05/26/2009
This is from immigration enthusiast Richard Nadler in NRO’s corner:
Major Quibble [Richard Nadler]
In “California’s Illegal-Immigrant Deficit, " Heather Mac Donald asserts that “the education, health-care, and criminal-justice costs of illegal immigrants and their progeny is no help in staunching the red ink €? of California’s budget deficit.
Since when have conservatives started judging the economic worth of groups by the balance of tax expenditures? The government runs a tax profit on single, childless Princeton professors; a Mormon family with 7 kids, a full-time working father, and a full-time housewife mom generates an annual tax deficit. Elderly retirees are a net drain, as are children generally. The rich bring in revenue, the poor do not. We don’t talk of deporting these groups.
No, because they're Americans. But he doesn’t seem to grasp that a Mormon farmer with seven children is different from an illegal Mexican immigrant with same number of children. The Mormon children represent part of America’s future. The Mexican’s children represents Mexico’s future in America.
Since the objection against illegals is that they are illegal, why not say that? Why suggest that their tax balance indicates their economic worth?
It is not really Heather Mac Donald I am calling out. It is Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, who validated this style of immigration analysis on the Movement Right.[More]
He goes on about the value of cheap labor to the employers of cheap labor, and how conservatives should like this, because it’s good for capitalism, but it’s all nonsense. We have tens of millions of Hispanic immigrants. The majority are net tax eaters. Their fathers and grandfathers were poor peasants, and their sons and grandsons are likely to be the same. We have, as Steve Sailer pointed out, had previous experience with this, in the form of the State Of New Mexico. See The Results Of 159 Years Of Hispanic Assimilation In New Mexico.
It’s all part of the fantasy that we're repeating the experience of New York in 1908. In the early 20th century we had Irish, Jewish, Italian, Scandinavian, and Asian immigrants. Most of their descendants are net taxpayers, and the grandsons of the Jewish and Asian immigrants are doctors and engineers. We are not going to get a large number of doctors and engineers out of the children of Mexican immigrants, most of whom don’t graduate high school. We are going to get barrios, colonias, and participants in the Food Stamp Program.
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