Toughening Immigration Laws. The big story today was demonstrations in various cities across the Nation by immigrants against proposed Federal legislation to make willfully violating the immigration laws of this country into a felony. The AP news story quotes some of the demonstrators in Los Angeles saying naive, even dishonest things like this:

"They say we are criminals. We are not criminals," said Salvador Hernandez, 43, of Los Angeles, a resident alien who came to the United States illegally from El Salvador 14 years ago and worked as truck driver, painter and day laborer.

You violated the immigration laws but are not a criminal? I'm afraid you are. Immigration laws are laws. You violate them, you're a criminal. Res ipse loquitur — the thing speaks for itself.

Francisco Flores, 27, a wood flooring installer from Santa Clarita who is a former illegal immigrant, said, "We want to work legally, so we can pay our taxes and support the country, our country."

Oh, what country would that be? I saw coverage of those demonstrations, punctuated with waving Mexican, Honduran, and other foreign flags. If you are so proud of your country of origin, why did you leave? It really is not our responsibility to make up for the defects of your societies. It is up to you to make your countries work, not make it harder for our own country to work.
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And if you paid taxes, could you still afford to work so cheaply as to be preferred over native-born Americans?

Elsa Rodriguez, 30, a trained pilot who came to Colorado in 1999 from Mexico to look for work, said she just wants to be considered equal.

"We're like the ancestors who started this country, they came from other countries without documents, too," the Arvada resident [said]. "They call us lazy and dirty, but we just want to come to work."

Sorry, folks. "Driver, painter and day laborer" are not jobs that no American will take. When illegal aliens arrive and work extremely cheaply, they undercut drivers, painters, and laborers in many fields who could make a living wage at such occupations were it not for the constant inpouring of illegals. And Ms. Rodriguez, there are a great many pilots in this country who have been thrown out of work by turmoil in the aviation industry. We don't need to import competitors to native-born Americans.
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Few people nowadays call Mexicans lazy. Quite the contrary, they have gained a reputation of being hard workers who gladly work cheap. But they work all too often in occupations that Americans are willing to work in if they could make a decent wage, with reasonable hours and working conditions. The only reason they cannot make a decent wage in those occupations is because criminals who violate our immigration laws steal jobs, subvert wages by unfair competition, and accept working conditions that no self-respecting American would put up with. So illegals are three times criminals: first, they violate our borders in defiance of our immigration laws; second, they steal jobs from Americans; and third, they co-conspire in violating wages-and-hours and other benefits laws designed to protect workers. In consenting to be exploited, they empower employers to abuse their employees of whatsoever nationality. Illegal immigration is not harmless.
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How did these people normalize their legal status if they came here illegally? Amnesty? Have they become U.S. citizens? If not, why not? If their loyalty is to their country of birth, they should go back, and put their money where their mouth is. But they mustn't take our money with them.
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You can tell our money from theirs. Ours has our name on it: "United States of America".
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Americans can't just step across the Mexican, Honduran, or Salvadoran border and compete with locals for jobs. Hell, Hondurans and Salvadorans can't just step across the Mexican border and compete with Mexicans. Why should they think they have the right to ignore our border and our laws?
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Tho it is certainly true that at various times in history, people have moved from place to place without paper permissions, it is also true that people, like other animals, defend their territory. Animals mark their territory with pee and poop, and defend it with violence. People mark their territory with borders, fences — gates with skulls on stakes. The Chinese built a Great Wall to keep outsiders outside. There's nothing unique here.
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Our country is ours. You have a country of your own. We have no more obligation to take in foreigners than they have to take us in, and citizenship has its perks. Some countries don't naturalize more than a tiny proportion of immigrants, if indeed they permit any immigration at all. U.S. law is unusually generous. But the purpose of immigration is to serve our interests, not yours. That goes for our geopolitical interests, not just our economic interests.
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If we open the Golden Door, don't be surprised if we charge for admission.
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That charge may be in the form of a requirement that you pay an application fee to ask permission to enter; wait your turn; prove that you have skills we need and that you will not push labor rates down, impose burdens upon localities you move to, go on welfare, commit crimes, or otherwise adversely affect this country. We may even, if military recruitment dips dangerously low, require military service of new immigrants. And require immigrants to pledge either to leave after five years or apply for citizenship.
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If you pass all those tests, we will let you in — in due course, meaning, in our own sweet time. If you are not willing to play by the rules, we will keep you out or, if we find you here, kick you out, and bar you from re-entry for any period we may decide, up to life.
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The U.S. has had restrictions on immigration thru much of its history, and immigrants today face nothing like the indignities and anxieties that immigrants passing thru Ellis Island faced. Even those were mild as against much of the rest of the world thru much of history, including what is now Latin America. An Indian of a neighboring tribe found on Aztec land might well find himself at the top of a great pyramid in Tenochtitlán ("Templo Mayor" in modern Mexico City), there to have his heart cut out with a stone knife and held aloft while still beating. A Mongol found on the wrong side of the Great Wall was likely to be killed or enslaved. Now those are harsh immigration laws.
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If Mexicans and Central Americans want open movement to all parts of the United States, let them agitate for their governments to petition the United States for admission as States of the Union.
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In 1849, the British Empire was aggressively seeking to enlarge its Mosquito Coast colony in eastern Nicaragua and Honduras, and even seize territory in the Gulf of Fonseca with an eye to creating a sea-level canal thru Central America, in blatant disregard of local sovereignty.

Several of the Central American republics, including Nicaragua, had become so apprehensive of British designs that they were looking to the United States for protection. As [U.S. Secretary of State John M.] Clayton bluntly informed [the British minister in Washington]:

There is not one of these five Central American states [Panama was then only part of Colombia] that would not annex themselves to us tomorrow, if they could, and if it is any secret worth knowing you are welcome to it — Some of them have offered and asked to be annexed to the United States already. [Italics in original.]*

A year earlier, the U.S. had annexed all of northern Mexico west of Texas. Three years before that, we annexed Texas, which had been independent almost ten years but before its independence had also been part of Mexico. In the Mexican War that brought the Mexican Cession, the All-Mexico Movement had advocated that the entire territory of defeated Mexico should be annexed to the United States and created first into territories for a transition period and then into full states. Had that been done and Central America also annexed, we wouldn't have the problems with immigration from those exact areas that we have today. Instead, the entire region from the Rio Grande to the northern border of Colombia would be prosperous Sunbelt states today (for we would surely have made Panama a state too if Costa Rica had already been made so by the time we broke Panama off from Colombia to dig the Panama Canal).
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If we show the kind of foresight our ancestors did not, and bring Mexico and Central America into the Union now, they will be prosperous Sunbelt states 50 years from now. Better late than never.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,322.)
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* A Diplomatic History of the American People, by Thomas A. Bailey, 1969, p. 275.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:38 PM