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Amnesty Ends the American Dream -- FrontPage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield

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  • Amnesty Ends the American Dream -- FrontPage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield

    Amnesty Ends the American Dream

    FrontPage Magazine

    Daniel Greenfield
    1/28/2014

    Excerpt:

    Immigration is becoming unpopular everywhere else. In the UK, immigration has become so toxic that it may lead to a split from the European Union. In Australia, it helped elect a conservative government willing to tackle its migrant boat problem. Meanwhile in the United States, Republicans keep flirting with a Super-Amnesty that would be four times as big as the last disastrous amnesty.

    Accepting amnesty as inevitable would be a mistake even if the economy were on track, but it’s an even worse idea when unemployment is so bad that a sizable percentage of the population has dropped out of the economy, national and local social services are overstrained and the country is deep in debt.

    Politicians on both sides of the aisle promise that legalizing illegal aliens will jumpstart the economy, but the illegal alien population is already a floating economic disaster.

    The states with the highest illegal alien populations also tend to have the highest unemployment rates and the highest poverty rates. That welfare triangle is dragging down formerly booming states into the economic gutter. Legalizing illegal aliens won’t change that. Instead it will push those states even closer to the drain as legalized illegal aliens lose their illegal jobs and are replaced with new illegal aliens.

    Corporate lobbies insist that America lacks workers even as the country’s immigration rate and unemployment rate remain extremely high.

    The United States has been taking in a million immigrants a year since 2004. Are a million immigrants a year really inadequate for the needs of businesses in a country with less than one hundred million private sector employees and over ninety million people out of the workforce?

    Black and Latino unemployment rates are already far higher than white unemployment rates. The Mexican-American unemployment rate is between 10 and 12 percent. If American companies can’t employ the millions of Mexican-Americans already in this country, why do they insist on displacing minority workers born in this country, including Mexican-Americans, by legalizing 12 million more?

    From 2000 to 2009, nearly 2 million Mexican immigrants obtained permanent legal status in the United States. Along with them came 200,000 Haitians, part of the more than one million Caribbean migrants, who have a higher unemployment rate than African-Americans. Those figures are unusually bad because immigrant minorities are more likely to hold jobs than domestic minorities.

    Pro-amnesty politicians use that to prove that immigrants are more likely to “contribute” to the economy than the native population.

    The dirty little secret however is in the details.

    To quote the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, “The unemployment rates for foreign-born blacks, Asians, and Hispanics were lower than for their native-born counterparts, while the rates for foreign-born and native-born whites were little different.”

    Talk to anyone who employs illegal aliens and that discrepancy between foreign-born minorities and native-born minorities stops being a mystery. They prefer first generation minority immigrants to second generation immigrants because they consider them more obedient, docile and responsible.

    Like a man who keeps divorcing and remarrying every few years, they constantly want fresh immigrants, but they don’t want to hire their American-born children. And so the social welfare system becomes a dumping ground for the children of cheap labor immigrants and the businesses head somewhere else to escape the taxes voted in by that second generation leaving behind bankruptcy, crime and despair.

    Taking in millions of people whose children will be less likely to find work than their parents is a brutal reversal of the American Dream.

    It’s unfair to them and it’s unfair to us.

    We aren’t doing immigrants any favors by encouraging them to trade Mexico’s 4.25 unemployment rate for an unemployment rate that is more than double that for Mexican-Americans and has to be balanced out with a generous helping of subsidized everything from food to phones courtesy of the welfare state.

    That’s not an investment in the future. It’s an investment in voting blocs while stealing the futures of second generation Mexican immigrants who would be more likely to find work at home and the future of the United States which cannot afford to keep investing social capital that will never be paid back.

    The traditional forms of immigration that worked were undone and reversed with disastrous results. There was more legal immigration from Mexico (pop. 120 million) in ten years than from all of Europe (pop. 739 million). 156,000 immigrants came from Guatemala and 15,000 from Ireland, 28,000 from Italy and 251,000 from El Salvador. This reversal might have been defensible if it had worked. It didn’t.

    These unbalanced numbers reflect very little concern for either immigration fairness or the future. Despite the statistics showing that white immigrants are less likely to be unemployed, our immigration system perversely favors bringing in immigrants who are more likely to be unemployed.

    The Irish are coming. One Irish person emigrates every six minutes. 300,000 have left in the past four years. But they aren’t coming to America; not legally, though there are 10,000 Irish illegal immigrants in Boston alone. 1,371 Irish immigrants became permanent legal residents in 2011 compared to 19,662 Jamaicans, 22,111 Haitians, 46,109 Dominicans, 10,166 Nepalese, 15,546 Pakistanis, 21,133 Iraqis and 143,446 Mexicans. 60,000 Italians emigrate each year, but only 2,443 became US residents in 2011.

    American immigration has been ingeniously designed to bring in immigrants who are less likely to be employed than the white native population in either the first generation or the second generation so that the first generation provides cheap labor while the second generation provides cheap votes.

    ......................................

    View the complete article at:

    http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgr...merican-dream/
    B. Steadman

  • #2
    Top Republicans to Call for Legal Status for Some Immigrants

    The New York Times

    Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker
    1/28/2014

    Excerpt:

    WASHINGTON — The House Republican leadership’s broad framework for overhauling the nation’s immigration laws will call this week for a path to legal status — but not citizenship — for many of the 11 million adult immigrants who are in the country illegally, according to aides who have seen the party’s statement of principles. For immigrants brought to the United States illegally as young children, the Republicans would offer a path to citizenship.

    But even before the document is unveiled later, some of the party’s leading strategists and conservative voices are urging that the immigration push be abandoned, or delayed until next year, to avoid an internal party rupture before the midterm elections.

    “It’s one of the few things that could actually disrupt what looks like a strong Republican year,” said William Kristol, editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, calling an immigration push “a recipe for disaster.”

    “Don’t Do It,” said the headline on a National Review editorial on Monday aimed at the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio. “The last thing the party needs is a brutal intramural fight when it has been dealt a winning hand” — troubles with the president’s health care law — ahead of the elections, the editorial said.

    At the same time, Republicans have seen their support from Latinos plummet precisely because of their stance on immigration, and the “statement of principles,” barely more than a page, is intended to try to reverse that trajectory.

    The statement of principles criticizes the American higher education system for educating some of the world’s best and brightest students only to lose them to their home countries because they cannot obtain green cards; insists that Republicans demand that current immigration laws be enforced before illegal immigrants are granted legal status; and mentions that some kind of triggers must be included in an immigration overhaul to ensure that borders are secured first, said Republican officials who have seen the principles.

    With concern already brewing among conservatives who call any form of legal status “amnesty,” the document has the feel more of an attempt to test the waters than a blueprint for action. House Republican leaders will circulate it at a three-day retreat for their members that begins Wednesday on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Several pro-immigration organizations that have been briefed on the guidelines say they are not intended to serve as a conservative starting point for future negotiations, but as a gauge of how far to the left House Republicans are willing to move.

    The principles say that Republicans do not support a “special path to citizenship,” but make an exception for the “Dreamers,” the immigrants brought into the country illegally as children, quoting a 2013 speech by Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader. “One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents,” Mr. Cantor said at the time. “It is time to provide an opportunity for legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children and who know no other home.”

    Even ardent proponents of an immigration-law overhaul are, at best, cautiously optimistic. In June, a broad immigration overhaul — with a 13-year path to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants now in the country illegally, and stricter border security provisions that would have to be in place before the immigrants could gain legal status — passed the Senate with bipartisan support. But that legislation has largely stalled in the Republican-controlled House, where Mr. Boehner has rejected any negotiations with the Senate over its comprehensive bill.

    “This is obviously a long, hard road,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat, who helped negotiate the Senate bill, “but I think since August, the number on the other side vehemently opposed has stayed the same, the number who think it should go forward has grown, and numbers in the wide middle are less opposed than they used to be. But that doesn’t guarantee an outcome one way or another.”

    Republican Party leaders, backed strongly by business groups, have said an overhaul is critical if they are to repair their political position with Latino and other immigrant voters.

    Barry Jackson, Mr. Boehner’s former chief of staff, is consulting for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which supports an overhaul that expands high-technology visas and guest worker programs.

    But immigration is less of an issue during midterm elections, when immigrants are not as likely to vote and House members in safe districts are insulated somewhat from the wrath of more moderate swing voters. Often the biggest threats to Republicans are primary challenges from more conservative candidates who say that changing the immigration status of someone who is in the country illegally amounts to amnesty for a lawbreaker.

    Representative John Carter, Republican of Texas and one of the Gang of Eight House members who tried to forge a bipartisan overhaul, was quoted by the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call as saying that an election year is not the time to press forward. “Immigration is a very, very contentious issue,” he said.

    Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, has allowed his staff to discuss with House conservatives ways to derail the push. On Monday, he said they were making headway.

    “Republicans in the House have a choice whether to go along with certain powerful forces and the president or stand with conviction against a larger flow of immigration that threatens the financial future of middle-class Americans,” he said.

    ...........................................

    View the complete article at:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/us...mmigrants.html
    B. Steadman

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