Obama's Open-Borders Scheme … During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama (left) repeatedly promised to make it "a top priority" to give illegal aliens a "path to citizenship" (read: amnesty) and to increase the levels of future immigration. So far, he hasn't delivered. Why the delay? For one thing, he's had bigger fish to fry – including his attempted government takeover of the American healthcare system and his "cap-and-trade" energy bill. But now … immigration "reform" is about to take center stage as Obama's top-priority legislative goal. Why? Because it actually represents Obama's best chance to deliver a major legislative victory to his left-wing base while at the same time appearing to "reach across the aisle" in a spirit of bi- partisanship. Remember, the GOP establishment and business lobbyists were on board with comprehensive immigration reform during the Bush years – and Senator John McCain was one of its loudest supporters. Sure, this was largely a political ploy – a failed attempt to woo Hispanic voters. But Obama knows that if they back off immigration reform now, Republicans will be wide open to further charges of just being "The Party of No" going into the midterm elections. And here's another reason Obamacrats see an opening on immigration reform: In a down economy, jobs are scarce, so illegal immigration has been down too. Better to pass "reform" now, while the issue is "off the radar" for most voters. – Human Events (from an email blast)
Dominant Social Theme: It's back and happening now.
Free-Market Analysis: When we previously wrote about the Mexico/American borders and immigration issue, we were surprised by the amount of attention the article received. But from what we can tell, the issue is not going to go away. In fact, it seemed to us that the recent US health care bill was in part aimed at furthering the power elite's apparent agenda to merge Mexico and the United States (and perhaps Canada, too).
We believed that health care would be a magnet for immigrants and, at the same time, put a good deal more financial stress on the system. This would lead to more calls for migrant workers to contribute legally to health care costs. The idea is to create pressure to further legalize the status of South American and Mexican workers.
This was one of the unspoken subtexts of the bill and a main reason for the almost maniacal effort to ram it through, we speculated. The more workers that flow into America from Mexico and South America, the larger the potential is for fundamentally changing the republican US culture, or what's left of it.
Those who don't want unlimited amounts of South American and Mexican workers flooding the US – and gaining the privileges of citizenship in the process – are often characterized by the opposition as racist. But it is not clear that workers from South America understand the essentially republican culture of the US. One likely has to be enculturated over time to understand the sociopolitical necessities of a free-market environment.
South American citizens are essentially freedom loving and entrepreneurial, but many have grown up under authoritarian governments. What this means is that the US is to be continually flooded by hard working South Americans who have had little exposure to free-market thinking. Such individuals shall in some cases tend to favor a strong central government – whether it be in their own country or America. It is this sentiment that mainstream leaders (of both parties) are counting on.
While the Democrats appear to be leading the charge, it should not be forgotten (as Human Events points out) that Republicans under George Bush also attempted to open up America's borders to a flood of legalized immigrant workers. The email blast from Human Events (excerpted above) tends to confirm our sense of what's up next. Here's some more from the email, which is actually announcing a Special Report on the subject:
"Obama Pushes Open-Borders Scheme."
Written by a top immigration expert, "Obama Pushes Open-Borders Scheme" will reveal:
• How workplace enforcement of immigration laws – the key to any effort to control immigration, since jobs are the chief magnet pulling illegal aliens here – has collapsed under Obama
• How the administration is requiring agents to audit worksites at night, so they won't encounter any actual illegal aliens
• How the Obama Administration is exploiting what anti-enforcement activists call "alternatives to detention"
• Ways of pretending to enforce the law without actually locking up any but the most violent illegal aliens (and not even all of them)
• How Obama's Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has tried to limit state and local law enforcement's ability to use immigration laws to help keep the peace in their communities
• How the Obama Administration Fiscal Year 2011 budget proposal actually calls for a cut in the number of Border Patrol agents
What will Obama's immigration bill look like? We already know – his allies in the House of Representatives introduced legislation in December, and the bill reinforces the open-borders message telegraphed by the administration's lax enforcement decisions:
• How the bill, HR 4321, makes very clear the true aims of the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress: Easy amnesty, little enforcement, and more immigration
• How the House immigration bill contains a remarkably broad amnesty, which would apply to all illegal aliens – unlike the 1986 amnesty, which required several years' residency
• How the bill requires a fine of only $500, a tiny sum that barely exceeds the $355 fee that sponsors of legal immigrants pay
• How the bill also guts enforcement in the future, thus laying the groundwork for a series of recurring amnesties, where a large illegal population again develops after each amnesty, creating a rationale for yet another one
• How the bill bans outright any state and local participation in enforcement of immigration law
• How the Democrats' bill adds new "rights" for illegal aliens, including the right to "legal orientation programs" for detained illegal aliens – and severely limits who may be detained
• How it burdens enforcement operations with onerous requirements intended to make them more difficult and expensive to carry out
• How the bill also would cripple border enforcement in myriad ways – e.g., it would restrict the ability to build fencing under the guise of environmental protection
This is a remarkable list of initiatives. However, we would like to make it clear that as a free-market oriented publication, we're not anti-immigration. Assuming that property and the means of production are in private hands, we would have no problem with an open borders approach to immigration.
If private entities want to hire private workers (assuming a fully privatized society), they should be welcome to do so in our opinion. The amount of workers, however, would be strictly limited by work available. And assuming there were no welfare or other benefits, workers would not be able to survive long without work. They would either find gainful employment or go back home. This is how the private market would regulate immigration. It is the politicization of immigration and distortive factors such as welfarism – and a general public government involvement – that causes problems.
Yes, from an immigration standpoint, private businesspeople would have the right in a free-market society to hire whom they chose – domestically or internationally. If these people then settled in the country and were able to make a living, they could have children who would stay too. This does not mean they would have voting rights or a say in the country's direction as in a republic those rights would be restricted, as they were initially in these United States. Ideally, a republic would have high standards – exclusionary ones – when it came to voting.
Unfortunately, the further the US moves away from a market-based society, the more problems it has and the more contentious such issues as immigration tend to get. The nation has moved so far, in fact, that most people don't even consider a private-market solution to a public problem such as immigration. They do not conceive of it.
NOTED: Why So Glum? Numbers Point to a Recovery … The American economy appears to be in a cyclical recovery that is gaining strength. Firms have begun to hire and consumer spending seems to be accelerating. That is what usually happens after particularly sharp recessions, so it is surprising that many commentators, whether economists or politicians, seem to doubt that such a thing could possibly be happening. – New York Times (Ed. Note: Maybe people have begun to realize – after so many cyclical recessions, and so much available "real" economic information on the Internet – that the system is simply not working as advertised?)
Actually, immigration is a private matter – or would be if there wasn't already too much public government involvement in the process. And that's what causes the problems. Obama is seemingly as determined to push ahead with immigration as he was with health care. We wonder how the majority of Americans will react.
