Steinlight’s Interview by Luke Ford
April 19, 2009 Far-left, Immigration Luke Ford, Stephen Steinlight
Some interesting statements by Dr. Stephen Steinlight from his interview with Luke Ford, which lasted two hours and forty minutes.
If comprehensive immigration reform were ever to pass, Heaven help us, it would have the most enduring and palpable impact on this country of any piece of legislation since the Emancipation proclamation. The heart of that legislation is not amnesty. That’s a weapon of mass distraction. The heart of that is doubling legal immigration. Given the way the system works, the engine of extended family reunification, chain immigration, it will mean 60 million to 100 million more Mexicans here in 20 years.
Steinlight’s critique of the social-Left was delicious.
Those people who fall over backwards to want to be loved by people of color, by Muslims, by anyone who’s skin tone is darker, who feel fundamentally ashamed to be Americans, who feel we need to apologize for who we are, whether it is because we’re white or because we belong to this culture, those people are all in favor of this because it is some kind of justifiable retribution.
“God spare us all from tikkun olam Jews. The rural white poor in this country, they despise. They no longer particularly like blacks because their self-loathing love was not requited. Right now they think they can patronize hispanics. I’ve got news for them — it ain’t going to be for long.
I wish they’d stop and think for a minute. Their support of this particular group, someone else is paying the price. You’re not. You’re probably college educated and have a decent job, and if not, mommy and daddy is going to take care of you. But what about folks who work for a living and have no expectations of inherited wealth? Those people are being slaughtered.
What they are always soliciting is the approval of the other, of the foreign. They see themselves as borderless humanists, the last group of people in the world I would trust to do anything. Why is it that their passion always increases in direct proportion to the distance between themselves and where the tragedy is taking place?
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“God spare us all from tikkun olam Jews. The rural white poor in this country, they despise. They no longer particularly like blacks because their self-loathing love was not requited. Right now they think they can patronize hispanics.”
Worth legitimate communal reflection.
You reap what you sow
For years, guilt over their colonial track record led France to lenient policies of immigration from Africa. Look where it’s gotten them.
If the Mexicans were coming north to get their shot at the American dream, it would be one thing. But from what I can see from up here in Canada, they’re not coming to plant the trees but rather to pluck the fruit from them.
Is this the Stepehn Steinlight whining about “censorship” in the internet age?
As usual, Steinleight is using scare tactics and straw man arguments.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has debunked the fear mongering, by nativists, that comprehensive immigration reform would vastly overpopulate America.
http://www.splcenter.org/intel.....ite_area=1
The AFL-CIO and Change to Win federation have agreed to join forces to support an overhaul of the immigration system. In return, they seek assurances that the US will not be flooded with “guest workers”. As a key constituency of the Democratic party, this is a major development.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04.....amp;ref=us
Comprehensive immigration reform would require a bi-partisan majority. Many GOP Senators want a re-orientation of US immigration priorities from “family re-unification” to skilled immigrants that would benefit the US economy. They propose changes in the family reunification provisions of US immigration law, limiting US immigration to nuclear families. This would mean ending US immigration law assigning top priority to family re-unification, thus stemming “chain migration” via extended family immigration. Ostensibly, they would replace these family based immigrants with skilled based immigrants and limit immigration to nuclear families. Thats the GOP idea of “family values”
Seems to me that in the horse trading sure to precede any deal between these opposing factions with very different ideas on how to solve this problem, they could split the difference 50-50.
Mexicans are “only” 59% of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US;
http://pewhispanic.org/reports.....portID=107
Nevertheless, I believe that any legalization should involve a quid pro quo from Mexico. Such as;
1) Joint border patrols by US border patrol agents and their Mexico counterparts. Coupled with technology like drones, virtual fencing, etc this would mean REAL border security
2) US criminal warrants executable anywhere in Mexico. US authorities (someday I guess) should be able to call Sinaloa or Veracruz authorities and say Jose Doe has a criminal warrant, go arrest and him and send him on his way back to face US justice.
Granted, that won’t solve the problem of corrupt US border patrol or customs agents.
http://www.pbs.org/frontlinewo.....epers.html
Other elements of comprehensive immigration reform would include;
1) Mandatory E-Verify of all US workers
2) Focus law enforcement resources on EMPLOYERS who hire undocumented workers with high profile prosecutions of egregious corporate offenders.
3) Undocumented immigrants put on a path to citizenship must learn English.
4) To be successful in ending illegal immigration once and for all. Comprehensive immigration reform must include LEGAL avenues for Mexicans to enter the USA. Traditional Mexican migration patterns to the USA are “circular” in nature. IMO, in accordance with labor union concerns about “guest workers” skewing supply and demand in US labor markets, any Mexican “guest worker” program should be designed with “circular migration” as the guiding principle subject to Mexico co-operation with joint US-Mexico border patrols and execution of US criminal warrants anywhere in Mexico as outlined above.
As Mexico is Americas #2 customer, this could benefit the US. As it stands, Mexico pays for much of its US imports with oil.
http://www.census.gov/foreign-.....ml#exports
Given the precipitous drops in Mexico (and Latin American) fertility in recent decades, it’s not realistic to think 60-100 million Mexicans would come to the US in the next 20 years as that means almost no one would be left in Mexico.
http://www.american.com/archiv.....lve-itself
By 2050, the US Census projects almost all countries to have total fertility rates at or below the replacement level of 2.1 babies per woman. This alone reduces emmigration pressures.
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/summaries.html (Click on country of interest)
Finally, though only about 50% of undocumented immigrants come over the border (the other half arrive legally and overstay their visas) the forces that caused millions of Mexican economic refugees in the FIRST PLACE must be reigned in.
THE TEQUILA TRAP: THE REAL STORY BEHIND THE ILLEGAL ALIEN INVASION
http://www.webofdebt.com/excerpts/chapter-22.php
“Mexicans are “only” 59% of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US;”
Only 59%…
Temoc, you really can’t understand what numbers mean, eh? You just don’t get it.
I don’t mind people who suffer from number-dyslexia or numerical IQs <80 (70?), but it wouldn’t hurt if those poor souls would just shut up and listen to the more able (and smarter) number-wise people.
Nerds exist for a reason, otherwise they would have died out.
If you want to see documented studies using real data and statistics, go to the blog of world respected economist, Dr. George Borjas, of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard: http://borjas.typepad.com
Here’s one article he’s just written that refers to how the SPLC attempts to silence organizations like the CIS:
Smearing CIS
I’ve been following the work of the Center for Immigration Studies since the mid-1990s. They regularly publish empirical research on immigration, and I happen to be friends with both the head of the center, Mark Krikorian, and its research director, Steve Camarota. So it is with bizarre fascination that I watch from afar as the Southern Poverty Law Center attempts to tarnish what CIS does.
In fact, CIS has made it possible for me to disseminate my technical research to a much wider audience. At least two or three times, I have taken some of my technical work, rewritten it in English, and this readable version has been distributed as a CIS backgrounder. It seems to me that the smearing effort’s objective is simply to silence a group that has been an influential critic of current immigration policy. Read the entire article here: http://borjas.typepad.com/the_.....g-cis.html
Here are some statements made by economists and others on how illegal immigration harms citizen workers, eroding wages and displacing American citizens, who happen to be black, brown and white:
Vernon Briggs, a Cornell University labor economics professor stated:
“The toleration of illegal immigration undermines all of our labor; it rips at the social fabric. It’s a race to the bottom. The one who plays by the rules is penalized… a guest worker program guarantees wages will never go up, and there is no way American citizens can compete with guest workers.”
An amnesty for illegal aliens forgives their act of illegal immigration and implicitly forgives other related illegal acts such as driving and working using false documents. The result of an amnesty is that large numbers of foreigners who illegally gained entry into the United States are rewarded with legal status for their breaking the law. In January, 2004 President Bush Proposed an earned legalization program for illegal aliens. This is an amnesty under another name.
Tidal wave of illegal immigration.
For over 200 years, the United states only granted amnesty in individual cases and had never given amnesty to large numbers of illegal aliens. Then in 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) which gave amnesty to all illegal aliens who had evaded law enforcement for at least four years or who were working illegally in agriculture. This resulted in 2.8 million illegal aliens being admitted as legal immigrants to the United States.
Because of chain migration, those granted amnesty have brought in an additional 142,000 dependents – relatives brought in to the United States to join their family members.
The amnesty of 1986 was supposed to be a “one time only” amnesty. Yet since 1986, Congress passed a total of 7 amnesties for illegal aliens:
1. The Immigration and Reform Control Act (IRCA) Amnesty of 1986 – the “one-time only” blanket amnesty for some 2.8 million illegal aliens.
2. Section 245(i) The Amnesty of 1994 – a temporary rolling amnesty for 578,000 illegal aliens.
3. Section 245(i) The Extension Amnesty of 1997 – an extension of the rolling amnesty created in 1994.
4. The Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) Amnesty of 1997 – an amnesty for nearly one million illegal aliens from Central America.
5. The Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act Amnesty (HRIFA) of 1998 – an amnesty for 125,000 illegal aliens from Haiti.
6. The Late Amnesty of 2000 – an amnesty for approximately 400,000 illegal aliens who claimed they should have been amnestied under the 1986 IRCA amnesty.
7. The LIFE Act Amnesty of 2000 – a reinstatement of the rolling Section 245(i) amnesty to an estimated 900,000 illegal aliens.
An amnesty is a reward to those breaking the law. Issuing an amnesty to illegal aliens only encourages more illegal immigration into the United States. After the 1986 amnesty, illegal immigration increased significantly. Census Bureau 2000 data indicate that 700,000 to 800,000 illegal aliens settle in the U.S. each year, with approximately 8-11 million illegal aliens now currently living in the United States (up to 12 million, according to Department of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge).
Yet an amnesty benefits neither our society nor those being amnestied. An Immigration and Naturalization Service study found that after living in the United States for 10 years, the average amnestied illegal alien had only a seventh grade education and earned less than $9,000 a year. Amnestied illegal aliens have no sponsor to support them financially. Instead, by enacting an amnesty, Congress places a staggering financial burden on American taxpayers to support those amnestied.
According to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, the total net cost of the 1986 IRCA amnesty (direct and indirect costs of services and benefits to the former illegal aliens, less their tax contributions) amounted to over $78 billion in the ten years following the amnesty.
Congress has paved the way for more amnesties. In 2001, Mexico’s President Vicente Fox began to lobby the United States to “regularize” the status of millions of illegal aliens from Mexico living in the United States. Both U.S. political parties, in attempts to pander to the Hispanic vote, speak of amnesties in various forms for illegal aliens.
By granting amnesties, Congress has set a dangerous precedent that threatens homeland security. Our normal immigration process involves screening to block potential criminals and terrorists from entering the United States. Yet millions of illegal aliens have avoided this screening and an amnesty would allow them to permanently bypass such screening.
President Bush’s January, 2004 guest worker plan announcement – really an amnesty for illegal aliens – directly caused at least a 15% to 25% increase in illegals entering the United States.
Polls show that nearly 70% of Americans oppose amnesty for all illegal aliens and that Hispanics are less likely to reelect President Bush if he supports amnesty.
Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., PhD, Emeritus Professor of Labor Economics at Cornell University, in an Apr. 4, 2008 testimony before the US Civil Rights Commission titled “Illegal Immigration: The Impact on Wages and Employment of Black Workers,” offered the following:
“Of the 50 million low skilled adults (those 25 years of age and over) in the civilian labor force in 2007, black Americans accounted for about 5.6 million of such workers (or about 10 percent of the total). These black American workers, however, had the highest unemployment rates of any of the four racial and ethnic groups for which the data was collected… Because most illegal immigrants overwhelmingly seek work in the low skilled labor market and because the black American labor force is so disproportionately concentrated in this same low wage sector, there is little doubt that there is significant overlap in competition for jobs in this sector of the labor market. Given the inordinately high unemployment rates for low skilled black workers (the highest for all racial and ethnic groups for whom data is collected), it is obvious that the major loser in this competition are low skilled black workers… Illegal immigrants – who themselves are often exploited even though they may not think so — are allowed to cause harm in the form of unemployment and depressed wages to the most vulnerable workers in the American work force.”
Apr. 4, 2008 – Vernon M. Briggs Jr. , PhD
B. Lindsay Lowell, PhD, Director of Policy Studies of the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, in a Nov. 26, 2007, stated:
“Some Americans are hurt by unauthorized workers, just as other benefit. Objective economists are clear that there is no free lunch, just as they clear about benefits accompanying most costs. Unfortunately, and no matter assertions on one side or the other, the actual research available is not in agreement at this point in time on the balance of pluses and minuses. But it is clear that unauthorized employment undercuts transparency and the legal framework protecting the American workforce. Even if there were no clear evidence of adverse economic impacts, and some evidence does exist, its hard to see how one can reasonably conclude no harm on non-economic grounds.”
Nov. 26, 2007 – B. Lindsay Lowell, PhD
Richard Jones, Sheriff of Butler County in Ohio, on a Dec. 6, 2007 responded:
“Yes. Not only are American workers harmed by the loss of jobs, the hourly rates are reduced because of illegal aliens working for far less. I know of business owners who often cannot compete in the bidding process for contracts because of under bidding by other businesses that cheat and hire illegal aliens at far less than standard wages. This practice is destroying many American businesses and costing honest, hard working Americans their jobs.”
Dec. 6, 2007 – Richard K. Jones, MS
Joseph George Caldwell, PhD, Financial Management Consultant, in a Nov. 27, 2007 wrote:
“Yes, American workers are harmed by an illegal alien workforce… Every immigrant to this country, legal or illegal, causes the destruction of approximately one acre of natural land, because of construction of infrastructure (homes, offices, roads, parking lots, schools, hospitals, and the like)… Even from an economic viewpoint, U.S. workers are hurt, because they are forced to compete with illegal workers willing to accept a much lower wage.”
Nov. 27, 2007 – Joseph George Caldwell, PhD
Virginia Deane Abernethy, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, on Nov. 28, 2007 offered the following:
“Yes. American workers are harmed by an illegal workforce both through wage depression and displacement from jobs.”
Nov. 28, 2007 – Virginia Deane Abernethy, PhD
George J. Borjas, PhD, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at Harvard University, in a May, 2004 Center for Immigration Studies essay titled “Increasing the Supply of Labor Through Immigration, Measuring the Impact on Native-born Workers,” wrote:
“Economic theory predicts that increasing the supply of labor… will reduce earnings for natives in competition with immigrants… Statistical analysis shows that when immigration increases the supply of workers in a skill category, the earnings of native-born workers in that same category fall. The negative effect will occur regardless of whether the immigrant workers are legal or illegal, temporary or permanent. Any sizable increase in the number of immigrants will inevitably lower wages for some American workers. Conversely, reducing the supply of labor by strict immigration enforcement and reduced legal immigration would increase the earnings of native workers.”
[...] of the remarks of this dedicated immigration patriot is prime VDARE.com material. (Hat tip The Kvetcher. For the sake of clarity, paragraphs are reordered slightly and some links [...]
[...] Stephen Steinlight noted, The heart of that legislation is not amnesty. That’s a weapon of mass distraction. The heart of [...]
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