Here are some notes from an immigration discussion your humble Blog Goliard got into in the comment boxes of another website (yes, yes, he knows…but these were fairly sane and low-traffic com-boxes).

1

There’s plenty of Republicans as well as Democrats who believe that Americans have no right to preserve the country they grew up in and hand down something recognizably similar to their children. Sadly, this is an utterly bipartisan (and generally, elite) position.

If, however, millions of Germans suddenly turned up uninvited in Peru, taking jobs from locals and threatening to overwhelm traditional Andean cultures, you can bet the same bien-pensants would change their tune—lecturing not the Peruvians for trying to kick them out, but the Germans for respecting neither the laws of other nations nor the preciousness of the unique character of other peoples’ homelands.

2

Plenty of immigration fairy tales being peddled here. As with any issue, misinformation can be too useful to not propagate, and so we all come to “know” things that aren’t so. Here’s two.

* The fairy tale of the good, family-values, Catholic Hispanics:

Heather MacDonald is one scholar who has been on the case here. See, for instance, “The Hispanic Family: The Case for National Action” and “Honesty from the Left on Hispanic Immigration”.

* The fairy tale of a vast legal guest-worker system as a solution:

1) Ask, say, the Germans and the Dutch how that’s been working out for them.

2) If we’re so short on labor, then: a) I’m sure that will be a great comfort to those now looking for work, who surely even in this crisis should have been able to find something by now…if not, obviously they are just doing it wrong; b) the only real long-term solution, of course, is to start having a healthily above-replacement-rate number of babies again; else no matter what we do the country will not long endure.

3) This is supposed to solve the problems of inequality and people having second-class status in America how exactly?

3

Other comments:

* Deportation does not equal “demonization” (which is mostly a straw-man anyhow). And anyway, I read the above comments of Archbishop Chaput as criticism of both.

* Scott overstates the degree to which illegal immigration has been officially overlooked (the fact that these people needed to get fraudulent Social Security numbers to do any number of things should have been their first clue that what they were doing was still unlawful).

Also he fails to recognize that prosecutorial discretion cuts both ways–the prosecutor always has the choice to start aggressively enforcing the rules on the books again, just as he had the choice to give them a low priority before. Given fair notice (which we’ve already had; witness the number of immigrants who have voluntarily returned home in the past year or two), this is not a problem at all, especially legally.

Were the above not true, the successful “broken windows” law-and-order initiative under Mayor Giuliani would hardly have gotten off the ground.

* “Sacrificing for others” is not a reason for us to accept gravely damaging one of the minority of countries in the world that does work. Indeed, that starts to look more like a failure of stewardship. Charity has its place, but you cannot raise one nation up by dragging another down…nor have governments succeeded in raising other nations up by even the most lavish aid efforts, except in the rarest of occasions.

The best way to help the largest number of Mexicans over the long term is to encourage things to get sorted out in Mexico. Closing the border would be the most efficient way to do that, as it would cut off the main safety valve that the Mexican government uses to export and ameliorate its racial and poverty problems without solving them, and that the Mexican people use individually to escape those and all the other problems of their country without solving them.