We are told that there is going to be immigration reform sometime later this year. We are told that the Republican Party in Congress is ready for this. That was before Cantor had his head handed to him in the Republican primary The issue that sank him was his commitment to amnesty. I think that message has now been sent to a lot of members of Congress. It is a new ballgame politically on amnesty.
Let's think about amnesty. I'm not in favor of giving it, but let's assume that it is given. Is anything likely to change? No. There are at least 12 million illegal immigrants in the country, and it may be 20 million. There is no way that the government can round up all these people and send them home under today's non-amnesty laws. With or without amnesty, they will stay in the country. They will live in the shadows if there is no amnesty. They will not vote. But they are not going to go home in either case. This is their home. Their children, who were born in this country, will grow up and vote.
Fact: net migration from Mexico, 2007 to 2012, was zero. All the media talk about a huge influx of Mexicans is not supported by the facts. We have seen the last of the great waves of immigration. Mexico's economy is improving. This is no flash in the pan.
If we are talking about fundamental change in the United States, amnesty is neither here nor there. What matters are comparative birthrates. Birthrates for Hispanics have dropped since 2007. This country was in replacement mode until 2008. Birthrates were about 2.1 children per woman, which is the replacement rate. In 2007, we were the only major Western industrial country that had a replacement-rate population. The recession reversed this, and it is only slowly beginning to go back up.
Most of this increase was from Hispanic birthrates. White birthrates had gone under replacement years earlier. They were down around 1.7 children per woman. So, replacement-rate demography in this country was based on the presence of Hispanics.
Nothing is going to change anything much, one way or the other. That is the basic rule of economics. Change comes at the margin. There are marginal changes, but they take years to manifest themselves.
THE WELFARE STATE
Some people think that the big problem with illegal immigrants is that they are taking advantage of the welfare rolls. I'm sure a lot of them are. Whose fault is that? It's the fault of the Anglos, who created the welfare system. It wasn't created by illegal Mexican immigrants. It began in the New Deal. It was promoted by graduates of the Ivy League universities. All of this was invented by educated people, and it was supported by grassroots Democrats who used the programs to get elected after 1930. The shock troops of the welfare state are not Mexicans. They are Anglos.
What is the biggest problem with illegal immigrants? Gangs. If the United States tomorrow reversed all of the drug laws, how long would the Hispanic gangs survive? Not very long. They wouldn't be making it big on prostitution, gambling, and petty crime. They make big it on the drug trade. That's where the billions of dollars are. The whole system of the drug cartels in Latin America relies on demand, and the demand comes from Anglos in the United States. That's where the money is.
Take away the welfare system and break up the gangs related to the drug cartels, and the two biggest arguments against illegal immigrants disappear.
Let's go to one that is cultural. Latin American girls get married too young. They drop out of school. That is part of the culture, and it is a sign of a lower-class mentality. The girls are present-oriented. They don't wait until they're 22 or 23 to get married. They don't get educations or job experience.
But if they got married at 17 and stayed married, and if their husbands did not adopt Latin American macho practices and commit adultery, then the younger marriages would not become a major liability in the culture. The culture adjusted to younger marriages a long time ago. Hispanic culture has not adjusted to the public school system of the United States, and also to the situational ethics taught in the public schools. This is having a devastating effect on Hispanic culture. When you combine this with the macho man mentality of Latin Americans, which favors adultery by husbands, you have a serious liability. It has to do with ethics.
Change the legal code. Let the victimized spouses get 100% of the family's assets. That would change people's behavior. But Anglos don't want this behavior change . . . for them.
What if we shut down the American public school system? Then would the devastation begin to cease inside the Hispanic community? I think it would. I think the same kind of devastation would be dramatically slowed down in the Anglo section of the population, too. If students were educated by the Khan Academy instead of the public schools, the ethics of the country would improve. The academic performance of the country would improve. Taxes could be lowered. Students would be better off.
It's not a matter of lack of money. It's a matter of culture, and the primary U.S. culture is Anglo. This culture is favorable to the public school system. It is favorable to the use of coercion by college-educated people, because those people want to control the thinking of everybody coming up through the public school system. This has been going on since 1837. This is not new.
When you look at the liabilities that are associated with illegal immigration, most of the liabilities stem directly from Anglo culture. Hispanics are taking advantage of the system. They didn't invent the system.
The hue and cry against illegal immigration is a hue and cry against the fact that illegal immigrants come here to take advantage of the unethical social and economic structures that have been set up by the Anglos. Anglo voters look at Hispanic immigrants, and they perceive them as weak people: welfare clients. But at least half of the American population is on the dole in one way or the other. The two biggest welfare programs in the country are Medicare and Social Security. The beneficiaries of these programs are primarily white middle-class voters who got old. The only way that these two systems can remain solvent longer is because of new workers coming into the economy. But these new workers, at the margin, are Hispanics. They are doing in the United States what immigrants out of North Africa are doing to the welfare state economies of southern Europe. They are keeping the welfare system going.
Yes, there is welfare at the local level, which Hispanic illegals take advantage of, the main one being the public school systems. But if you don't count the public schools, which are mostly run for the benefit of white middle-class people, and you focus on total welfare outlays, the big recipients are not illegal immigrants. The big recipients are Anglos. They are older. They have waited all their lives to cash in on the welfare state. They have been waiting to retire, and to get all that free medical care. The moral rot took place at the top. People resent Hispanic immigrants for taking advantage of the dregs of the welfare system. When immigrants go to work, they pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. They are paying for the welfare checks that come to the whites.
If young teenagers are coming into this country, unless you can show me that most of them are members of Central American gangs, I figure they're coming here to get jobs. They're coming here for economic reasons. They are not trying to cash in on the welfare system, but rather the employment system. That's a good mentality, in my book. Somebody who goes to the risk of crossing a bunch of borders, coming to this country with nothing in his pockets, in order to take advantage of job opportunities, is the kind of person I prefer to recruit as a future citizen. Most immigrants are entrepreneurial. They always have been.
Change takes place at the margin. It takes years for these changes to make a difference. The fundamental fact of this country, politically speaking, is easy to state: the voters will not accept federal tax burdens above 20% of GDP. That has proven true for all my adult life. That is not going to change. So, whatever the illegal immigrants do, whoever they vote for, it is not going to change the tax burden on the country.
It surely is not going to change the tax burden on the super-rich, because they have gamed the tax system. Mexican voters in 20 years are not going to have any more success in imposing high tax rates on the super-rich than all the other voters have had over the last 20 years.
At the margin, there are more illegal immigrants who want to work than there are who want to get on the dole. The solution to this is to get rid of the dole. But the Anglos don't want to get rid of the dole. So, we must wait until the cities and states run out of money. That is going to be taken care of by Congress, most of which represents white middle-class voters. The Hispanics will not have much to say about it, one way or the other.
Yes, California is liberal. One of these days, Arizona and Texas will get more liberal. But if you're talking about an entire Hispanic culture, you're talking about New Mexico. It has always been Hispanic. But the voters twice elected Gary Johnson, who was the most libertarian governor in the country to be re-elected. So, if the whole country goes Hispanic, it will not be any worse off than New Mexico. The state has a large population living on the reservations. If you talk about a state that has always been heavily Hispanic and is the poster child of the worst of the welfare state federal culture -- the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- you're talking about New Mexico. New Mexico is a decent place to live.
I don't see why people get so upset about the possibility that the Southwest might conceivably turn into New Mexico. I'd rather have the country be like Texas, but if I had to live in New Mexico, it would not be the end of the world. There is air conditioning. Life goes on.
CONCLUSION
The worst aspects of Hispanic-American culture are the result of American culture. White voters do not want to face this, but it's the truth.
Jesus warned us to take the mote out of our own eye before we tried to take the speck out of our neighbor's. With respect to the welfare state in the United States, I cannot imagine any better advice.
The #1 rule of immigration reform must be this: Do not create a national identity card which must be presented by every American -- no profiling -- to get a job. It won't change illegal immigration, but it will change liberty.
Here is my plan for immigration reform.
1. Legalize drugs.
2. Abolish welfare at the local level.
3. Close the public schools.
4. Stop using employers as unpaid informants: no state-mandated background checks.
5. De-fund Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
6. Abolish minimum wage laws.
7. Loosen up green card rules for employed families who return home and then apply.
8. Deport any illegal immigrant convicted of a felony -- no jail time or expenses. Boot him out.
Anglos run the political system and the courts. These can be reformed. Anglos do not want to reform them. They like the system. But voters don't want outsiders to sign up for the welfare programs. The voters do not want to share the booty. "Redistribution ends at the border."
The amnesty debate is mostly symbolic. The immigration wave is behind us. The children of the immigrants will soon vote. For this, you can thank the memories of Teddy Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who rammed through the Immigration Act of 1965. The fiftieth anniversary is next year.
It would take a police state to locate, arrest, and send all of the illegal immigrants back to their home countries. I think we all know this. I have never heard anyone call for this.
In contrast, the American welfare state is not symbolic. It is real.
Any conservative who gets in a dither over amnesty, but who is unwilling to eliminate the welfare state, has his priorities messed up. His ethics can be summarized in this moral axiom: "Illegal immigrants should not have access to our loot. We stole it fair and square."
© 2022 GaryNorth.com, Inc., 2005-2021 All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission prohibited.