By Paul Nachman
03/29/2015
John Hinderaker of the PowerLine blog opens a current entry there (By Its Own Criteria, the Obama Administration Is An Economic Failure) with this:Lately there has been a fair amount of happy talk from liberal pundits about our supposedly robust economy. Such optimistic evaluations have been guarded, since everyone knows that the jobs picture is still bleak, largely because of runaway legal and illegal immigration.Note that Hinderaker includes legal immigration in his reasons for our employment dystopia. That’s especially heartening, since America’s immigration disaster is fundamentally that of mass legal immigration, which — besides all its direct harm (economic, environmental, cultural, … ) — provides the environment that has enabled illegal immigration to metastasize.
(Whereas for all too many ignorant people, including ignorant eminences, the canonical refrain is, approximately, "I strongly oppose illegal immigration, but legal immigration is magical.")
It’s not clear to me, though, if Hinderaker thinks that "everyone" understands the immigration connection to the scarcity of jobs — or just that everyone knows the jobs picture is dim, for undetermined reason(s).
Either way, this is prominent recognition of what’s been a central theme here for more than a decade, especially via Ed Rubenstein’s tracking of the VDARE.com American-Worker-Displacement Index [VDAWDI].
How prominent? Recently Newsmax put PowerLine fourth on its list of the top 50 conservative blogs (Newsmax’s Top 50 Conservative Blogs of 2015, by Theodore Kettle, March 24,2015), although their criteria for doing the ranking aren’t revealed.
Unfortunately, "everyone" doesn’t mean "literally everyone," as the hyper-open-borders manifesto in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine makes clear. In Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant (March 24, 2015), author Adam Davidson goes waaay beyond the appalling-enough title to express his equanimity with immigration rates of up to 11 million per year.
If you read the Times piece in full, you may feel like pounding your head against the wall afterwards. A healthier alternative is to read the point-by-point refutation of Davidson’s exercise in full-frontal-libertarianism (i.e. economics uber alles), Give Me Your Tired Arguments, Your Poor Reasoning (National Review Online, March 28, 2015), by Steve Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.