits that far exceed what they can get in Mexico. The health insurance plan we get out of this Congress will absolutely include illegals--another magnet. Oh, and we'll be paying some substantial portion of the 5 million mortgages given to illegal immigrants during the past half-dozen years of the Fannie Mae bubble. If you're an illegal, it's all good with the Democrats.

Much depends on how long the Democrat hallucination of prosperity through expropriation will keep its grip on the country. For unless and until Latinos and substantial portions of the rest of the demographic groups under its spell of are jolted awake, conservatives can only try to prevent the worst excesses of an America seriously playing with socialism. Only when the narcotic wears off will conservatives have an audience again among those whose votes will be needed to turn this thing around.

The New World Obama Will Make

Pat Buchanan (quite reasonably) sees this as President Obama leaves the starting blocks ("Obama's First 100 Days").

• Swift amnesty for 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens and a drive to make them citizens and register them, as in the Bill Clinton years. This will mean that Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona will soon move out of reach for GOP presidential candidates, as has California.

• Border security will go on the backburner, and America will have a virtual open border with a Mexico of 110 million.

• Taxes will be raised on the top 5 percent of wage-earners, who now carry 60 percent of the U.S. income tax burden, and tens of millions of checks will be sent out to the 40 percent of wage-earners who pay no federal income tax. Like the man said, redistribute the wealth, spread it around.

• Social Security taxes will be raised on the most successful among us, and capital gains taxes will be raised from 15 percent to 20 percent. The Bush tax cuts will be repealed, and death taxes reimposed.

• Two or three more liberal activists of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg-John Paul Stevens stripe will be named to the Supreme Court. U.S. district and appellate courts will be stacked with "progressives."

• Special protections for homosexuals will be written into all civil rights laws, and gays and lesbians in the military will be invited to come out of the closet. "Don't ask, don't tell" will be dead.

• The homosexual marriages that state judges have forced California, Massachusetts and Connecticut to recognize, an Obama Congress or Obama court will require all 50 states to recognize.

• A "Freedom of Choice Act" nullifying all state restrictions on abortions will be enacted. America will become the most pro-abortion nation on earth.

• Affirmative action – hiring and promotions based on race, sex and sexual orientation until specified quotas are reached – will be rigorously enforced throughout the U.S. government and private sector.

• Universal health insurance will be enacted, covering legal and illegal immigrants, providing another powerful magnet for the world to come to America, if necessary by breaching her borders.

• A federal bailout of states and municipalities to keep state and local governments spending up could come in December or early next year.

• The first trillion-dollar deficit will be run in the first year of an Obama presidency. It will be the first of many.

Your children will grow up (and themselves have children) in a radically different America.

The only hope for some moderation in this Pelosi-Reid supported agenda is ...

(1) Obama has run as a centrist, covering over many of these issues, such as abortion, homosexual marriage and amnesty for illegal aliens;

(2) popular outcry against some of these measures by (oddly) surprised middle America will restrain House and Senate members facing re-election in marginal districts within two years;

(3) his natural concern to maintain his legislative majority by not repeating Clinton's mistakes leading up to the 1994 GOP midterm Congressional victory, and of course to see himself re-elected in 2012.

Absolut Cause for Concern

Does this suggestion get you angry?

Market research by Mexico City ad firm Teran/TBWA must have shown that the prospect of restoring the 1848 Mexican-U.S. border strikes a chord with consumers in Mexico where Absolut Vodka has been running this ad. (They've pulled it in response to the controversy.)

Read Michelle Malkin's column, "Absolut Folly" (NRO, April 9, 2008). Apparently there is a significant number of Mexicans, both in Mexico and here in the the United States (legally and illegally), who harbor a notion of "reconquista." There is a group called The National Council of La Raza (“the race”) who deny there is such a goal but act in every way consistent with it. Hillary Clinton campaign co-chair Dolores Huerta is reported to have said in a speech two weeks ago, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” As to the reconquista, she said, “It’s really too late. If 47 million (Latinos) have one baby each . . . it’s already won.”

Read the column. It's short, and it's worth noting. For more ads and spoofs of ads and links, go to Malkin's website. Here is the AP story.

More on Mexico's Plutocracy Problem

In an earlier post on illegal immigration, I mentioned a fabulously wealthy Mexican gentleman named Carlos Slim, and his role in restraining the economic potential of the Mexican economy. I have found his name popping up repeatedly since then. The most recent report that I have encountered is "Mexico's Plutocracy Thrives on Robber-Baron Concessions" by Eduardo Porter (New York Times, August 27, 2007, p. A16).

Porter provides some interesting facts:

• Of the 946 billionaires in the world, 10 are Mexican, and Carlos Slim Helu is one of them.


• Carlos Slim (worth US$59 billion) recently surpassed Bill Gates (US$58 billion) as the world's richest man.


• Mr. Slim's net worth amounts to 7% of Mexico's GDP. Bill Gates's wealth is only 0.5% of America's GDP. John D. Rockefeller's (1839-1937) wealth was worth 1.5% of his country's GDP (I'm guessing that he means around 1890).

This son of Lebanese immigrants who clearly has remarkable abilities that most of the rest of us do not have -- and he is entitled to reap the fair fruit of that -- nonetheless did not get to where he is today without significant and morally questionable government help.

In 1990, the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari sold his friend Mr. Slim the Mexican National phone company, Telmex, along with a de facto commitment to maintain its monopoly for years. Then it awarded Telmex the only nationwide cellphone license.

When competitors were eventually allowed in, Telmex kept them at bay with some rather creative gambits, like getting a judge to issue an arrest warrant for the top lawyer of a competitor. Today, it still has a 90 percent share of Mexico's landline phone service and controls almost three-quarters of thew cellphone market.

Porter reports that 20% of Mexicans have land lines, less than half of these have cellphones, and only 9% of Mexican households have Internet access. The corrected front page Wall Street Journal Luhnow article on Slim cites the World Bank as putting that land line figure at about 50%.

Mr. Slim's style of wealth accumulation is not rare in modern Mexico. From television to tortillas, vast swaths of the Mexican economy are controlled by monopolies or oligarchies. Many of Mexico's billionaires were created by the government during the privatization of the state-owned companies in the 1990s.

But though the figures may or may not be off, it is certainly true that if men like Carlos Slim would loosen their monopolistic control of their country's economy, they would have more potential customers with a lot more money. As a consequence, they (along with everyone else) would be much richer -- or "prosperous" is perhaps a gentler word.

Porter's leftist sentiments come through in his attempt to sound the alarm here in the United States against big business and wealth accumulation. We are "fast approaching Mexico's levels of inequality." He cites "[t]he concentration of 44 percent of the nation's income among the top 10 percent of taxpayers...." Aside from his seeming unreliability at reporting figures, the difference between our rich and Mexico's is that, in our relatively free economy (it could benefit from being freer), that wealthy 10% generates productive capacity and wealth which spreads throughout the population.

Harvard Prof: Multiculturalism Kills Community

Daniel Henninger reported yesterday in The Wall Street Journal (“The Death of Diversity”) that the cultivation of diversity in the form of perpetually distinct ethnic communities “has a downside.” That is, “People in ethnically diverse settings don’t care about each other.”

That seems counter-intuitive.

He draws this conclusion from reading a study by Robert Putnam, public policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000). He has just completed a study of the impact of diverse communities on social cohesion and civic engagement entitled E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century.

Henninger quotes Putnam’s scandalous conclusion:

Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.

Growing up in Canada, I was taught that while America follows the “melting pot” approach to integrating immigrants into the nation (understood to be clearly bad), enlightened Canada welcomes her new arrivals into something we called a “salad bowl” (understood to be clearly good). The Trudeau government of the 1970s made this a matter of policy, calling it “multiculturalism,” their way of trying to diffuse the bi-cultural, bi-national Quebec problem.

I came to see the inherent contradiction in this. The goal was to form a tolerant society of diverse communities, each appreciating and respecting all the others. The celebration of this social model was the annual “Caravan” festival in Toronto, a delightful arrangement in which the various ethnic groups would put on shows, serve food and sell crafts at their respective restaurants and community centers. People would buy “passports” and circulate from one venue to another all week.

The problem is that the people hosting and the people circulating represent two very different views of the world and of neighboring worlds. The more appreciation for diversity one has, the less attached one becomes to one’s own culture. Perhaps it is a weak sense of having a culture at all that inclines a person to circulate rather than host at an event like Caravan. Of course this is a generalization, but English Canadians are notorious for their paralyzing confusion over who they are.

So diversity, in the sense of a confederation of distinct yet peacefully coexisting communities, a "community of communities" as I think Canadian Tory leader Joe Clark once put it, is something that can be cultivated only by people who care nothing for it, but instead care only for their own respective insular ways of life. They care nothing for other communities and nothing for the nation as a whole, except perhaps insofar as it pertains to protecting what is particular to them, if they think about it at all. There is no citizenship within this view, except in the merely legal sense, for that requires a sacrificial concern for the common good. There is only the opposite. This social model encourages retreat into concern for what is narrowly one’s own, though not as far as what de Tocqueville calls individualism. Love for everyone else’s cultures is held up as a virtue, but those cultures can perpetuate themselves only to the extent that there are people paying no attention to other people’s cultures and perhaps even rejecting them. This is what Putnam has documented. (It is interesting that we need expensive studies to prove what otherwise is quite obvious.)

The American model, the so-called “melting pot,” is not the oppressive enemy of human flourishing that some claim it to be. Indeed, it is the opposite. The “melting” indicates the virtue and necessity of conforming to what is “American.” The United States is the only country in the world that is founded on certain principles of right, truths held to be self-evident, namely “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Thus, a newly naturalized citizen, whether from Canada or Tonga, is as much an American as a descendant of Washington himself, provided that he supports the Constitution and the principles on which it is based. This model is most conducive of citizenship, or what Putnam calls “social cohesion and civic engagement.” It directs people to think more about “us” than about “me,” with what is good for “us” being informed by what is objectively known to be good through reflection on nature and nature's God.

Putnam goes even further than I would expect, however, in his characterizations of these insular communities. Notice, they "withdraw even from close friends, [and] expect the worst from their community and its leaders." The final picture is one of total alienation: they "huddle unhappily in front of the television." It sounds like a stultifying and miserable existence. This goes beyond even the individualism against which de Tocqueville cautions us, and descends into egoism. I don't recognize this, but his argument merits reading.

Especially interesting is the hope Putnam sees in "large evangelical congregations" which provide people of diverse ethnic backgrounds with lots of little groups (perhaps local Bible studies and fellowship evenings) in the context of a common identity and community experience. I would say that the church of Christ offers people the social body and personal identity for which they long, but which can be found only partially in gangs, families, neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves. See my earlier post on community and the longing soul.

For a good study of the present fixation on diversity by our cultural elites, Peter Wood's Diversity, the Invention of a Concept (2004) is the definitive word of the subject.

Mexico's Tight Credit Drives Illegals North

People stream across the Mexico-US border in search of jobs. Clearly, there are far too few jobs in Mexico or the pay differential between Mexico and the US is far too high, or both.

Joel Kurtzman, a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, in "Mexico's Job-Creation Problem" (Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2007), provides some illuminating information: "Mexico has a job-creation problem."

"During President Vicente Fox's six years in office his goal was to create six million jobs across all sectors of the economy." During that time, however, "Mexico created only 1.4 million jobs." Of particular interest to Americans is the observation that during that same period, "[t]he number of illegal immigrants from Mexico was roughly equal to the number of jobs Mr. Fox did not create."

Oh, it gets better. Why does Mexico find it so hard to create jobs? They have lots of oil, an abundant and hard-working labor force, long tourist-attractive coastlines, and a shared border with the American economic behemoth. Ka-ching! But jobs are created by entrepreneurs, and in order to create jobs entrepreneurs need access to capital. The problem is that "Mexico's financial and economic structures fail at providing entrepreneurs with the capital they need to create jobs." According to Kurtzman, nearly half the Mexican economy is controlled by one man, Carlos Slim (see WSJ, "The Secrets of the World's Richest Man," Aug 4-5, 2007), and most of the rest is in the hands of a few others. They don't like competition, failing to understand the basic economic fact that a growing economy that is a free economy enriches everyone, even the Carlos Slims.

Read the article for what he says about the oil and banking industries and about household credit and their residential mortgage market. What a mess. "If mortgages were cheap and plentiful -- through the increased use of mortgage securitization tools, for example -- the epicenter of demand for Mexico's trade- and craftsmen would not be California, Arizona, Texas and Florida. It would be in Mexico."

The people crossing illegally from Mexico into the United States are not just job seekers. They are also capital seekers who come here to start businesses. "Solving the immigration problem will not happen unless Mexico solves its job-creation problem."

FYI - SUNY Professor has Idea for Illegals

State University of New York professor of political science, Peter Salins, suggests a simple, inexpensive and, he claims, effective solution to our illegal immigration problem. ("Use Social Security to Seal the Border," The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2007, p.A17). It is something like the "deal with it at the point of consumption" answer to the illegal drug problem.

Under current employment law, every legal permanent resident of the United States is required to have a Social Security number. Further, employers must register their employees' status and Social Security numbers with the Social Security Administration and make contributions to the system on their behalf. These two features together can serve as a dragnet for identifying all illegal workers. ... By directing the Social Security Administration to use its database to enforce our existing immigration laws, President Bush can do this now without waiting for Congress to pass a bill.

Read the the whole article, then call your senator and congressman.

Common Sense on Immigration Reform

Lou Dobbs has weighed in with the obvious on the illegal immigration issue. On CNN.com, he writes:

This president desperately needs to be reminded that he is the president of all Americans and not just of corporate interests and socio-ethnocentric special interest groups.

In what other country would citizens be treated to the spectacle of the president and the Senate focusing on the desires of 12 million to 20 million people who had crossed the nation's borders illegally, committed document fraud, and in many cases identity theft, overstayed their visas and demanded, not asked, full forgiveness for their trespasses?

Illegal aliens and their advocates, both liberal and conservative, possess such an overwhelming sense of entitlement that they demand not only legal status, but also that the government leave the borders wide open so that other illegals could follow as well, while offering not so much as an "I'm sorry" or a "Thank you."

He then enumerates four steps for solving the problem. I listed the first two in an earlier post, and I included the third one in a broader call for a more generous immigration policy.

First, fully secure our borders and ports. Without that security, there can be no control of immigration and, therefore, no meaningful reform of immigration law.

Second, enforce existing immigration laws, and that includes the prosecution of the employers of illegal aliens. ...

Third, the government should fund, equip and hire the people necessary to man the Citizenship and Immigration Services. To do so will ensure that the agency is capable of fully executing and administering lawful immigration into the United States and eliminating the shameful backlog of millions of people who are seeking legal entry into this country. ...

At the same time, the president and Congress should order exhaustive studies of the economic, social and fiscal effects of the leading proposals to change immigration law, and foremost in their consideration should be the well-being of American workers and their families.

John Mueller of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in his newly published Redeeming Economics, notes a relationship between the legalization of abortion in 1973 and our current labor shortage. He writes, "Most immigrants are in their twenties, and the annual number of legal and illegal immigrants to the United States is now almost exactly equal to the number of abortions 20 to 25 years earlier: about 1.5 million."

In my June 7th post, I hesitated to add a fourth step to the solution simply because of its complexity, but prodded by Mueller's bold and illuminating book, I will re-enumerate my common sense steps to solving the illegal immigration problem, this time adding a critically important domestic policy change.

1. Secure the border

2. Enforce the immigration laws

3. Open the immigration spigot

4. Change the laws to at least discourage abortion (Rudy, can you do that?), and then to encourage families to have children and stay together. David Brooks broached this subject in his May 15th 2007 New York Times column, "A Human Capital Agenda," saying, "It means increasing child tax credits to reduce economic stress on young families. It means encouraging marriage, the best educational institution we have."

Recognizing the need for these measures and rallying the country and our legislators to support them is the work of a statesman and the measure of a successful presidential candidate in 2008.

Immigration Bill Serves Washington, Not America

Reagan AG, Edwin Meese III, gives us the definitive word on the Immigration Bill that is now before Congress ("Invasive and Ineffective," WSJ June7, 2007, p.A21). Essentially, the bill smooths the way for illegals who are now in the country and places onerous administrative burdens on both US citizens and legal immigrants (of which I am one), and without a serious effort to secure the border.

What do I conclude from this? What does anyone conclude who has even the most basic understanding of economics and of human behavior in general? In effect, as soon as the bill is passed, twelve million other people will immediately understand that, when they make it across the border, they themselves can become Z-visa holders just 24 hours after securing a forged bank statement, lease, telephone bill et cetera. If our present situation is overwhelming, the one it will produce will be literally hopeless. No government bureaucracy, not even one dreamed up and funded by the glassy-eyed liberals driving Washington these days, could follow up on the tens of millions of "probationary" Z-visa holders that would need to become permanent after a more thorough investigation. DHS is already considerably backlogged with proper applicants. Translate: home free and legal.

In addition, once these illegals are legalized, half of them will lose their jobs. I have a friend in the construction industry. (No, not a rich construction company owner. He does bathrooms. But he knows lots of guys in the business.) As soon as your illegals become legal, your labor costs go up by 50% because of workman's compensation and other government mandated contributions. Regardless of what one thinks of those, a sudden and sharp increase in labor costs will mean layoffs and higher prices, which in turn will mean lower demand which in turn will mean more layoffs. Millions of unemployed foreign nationals on our soil. Problem.

If the problems with this legislation are so obvious, why are 535 legislators and a President seriously considering it? One reason is that very few people in political office understand anything about economics and human behavior. (If this were not so, we would never have had AFDC.) The Democrats want the law because they expect that most of the legalized illegals will eventually become Democrat voters, locking the Republicans out of power for the foreseeable future. Even if they understand the unemployment that will result, even among citizens, that's good too because unemployed people vote Democrat, even if the Democrats are the ones who caused it. The President wants it because the reason that he was elected in 2004 was the significant increase in Hispanic voting for the Republican ticket. He too imagines that these legalized illegals will eventually vote for his party, though he is less justified in believing that. The Republicans in Congress are dithering between principle and pipe dreams.

So, people who carp and criticize should cough up their own solutions. Again, it is obvious.

Number one: secure the border. We are being invaded -- not by a hostile army -- but nonetheless invaded. Put up a fence and regulate traffic through the open bits. If we can drop Shock and Awe on Iraq, surely we can face down Mexico with a fence. Get it done, and fast.

Second: start identifying who is here illegally and start putting them gently on the other side of the fence. Twelve million people are a lot of people. No problem. Take twenty years to do it, if necessary. In the end you may be repatriating someone who has been here for thirty years. He can thank the Lord that he has had thirty years in America. I hope that he is saving. What if these people have children born here? Those children are American citizens. Fine. They are repatriated with their parents and when they turn 18 they can come back to the land of their birth, America. If you let parents stay because of their American-born babies, guess what? (Follow the logic of predictable human behavior.) People sneaking into the country will secure their permanent residency by having babies here. What if an illegal marries an American? Will we split up families? If you marry someone who is illegally in the country, you have implicitly agreed to follow your beloved to his or her country of origin if need be or live potentially very separate lives. Otherwise, people will sneak into the country and secure their permanent residency by marrying the first gullible Americans they can dupe into wedlock. Can't have that. (Remember AFDC?) It's tough love.

Third: open the immigration spigot much wider than it is and employ enough people at DHS to process them in a timely manner. That's growing the government. That's something we do well. There is surely a majority in Congress for that.

Thank you Mr Meese. You continue to serve your country ably and faithfully.