A rational
immigration reform would attempt to reorient, not accelerate, current policy
Most countries in
the world have irrelevant numbers of “immigrants.” In the Americas, for
example, only Canada, America, and the British West Indies have significant
non-native populations. In Mexico, immigrants account for 0.6 percent of the
population, and that generally negligible level prevails all the way down
through Latin America until you hit a blip of 1.4 percent with Chile and 3.8
percent in Argentina. There’s an isolated exception in Belize, which, like the
English Caribbean, has historical patterns of internal migration within the
British Commonwealth, such as one sees, for example, in the number of New
Zealand–born residents of Australia. But profound sweeping demographic
transformation through immigration is a phenomenon only of the Western world in
the modern era, and even there America leads the way. Over 20 percent of all
the immigrants on the planet are in the United States. The country’s
foreign-born population has doubled in the last two decades to 40 million —
officially. Which is the equivalent of Washington taking a decision to admit
every single living Canadian, and throwing in the population of New Zealand as
a bonus. Thank goodness they didn’t do that, eh? (Whoops.) Otherwise, America
would have been subject to some hideous, freakish cultural transformation in
which there would be hockey franchises in Florida, and Canadian banks on every
street corner in New York trumpeting their obnoxious jingoistic slogans (“TD:
America’s neighborhood bank”), and creepy little pop stars with weird foreign
names like Justin and Carly Rae doing the jobs America’s teen heartthrobs won’t
do. What a vile alien nightmare that would be to wake up in.
Not so very long
ago, its national mythology notwithstanding, the United States was little
different from most other countries. In 1970, its foreign-born population was
4.7 percent. And, while most of the West has embraced mass immigration in the
last half-century, America differs significantly from those developed
countries, like Canada and Australia, that favor skilled migrants. Personally,
I don’t see what’s so enlightened and progressive about denuding Third World
nations of their best and brightest to be your doctors and nurses, but it does
demonstrate a certain ruthless self-interest. By contrast the majority of U.S.
foreign-born residents now come from Latin America, and more than a quarter of
them — 12 million — from Mexico. A policy of “family reunification” will by
definition lead to low-skilled immigrants: An engineer or computer scientist is
less likely to bring in an unending string of relatives — because his dad’s a
millionaire businessman in Bangalore and his brother’s a barrister in London,
and they’re both happy and prosperous where they are. Insofar as there is any
economic benefit to mass immigration, it’s more than entirely wiped out by
chain importation of elderly dependents and other clients for the Big Government
state.
So any rational
immigration reform that respected the interests of the American people would
attempt to reorient present policy. Instead, the Gang of Eight’s bill will
cement it, and accelerate it. According to Numbers USA, if the immigration bill
passed, it would increase the legal population of the United States by 33
million in its first decade. That figure includes 11.7 million amnestied
illegals and their children, plus 17 million family members imported through
chain migration, with a few software designers on business visas to round out
the numbers.
Thirty-three
million is like importing the entire population of
Canada . . . oh, wait, we did that shtick three paragraphs
ago. Okay, if you’re black, look at it this way: The demographic clout it took
you guys four centuries to amass can now be accomplished overnight at a stroke
of Chuck Schumer’s and Lindsey Graham’s pens. And, if you belong to the 40
percent of Americans who’ll be encountering many of these “chain migrants” in
the application line for low-skilled service jobs, isn’t it great to know that
in this gangbusters economy you’re going to have to pedal even faster just to
go nowhere?
Speaking of
demographic clout, the main reason for not importing 33 million Canadians is
that they’re supposedly a bunch of liberal pantywaists and the Republican party
would never be elected to anything ever again. But fortunately 33 million Latin
Americans are, as we’ve been assured time and again by Charles Krauthammer and
other eminent voices, “a natural conservative constituency” — which I think
translates into Spanish as “una parte del electorado conservador natural.” I
Googled this phrase and it got no hits, so perhaps Dr. Krauthammer got lost in
translation. But I’ll take his word for it that, once America assumes the
demographics of California, the Republican party will be unstoppable.
Aside from that
electoral windfall, the benefits of Schumer-Rubio “comprehensive” “reform” seem
doubtful. Every new arrest in the Boston Marathon bombing reveals some
laughably obvious breach of the system. Alert to the possibility that the
involvement of various hardworking immigrants in the recent unpleasantness
might not be the best advertisement for his bill, John McCain is now proposing
that the United States look more carefully at admitting persons “from countries
that have histories such as Dagestan and Chechnya and others where there has
been significant influence of radical Islamic extremism.” Incendiary Chechens
is nothing a bit more bureaucratic oversight can’t cure.
The problem with
this instant solution is that Chechnya and Dagestan are not “countries” — or,
to be more precise, are not sovereign nations. They’re subnational
jurisdictions of the Russian Federation, whose citizens travel on Russian
passports. This would be the equivalent of permitting United Kingdom immigrants
from Wales and Scotland, but not from England and Northern Ireland. Senator
McCain’s proposal could in theory work — if you believe that our post-9/11
state-of-the-art “smart government” will have no trouble distinguishing between
a guy from St. Petersburg, and a fellow from Makhachkala, formerly Petrovsk,
the Dagestani capital once named after the same tsar as Petersburg. But, if
you’re a wee bit skeptical that U.S. immigration officials are capable of
distinguishing a Russian from one city named after Peter the Great from a
Russian from another city named after Peter the Great, it’s a bit of a long
shot — and that’s before the Dagestani from Petrovsk takes the precaution of
getting a post-office box in St. Petersburg.
So McCain’s
intervention is useful only insofar as it reminds us of the gulf between
political “solutions” and reality. When I came to this great land, I was
initially worried that the government might find out about my unpaid parking
tickets in Moose Jaw and the chain of unsolved prostitute murders in the port
of Hamburg. My immigration lawyer explained to me that the examiners devote six
minutes to each application, and then say yea or nay. I’m confident that if we
toss another 33 million into the mix, we can get that six minutes cut by
two-thirds. Much of which can be devoted to checking the background of
Dagestani applicants, assuming the immigration official takes no more than
three attempts to type “Makhachkala” correctly.
And so it will go
with all the other much-vaunted “triggers”: Chances of them ever having any
meaningful impact? Zero percent. The Daily Caller has already identified in the bill 999
references to “waivers, exemptions, or political discretion,” meaning that all
these “triggers” will be in the hands of a federal bureaucracy that will never
pull them, and will take its cue from the left-wing immigration-lobby groups
the new bill funds so generously. So what’s the big deal about making McCain’s
Dagestani crackdown the 1,000th meaningless safeguard that will be entirely
ignored?
Beneath the phony
“triggers,” an already rapid transformation of America is about to be speeded
up. An informed citizenry would trade all the triggers for a straight answer to
one simple question:
Why?
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