06/11/2011
No, not the lovable New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, well known for his contempt for his fellow Americans and solicitude for fellow billionaires. The time it is the news service he founded and controls (to put it mildly, where this issue is concerned).
Honoring the Past and Accepting Reality in Immigration Law: View By the Editors Bloomberg Jun 9, 2011 deserves consideration as demonstrating the intellectual progress the debate has made during and since the Bush Amnesty Wars.
The Bloomberg Editors gracefully — almost eagerly — offer concessions:
An influx of millions of largely unskilled, uneducated, rootless workers would present a challenge to any nation…Though the U.S. has been defined — physically, culturally and metaphorically — by immigrants, that doesn’t mean it always will be… Nor does it mean that immigration should be a self- selecting process, with the U.S. accepting whoever possesses the wiles to sneak over the border.
They accept that illegal immigration
… places burdens on health-care and education systems, especially in border states
and acknowledge that George Borjas
… points out that if illegal immigrants reduce the market wage for a low-skilled, low-income earner by only 4 percent, the effect can be devastating.
They even admit:
Opponents decry a pathway to citizenship — which would require the payment of fines and other measures in return for legal status — as “amnesty.” We cede the point. With comprehensive reform, illegal immigrants would, in effect, be rewarded for having broken the law and outlasted the political opposition
(Vdare.com emphasis) This is a refreshing change from the Julian Simon and Wall Street Journal tradition of dealing with contrary arguments by not mentioning them.
So what are the policy fruits of this intelligent and reasonable appreciation of the opposition’s concerns? ABSOLUTELY ZERO!. The Bloomberg Editors still demand full amnesty, more visas for highly skilled immigrants…and by the way
Visas for low-skilled immigrants should be increased, as well, sustaining the opportunity to rise from the bottom that is the essence of the American dream.
AKA keep my domestic servants coming, and (redacted per Peter Brimelow) the American working class.
What we are dealing with here is a crazed and insatiable lust to transform America, regardless of economic or (perhaps) political consequences. Birthright Citizenship — an area where concession would actually offer something of political significance to opponents — significantly goes unmentioned. The editorial concludes with the usual triumphalism:
By the early 1830s, Samuel F.B. Morse, an inventor of the telegraph, was already inveighing against the “outcast tenants of the poorhouses and prisons of Europe” who would soon strangle a nation in its infancy. But the immigrants kept coming. They shaped American character and fueled American success.
But in fact the immigrants Morse was concerned about did not keep coming. Morse was a part of the much-maligned "nativist" movement, shocked by transforming Irish Catholic immigration into his native New England, a section from which immigration had been essentially absent for 200 years. Irish Catholic immigration peaked in the 1840s and then collapsed. This is just one of immigration’s “Great Lulls”, as Peter Brimelow put it in Alien Nation, which affect both the volume and the ethnic composition of the influx, and which are key to assimilation.
Of course, it may well be that, without the subsequent late 19th Century influx, America’s character would not have been "shaped" into spending thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in Middle Eastern Wars.
As commentator “Mayor” posted I’m with Morse!
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.