The Hidden Costs of Immigration

The Claremont Review of Books ^ | November 8, 2016 | Christopher Caldwell

[reaganaut1]

It looks erratic to us but may one day seem inevitable to historians that Donald Trump should have fought his anti-establishment campaign for the Republican nomination on the terrain of immigration policy. Already it is hard to recall that it was the establishment, not Trump, that insisted the battle be fought there. The candidate, at his announcement speech, spent a few minutes on immigration but then moved on to China, ISIS, Obamacare, the national debt, the Second Amendment, his desire to be a kind of National Cheerleader, and his own net worth. Trump’s skepticism about mass immigration won the attention of his primary opponents and the journalists who covered him because it seemed crazy—almost pitiable.

For a generation, mass immigration has held a place of honor in each party’s political theology. It fits Democrats’ anti-racism and Republicans’ supply-side economics. There is a bipartisan magic about open borders. When the needs of immigration conflict with those of democracy, it is democracy that gets pushed aside. Federal and state authorities have left unenforced, and even flouted, the laws that govern employment, deportation, access to public services, and voting rights for non-citizens. In a 1994 referendum, five million Californians sought to deny welfare benefits to illegal immigrants, giving the state’s Proposition 187 a 17-point landslide at the polls. But District Court Judge Mariana Pfaelzer decided they were wrong. And that was that.

Immigration is thus a synecdoche for the way society has evolved over the last half-century. The economy boomed as we tapped resources that our forefathers’ technological and—so we liked to think—moral backwardness prevented them from tapping. Since 2008 it has become clear that what had looked like a boom was actually a bubble made of $45 trillion in government, household, and business debt.

[reaganaut1]

This is a review of the book "We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative", by George Borjas. Caldwell, the reviewer, wrote the 2010 book "Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West".

[Elsie]

We Wanted Workers:

Then why have we KILLED over 58 MILLION Future Americans in the last fourty plus years?

[Elsie]

But District Court Judge Mariana Pfaelzer decided they were wrong. And that was that.

Attention Donald...

[Flintlock]

So that our little girls can screw around without consequence—UNLIKE the boys (paternity and all that jazz).

[VRW Conspirator]

I long for impeachment and removal of judges like these. Gingrich said that it will take a half of dozen scalps before these activist judges.

[Lurkinanloomin]

Both parties have been working against the citizens and the rule of law for decades.
In every election since the last amnesty the GOP nominated only amnesty candidates until Trump forced his way into their club.
If not for Trump they would have nominated Yeb! to carry forward the amnesty/open borders agenda.
They did not care if they lost elections with Designated Losers as long as they denied the citizens the ability to stop the illegal alien inundation.
The GOP is still dominated by Cheap Labor Express Republicans. The only 2 Senators to vote for Gang of Eight to lose were Ayotte and Kirk.
McCain, Hoeven, Murkowsky and Rubio were all rewarded for the perfidy with another term.
Hatch, Flake, Corker and Heller come up in 2018, we must begin to plan for their removal now.
Alexander and Graham must be removed in 2020.

[Vaduz]

Immigration = Overhead

[AllAmericanGirl44]

bkmk