by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia

When Everything Is a Lie

Everything we are told about illegal immigration is mostly a lie, and a self-serving one at that. Remember that fact, and the current debate over the border becomes comprehensible.

Fleeing to an Oppressive Society?

Most of the advocates for open borders agitate from a position of criticism of the U.S. By that I mean we rarely hear La Raza activists explain why they want amnesties for millions of illegal aliens, at least in the sense of why millions have left Mexico to risk their lives to arrive in the U.S.

What is it about America that attracts patriotic Mexican nationals to abandon their own country en masse? That is not a rhetorical question, given much of the immigration debate is couched in critiques of the U.S. The pageantry of an open-borders demonstration is usually a spectacle of Mexican flags. How odd that almost no advocate ever says, “We want amnesty so that our kinsmen have a shot, as we have had a shot, at an independent judiciary, equality under the law, the rule of law, true democracy, free speech, protection of human rights, free-market capitalism, and protection of private property. For all that, millions risk their lives.” But instead there is either nothing, or a continual critique of the U.S. If we were to take a newly arrived illegal alien, and enroll him in a typical Chicano Studies course, he would logically wish to return across the border as soon as possible.

Unemployment Is Too Low?

Do we really need millions of new workers in a supposedly worker-scarce America [1] from Latin America? The unemployment rate in the American Southwest is still high. Floods of illegal immigrants only drive down wages in agriculture, the hospitality industry, construction, landscaping, and social services [2]. The influx enriches employers, dumps the resulting medical, legal, educational, criminal justice, and social costs on the taxpayers, and undermines the viability of U.S. workers, many of them, for example, Mexican-Americans. If one wished to hurt American maids, nannies, gardeners, plum pickers, roofers, cooks, and janitors, one could do no worse than flooding the border with illegal immigrants. Elites benefit from cheaper entry-level wages, and then brand all others as nativists and xenophobes who object to the hypocrisies involved (e.g., so the Menlo Park techie must sigh, “Juanita is the best maid I ever had; but I had to put our Connor and Ashley into prep school because with all these immigrants coming into our area, they watered-down the AP curriculum at the local high school”).

Diversity Bad?

Likewise, racist chauvinists who destroyed immigration law call others racists. But in fact the open-borders movement is race-obsessed to the core. Its message is anti-diversity, and anti-inclusiveness. Latino activists (in the age of the Redskins controversy, how has the racist rubric La Raza continued [3]?) have essentially hijacked U.S. immigration policy and set the following parameters: almost all illegal immigration shall come only across the southern border from Mexico and Latin America. Almost all legal immigration shall be predicated on family ties, which ensures Latinos will be privileged over all other groups, regardless of skill sets or education. If one objects that such a de facto policy is ethnocentric and does not result in ethnic, cultural, or professional diversity, then he is rendered a xenophobe. Racialists through extra-legal means have expropriated federal immigration law. It no longer exists. The losers are the Kenyan dentist, the Filipino nurse, the Estonian doctor, the South Korean architect — any who are not Latino, any who do not break U.S. immigration law, and any who have professional degrees and skill sets to offer America. How is that not biased to ignore all notions of diversity and meritocracy in favor of using only ethnic criteria?

A Health Crisis on the Horizon

Hunger is said to plague recent immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. I am sure that it exists. But right now the U.S. is suffering an epidemic of deadly obesity among its newly arrived and residential Latino population, at rates much higher than the high U.S. obesity level. Mexico suffers from the highest rates of obesity [4] in the world, and the condition only gets worse given the plentitude of cheap and innutritious U.S. fast and processed food, almost all of it subsidized by various state and federal agencies. One of every four state residents admitted to California hospitals for all causes is discovered to suffer from diabetes. Dialysis clinics are now popping up throughout rural California. No one addresses this public health crisis. Instead, we talk more of the starving and the plague of malnutrition because it channels into the open-borders narrative. We dare not suggest California is sitting atop a health tragedy of unprecedented proportions, as an epidemic of obesity among Latino immigrants and their American-born children is leading to early diabetes and with it costly hospitalization and lifelong medical support. I see relatively young people — in their thirties and forties — with near blindness, amputations, and the inability to walk. Go to any lab for a blood test, visit any GP in Central California, enter an emergency room — and the crisis is manifest; read any newspapers, turn on the news, listen to the latest talking head — and it does not exist. The ramifications of this health crisis threaten to dwarf the prior AIDS epidemic as the immigrant population both expands and ages.

Incomprehensive Immigration Reform

Comprehensive immigration reform is a chimaera. It simply does not exist. Talk to any Latino activist in private and ignore what the Democrat and Republican hierarchy profess and the paradox is clear. Secure the border? I know of no supporter of comprehensive immigration reform who, as a requisite for compromise, wants to finish the fence [5], fine employers who hire illegals, and deport those who have broken numerous federal laws. To do so would weaken all the forces that Democrat operatives see breaking their way, that Latino elites see as essential to their own self-appointed perches as group spokesmen for the perennially dispossessed, and that employers see as a way to ensure cheap good labor.

Deportation is now a joke. When the Obama administration bragged of near-record deportations before the 2012 election, we knew it was a lie. And so it was, predicated on redefining “deportation” as temporary turn-back at the border. Otherwise explain to a supporter of CIR that you favor deporting those with criminal records, with no work history, with long residence on public assistance, with only a brief residence in the U.S. — and yet would be willing to grant green cards to those working, paying taxes, not employing false names and fraudulent documents, with long tenure in the U.S., with no record of criminality or public assistance — and outrage still follows! Continue the conversation and you learn that CIR is a synonym for blanket amnesty and its supporters do not wish to deport anyone, to close the border, or fine any employers. Republicans know that as well as Democrats. In my experience, the Tea Party is not very likely to want to deport everyone while the race industry and Chamber of Commerce are very likely to want to deport no one.

1984 Redux

Finally, consider statistics. Try a brief experiment. Google rates of health problems, education, and hunger in terms of illegal immigration (using the appropriate euphemisms), and then all sorts of studies pop up from social scientists and bureaucrats, the themes being that racism has led to inequality and lack of parity. Then look up rates of criminality, incarceration, graduation rates, and public assistance predicated on illegal status, and you will either hit a brick wall, or quickly learn such data is “problematic.” It is quite Orwellian how research is predetermined to find the host culpable, but never to suggest the guest is at fault.

If immigrants came in manageable numbers, if they arrived in legal fashion on the basis of ethnically blind and meritocratic criteria, if the host believed in the melting pot and promoted integration, assimilation, and the mastery of the English language, if the arrivals were reminded why they were leaving their homelands and why they were entering the United States, then we could manage. But, alas, the very opposite of these criteria is true.

It has become a cachet of elites to mouth platitudes about “comprehensive immigration reform” as they carefully construct their own apartheid existences in Nancy Pelosi style [6]. They are not so much immune from the ramifications of their own ideology as found guilty of racial bias and prejudice by their very efforts to talk in the abstract in a way that offers them psychological recompense for never living that way in the concrete.

(Artwork created using a modified Shutterstock.com [7] image.)

URLs in this post:

[1] new workers in a supposedly worker-scarce America: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2014/07/28/wasting-away-again-in-obamaville/

[2] and social services: https://twitter.com/KLSouth/status/494995508297871360

[3] how has the racist rubric La Raza continued: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/224980/la-raza-facts/michelle-malkin

[4] the highest rates of obesity: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mexico-takes-title-of-most-obese-from-america/

[5] wants to finish the fence: http://gopthedailydose.com/2014/06/21/watch-remember-complete-danged-fence-amnesty-hypocrite-john-mccain-changes-tune-border/

[6] in Nancy Pelosi style: http://twitchy.com/2014/07/16/perfect-iowahawk-finds-a-great-place-to-send-all-those-unfortunate-border-kids-pic/

[7] Shutterstock.com: http://www.shutterstock.com