06/16/2013
[Originally published on WND, June 12, 2013. Updated for VDARE.com with more links.]
The famous joke says that you can always tell when a lawyer is lying — his lips move.
Similarly, you can tell that backers of S.744, the 1,000-page Schumer-Rubio immigration bill that has been rushed to the Senate floor this week, are terrified that justly outraged American patriots will tar and feather them and run them out of town on a rail — they always describe their insanely radical and grossly self-interested proposal as “immigration reform” or, frequently, “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”
And, needless to say, their Mainstream Media megaphone repeats the term endlessly. Even patriotic opponents can find themselves battered and bemused into using it.
Of course, it’s a deception. “Immigration reform” could logically mean just about any change in the current chaotic, stuck-on-full-throttle immigration system. It could even mean an immigration moratorium — no net immigration. In fact, in view of America’s multi-year unemployment crisis, that is exactly what it should mean.
And, shamelessly, S.744?s backers are actually presenting the measure as an enforcement and anti-amnesty bill (they redefine amnesty) in what appears to be a lavishly funded election-campaign-style phone bank offensive, which I’ve heard about from states as far flung as Montana and Alaska.
But what S.744 actually comprises:
Forget about “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” — S.744 must really be called the 2013 Amnesty/Immigration Surge Act.
Naturally, most public attention is focused on the amnesty provisions. And they are truly outrageous.
But the increase in legal immigration is the real kicker here. It’s been smuggled in along with amnesty because, while opinion polls can sometimes be tortured enough to seem to show that, under various impossible circumstances, Americans might support amnesty for some illegals (children etc.), there has never been any poll that shows Americans want legal immigration increased.
Yet that’s what the financial musclemen who are providing that lavish funding to market the Amnesty/Immigration Surge — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Bloomberg.com’s Michael Bloomberg, etc. — really want. They want cheaper computer programmers, as well as cheaper golf course tenders. (Yes — Bloomberg once actually said this!)
There’s a huge amount of money at stake. By depressing wages, current immigration policy shifts some 2-3 percent of Gross Domestic Product from labor to capital. That’s a windfall profit to the plutocrats of $300-$450 billion a year.
And remember, the Amnesty/Immigration Surge bill could triple legal immigration. So we could be looking at a diversion of income to the plutocrats amounting to more than a trillion dollars.
This is a looting of the U.S. economy that can only be compared to the Russian oligarchs’ theft of assets as the Soviet Union collapsed.
It’s widely understood that the 2013 Amnesty/Immigration Surge Act is a larger replay of the 1986 Amnesty, signed by Ronald Reagan (who was honest enough to admit it was an amnesty) on the understanding that there would be increased border security and interior enforcement — which didn’t happen.
Less understood is that the 2013 Amnesty/Immigration Surge Act is also a larger replay of the 1965 Immigration Act — which opened the floodgates after a 40-year period in which there was essentially no immigration at all.
(There have been many such pauses in American history. They have been essential to the process of assimilation. It’s time for another!)
It’s entirely because of the 1965 Immigration Act that that the U.S. population, 90 percent white in 1960, is projected to shift to majority-minority after 2040. Bluntly, the federal government — specifically, the Democratic Party, which thinks it will benefit — is electing a new people.
But beyond this social engineering, unprecedented in the history of the world, the 1965 Act is associated with a number of unpleasant specific effects never mentioned in the Mainstream Media.
For example:
For three decades after World War II, U.S. poverty rates dropped like a stone — from 32 percent of families in 1947 to 11.1 percent in 1973.
But then the 1965 Immigration Act kicked in. It had two effects: importing poverty-stricken immigrants and intensifying labor market completion, forcing more American-born workers into poverty.
Progress against poverty stalled.
The poverty rate has most recently risen back to some 14.5 percent — way above the low achieved 40 years ago.
Of course, the immigrant labor force is not the only cause of this immiseration of U.S. workers. But it has contributed.
Basically, in 1965 the U.S. could have chosen to be Switzerland. It was tricked onto a course where it will become Brazil.
And in the future, if S.744?s backers have their way, it could be tricked into being Liberia.
Peter Brimelow is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, “Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster,” is now available in kindle format.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.