06/10/2011
Globalist academic Walter Russell Mead has a post on the AEI blog Via Meadia saying that California is a failed state — but not blaming immigration. [SCOTUS Makes It Official: California A Failed State, May 27, 2011] He writes
"California used to be the glory of this country, the dream by the sea, the magic state. Now it produces so many criminals it can’t pay to keep them locked up."
In fact, many of those criminals are produced in Mexico. But even if you thought that California’s troubles were entirely produced by Democratic ideology — Mead writes "This is partly a blue social model thing. California’s public unions are sucking the state dry — like a parasite killing its host" — then you would have to admit that the rising Hispanic population, with its traditional left-wing Democratic politics would contribute to that.
The traditional thing in these "California is broke" articles is not to mention immigration at all. Mead goes farther than that — he praises immigration.
More exposed to illegal migration than any other state, California has been overwhelmed by both legal and illegal immigrants. Immigrants are a net plus for the United States, but neither the federal nor the state governments have been willing to provide the appropriate policy framework to manage this flow — and to cope with the consequences.
If I were on my feet debating this, I would be able to say "I don’t know what Professor Mead is professor of (besides Advanced Globalism) but it can’t be economics."
As an internet-enabled blogger I can’t say that — I always know exactly what someone is Professor of ("Foreign Affairs and the Humanities"in this case) and I was right about it not being economics. As for the Advanced Globalism, Mead is Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations.
Immigrants are not a net gain to the United States. They are a net gain to the employers of cheap labor, and the proprietors of bodegas and cantinas springing up in formerly American neighborhoods, but they pay a lot less in taxes than they consume in services, and unlike earlier generations of immigrants, are unlikely to produce a lot of nuclear physicists and surgeons.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.