01/30/2013
The new rush to enact another illegal immigration amnesty, now like the triple threat man in sports playing on the other team, mounts a three-pronged attack on Americans’ rights, jobs and their very quality of life.
What are those three threats? Of course, you can easily list many more than three. But let’s pose these for starters.
The record of its non-enforcement is long and clear. But these new “reform proposals” are dangerously unhooked from any enforcement safeguards. Worse, they are no more likely to be enforced than are the current safeguards are now.
Many responsible patriot voices have already chimed in on Obama’s enforcement record. Here is one of many, from NumbersUSA:
After reviewing Obama’s plan, our Director of Government Relations, Rosemary Jenks, told the press:
"This is not a serious plan for comprehensive immigration reform; it is a comprehensive special-interest New Year’s wish list, in which everyone gets something except the American people. Unfortunately, all Americans get is the bill, which they will have to pay with their jobs and their tax dollars."
— Rosemary Jenks, NumbersUSA
Obama was a bit vague in his Las Vegas speech, but the policy outline distributed by the White House makes his demands very clear. Full voting citizenship for most all 11+ million illegal aliens with NO CONDITIONS. NO guarantees about border security. NO E-Verify in place to check for employment fraud. NO funding of Entry-Exit visa-checking system.
Further NumbersUSA comment:
The other plan to surface this week is from a Senate "Gang of Eight." The group includes long time Amnesty champions like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ). No surprises here. All these men have pulled every trick imaginable for years to push Amnesty.
More surprising is the addition of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who actually campaigned against Amnesty while running for the Senate! In 2009, he said, "If you grant amnesty, the message that you're sending is that if you come in this country and stay here long enough, we will let you stay. And no one will ever come through the legal process if you do that." We hope this is a temporary lapse for him.
The second threat:
I am a Democrat, but it is disgusting to see GOP grandees rushing to slather anyone with a name ending in a vowel with privileges which should be reserved for all Americans — certainly not extended to illegal aliens, who may number now as many as 20 million.
And third:
Yup! In recent months, I have written pieces for VDARE.com about the game-changing force of automation (see here and here).
However, my engineer son recently sent me even more persuasive material on where the USA and the world is going at flank speed — a Navy term meaning full speed ahead.
In the October 2012 issue of the Atlantic Magazine, in an article entitled, The Consequences of Machine Intelligence, we learn about the work of “Moshe Y. Vardi, a professor of computational engineering at Rice University. His research focuses on what machines can and cannot do.”
He begins with a question: “If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?”
Turns out the answer, which you can read for yourself, adds up to a huge slowing in the number of workers needed in our rapidly automating work place.
Look at these initial paragraphs of the Atlantic piece. Does the continued importation of 100,000 legal aliens a month, with 25 million Americans unemployed, underemployed or stopped looking for work, makes any sense?
The question of what happens when machines get to be as intelligent as and even more intelligent than people seems to occupy many science-fiction writers.
The Terminator movie trilogy, for example, featured Skynet, a self-aware artificial intelligence that served as the trilogy’s main villain, battling humanity through its Terminator cyborgs.
Among technologists, it is mostly "Singularitarians" who think about the day when machine will surpass humans in intelligence. The term "singularity" as a description for a phenomenon of technological acceleration leading to "machine-intelligence explosion" was coined by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in 1958, when he wrote of a conversation with John von Neumann concerning the "ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."
More recently, the concept has been popularized by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who pinpointed 2045 as the year of singularity. Kurzweil has also founded Singularity University and the annual Singularity Summit.
It is fair to say, I believe, that Singularitarians are not quite in the mainstream. Perhaps it is due to their belief that by 2045 humans will also become immortal and be able to download their consciousness to computers.
It was, therefore, quite surprising when in 2000, Bill Joy, a very mainstream technologist as co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote an article entitled "Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us" for Wired magazine. "Our most powerful 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech — are threatening to make humans an endangered species," he wrote. Joy’s article was widely noted when it appeared, but it seems to have made little impact.
Yup, very little — at least on our politicians and pundits.
Now, despite the hyping from the Open Border-cheap labor-ethnic lobby-Big Religion crowd for more and more immigrants, we are confronted with the reality: we will need fewer and fewer.
We have plenty of people now.
About the Author: Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., is CoChair of the National Advisory Board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). However, his views are his own
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.