Redstate

I am reminded of the old saying that we should never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

For some reason, I am almost always on the losing side in arguments over what-goes-with-what. I guess my head just works differently than other people's.

When they first formed the Department of Homeland Security, the "big innovation" was to centralize all the stuff having to do with 'security,' and put it all under one command so that things would work better. So in went fighting terrorism, keeping nukes out of the US, and along with that the Border Patrol and the INS.

When I look at that, what I see is some sexy stuff where people can make names for themselves and play with lots of good toys, and some other stuff that is mundane 'grind it out' execution. So I expect all the smart people to run for the jobs in the top half, and then use the bottom half as the dumping ground for their hiring mistakes. The INS had already been that for the DOJ; it was where they put you to work to get you out of the way.

So I fully expected the Border Patrol to go down the tubes, and it has. By now all the management positions are filled with guys that the terrorism-fighters didn't want.

The right way to do this is to have a Department of Mundane Execution. In fact we already have one; it's called the GSA and it doesn't do a bad job. The government never seems to run out of paper or paperclips, and we can thank the GSA for that. They never get any glory, but they're there every day keeping the lights on and the Xerox machine stocked. This where something like patrolling the border goes. To people in the GSA, patrolling the border would almost be like Fightin' Crime. It would be the fun part instead of the mundane part.

Beautifully written and I agree with you on all points.  I do not believe any of GWB or the admin's promises on immigration.  I think the current state of affairs with immigration and national security is pitiful at best, and we have a capable president who is incapable of being tough on this issue.  I don't understand it.  

I think our culture has become a culture of laziness.  Ask any small business owner and they'll tell you that everyone wants to get paid, but no one wants to work.  We somehow feel that we are above that type of work, but then complain when others swoop in and take it from us.  

Someone needs to get tough on this issue and stick with it.  Everytime I think about it, I get this overwhelming feeling of sadness.  Our political climate has paved the way for pandering and softness when it comes to these types of issues, and anyone who tries to blow the whistle or do something about it gets quieted in favor of votes.

Before you even can do so.  It was tried in California after Prop 187, and the juries did not convict - even in the face of slam-dunk evidence.

How many more cases do you wish to see end up like that?  How many hits in the polls will be needed until you have decided they have suffered enough to warrant your consent to trying to come up with a rational and workable solution?  How much money must be wasted in a futile effort to construct a "Southern Wall" before you will recognize that you made a mistake?

I'd like to know when you think enough will have been done.  Quite frankly, I have my doubts that there could be enough enforcement for your tastes.  And so the vicious circle would continue... the problem would still exist, even with the solution in plain sight.

The liberal judges were trying their hardest to shut down 187.

That proves nothing except that we need better judges and to try the federal courts instead.

This still smells like jury nullification.  Anyone want to attempt a justification of that?

We don't believe you.  We're not convinced that you actually want a solution to the problem, or even think it is a problem.

We have a huge problem and the chief executives of the country have ignored it. We have laws being flaunted directly in front of officers sword to uphold those laws! Why aren't we enforcing every law we have on the books. It is their sworn duty. What about the Rule of Law? Every law much be enforced to its fullest extent. Yes, the horrible problem of jaywalking must not be allowed to continue.

Oh wait. We don't enforce every law, so this whole conversation really does boil down to how harmful illegal immigration is in order to prioritize law enforcement resources. Just because a law exists doesn't mean it should be or is strictly enforced.

You need to get a real argument besides "It's the law." That isn't working.

Are you saing that something is wrong with jury nullification?

If by problem you mean illegal immigration, then many anti-anti-immigration types do think that the lack of documentation and background checks is a problem are willing to take steps to fix it. However their fix often involves increasing (sometimes drastically) legal immigration.

If by problem you mean immigration in general -- legal or illegal -- then no, many of us don't think it is a problem to be "solved".

... a Southern Wall.

All we need is a law that says -

• employers will spend a year in jail for every undocumented alien they pay
  
• no welfare, education, healthcare etc., for undocumented alients

... and some serious enforcement. The illegals won't come here if there is no job at the end of the tunnel.

Juries are away to let the people put a break on bad laws.

It's part of how are justice system is suppost to prefer letting the guilty go free than putting the innocent in jail.

I don't believe him when he says he'd be willing to consider changes after more enforcement.

He does not say how or when there will have been enough effort at enforcement so that he will deign to consider changing the law.

How do you propose to impose the jail sentences if you do not get convictions?

For myself, I believe that men whose counsel concerning the territorial integrity of their country is a bland "oh well," followed by, "it's impossible to maintain anyway," are unlikely to be moved by reasoned argument, much less by the natural sentiment of patriotism.

As for when "there will have een enough effort at enforcement," I'll not be happy until deportations have increased enough to set the Liberals into conniption fits -- including the soi disant conservatives whose recommendations of the obliteration of our borders demonstrates beyond all doubt their intransigent Liberalism.

All we need is a law that says...employers will spend a year in jail for every undocumented alien they pay...

I have no problems with more stringent measures, but throwing people in jail is tricky. I'd like to know exactly how we deal with the problem of false credentials. How efficacious will such measures be if they rely on the expertise of some plant manager or HR rep to acertain the veracity of federal documents? If we are to embrace this sort of an enforcement regime, we really need a national ID system that utilizes technology that makes it nigh impossible to forge the cards.

At any rate, I'd be happy to see proponents of a supply side/decriminalization approach (the camp I'm in) reach compromise with the restrictionist wing by embracing the idea of targeting employers with beefed up sanctions and enforcement efforts, if they'd be willing to try our approach, too. I basically want to see a carrot and stick strategy. But I don't think it can be all stick and no carrot, and I'd like to know just how much the other side is willing to compromise.

I agree with you that throwing people in jail would be a bad thing, but I would fine the heck out of them, say $10K per employee caught. Instead of ICE going after illegals, start going after the employeers.  

How to help,

Congressman David Dyer who I am not a big fan of, has a bill in congress to come out with secure social security cards. If this bill was enacted, employees would have no excuse "mistakenly" hire an illegal. Hire someone, check their social number,  not good and you are legally exposed.

Call or write your congressman and urge them to support this bill.

Would you care to point out where I have advocated the "obliteration of our borders" or where I have demonstrated anything akin to "intransigant Liberalism" in my posts?

I do not consider myself a liberal.  I think my posting history here will reflect that I am not anything close to a liberal.  Quite frankly, I do not appreciate being lied about, sir.

I have problems with the National ID card idea, but if we could just upgrade our current SS cards to serve this might be tolerable. A card that was reasonably difficult to forge* and that had a picture of the bearer and nothing else (no birth date, address etc-- don't want to make life easy for ID thieves!) could serve as a way to verify a person's legal status without creating a Big Brother system of tracking everyoen in the country and without offloding the costs on the states the way the lame-barined Real ID Act attempts to.

* a forge-proof document is an impossibility. But if it costs, say, $10K to forge a document then stone-broke illegal immigrants will not be able to afford them.

The second paragraph of my last comment did not refer to you specifically -- this for the simple reason that I don't know your views on immigration (other than your insouciance about enforcement and your monomania about failed prosecutions), because so far your contribution to the debate has consisted of mere heckling.

Choose not to enforce a law? I'm not being snide. Traditionally, prosecutors retain discretion over the laws they choose to, well, prosecute, and in this context, the Executive is mostly a prosecutor.

If yes, why not this law?

If no, what about laws they believe unconstitutional? Inherently unjust?

I suspect I know your answer, and I suspect it's not susceptible to yes/no questions.

All this "enforce the laws we have before we pass new ones" is well and good, but it completely misses the point.  But more on that later.  I'm much more intrigued by the suggestion that but for President Bush's failure to enforce the current immigration laws, you'd be open to changes in those laws.

Assume the laws are being enforced perfectly (or, as perfectly as they can be).  Use the "War on Drugs"* in the 1980s as your model:  An intensive, coordinated, Federal-and-State response to illegal immigration involving both police and military units, combined with judicial and prison reform,** to ensure that those who violate the immigration laws are placed in jail for a substantial period of time (or deported immediately, as the case may warranted).  Assume that your efforts have reduced the amount of illegal immigration -- not entirely, of course, but by a substantial amount.

What policies would you now enact?

von

*I don't mean to suggest that an illegal immigrant is a comparable evil to, say, crack cocaine or methamphetamine.  I'm simply providing an example of a comparable enforcement "effort," so that we can all understand the parameters of this debate -- i.e., what "more enforcement" might look like.

**But, of course, we're not merely talking about enforcement.  So far as I can determine, every single proponent of the "more enforcement"  approach actually wants to pass "new laws" -- above and beyond funding provisions.  It should be self evident, but "more legislation" is not the same as "more enforcement."  I can't say whether Mr. Cella conflates "legislation" and "enforcement" in the way that so many of his fellow travelers do, but I'm sure he'll clarify himself.

While we're on the subject of untruth in advertising, there is no such thing as the "open borders lobby" in any real or substantial sense.  Indeed, Google(tm) the words "open borders lobby" (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=RNWE,R
NWE:2005-19,RNWE:en&q=open+borders+lobby):  the first page is taken up by the usual anti-immigration suspects (FrontPage Magazine, the loathesome VDare, Michelle Malkin).  The rest of the pages continue the trend.  

Paul, of course, didn't use the term "open borders lobby," and thus is exempt from the preceding paragraph.  (And, though I disagree with Paul on this subject, my respect for him and his writing remains intact).

Many illegal immigrants appear before an potential employer with a valid social security* number and other indicia of citizenship.  At first glance, everything looks kosher -- but let's assume that the employer harbors some suspicion that the potential employee before him or her is in the country illegally.  Do you impose a duty on the employer to investigate?  Or can, as is the case today, the employer accept the documentation without conducting an investigation (an investigation for which most businesses are ill-equipped)?

Consider carefully the burdens that you'll place on businesses (particularly low-margin businesses, like produce and slaughterhouses) before you deputize employers.  And realize that if you remove the current de facto safe harbor (legit documents, legit employee) and threaten HR with jail time**, these folks will take the threat seriously.

von

*Sometimes stolen.

**Let's pass for the moment the possibility that some of us may very much enjoy seeing our company's HR departments behind bars.

Prosecutorial discretion has long been a part of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, as the front-end equivalent to the power to pardon.

The notion that our immigration laws are bad is precisely the subject of debate; moreover, the goodness or badness of a law is dependent upon, and decided by, far more than whether a group of interested parties are willing to adhere to the law against their own illicit interests.

nullification of the national borders is a bad thing; that is the consequence of nullification, by juries, in individual immigration trials.

 "jury nuillification" is too strong here. How many of these acquitals were the result of prosecutors being unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the employers knowingly hired illegals? Many illegals have fake documents after all, and it's not unreasonable for juries not to want to convict employers who can credibly claim to have been the victims of fraud.

But as the prosecutions which another poster incessantly throws in the faces of those of us concerned for more than the bare and tiresome abstraction of market efficiencies occurred in the southwest, there exists, at least, a prima facie case that the acquittals were of the character of, "they should get away with it because we all involve ourselves in the illegality."  As for the issue of "knowingly" hiring illegals, it is not always, even usually, the case that the fraudulent documents are so masterfully executed that the forgery cannot be detected.  We do ourselves, and the truth, no favours by embracing a myth of the omnipotence and omnicompetence of forgers and the ability of the motivated to violated the laws with impunity.

What policies would you now enact?

I hesitate to even answer this, for the very reasons I indicated in the original diary. My distrust of immigration enthusiasts is very deep. But I will make an exception here, out of respect for Von.

In the unlikely event that the administration repents of its perfidy on immigration, and begins enforcing law with the kind of vigor that sends the poor Liberals (and many self-styled conservatives) into hysterics, I would be happy to consider a variety of generous immigration policies -- all through legal channels. I would be open to increasing our legal immigration numbers, our work visas, student visas, etc.; all of it, except for Muslims, whom I still think should be refused entry.

I must disagree with your denial of an "open borders lobby." There is indeed such an entity, diffuse and muddled though it may be. We have, for example, the widest-circulating newspaper in the world urging a constitutional amendment for open borders (this is a point of contention, I realize, but I take Mr. Robert Bartley, who edited that paper for 30 years, at his word). We have pundits beyond count calling border enforcement and deportation impractical. We have ethnic spokesman and other p.c. inquisitors denouncing the restrictionists as mere bigots. We have businesses opposed to enforcement. We have other activists working with the Mexican government to undermine our laws. Etc., etc. Perhaps "open borders lobby" is too inflamatory, but beyond all doubt there is a faction in this country that, in the final analysis, resists all attempts to enforce immigration law and secure the borders.

and take it from there.  Though I think we'd be better served by

1.  A national ID card to make verifying the legal status of prospective employees very simple.
   
   
2.  civil fines (so as to avoid jury nullification) against employers who hire illegals.  While I concede that it may be possible for employers to hire illegals unknowingly, it really strains credulity that employers of say, strawberry pickers in California, or meat packers in Nebraska, or busboys in Arlington, are so naive as to not suspect, that is if they don't actually know, that many or most of their workers are illegal.  Businessmen aren't that stupid.  They know very well what they're doing, and just like with dumping pollutants into rivers, or locking women into sweatshop firetraps, they'll continue to do it as long as we permit them to do so.  They'll also complain that we're going to put them out of business every time we try reform.  
   
   
3.  A reinterpretation of the 14th amendment to eliminate the phenomenon of "anchor babies."
   
   
4.  A skills-based system for the admission of new immigrants.  
   
   
5.  A devaluation of family ties as a basis for the issuance of new visas.
   
   
6.  A wall, or system of walls, along the southern border.  

But, if you're responding to me, I would oppose any law that will let more immigrants into the US at this time than we already receive.  The issues for me, more than their legal status, are their sheer number, and secondly their declining relative skill level, dependence on public benefits, and the social and political effects of importing a huge new underclass that is likely to remain so for at least two more generations.  Instead, I have always been clear, and will reiterate now, that I want an absolute decrease in the number of immigrants to the US.  If that makes me "loathsome," again, so be it.  I think a policy that redistributes wealth from poor native workers to business, increases environmental degredation, and increases ethnic strife, all while helping to elect Democrats, is both loathsome, and far too high a price to pay for slightly cheaper produce.  

Magnificent comment, Cyrus.

with the power, if not the particular use of it.  I'm reminded of Andrew Jackson refusing to enforce a Supreme Court diktat (which one, I don't recall).  But no, the immigration system is broken, and enforcing it more strenuously would still be insufficient.

While we're at it, when did "conservative" come to mean making society an adjunct to the market, rather than the market a part of society?  Why is it that Marxists are so much more capable of thinking clearly about this than "conservatives?"  I'll gladly give one-and-a-half cheers, maybe even two, for capitalism, but never three.  I'll no more substitute it for a functioning culture and society than I would bow down to Sauron.  

In the name of fighting illegal immigration?

No, thanks.

1. I do not like the notion of a national ID card at all.
   
2. Removing the juries from the equation because they acquit people you think should be convicted is not reassuring.

Those who give up liberty for the security of safety usually end up with neither.

but I fail to see an alternative.  We can't entirely seal our borders, and plans to give some sort of ID card solely to guest workers or immigrants, as I heard Newt Gingrich advocating on CSPAN recently, would fail, simply because someone without papers could very simply claim to be an American citizen, and provide easily-forged documents to that effect.  Who would contradict him, or even know?  It would have to be issued to everyone legal to avoid this.

The capitulation of Conservatives before the idol of the market is a sad spectacle: Having defeated the enemy that arose from the ideology (Marxism) that made everything answer to economics, we turn around and endorse that very proposition? Lunacy.

this is what you were thinking of.

form the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War, during which conservatives increasingly came to reduce the substance of their doctrine to an inversion of communism: where the adherents of the latter envisioned all of history as prologue to the realization of communism, seeing the economic logic of centralization as the engine of history, conservatives, particularly those of an economic or libertarian bent, came to envision the "free market" as the internal logic of history, the telos unifying its movement.  It is an intellectual crudity, to be sure, but without such an intellectual - and seldom defended - priveleging of a particular aspect of human life as the overriding value of that life, all of the stupidities of border abolition and low-price-to-consumer/high-profit-to-corporations-as-the-summum-bonum-of-so
cial-existence could not exist.

And to be very honest, I think that site, at a minimum, tolerates bigotry (in particular, take a good look at the background of Jared Taylor, a contributor to that site.  Also keep in mind they ran stuff from the late Sam Francis - who was an unreconstructed racist who was fired from the Washington Times for his comments at an American Renaissance convention.

I will also note that Malkin seems to have no problems with giving VDARE the first look at her column (compare the run dates of her VDARE archive with the date on her Townhall archive).

What is worse (and what has affected my views on this issue) is that all too often, conservatives not only have brushed off the concerns, but have demanded that this ugly side of the restrictionist movement be ignored - and on at least one other site, people who do try to question this are called quislings.

Are we really to trade our nationhood and culture for lower prices; are lower prices the summum bonum of our social existence?

Re: A reinterpretation of the 14th amendment to eliminate the phenomenon of "anchor babies."

This is possible, but at something of a price. Neither Native Americans nor foreign diplomats whose children were born in the US were included in the 14th amendment's definition of "native born"  when the amendment was ratified. Indians of course have beome citizens through a later act of Congress, but diplomats' children are still excluded. The actual wording of the 14th includes the phrase "and subject to its jusrisdiction"--i.e., persons born in the US who are under US law. This applied to neither Indians nor diplomats. To make this exclusion also applicable to illegals we would have to grant them a sort of diplomatic immunity: they could be deported certainly, but could not be prosecuted here for crimes. Is that worth it to get rid of the "anchor baby" phenomenon?

IS our nationhood and culture?  Who decided that?  Is that really the business of the federal government?

happened was actually a myth.  Very interesting, nonetheless.

is not very amenable to conscious political direction. But nationhood is. And yes, the people of the United States have every right to determine what their nationality shall consist of.

is involved because it is the practical instrument of the deliberate will of the sovereign people.

Because if the study of history and anthropology teaches us anything, it is that cultures are more than the aggregation of individual preference satisfactions.

We've seen it mess up our schools.  We've seen the inner cities get worse with the addition of HUD.  Let's not get started on the messes known as Medicare and Medicaid and HHS...

Do we really want the government intervening in cultural matters?  The track record on other social issues is not encouraging to say the least.

is that the juries are not simply saying "We disagree with these immigration laws and therefore will not convict these employers." It's far more likely they are saying "There exists a reasonable doubt that these guys knew they were hiring illegals, because they did obtain the necesssary documentation from the workers under the existing law." And from a legal standpoint they are exactly right. The suggestion made another poster, that we need to replace crminal charges with civil fines (so that the standards of proof are lower) is probably dead on. If we want to do something about the employment of illegals it may be better to hit the employers in the bank accounst anyway.

What happens when the businesses start to object?  The hue and cry will not be just the liberals.  It's going to be a lot of folks who wanted something done, but when the reality hits (as opposed to the abstract issue), they're gonna feel they got sold a bill of goods.

Guess who they're gonna take out their frustration over that on?

Poohbah explains the situation.  In at least one case, the documents were printed on fax paper.

Given the computing power today... making good forgeries is quite possible, though.

all that impressed by this litany of horribles, in the first place, because I am not a libertarian and not inclined to the belief that "The State" is a sort of reverse midas that turns absolutely everything to crap, and in the second place because you are mixing and matching things that are not necessarily alike.  Education and urban policy are best left to localities; Medicare and Medicaid may be necessary at some social level, allowing for a limited federal role (read:accounts), but the mess of the current situation is due to the fact that the government has grafted what is essentially a bureaucratic health-care system onto an already existing, and more market-governed, system, distorting it.  And while there is a necessary role for regulation in the health-care sector, for reasons I consider obvious, we know that more government adminstration only leads to Canadian or British style nonsense.

But culture is another matter; America is a federal state, and if we wish it to remain one, this will require a commonality of culture; and that is not fostered by ever-expanding subpopulations of people who do not speak the primary language and maintain such close cultural ties with their home countries that they come to regard LA as Mexican territory.  In the past, we have had greater success in fostering a sense of cultural unity by limiting immigration, encouraging, even requiring, the use of English, and so on.  Past successes demonstrate that the government does have a positive role to play in fostering the American culture required by our federal system.

are printed in fax paper, that is as clear a demonstration as possible that the document is fake.    Civil fines would indeed be a possible way forward: 10K per illegal per month of employment.

But outside of national security and foreign policy, I really don't.

Now, I think we ought to have English as the official language.  But beyond that, what business of the government's are other cultural matters?

I don't like the government poking its nose into a lot of these matters.  Because when the folks doing it are along the lines of a Janet Reno or Hillary Clinton, it's going to get very messy.

Despite the fact that a trail by jury is protected under the Sixth Amendment, and the charges are criminal in nature?

The Bill of Rights is not an a la carte menu.

like parking tickets.  Very, very, expensive parking tickets.

as civil in nature, levy the fines, and be done with it.  The Bill of Rights is not a pact which allows for slow-motion secession.

in a representative government, fall within the purview of government if the people wish it to be so.

Many states already impose a duty on the employer to report the name and social security numbers of new hires to the SSA.  This info should also match a photo ID.  The SSA then checks and contacts the employer for more info if name/number don't jive.  I know because I once filled out one of these forms and transposed two numbers!

Seems to me if you do this and the SSA gives the new hire its blessing,the employer ought to be in the clear.

The biggest problems is that employers are willfully ingnoring these laws, and we all know why.  

In the unlikely event that the administration repents of its perfidy on immigration, and begins enforcing law with the kind of vigor that sends the poor Liberals (and many self-styled conservatives) into hysterics, I would be happy to consider a variety of generous immigration policies -- all through legal channels. I would be open to increasing our legal immigration numbers, our work visas, student visas, etc.; all of it, except for Muslims, whom I still think should be refused entry.

And I would expect just such a clearheaded and kindhearted answer from you (we disagree as to whether we should refuse entry to all Muslims, but let's leave that aside for the moment).  Here's my purely pragmatic point:  If we are comfortable with reforms that enlarge and encourage the number of legal immigrants who come here to work, why impose a prerequisite of a (costly) "enforcement" policy?  I understand the argument that we should respect the laws, agree or disagree, good or bad.  What I don't understand is why we must go to extraordinary lengths to enforce a "bad" (or, at a minimum, "suboptimum") law before we can change it.  Surely, when confronted with tax rates so high that they lead to a lot of "cheating," we do not say "before we can change the tax rates to more manageable levels, we must declare war on tax cheats."  Instead, we recognize that cheating as evidence of a law that is out-of-whack and, without accepting or agreeing that it's permissible to cheat, put the laws back into whack.

Which cultural matters important to you are you willing to let the people decide on?

There is some aspect of your life people might not like.  Would it not be better for government to avoid butting into people's lives?  Or is this a variable - which changes depending on whose lives the government is butting into?

quasi-Millian abstractionism.  As a conservative, I do not approach political and social questions from the vantage point of such abstractions as "the state", "the individual" and "privacy".  We have a political system with a determinate shape, and that shape allows - or allows when judges are not abusing it - for legislation upon a wide variety of cultural matters.  As to the point at hand, it surely allows for legislation upon the cultural matter of hiring illegals to do work merely because we only WANT to pay x dollars, when no American will do the work for x dollars.

Converted into a civil offense?

As I recall, some aspects of the Endangered Species Act involve civil penalties.  There are horror stories from that (like the farmer who accidentally ran over an endangered rat).  Due process tend to be lacking in cases involving some environmental laws.  I'd like to roll that lack of due process back, not expand it.

also stipulates that an employee cannot be fired if the data doesn't match. And there's a good reason for that: some (many, actually) women may not have changed their names with the SSA when they married or divorced. Or worse: SSA itself has some notriously bad records with lots of mispellings of names and even inaccurate birth dates. Correcting these problems can be a major hassle and no one should be blackballed from employment because some lazy or stupid bureaucrats have misspelled their name.

We have a different definition of "culture".  The situation you describe seems more along the lines of "economic" to me.

How many people's lives get ruined because a bureaucrat screwed up?

Oops.  The folks crying about "enforcement" or "illegals getting jobs" don't seem to have an answer for that one, either.

Take a look at your birth certificate sometime. If it's a later copy of the original, chances are that it's on plain old copier or fax paper. Mine is. Sure, it has a raised seal, but those can be duplicated. Or an existing birth certifcate can be effaced and new info can be entered on it. This is amateur-level work. Check fraud artists do it all the time. Like it or not, there's no way to upgrade existing, many-years-old birth certificates to make them reasonably forgery-proof. SS Cards are not much better. That's why I very reluctantly support some form of national ID, as long as it is very minimalist in content and measures are in place to prevent it from becoming a Big Brother sort of thing (no RFID chips, etc.)

the laws are not bad, or even "suboptimum": they are, more nearly, "conceivably suboptimum in a saner world." I said I would consider increasing legal immigration if, mirabile dictu, the illegal mess were cleaned up. There is a qualitative difference between legal and illegal immigration that your very sincere and even admirable sophistry here cannot efface.

In short, I dispute that the laws are out of whack.

I place environmental regulation in the same category as immigration violations?  Conservatism is not libertarianism; neither is it the simple opposite of everything libertarianism holds.

but then again, I've not heard it mentioned just what sort of bogus, fax-paper document the illegals in question presented.  

All the more reason, then, for a national ID and vigorous border enforcement.

A few years ago I hired a caucasian Brit,(we had several), who produced a CA drivers license that looked just like mine and a Green Card that looked just like the other Brit's cards. Both of these types IDs have fairly sophisticated anti-forgery features. Two weeks later, he confessed that both were forgeries that he had bought locally for less than $500.00. Unless we are going to implant chips at birth or upon legal entry, I don't want to be responsible, as an employer, for determining worker status.

. . . because no one ever, ever, ever was harmed, or their lives ruined, by illegal immigrants.

Oh wait. In fact we have an illegal alien crime wave.

• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.
• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.
• The leadership of the Columbia Lil' Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.'s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.

The issues for me, more than their legal status, are their sheer number, and secondly their declining relative skill level, dependence on public benefits, and the social and political effects of importing a huge new underclass that is likely to remain so for at least two more generations.

As a proportion of the population (and also, for some years, in absolute terms), the current level of immigration is substantial less than the immigration from Ireland and Eastern and Central Europe at the turn of the century.  I'd also note that the concerns that you express above are identical to the concerns expressed regarding the Irish, Jews, Poles, Slavs, etc. who immmigrated during that time.  Each one of these immigrant groups assimilated into our society.

Now, undoubtably, each changed society as they did -- e.g., it's no longer kosher to bar Catholics from country clubs; only a schmuck would refuse some delicious kielbasa on a cool football Saturday; and y'all know what the words "kosher" and "schmuck"* mean without looking them up in a dictionary.  Each also contributed to the economic growth of our society, and our national power and prestige.  Some folks did indeed suffer.  But, on net, things got better.  Rather than being satisfied with ever-narrowing slices of the same pie, the pie grew.

Indeed, this has usually been the result of immigration in the United States.  Since the factual presupposition to many (all?) of Cyrus's points is that the restraint of immigration is a net "good," I'd like him to produce some kind of evidence to support his claim.  Identify -- general terms are fine (for I don't want to impose a burden that I would not myself undertake) -- a period of US history in which we barred immigration and were rewarded with robust economic and social gains.

von

*Or think you know.  Schmuck is actually a dirtier word than often supposed.

The previous waves of immigration (1) came under firm ethnic quotas and (2) ended completely. Are you willing to apply the totality of the parallel, or just the part that is most expedient for you?

we had robust economic growth in the years following the end of WWII, and yet I don't believe that those were years of massive immigration.

"What makes you think I place environmental regulation in the same category as immigration violations?"

Because, like the ecofreaks, when you find due process to be inconvenient, you simply want to sidestep the whole concept of due process. That is a very dangerous thing. It's not a conservative stance.

The dirty little secret of your proposal: the only effect of doing this would be to set up sting prosecutions of dubious legality (i.e., they would border on--and frequently cross over into--entrapment) solely for the purposes of revenue enhancement for the agency or agencies involved. It wouldn't do a damn thing about the number of illegal aliens hired. Hell, the cops would be the ones hiring the most illegals (just as the cops are the most likely to hire drug dealers now--they're called "confidential informants").

Crime in California is at a record low. But don't let facts stop your idiotic rant.

"The report also puts the 2004 crime rates in historical context. The violent crime rate last year was 51.1 percent below the peak reached in 1992. The property crime rate in 2004, meanwhile, was 41.6 percent below the peak rate in 1989."

the records are not 100% accurate, none are.  neither are the ones any governmentagency uses to grant or deny various privileges.  (And, by the way, neither are the records maintained by private enterprise - such as the credit bureaus - 100% accurate.)  Doesn't mean they shouldn't be used.   If a name and number don't match it should be a warning that things may not be right and that more info is needed about an employee.

The problem is what do we do about employers who refuse even to file this information - because they know very well that it is bogus as regards a bunch of their employees.  Those employers should rot in jail, IMHO.

You are a complete non-sequitir.

The crime rate has proceeded downward even as the numbers of illegal immigrants has gone upward. Thus, the evidence for a "crime wave" associated with illegal immigration in California is disproven.

Try again.

that in a slight majority of cases, articulating a policy position opposed to that favoured by the economic/libertarian wing of the party results in just this sort of spluttering discharge of unreason, invective, and profanity.  The personal attachment to a policy position is quite curious.  

This is not a matter of sidestepping due process; our laws recognize the distinction between civil and criminal offenses, in the sense the Cyrus and I have mentioned.  And there are surely rational arguments to be advanced on either side of the debate on the question of whether to sidestep a jury process hopelessly - as some here never tire of telling us - corrupted (my term) by the incidence of illegal immigration.  Yours is not one of them: who says that any such law as I propose would have to allow for stings of the sort you fear?  The law could simply forbid them, and require only some combination of a national ID, a registry of legal migrants and workers, a requirement that employers verify prospective employees' status, and fines for offenders.  Even if stings were to be permitted, it is implausible beyond all rationality that a majority of offenses would be generated by them; a majority of drug offenses do not arise from entrapment, so what reason, beyond the tiresome belief that all government action does nothing but turn the world into crap, have we for believing that things would be otherwise with immigration.

The open secret about the present immigration system is that it promotes ethnic, linguistic and cultural balkanisation, and all of the social, economic and political instabilities one would expect.

Re: Absolutely the records are not 100% accurate, none are.  neither are the ones any government agency uses to grant or deny various privileges.  

I would agree that employers who cannot even be bothered to check are definitely up to no good (though I would be a bit lenient when it comes to really small businesses since I know how harried and hectic and frustrating that sort of stuff can be for an owner who has to do all the paperwork him or herself.) But what do you think should happen when some sort of mismatch is found? One such exists in my records: for whatever reason the SSA does not have my middle name. So when the HR person called me in to mention this all I did was show her my drivers license (and offer to bring in my birth certificate). Is that adequete?

One quibble I do have, and it may simply be a poor choice of words on your part, but I do not consider employment a "privelege" granted by the government. That sounds like something one would hear coming out of the old Soviet Union, though again, it may just be a poor juxtaposition of words on your part.

Yes, it's perfectly inconceivable, totally outside the realm of possibility, that the crime rate would be lower without illegal aliens.

In fact, as the least bit of reflection will reveal, the crime rate in a state as large as California can contain within it trends and patterns innumerable, many of which do not comport well with the general trend. This is elementary stuff, big guy.

and replace them with poor citizens that are illiterate and cannot speak the language and you will likely find that the crime hasn't changed a bit.

There was a difference between gang members and folks who are getting jobs.

Well, replace them with highly literate, urbane, well educated, affluent citizens, and the rates drop.

Heck, replace the student body at my law school with functional illiterates... strike that. Replace the student body at most colleges ... strike that.

You get the idea.

Why the juries acquitted in what would have been slam-dunk cases.  What other reason could there be?

Furthermore, your objection again comes down to, "I will not discuss changing the law until I have decided we have tried hard enough to enforce it."

That's pretty easy for you to say.

blah blah blah JURIES

blah blah blah CASES

blah blah blah ACQUITTALS

The previous waves of immigration (1) came under firm ethnic quotas and (2) ended completely.

Neither one of these is correct; indeed, the prior waves of immigration did not "come under firm ethnic quotas," but rather ethnic quotas were imposed to stop waves of "undesireable" immigrants.  Thus you have the restrictions on Japanese/Chinese immigration of 1900 (?  1907?) (the immigrants who got in prior to the restrictions help build the transcontinental railroad); the quotas on EE immigrants of 1921 (the immigrants who got in prior to the quotas helped man the industrial revolution that contributed to the booms of the 1920s).  

Second, immigration never "ended completely"; more frequently, one majority immigrant group is merely replaced by another.

When will they have tried enough in your opinion?

How much money?  How much time?  How big of a hit must be taken in something that will be ultimately futile?

Will you ever be convinced?  Or will you keep demanding impossible conditions be met before you will consider other options?

I would not want to live in a country that resorts to implanting chips.  Too much of a "Big Brother" feel to it.

580,000 from Germany alone, 1950-61 (source:  http://www.loc.gov/rr/european/imde/germchro.html).  Pretty remarkable, given everything.  (By comparison, 100 Japanese were allowed in under a 1951 law, and most of those were married to American servicepeople.)  The 1950s also saw significant immigration from Cuba and Latin America.

as surrounding all possible immigration enforcement scenarios pragmatic in nature, or are we talking metaphysics?  Jeez....

What happens when the businesses start to object?  The hue and cry will not be just the liberals.

I'm not objecting as a "liberal."*  I'm objecting because I'm pro-business and pro-growth.  

BTW, the folks who bear the brunt of these efforts will not be the large multinationals, which one can so fashionably despise.  Small businesses will be the ones caught out in the cold.

*Perhaps as a "classic liberal," but that's for another time.

these figures are still dwarfed by the pre-moratorium figures.  And they still leave one to wonder about the ratio of skilled to unskilled labour; I rather doubt that many of those Germans were functional illiterates who sought to retain primary loyalty to the old country, and to change America in accordance with the values of the old country.  Neither do I think that the correlation of these comparatively modest figures with a period of robust economic expansion proves that that expansion would not and could not occur in the absence of immigration, nor that immigration generally is necessary for economic growth.  Population growth, maybe.

Some of my objections are practical - I don't want to waste time, money, and effort on something that is futile.

Other motivations are philosophical - I am not willing to trade to trade away civil liberties on a widespread scale to fight illegal immigration.

Another set of objections are simply because I do not trust the motives of some of the opposition.  As I have noted elsewhere on this thread, there is a dark underbelly of that is all too often glossed over.  Specifically, it is what seems to be a blind eye turned towards what I think is out-and-out bigotry.

It's a multitude of objections.  I couldn't even really give you a breakdown as to which objection is primary.

Where's the support for these astounding figures?  95% of homicide warrants in LA are for illegal immigrants?  This is an extraordinary claim, which the linked article helpfully notes is not in any "official crime analysis."  Fine, I suppose.  Where is the "unofficial" support for these figures?  What're the underlying datasets?  

(In other news, I can report that 96.7% of violent crime in LA County is committed by aging movie and/or sports stars .... Of course, it's not reflected in the "official figures" because the government is hell-bent on protecting the entertainment industry ....)

Von, I was too flippant with the early comment, but my point is that the historical parallel presents difficulties for both sides.

But Heather MacDonald is a first-rate journalist and City Journal a highly respected magazine.

Agreed on the general point.  

The biggest problems is that employers are willfully ingnoring these laws, and we all know why.  

I don't know if that's correct.  It seems that the biggest problem may very well be that the SSA isn't set up to identify illegal workers.

is futile is not empirically grounded; it is, it would seem, an a priori in your arguments, hence my quip about it being a metaphysic.

I would say something similar about your fear that enforcement will result in the curtailment of civil liberties.  I am also tempted to state that if any civil liberties were to be cutailed, they would be the imaginary, candyland ones of being able to buy labour at the absolute lowest price possible, being able to hire people whose presence here is a violation of law, and to abet the dissolution of national integrity.  But really, I do not see how a better ID system and the deportation of people disproportionately likely to be unskilled, illiterate and criminal (not that all are, or even most, but stats are stats) undermines civil liberties.  This strikes me a the sort of hysteria that greets every mention of the Patriot Act, as though it were dangerous to learn that terror watch list suspects are reading books on nuclear engineering, and wise to inform them in advance of proposed searches.  Just overwrought.

No, I don't trust every member of the restrictionist movement, either.  Neither do I trust the collection of corporatists, paid apologists, ethnic lobby lawyers, end-of-nation-staters, activists bent upon "electing a new people" because they lose at the ballot box, economic determinists and other assorted fruitcakes, hacks and fools who oppose the restrictionists.  Too often, there is a blind eye where balkanisation, PC, America and West-hatred, epileptic economism and rank cupidity are to be found among immigration enthusiasts.

So, what I would really like to read is a discussion of WHY enforcement is futile, without recourse to all that economic determinist crap that amounts to little more than tautology: it is futile because it is futile.

As a proportion of the population (and also, for some years, in absolute terms), the current level of immigration is substantial less than the immigration from Ireland and Eastern and Central Europe at the turn of the century.

that, based on a percentage of total US population, not only are current immigration levels less than during the era around 1900, but in fact that era's immigration totals were less, still, proportionally, than during the middle of the nineteenth century. (Sorry, my limited lunch break precludes googling up some stats for the moment). You think you're being inundated by immigrants? Talk to somebody in New York or Boston around 1850.

Of course, another reason we can accomodate today's immigration numbers (which, again, by historical standards are quite moderate) is the fact that Americans are having fewer and fewer babies. We'd have population increase numbers much closer to our European cousins (which is to say very little increase indeed) were it not for the fact that we're absorbing 2 or 3 million people each year from around the globe.

Some people think zero population growth is desireable, of course. I don't happen to be one of them.

As a proportion of the population (and also, for some years, in absolute terms), the current level of immigration is substantial less than the immigration from Ireland and Eastern and Central Europe at the turn of the century.

At least 10% of the US is foreign-born now, as opposed to 15% in 1910, IIRC.  On the other hand, almost all of our population growth since 1965 has been as a result of post-1965 immigration and the descendants thereof.  And, after forty years of very heavy immigration, we paused for an equally long time to allow ourselves to digest the newcomers.  Were we to take your counsel, we would not do that.

I'd also note that the concerns that you express above are identical to the concerns expressed regarding the Irish, Jews, Poles, Slavs, etc. who immmigrated during that time.  Each one of these immigrant groups assimilated into our society.

There are many, many differences between now and then:

They, and the rest of the United States, had the benefit of forty years of heavily restricted immigration, from 1924 to 1965, during which to assimilate.  The shared experience of WWII, the Cold War, 25 years of conscription, and the Great Depression can't have hurt the process of assimilation, either.  

Those immigrants were almost entirely "white," meaning that they did not visibly differ from the majority of the country (the opinions of the KKK notwithstanding).  They could, with a name change and some English proficiency, disappear into America.  Furthermore, the gap in relative education between immigrants and native-born Americans was much smaller then, as a result of which such immigrants were able to earn almost as much as natives.  Coupled with ease of assimilation, this meant that ethnic income inequalities weren't so great and didn't tend to persist over generations, the way they are beginning to now with Hispanic immigrants and their descendants.  One need not look very far to see how dangerous and unstable such a state of affairs is.  There's always Latin America for an example.  

The stream of immigrants from 1880-1924 didn't predominantly speak a single language or share a single culture.  There were enough to displace the previous populations in certain places, but only locally.  Not surprisingly, until the process of assimilation advanced, we did see the very sort of ethnically-based politics (think ethnic machines in New York or Chicago) that I and my "fellow travellers" are warning that we will increasingly see as a result of our present immigration policy.  Only now, it will be probably be in entire states rather than cities.

Now, undoubtably, each changed society as they did -- e.g., it's no longer kosher to bar Catholics from country clubs; only a schmuck would refuse some delicious kielbasa on a cool football Saturday; and y'all know what the words "kosher" and "schmuck"* mean without looking them up in a dictionary.  Each also contributed to the economic growth of our society, and our national power and prestige.  Some folks did indeed suffer.  But, on net, things got better.  Rather than being satisfied with ever-narrowing slices of the same pie, the pie grew.

It did.  The question is:  Is the pie growing now, as a result of immigration?  Or have conditions changed such that the policy that made sense in 1890 may not make much sense now?  What worked in a largely rural country of less than 100 million people and lots of (relatively) good-paying semi-skilled jobs may not work today in a nation of 300 million urbanites and suburbanites for whom increasingly a college degree is a minimum for any kind of middle-class employment.  You need to decide what the purpose of an immigration policy (which we must have, since the number of potential immigrants is effectively limitless), then adopt a plan to meet that goal.  If, as is implicitly assumed in these discussions, the purpose is to produce economic growth, we could do a lot better by admitting different people from the ones we do now while decreasing absolute numbers of immigrants at the same time, and without the perverse, income- regressive effects of our current policy.

Indeed, this has usually been the result of immigration in the United States.  Since the factual presupposition to many (all?) of Cyrus's points is that the restraint of immigration is a net "good," I'd like him to produce some kind of evidence to support his claim.  Identify -- general terms are fine (for I don't want to impose a burden that I would not myself undertake) -- a period of US history in which we barred immigration and were rewarded with robust economic and social gains.

Others have mentioned it already, but the period from 1924 to 1965 was, the Great Depression excepted, a period of rapid growth in our nation's economy, power, and sense of nationhood.  It was also a period that saw great strides in race relations, and in the 1950s and early 1960s, historically low rates of crime.  And immigration was limited to about 150,000 per year, and those admitted tended to be more educated than American natives, rather than dramatically less so.

In twelve years?  Chickenfeed.  That's twelve months worth of illegals nowadays.  Besides, the Germans in particular (see Borjas) admitted in that period tended to be very highly educated, far more so than American natives, and therefore highly economically beneficial.  It was, after all, the world's most advanced society before it was taken over by Mr. Shickelgruber.

immigrants were permitted in under a quota that allotted visas to countries of origin based on the representation of that country's ethnic groups in the US in 1924, meaning that the English and Germans got lots more visas than anyone else.

I am blogging on the fly between meetings and actually doing some billable work, so comments are not always as finely crafted as I would like.  I'd be the first to agree that employment is not a privilege.

I think if there is a mismatch, inquiries should be made and a little more documentation obtained; just as in your case.  I understand your concerns well, my husband, a resident alien, has no middle name, an apparent perversity that causes a surprising amount of trouble.  We also both own small businesses so I am well aware of how harried and hectic things can get.  (And never more so than when you spend more time than you should at blogs!)  

For all I know, these figures are correct.  But, given the sheer demographics of LA, I find it very hard to believe the 95% of all homicide warrants are for illegal immigrants.  Granted that homicide warrants are not a perfect proxy for homicides (e.g., if five guys rob a store and, in the course of the robbery, someone gets killed, all five can be charged with homicide under the felony-murder rule).  But this number is so large that it would seem to suggest that illegal immigrants commit virtually every murder in LA -- which just doesn't seem plausible.

I count 11 years.  And, yeah, 58,000 (or so) a year from our mortal enemy of five-to-ten years prior does seem like a lot.  Also, Germans made up only a small number of immigrants during this period,* which (I'll happily) concede, contained one of the lower rates of immigration.

But Jan 1 1950 through Dec 31, 1961=12 years.  If it was Sept. 30-Sept.30, it would be 11.  I don't know how it was counted, so I assumed calendar years.

We over-regulate and over-mandate business into the ground.  Arguably, we have passed that point (given the way companies are outsourcing and offshoring).

Look over the National Association of Manufacturers study.  We're being productive, but a lot of it is being eaten up by taxes, regulations, and litigation.

There is a risk of ruining the economy in the name of saving the nation.

why you are saying that a document printed on "fax paper" is necessarily and obviously a fake. For sure a drivers license on fax paper would be a fake, but that's NOT true of birth certificates, school records, baptismal certificates, military discharges or the like. As I mentioned above my own birth certificate (an official and perfectly legitimate copy of the original) is printed on plain-old everyday copier paper, with only a raised seal to identify it as genuine-- and as I mentioned above this sort of thing can be faked by amateurs.

same point twice. But yes, we need some sort of national ID because many official documents are very easy to fake.

that "Coupled with ease of assimilation, this meant that ethnic income inequalities weren't so great and didn't tend to persist over generations, the way they are beginning to now with Hispanic immigrants and their descendants. "

Everything I have read on the topic has stated that Hispanic assimilation, inclduing reaching rough income equality, is occuring at the same rate as with other immigrant groups-- i.e., after the third generation they are indistinguishable from natives (which of course they are by then).

The problem is that so many new low-scale, ill-educated immigrants keep flooding in that it depresses the averages for the group as whole

Heaven's Door.  Borjas is an economist, and an advocate of a skills-based visa issuance system.  In any event, he documents first that Mexican and Central American immigrants earn only 60% as much as natives, compared to the 82% to 88% rate earned by early 20th century Italian and Eastern European immigrants.  Furthermore, as a rule of thumb, income gaps decrease by about half in each generation.  Using that rule of thumb, we could expect the grandchildren of today's Mexican immigrants to be at the same relative level of income as first generation Poles were in 1910.  And that is assuming the normal processes of cultural assimilation function at the same rate they did then, something I am inclined to doubt, not least of all because we keep bringing in more unassimilated immigrants from the same countries.  We must also consider the great increase in lifespans since 1910, which will lead to those first generation immigrants whom, based on our "Ellis Island" experience, we don't really expect to assimilate, living here for decades longer.  

Re: We must also consider the great increase in lifespans since 1910, which will lead to those first generation immigrants whom, based on our "Ellis Island" experience, we don't really expect to assimilate, living here for decades longer.  

Most of the increase in life expectancy has occured in the first two decades of life. It's not so much that adults are living longer (though that is true to some extent) but rather that far fewer children are dying and skewing down the averages.

Are you also one of those loons that thinks the Mexican immigrants are an invading army bent on taking back the American Southwest?

Too much regulation is undoubtedly bad for business - but we should also avoid the simplistic conclusion that because too much is bad, none would be good.  There needs to be a balancing act.

A major terrorist event in this country is not going to be good for business or the economy.  Business should welcome reasonable sane measures which greatly reduce this risk - out of sheer naked self-interest.

I've been tied up.

At least 10% of the US is foreign-born now, as opposed to 15% in 1910, IIRC.  On the other hand, almost all of our population growth since 1965 has been as a result of post-1965 immigration and the descendants thereof.  And, after forty years of very heavy immigration, we paused for an equally long time to allow ourselves to digest the newcomers.  Were we to take your counsel, we would not do that.

First, your recollection is a bit off, and in a couple crucial ways.  Here's the story (from this working paper:  http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/twps0029.html):

As a percentage of total population, the foreign-born population rose from 9.7 percent in 1850 and fluctuated in the 13 percent to 15 percent range from 1860 to 1920 before dropping to 11.6 percent in 1930. The highest percentages foreign born were 14.4 percent in 1870, 14.8 percent in 1890 and 14.7 percent in 1910.

From 1930 to 1950, the foreign-born population of the United States declined from 14.2 million to 10.3 million, or from 11.6 percent to 6.9 percent of the total population. These declines reflected the extremely low level of immigration during the 1930s and 1940s. The foreign-born population then dropped slowly to 9.6 million in 1970, when it represented a record low 4.7 percent of the total population. Immigration had risen during the 1950s and 1960s, but was still low by historical standards, and mortality was high during this period among the foreign-born population because of its old age structure (reflecting four decades of low immigration).

Since 1970, the foreign-born population of the United States has increased rapidly due to large-scale immigration, primarily from Latin America and Asia. The foreign-born population rose from 9.6 million in 1970 to 14.1 million in 1980 and to 19.8 million in 1990. The estimated foreign-born population in 1997 was 25.8 million. As a percentage of the total population, the foreign-born population increased from 4.7 percent in 1970 to 6.2 percent in 1980, to 7.9 percent in 1990, and to an estimated 9.7 percent in 1997.

The percentage of Americans who were foreign born was approximately equal to or above today's level from 1850 through 1930 (and possibly later).  That's an eighty-year period, not a forty-year period.  Then you had a forty year period of time (1930-1970), during which we suffered a great depression and fought a world war, before immigration started to increase again.  [But immigration did not cease during these periods, of course; it simply declined relative to native birth rates.] Yet, even today, the foreign-born population still has not reached its 1930s level, however (11.6%).

In other words, your model of "forty years on and forty years off" is, well, off.  The relative number of foreign-born persons is still relatively modest by historical norms.  Your reliance on the Great Depression and WW2 to explain immigrant assimilation is also misplaced; how, then, did the far larger (relative) numbers of immigrants between 1870-1910 assimilate?

Those immigrants were almost entirely "white," meaning that they did not visibly differ from the majority of the country (the opinions of the KKK notwithstanding).

That's flat-out false, in the sense of how "white" was defined in the respective eras.  White was white, anglo-saxon, and protestant -- and to more than just the KKK.  Indeed, you need only read the literature of the time to hear all the various ways in which the physical characteristics of South Europeans (Italians, Greeks), central Europeans (slavs, Poles), and Jews were described and denigrated.  

Moreover, what we're really talking about is identification of certain purportedly "undesireable" groups based on physical characteristics.  Not to put words in your mouth, but I hear you to suggest that Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Poles, and Jews somehow "pass" more easily as "white" (really, WASP, according to the standards of the time) than, say, individuals of Mexican or Central American descent.  Leaving aside all the underlying assumptions in that suggestion [were this an English class, we'd undoubtably start discoursing on the iterability of the colonial narrative at this point], I think that's self-evidently inaccurate.  

The stream of immigrants from 1880-1924 didn't predominantly speak a single language or share a single culture.

This is a distinction, although I'm not sure why it's effects are presumed to be negative.

It did.  The question is:  Is the pie growing now, as a result of immigration?  Or have conditions changed such that the policy that made sense in 1890 may not make much sense now?

I note that you've cited Borjas in response to other posters; that's unsurprising, since Borjas is one of the few economists whose work consistently supports natavist claims regarding labor market substitution.  Borjas is well regarded, but his methodology has been criticized and even he does not claim that immigrants are a drain on the economy as a whole -- only low-wage workers.  (See, e.g., http://www.economist.com/surveys/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=289789).  Moreover (and, despite some looking, I confess I can't find the study), even Borjas found that the effects on the low-wage job market of (1997?) immigration levels are extraordinarily modest -- something like a .1-.2%; other researchers have found positive results on the low-wage market.  (Remember, everyone -- including Borjas -- agrees that immigration has positive effects on otheer markets and on the economy as whole).

That's all the time I have for now.  Back later.

If I may speak for Maximos, no, the Aztlan and La Raza types excepted.  Are they likely to be particularly susceptible to the call of Mexican nationalism, given the mother country's nearness, the efforts of the Mexican government to foster dual loyalties (and the failure at the same time of the US government to foster or require loyalty), and the fact that the Southwest was after all taken from Mexico (though it was not inhabited by the ancestors of today's Mexican immigrants)?  Yes.  Resentment can be pretty easy for demagogues to whip up, particularly in the face of persistent inequality.  Mexico is not particularly pro-American to begin with.

if we believe that the occasional billboard on which LA, USA is crossed out and replaced by LA, Mexico is just an anamoly, a creative bit of advertising that, in spite of its being advertising, does not tap into a vein of real sentiment, even if that sentiment does not always assume the form of the agitations of La Raza, and if we believe that the occasional outburst of a Mexican politician in the form of a desire for a reconquista or a resentment of the loss of x% of "Mexican" territory is just politicking.  Given time and the persistence of crime, poverty, inequality and the very real cultural differences, it will take only a spark of demagoguery, or an unfortunate inter-racial incident, to awaken the possibility.  

Are you one of those loons who believes that such massive concentrations of cultural and linguistic differences can never threaten the integrity of American, culturally and politically?

Jjayson is one of those loons who believes that every person on earth has a absolute right to be in United States. Check out the sand-pounding stupidity in this thread.

What's the crime rate among illegal au pairs in this country?  What's the crime rate among illegal Irish immigrants?

IOW, what is the correlation between being an illegal immigrant and having a greater propensity to committ a crime?

What sense can be made of the doctrine that every person has the right to be absolutely anywhere on the globe he desires to be, in the pursuit, presumably, of money?  Now, what follows is by no means a racial comment, thought some unstable types might try to parse it as such, but economic 'law' being what it is, this will result in the emergence of an economically undifferentiated mass of not-very-well-off people.  I've heard it said that we could create a single, global labour market, but the consequence would be that "prosperity" would be defined down to what a poor shopkeeper in a shabby district of Karachi might recognize as "getting-by-plus-a-little".  

No thanks.

I'm a long way removed from English class, but I am curious.

That's flat-out false, in the sense of how "white" was defined in the respective eras.  White was white, anglo-saxon, and protestant -- and to more than just the KKK.  Indeed, you need only read the literature of the time to hear all the various ways in which the physical characteristics of South Europeans (Italians, Greeks), central Europeans (slavs, Poles), and Jews were described and denigrated.

I'm somewhat familiar with those ideas.  Was there not a distinction between "American" and "white?"  I don't think there were ever any miscegenation laws against marrying Catholics or Greeks, though surely this country was seen as Anglo-Saxon and Protestant at least into the 1940s, and in terms of the distribution of wealth and power largely remains so.  Just look at the makeup of Congress or the occupants of the White House.

Not to put words in your mouth, but I hear you to suggest that Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Poles, and Jews somehow "pass" more easily as "white" (really, WASP, according to the standards of the time) than, say, individuals of Mexican or Central American descent.

I think, broadly speaking, and acknowledging the great diversity among so-called "Hispanics" (who encompass whites, blacks, Indians, and every conceivable mixture thereof) that this is a somewhat accurate statement, not least because many Latinos see themselves as a race apart.  I would be interested to see data, if any exists, on intermarriage over the first three generations between say, Polish or Italian immigrants and members of other ethnic groups compared to Hispanic intermarriage today.  Is it higher or lower?  Do you know of any such data?  In any event, if Latino immigrants and their descendants, who start much further behind than prior waves of immigrants,  don't rapidly catch up to whites and Asians in economic performance, status, and political power, and see themselves as a separate (and oppressed) race I think the result will be a large degree of Balkanization.

This is a distinction, although I'm not sure why it's effects are presumed to be negative.

It may encourage group identification over against identification with the broader United States.  On the other hand, perhaps the historic enmity between Latin American countries, and ethnic groups within those countries, will persist here in the US.

Borjas claims a small net benefit of about $10 billion per annum from immigration, but argues that it is regressive, acting to redistribute wealth from poorly-educated natives to the immigrants themselves and to higher-earning natives.  Any claim that heavy immigration by low wage earners helps low wage earners already in this country strikes me as false on its face.  If you have more of something, the price for it tends to go down.  Maybe it's true, but the burden of proof would be pretty heavy.  Of course our current pattern of immigration helps some parts of the market, but just as surely hurts others, and may have other, non-economic effects.  

In other words, your model of "forty years on and forty years off" is, well, off.  The relative number of foreign-born persons is still relatively modest by historical norms.  Your reliance on the Great Depression and WW2 to explain immigrant assimilation is also misplaced; how, then, did the far larger (relative) numbers of immigrants between 1870-1910 assimilate?

The creation of public schools oriented toward assimilating the children of immigrants, the founding and existence of unions, a relatively small wage gap between natives and immigrants, greater lingustic diversity among immigrants, and geographic distribution across a then largely still empty country all come to mind.  You exclude the Civil War period and WWI rather artificially.  Surely WWI, with conscription and the anti-German phobia of the time (my great-uncle's parents' Schmidt became Smith) contributed to the assimilation of the immigrants who arrived in the early 20th century.  The large decrease in new immigration shortly after can't have hurt the process either.

This is fascinating, but I do have to do some work today.

but the readers of FT and The Wall Street Journal and the attendees of Davos will be much, much richer than they are now.  Priorities, people!

latifundia (I believe this is the term for the utterly enormous estates amassed by late antique noble families, worked by masses of rather poor labourers).  I cannot help but think of what succeeded them.  

I, too, have too much work to do today.  Regrettably, then, I'll respond to only a couple of your points:

I don't think there were ever any miscegenation laws against marrying Catholics or Greeks, though surely this country was seen as Anglo-Saxon and Protestant at least into the 1940s, and in terms of the distribution of wealth and power largely remains so.

I'm not aware of any, although the social taboos were fairly strong.

The creation of public schools oriented toward assimilating the children of immigrants, the founding and existence of unions, a relatively small wage gap between natives and immigrants, greater lingustic diversity among immigrants, and geographic distribution across a then largely still empty country all come to mind.

As for geographic distribution, I don't think that's the case:  with the exception of LA (then a sleepy backwater), the immigrants of the 1890s gathered in the same cities as they do today:  New York, Chicago, etc.  We also see the same tendency for new immigrants to gather where there are already established immigrant groups (i.e., the presence of some Swedes in MN led to greater Swedish immigration to MN; the same can be said about the Polish in Chicago, or, really, any ethnic/national group.)

As for public schools:  Despite my (at times) libertarian leanings and despite my general support for school vouchers, I continue to view public schools as essential to the development of the citizenry -- native born or immigrant.   Would that we do the things to improve them!

As a parting shot, I think that how one views immigration (legal and illegal) comes down to how one views America.  I view America as having been founded on -- and to continue to be guided by -- essentially Anglo-Saxon legal principles.  I do not, however, see America (or its "national character") as essentially Anglo-Saxon.  Surely, it was for a time.  But it is no longer; nor, to my mind, should it be.  The dream of America is as a beacon on a hill, where freedom reigns.  We should welcomoe anyone who agrees with the dream, and is willing to work for it -- for that is how a dream is perpetuated.

von

P.s., re: the "Iterability of the colonial narrative":

I'm having a little fun there.  Iterability refers to Derrida's notion that the text, once written, "walks" away from its author -- in that the meaning of a text is partially determined by the reader's response to it rather than the author's intent.  (This is one of the challenges of so-called "postmodern" literary theory to the traditional view that the meaning of a text is solely determined by the intent of the author.)  The "colonial narrative" has been reduced to a meaningless term in that it manages to pop up everywhere and mean everything; thus, it pops up here as well.  

By the way, don't take the above as an endorsement of Derrida/postmodern and -structualist critiques/post colonial analyses, etc.  Such things are sometimes interesting and useful, but seldom in the practical sense.  I.e., there's a reason why I eventually settled on econ as my undergraduate degree (I'm a lawyer, by postgrad training).  

As a parting shot, I think that how one views immigration (legal and illegal) comes down to how one views America.  I view America as having been founded on -- and to continue to be guided by -- essentially Anglo-Saxon legal principles.  I do not, however, see America (or its "national character") as essentially Anglo-Saxon.  Surely, it was for a time.  But it is no longer; nor, to my mind, should it be.  The dream of America is as a beacon on a hill, where freedom reigns.  We should welcomoe anyone who agrees with the dream, and is willing to work for it -- for that is how a dream is perpetuated.

Ideas, just like nations, have histories, and inhabit stories.  What is our new history or national myth that will on one hand maintain those Anglo-Saxon rules and institutions, which draw their validity from the history of DWM WASPs while simultaneously disavowing the special importance of that very same history in the interest of inclusiveness?  Who and what are we?  I submit that seeing ourselves simply as followers of liberal "rules of the game" is insufficient to maintain any society, least of all one that is supposed to be a melting pot.  We need to share the same story to be citizens of a republic.  

I'm having a little fun there.  Iterability refers to Derrida's notion that the text, once written, "walks" away from its author -- in that the meaning of a text is partially determined by the reader's response to it rather than the author's intent.  (This is one of the challenges of so-called "postmodern" literary theory to the traditional view that the meaning of a text is solely determined by the intent of the author.)  The "colonial narrative" has been reduced to a meaningless term in that it manages to pop up everywhere and mean everything; thus, it pops up here as well.

Ugggggh, Derrida!!  Seriously, I'd never heard it referred to as "iterability."

Any more than the massive concentration of other culturally and linguisticly different people did: Namely, Poles, Germans, Italians, etc.

Are you saying that those of us who disagree with you, cyrus, and Paul J. Cella are loons?

Ugggggh, Derrida!!  Seriously, I'd never heard it referred to as "iterability."

Google "iterability" (you'll see that I didn't quite choose the general definition of "iterability," but rather defined it in terms of an application of that definition.  Which, though confusing, is a very Derrida thing to do.)

But they probably will, unless efforts are made to encourage, even compel, assimilation, owing to their proximity to their countries of origin, the involvement of the political classes of those countries in the lives of their citizens resident here, and their sheer numbers, coupled with their relatively poor economic prospects compared to previous immigrant flows, such as those from Eastern and Southern Europe.  Different times, different geography, different politics, different resolve on our part to make them Americans.  The stew in our pot is starting to spoil.

The point is that you sallied forth in yet another non-sequitur that made no point at all whatsoever.

was never comparable in scale, and it didn't have airliners, Greyhound busses, Telemundo, officially enshrined multiculturalism, long-distance telephones, or a home country government that encourages dual loyalties.  Where we did have large concentrations of particular immigrant groups, such as the Irish (who could already speak English!) in Boston or New York, they did take over local politics and patronage and use it to the benefit of co-ethnics at the expense of others.  Look up Tammany Hall, and then imagine it expanded to encompass, say, all of California.  Or, look at Quebec in our frosty northern neighbor.  And those are just the peaceful outcomes.  There are plenty of far more dire examples of ethnic and racial strife destroying countries.  That our current group of immigrants are likely to be more difficult to assimilate under the best of conditions, and that, wracked with self-doubt, we as a country are increasingly reluctant to enforce assimilation, is all the more reason to worry.  

May I quibble?

The French-speaking Qubecois were not immigrants (other than at the very beginning in the same sense that nearly all of us are). It was the Anglo-Canadians who encroached on them.

removed by the Brits, when they won all of Canada.

The Fench in that area were Acadians, and some were relocated to the Virginia/Carolinas areas where they assimilated, but we ended up with "Cajuns" who were relocated to Louisanna, and continued their culture.

Although the Cajuns dialect has changed so much, that it is next to impossible for a French Canadian or for other French speakers to understand them (my husband was friends with a French Canadian during college, the college was in the Mobile area with several Cajuns attending, and he often laughed that he couldn't make heads or tails of their french).

The French-speaking Qubecois were not immigrants (other than at the very beginning in the same sense that nearly all of us are). It was the Anglo-Canadians who encroached on them.

I know, but didn't mention it because I didn't think it was relevant to my point that geographically concentrated, unassimilated, and self-conscious minorities are a source of conflict.

2,100 miles of border sufficient to deter most crossers and catch the excessively motivated ones who choose to cross anyway will require a bare minimum of 30 agents per mile, 24/7, plus supervisory overhead (15%, 24/7), plus administrative and logistical overhead (another 15% of the 20-agents-per-mile figure, 8/5).

2,100 miles x 30 agents/mile = 63,000.

63,000 times 0.15 = 9,450.

Total 24/7 manning for the border: 63,000 + 9,450 = 72,450; times five (to man one post 24/7 and still allow for weekends off/vacations/other necessary absences) = 362,250.

Add 9,450 personnel for admin overhead: 371,700.

495,600 federal employees at an average loaded cost of $150K per employee: $55,775,000,000 per year.

The only way you will get almost 56 gigabucks per year for this mission is to justify it as anti-terrorism. The problem is that opponents will point to the remaining 17,000 miles of unsecured border as a great big gaping hole in your "anti-terrorism" security perimeter, and then gleefully point out the additional $473,917,500,000 needed to secure the remaining perimeter to that standard.