12/04/2011
Behind the excitement about the welcome exit from the GOP Presidential nomination contest of the seriously under-qualified Herman Cain is the emergence of a key existential question facing America: should anything be done, not just about sealing the border, but about the huge illegal alien population? The issue is making the weekend talk shows: Bachmann On Immigration: Deport All The Undocumented,By Sam Stein, Huffington Post, December 3, 2011).
(To say nothing of the resultant burgeoning anchor-baby population).
The current Politically Correct estimate of the illegal alien population seems to be 11 million — but in fact, as James Fulford noted for us in 2007, there is good reason to suppose it could be as high as 20 million. See also here and here [The Underground Labor Force Is Rising To The Surface, Robert Justich and Betty Ng, CFA, Bear Stearns Asset Management, January 3, 2005].
Competition is a wonderful thing. Responding to the Gingrich Amnesty/Immigration Facilitation proposal, both Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann have made decisive suggestions:
Perry says he will deport all detained illegal immigrants by Jason McLure Reuters, November 29, 2011
(Of course, why anyone should credit Perry, after his betrayal on this summer’s proposed “Sanctuary Cities” legislation in Texas, is a mystery.)
“‘When people are intercepted here illegally, they need to come within the confines of the law,' Bachmann said. 'If that means deportation, we need to have deportation.'"
[GOP contender Bachmann, in South Florida, calls for English to be official language of U.S. government , By Andrew Abramson, The Palm Beach Post, December 1, 2011]
At the time of the Bush Amnesty Wars, the battle-cry “What is it about 'illegal' you don’t understand?” was generally recognized to be effective. Unfortunately, similar respect is currently being accorded to the slogan: “You can’t deport 11 million people.”
Dealing with this problem definitely requires courage and intellectual precision. So why is it such a problem for Republicans?
The humane answer to this immense dereliction by the American ruling class: attrition through enforcement. America’s immigrant populations have always been very volatile, as Paul Nachman has noted for us — the traditional pattern was for large proportions to go home anyway. One study says that for Italians at the turn of the last century, it was as high as 65%.
Which means that by reasonably re-balancing illegals' access to social benefits, including by policing fraud — and ideally by fixing the Anchor Baby problem, since illegals’ U.S. born children are entitled to all the benefits of citizenship — a lot of this problem will eventually go away. Especially if encouraged by the stance advocated by VDARE.com heroes Representatives Lou Barletta and Mo Brooks–firm enforcement of immigration rules when breaches come to the attention of the authorities.
The equally humane, but firmer and certainly un-PC answer: selective strategic deportation.
It’s never been necessary to “deport them all”. Even in President Eisenhower’s admirable Operation Wetback deportation program, which quickly ended the earlier illegal immigration crisis, only 150,000 were actually deported. Most (up to 3.9 million) got the message and left.
VDARE.com advocates applying the celebrated “Broken Windows” theory to deportation. By the selective strategic deportation of aliens, for example from the flagrant hiring venues developing in every American city, and above all from the increasingly-brazen insulting political demonstrations and arrogant self-outings, would very quickly send a new message — or in fact an old one, the one that President Eisenhower sent and subsequent Presidents allowed to be reversed: everybody go home — the party is over.
Illegal aliens are rational people. That is why they are here. Every move to make life here less inviting and riskier will increase an exodus.
Of course, an exodus is precisely what the actual political elite in America does not want.
The Democrats absolutely, positively want to elect a new people.
The Republicans appear blindly determined to justify James Kirkpatrick’s scathing description of them as “nothing but a glorified corporate lobbying firm” — in this case, for the Chamber of Commerce’s cheap labor agenda.
No doubt all this just means they will have to pay Newt Gingrich some more.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.