Mar 19 2007
Jeff Jacoby Explodes Immigration Myths
I pointed out in an earlier post the simple, hard math that this country doesn’t have the law enforcement and incarceration facilities to handle 20% of the immigration population (supposing the immigrant crime rate is much higher than our national average) because that is equal to our entire, current prison inmate population. Today Jeff Jocaby knocks down other quaint and fantasiful myths about immigration and where we should be focused (it is either terrorism or immigrants – we cannot do both):
According to a new Gallup poll, when asked to choose among three options — deporting all illegal immigrants, allowing them to remain temporarily in the United States to work, or allowing them to stay permanently and become US citizens after meeting certain conditions — a majority, 59 percent, chose permanent legalization. Fifteen percent favored the temporary-worker option. Just 24 percent supported deportation.
74-24%, or 3-1. Talk about being on the losing end of an issue. Those who are still in denial that the Reps lost the Congress because there was a groundswell against them need to wake up. Bush is responsible for the Iraq war – Congress was responsible for punting on immigration and crowing about it. 3-1. And these numbers are simply solidifying against the fence-only, no-guest-worker-program hard right. This debate is over and now the question is will the right ride their stubborness into long term political oblivian. Jocaby focuses on why recent efforts to close down the border have actually made the immigration problem worse:
“Between 1986 and 2002 the number of Border Patrol officers tripled,” notes Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey, an expert on Mexican migration, “and the number of hours they spent patrolling the borders . . . grew by a factor of about eight.”
Yet driving up the risks and costs of crossing the border hasn’t shrunk the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border — only the number prepared to run that gauntlet more than once. Historically, Mexican migrants came to the United States sporadically, working for a while, then heading home. Now, millions figure it is better to stay put and risk deportation than to go back to Mexico and risk being unable to return. In 1986, the probability that an illegal entering from Mexico would leave within 12 months was around 45 percent. Today it is half that.
Transient workers are good for our economy, but we need them to feel like they can go home. The problem is not the immigrant worker, it is the number some bureacrat pulled out of his backside to determine how many jobs we will give documentation out for – not how many we have to fill:
The United States creates more than 400,000 new low-skill jobs each year, a tremendous employment magnet for hundreds of thousands of foreign workers. But because US law authorizes only 5,000 visas annually for low-skilled immigrants, there is no lawful way for most of the workers we need to enter the country. So they enter unlawfully — a wrongful act, perhaps, but hardly an evil one.
Some crimes are indisputably wrong acts. It is wrong to kill, rob, etc. But some crimes are made up crimes because someone drew a number out of the air and said everyone after this number is a criminal. There is no difference in intent or impact between the 1st documented worker, the 5,000th, or the first undocumented worker (5,001). None.
But wroker 5001 is supposedly an evil criminal. Anyone saying that is no different from some liberal saying people who make over $100,000 are evil, greedy bastards. It is not right or accurate and reflects a simplistic view wrapped around a preconceived bias rationalized by an arbitrary number. But somehow that 100,000th or 1 millionth dollar is all it takes to go from a hard working, middle class person to the devil incarnate. The hard right on immigration use the exact, same ‘logic’.
As Ronald Reagan once said it’s one big tent we may not agree on every social issue but we can bring our opinions to the table to be discussed, unlike the Democratic party where Joe Lieberman was thrown under the bus because he disagreed on 1 issue.
Terrye true the 9/11 animals did come here legally but Mohammad Atta was also stopped by the Broward County Sheriff’s office with a expired visa and was released. We have a long way to go in protecting ourselfs but if you don’t start somewhere be prepared for another 9/11 sooner rather then later.
“any time I hire a new employee they must have a S.S. card and a Florida residency card
or they can hit the door.”
As would any employee I hire. But those things can be obtained at just about any flea market. Here in San Jose, CA there are people at the flea markets who specialize in getting people documents to work. Costs about $100 for a social security card. A little more for a California ID.
AJ posts:
“Bush did give on the Fence only – he signed it.”
Right… after playing goad-the-bear for a year, insisting that he would only a sign a comprehensive reform bill that would include work permits for illegals with the possibility of future legalization of all resident aliens. When that blew up in his face, THEN he reversed himself and gave in on the fence only.
AJ,
Agree
There is something to agree with in every comment in this thread.
Bikerken,
how do you answer Crosspatch’s economic argument for the needed workers in the years ahead? Your position on the other issues looks reasonable.
Terrye,
Agree, the right wing pundits have often been disappointments.
AJ rationally and regularly proposes a mixed solution that reduces the supply and the demand as well as makes enforcement possible.
Mack, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, google it. It depends on the contributions of new members, (workers) to pay the benefits to the older payees, (retirees). Here’s the problem. Since most everyone who collets SS will collect more than they put in, you need more and more new members to pay for the retirees. When SS was started, they had about 16 workers paying for every one retiree. Now we are down to less than three. That’s the problem with a ponzi, you need increasingly larger donations to keep up and mathematically they will always fail. The more people that get into them, the closer they are to collapsing. Social Security is not going to be helped by bringing in more people who will not even work their entire adult life here, who have been gaming the system with phony numbers for the last thirty years, and who don’t want to work over the table anyway.
They come up here and get section 8 housing, food stamps, WIC, free healthcare, free education, and if both mom and pop work under the table, they can be rich compared to how they live in Mexico. So why would they want to start paying the taxman. Answer: they don’t. They don’t want to be legalized, they want their illegal status to be allowed.
I’ll throw this idea out here one more time. When this immigration bill is submitted for a vote and we really know what’s in it, I would like to put it to a blog vote and see who’s really for it. I have a feeling that when most of you, (I know AJ and Terrye and a few others are dedicated to the idea sight unseen), when you see what’s really in the bill and you disgest it a bit, you’re going to say “this really isn’t going to work.” Lets vote it up or down here on the site and see how popular it is among us. I want to know a few things:
Is there a tamper proof ID card system in it that can’t be duplicated on the street for 20 bucks? That’s a biggie.
How many people are they talking about bringing in how fast. The last bill was originally 191 million over 20 years. I want to see a realistic idea of how many people would be allowed to come with a reasonable number that can be assimilated and not just colonize a whole damned state.
I want to know what is going to be the process for clearing these people in. Right now the immigration service cannot possibly process all the applications it gets and we intend to multiply their job by a factor of ten to twenty. How is this going to work? What kind of background or health screening are they going to get. They are already brining TB and other diseases back into this country that we had eradicated. Are they going to triple the size of the CIS to handle the load or are they really just going to ignore the screening process and wave the mobs in?
I want to know who exactly is going to be hiring these people and at what legal wage? The last bill mandated union scale for these guest workers. They would have actually been making more money than a heck of a lot of americans. How can you tell me those are jobs Americans won’t do? See here is where the logic falls apart, our employers want to hire them for less than minimum wage and they do. If they have to pay a lot more, they will hire less people or an american will do the job. Americans just won’t work for less than minimum wage, the employer knows he can get his ass in a lot of trouble that way, but not with illegals. So who is going to employ them and at what wage?
I want to know if they have to provide any proof of who they actually are or what they actually made before we start handing out large tax refunds and social security benefits to all of them. Are we just going to take their word for it?
I want to know what it means to say they will have to “go to the back of the line” when they are already here. If you’re already here and making money, seems to me the smuck in Mexico trying to do it the right way isn’t ahead of you!
I also want to know why anybody thinks this is going to work when we did this once before and they kept coming illegally and spit in our face! We still have a guest worker program called H2B that doesn’t get enough applications every year. It’s wide open and there’s no limit to it. BUT, to get into it, you have to be legally documented, pay taxes and play by the rules. This is why they don’t like it.
one part of AJ’s post was really humorous, he linked to Jeff Jacoby, an op/ed writer for the liberal Boston Globe. What an authority figure.
The november election was lost by Republicans because of Iraq, immigration wasn’t even a consideration, except that NOTHING was being done about it. The Dems want Americans out of Iraq now,(surrender) and the Repubs want them to win now, so neither was happy so they voted for a change.
I can’t figure why anyone would advocate not enforcing the country’s immigration laws. How and why are they less important than other laws? Should any laws of any kind be enforced? Or only the easy ones? I just don’t understand the “it’s too big a job, so let’s just look the other way and make all the illegals citizens then we won’t have any illegals(at that moment). So the answer to that would be to make them all citizens automatically if they get in the country? That way we would never again have an illegal alien problem.
I wonder why the White House has a fence around it? Surely it doesn’t reduce the flow of undesired people onto the White House grounds. Everyone knows fences don’t keep anyone out.
Why have Border Patrol agents on the border if we don’t want anyone kept out? Why not just do away with border checkpoints and border agents and spend the money on really necessary things like illegal alien health care and food stamps and section 8 housing supplements?
Hard right? I’m a middle of the road conservative and a Republican. I think Pres Bush is great. I don’t agree with him on immigration, (because he is for unfettered blanket amnesty and unconditional citizenship) but I do on most other things. I hope he doesn’t throw Gonzales overboard, but I’m afraid he’s going to.
I sure hope Fred Thompson will decide to enter the race.
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Bikerken,
I don’t believe in perfection or the tooth fairy. Just call me too old to fall for fantasies. Will the Bill be perfect?
LOL! Of course not. It will be a major improvement. Which is well beyond anything the hard right can produce. Checkmate.
DubiosD,
Bush still has influence. Tancredo is neutered. Nuff said.
Bikerken,
Most, here, want to know some of the same things.
Bush wants to match workers to jobs. And only the Dems would insist on union wages. Apart from SS, do you agree with Crosspatch’s worker shortfall projection and therefore a need for workers?
I suggest that your “opposition” on this site merely wants a plan that works , and objects to simplistic solutions and racial rhetoric by some. A “mixed” solution can solve most of your objections, it seems to me.
Macker, I think you’re correct. I think most people want a plan that will work. I haven’t heard of any to date, but haven’t seen any updated proposals yet either. I have no problem with having a workable worker program, just haven’t seen any proposed that looks like they would result in anything other than amnesty. I don’t favor mass deportation, but if anyone is supposed to be deported, depending on their situation, then I think the law should be enforced. I don’t think there is a simple solution. A workable worker program, no amnesty, no automatic citizensip, a secure border. Let somebody put that plan together and it could easily be supported.
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“Mack, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme”
Well, not exactly but it has come to resemble one. Most people don’t really understand it anyway. I will try here to lay it out as best as I can in a way I hope most people can understand:
Back when Social Security was proposed, the US was in rough shape. We were in the middle of a global depression, millions were out of work and living in poverty, and this is where we were in 1933:
We needed money to pay for these programs. The US Government needed a way to finance a huge budget deficit. The Supreme Court was shooting down some of the Democrats legislation as unconstitutional such as the National Recovery Administration.
A sceme was devised where people who were working would pay a portion of their salary into a fund. The entire proceeds of that fund would go to “buying” government debt. That money would then be used by the government to fund projects that would put people to work and inject money into the economy. If people had a job building a dam or other public works project, they would have money to spend on groceries and the like and put cash back into circulation and hopefully get the economy back up and running. Basically, those who were working were going to chip in and fund jobs for people who weren’t working. We were in a really horrible situation and the people were desperate so we went for it.
In 1935 the average life expectancy was about 65. People worked until they were too old and were then cared for by family unless their job paid them a pension or they were of enough means where they could retire before they were no longer able to work. There was no such idea of a “retirement age”. 65 was to people in 1935 what 78 is to us now. If you lived past 65 years old and were no longer working, you could collect a small stipend from the government to help relieve your family of caring for you which also helped inject money into the economy by relieving the burden on your family and giving them more disposable income.
In 1935 there were no modern antibiotics, many died from disease and injury, there were no effective treatments for any form of cancer. There were no organ transplants and no such thing even as a defibrillator. If you became seriously injured or ill, there was a good chance you were going to die. Most adults smoked, and the quality of air and water in cities was not up to todays standards. In short, a very large portion of the people who paid into the system would never live long enough to ever draw money out. If you did start drawing, chances were very good you didn’t draw out very long. Very few would be expected draw for 10 a stipend for years or more.
But after WWII things changed. People started living longer and Social Security was expanded to cover more things. MOST workers who pay into the system can now expect to live long enough to draw out for 10 years or more.
In the meantime, Social Security holds no cash. All of the money it takes in is used to purchase government budget deficit debt. Basically, Social Security holds a pile of IOUs. The problem comes in at the point where Social Security needs to pay out more than it is taking in. It needs to take those IOUs to Congress and “cash” them. If the government is running a surplus, that isn’t a problem. But if the government is running a deficit, it is a BIG problem. First of all, Social Security won’t be funding any of that deficit so the government needs to go out onto the financial markets and borrow at market rates. Secondly, it needs to borrow even more to cover the IOU that Social Security just handed it. This drives up interest rates. Money is like anything else. Interest is the price of money. If the demand for borrowing goes up, the price of lending goes up. In order to get someone to lend them a dollar, the government must offer more in interest than other people who are also in the market looking to sell bonds (a bond is basically a loan).
This is why our Chairman of the Federal Reserve have been making noise about reforming Social Security and why deficits in the budget combined with a Social Security shortfall could spell a very hard time ahead. High interest rates could put the brakes on building and development, investment by industry, and case serious economic trouble.
So it wasn’t designed to be a Ponzi scheme but in the years when the boomers were entering the market, Social Security was a cash cow for Congress that they couldn’t resist spending. They expanded it and failed to index up the retirement age as life expectancy increased. So yeah, these days we have a system that pays out much more per person that it was originally designed to and there is no Social Security “trust fund” except for a pile of IOUs. And if the government budget isn’t running a surplus when Social Security needs to cash those IOUs in, we are in a world of hurt.
President Bush wanted to wean Social Security off government debt by allowing people to invest a portion in the open market. But the Democrats shot that idea down. So here we are. Once the boomers start to retire … you better start looking for a paddle.
Mack, you are absolutely right. I have said many times on this blog that I would be for a guest worker program if it actually was a well thought out plan that would address the concerns I’ve mentioned above. But what I have been seing is people who are supportive of the immigration bill and don’t have a CLUE as to what’s in it. That can only mean one thing, they don’t really care. All they want is to make all of their illegal nannys and housekeepers legal and feel like they have done something big hearted and wonderful! Problem is, every time we have done this SAME THING in the past, very few people opted to follow the new law and the Fed opted not to enforce it. Some areas of the United States are being violently overrun. Tucson, where my mother lives has over 200 drive by shootings a year now! My mother says that aint the half of it. You just can’t bring tens of thousands of poor people with nothing but the clothes on their back and not expect a lot of problems.
You will notice by the way Mack, that you are not going to hear any specific reasonable intelligent answers to the problems I posed, instead, you will see me be accused, once again, of just wanting to deport 12 million people and how hateful and stupid that is!
Thats a fine analysis CP, it tells us how we got here. But it really is a ponzi scheme now, and that kind of a financial system only collapses faster when you expand it. Personally, I think the biggest mistake this country has made is not pushing for the private accounts. If I would have had all the money I poured into SS all these years, I’d be a hundred times better off! It would have been the most dynamic positive change to our government since the constitution.
Those people who keep talking about how much positive effect the illegals have on the economy, those people are called L I A R S! LA alone puts out about four billion a year in tangible costs to pay the expenses of what is probably over two million illegals in one city! But that’s a far far away land from Virginia. The governor is trying to recoup some of the cost from the federal govt because they keep passing laws requiring LA to pay it! It’s easy to see how the issue looks different depending on where you live. It’s always the NIMBY’s who support bad law!
One more thing here CP, ironically, I really can’t even collect Social Security. Why? I am an honorably discharged Retired Veteran collecting a full pension. When I hit the right age, whatever it is then, any social security I collect will be deducted dollar for dollar from my military pension giving me a big fat zero increase in income. Civilians don’t have that problem.
Well, thats because Social Security and military retirement are from the same source. The full military retirement is a better deal that Social Security. Not sure how it is now, but when I was in the service, I could have “retired” with full benefits at 38 years old after 20 years of service.
When I was in the service, in the ’50’s, you retired with 50% of your base pay at 20 years and 75% at 30 years and it was pro-rated in between and you got no more for more than 30. the way they counted years back then was to allow you to enlist 6 months early but credit you with the full enlistment. If I had done than every re-up, I could’ve retire with 20 years at age 34.
I’m not complaining about it that much, but they don’t tell you that when you enlist. As a matter of fact, most military don’t find out about it until just before they retire.
Speaking of that. Here is an immigration program I could get behind right now. Draft em! Put them in the military. Lets face it folks, our military is about one half the size it really needs to be. We need a couple of hundred thousand more recruits BADLY. The public just doesn’t have a clue as to how small our military is now and how much bigger it really needs to be. If you are of drafting age and agree to join a branch of our military, (Which branch would have to depend on the needs of the services but we should try to accomodate), and serve a minimum of a four year term, and be HONORABLY discharged, I think citizenship would be a just reward. If you happend to die in that cause, it should be given to your spouse and child. I would have no problem with that. I think that military service is an honorable sacrifice and if you are willing to do that for this country for four years, then I am convinced that you should be a citizen. We could have a program like the one we had with the Phillipines from WWII up until the 1980’s where we allowed Philipinos to join, (only in certain job areas, security clearences were usually not included), and serve and then retire either in the PI or back here. That is something I would like to see in a comprehensive immigration bill.
Bikerken,
Agree that four years honorable service would be “earning” citizenship and they would appreciate it. Plus, it would help screen out the misfits.