The Amnesty Papers: Restoring the American Republic
(Discussion #4 – Haste, Crisis, and Reality)
I. The Real Problem Versus The Fake Problem
In this series we have avoided going deeply into the massive problems directly caused by the millions of illegal alien residents in the US. This is because the problems have been well documented by serious researchers who have been active in monitoring federal immigration law, policy, and social impact for decades. So we’ll avoid a tepid rehash of their excellent work, and stipulate that we have a major problem that needs to be addressed.
For those unsure, the fact that a definite, sizeable majority of Americans clearly do not want amnesty for illegals should be a solid clue that this is so. For a quick recap, Christine Romans did a concise report on the the costs of illegal aliens, back in 2012. However, if you want a good resource for detailed information on the impact of our resident illegal alien population, please check out the library of articles at The Federation for American Immigration Reform.
For the philosophical aspects, I’ll let our good friend Bill Whittle explain why Tea Party and Conservative Americans do not want illegal aliens rewarded for breaking the law.
But as detailed in The Amnesty Papers – II, the Left has used control over the language to virtually bury the real impact of forty-nine years of statist-engineered, illegal alien accretions onto our social compact. They have instead directed the people’s attention to a false dilemma. They want you to think that we must either quickly grant amnesty to this population, or we will suffer some vague consequence involving misuse of the term justice, and also suffer the economic harm that comes from a loss of indentured, cheap labor.
Source: HispanicallySpeakingNews
In other words, to retain this population as an exploitable resource, we must move at great haste—the preferred speed of totalitarians throughout history—to insure that the well-connected have access to a special class of workers. Specifically, they want access to workers who have citizenship dangled far in front of them as a carrot, while the stick of minimal economic mobility prevents them from seeking prosperity. The Progressives cover up this misuse of human beings by repeatedly referring to the meaningless concept of “social justice” (long used on the flat-Earth maps of social policy institutions as a placeholder for, “Here be dragons”).
The reason the Progressives are so desperate to exploit this vulnerable population of illegals is because socialism requires a continuous supply of capital (in this case, human labor) to relieve of its treasures so they can dole out the loot to those who will keep them in power. As our real economy continues to shrink and fall behind other major economies (in terms of growth and opportunity), the desperation increases in proportion.
As Friedrich Hayek pointed out, economic participation is essentially a game of chance. One cannot “rig” a game of chance so that all players win. Leftists know this, of course, so they pretend that games of chance are zero-sum. But zero-sum only happens when the buy-in is fixed, and you play until only one person has all of the money (or you fix the number of rounds).
Of course, economies are not one single game with fixed rounds and fixed buy-in. They are an infinite series of such games, and participation requires that people seek resources with which to play. The constant seeking, finding, and creation of resources is how an economy grows, and by that growth, the people who participate will generally prosper. See for example, all of Western history.
Because one cannot rig a game of chance so that everyone wins, so-called, “economic justice” is a totally meaningless idea. Choosing the word “social” to stick in front of “justice” (in an attempt to hide the “economy” part) simply clouds an already empty concept.
This desperation from the left to seek out more targets for exploitation, in conjunction with big businesses seeking shelter from an overactive regulatory swarm, has driven many Republicans to jump, like startled grasshoppers, into thinking, “Yes, we really must do something about immigration, right away!” In a sense, the success of the left has managed to herd businesses like cattle, into the position where they feel they cannot survive unless they play the game Ayn Rand called “the politics of pull”. The current engine driving this capitulation to the left is the US Chamber of Commerce.
The Chamber has been lobbying Republicans and the media to solve the economic woes of Progressives on the backs of illegal aliens. This relationship between the US Chamber and Republican leadership is the crony-capitalist “whip hand” driving Congress to move with reckless speed to grant legal status to the illegal population.
As the old saying goes, speed kills. Anyone paying attention throughout 2009 through mid 2010—when Congress decided we were in several crises demanding immediate action—knows that the end result of such stampeding of legislators (and big party donors) was corruption on a scale that would have impressed Stalin and the Gang of Four. A major byproduct of this corruption was the 2000-plus pages of Dodd-Frank and nearly 1000 pages of the Obamacare (ACA) Act, combined with it’s attendant 10,535 pages of “final” regulations.
In the four years since the passage of Dodd-Frank, the regulatory impact on businesses resulted in a massive reduction of America’s wealth, all in the name of fixing a very particular and rare bug in a banking system that has worked without breakdown for nearly a century. The actual “fix” should have taken two pages of text and a simple directive to the Fed.
Progressives should note that when your mistakes are thoroughly raked over by the reliably-Keynsian Economist, then you know you’ve really screwed up.
Both of those monstrous insults to the Constitution (and the People) were direct products of cronyism, collusion, and an effort to rush things past the People’s ability to follow what was being done to them. Both were sold as solutions to crises that had to be solved immediately. Both crises were fabrications of hyperbolic oversell (Problem? Yes. Crisis? Not really). Both of the problems these acts were to address—Healthcare costs and the Sub-prime Lending bank failures—could have been solved piecemeal, by deliberative men and women of good faith, who actually wanted to see real solutions. Both problems could have been solved slowly, and without harm to the nation or the People.
Source: Republican Senate Leadership
Instead, Congress used the excuse of Crisis! to create a wide-open, regulatory dystopia, where no one could possibly know how to avoid running afoul of the provisions of such incredibly complex laws. Unfortunately for so very many businesses that have been destroyed by these two Acts, that particular impossibility cannot shield any of us from prosecution. Worse, Congress delegated its authority to the regulators, who are now free to effectively create law without the need for legislative process, adminstrative or judicial review, or responsibility to the electorate. You cannot vote a regulator out of office.
The proof that Dodd-Frank was not an emergency ironically lies in the passage of Obamacare: if Obamacare, with it’s massive debt (now heading for $20Trillion ) and its unending supply of industry-killing provisions couldn’t wipe out the economy in a few months or years, then clearly the banking practices they wanted to fix with Dodd-Frank—practices that had worked reasonably well for decades before the Affordable Housing Act—could not have done so.
The lesson here is obvious. The more the Progressives claim we must hurry to “fix” immigration, the more we must require our lawmakers to slow down, and really look at what we want from them. So we’d better have a very good idea ourselves of exactly what we want them to do. We need our representatives to focus on the real problem, and stop falling for the fake problem being presented to them by those desperate to avoid being targets of the sucking maw of insatiable government.
2. A Predictable Series of Easily-Avoidable Mistakes
Since 1965, when Congress unwisely bowed to pressure for social justice and created a failed strategy to end “discrimination” by enabling chain migration (while preventing the ability to limit immigration from a particular country), the result has been a steady increase in the population of illegal resident aliens. If you think this was unexpected among conservatives of the day, you would be wrong. In a balanced piece by Bill McGowan at the pro-amnesty, Center for Immigration Studies website, you can see that the battles we are fighting today are incredibly similar to the ones fought before passage of that sweeping, culture-shifting legislation. (I urge you to take time to at least skim that article.)
Conservatives of the period fell in line, based on the same sorts of arguments about social justice bouncing around today. The result should have been easily predicted, because what is rewarded, increases. This age-old economic maxim seems to evaporate from the minds of Republicans every time the issue of amnesty is on the table. In a twist on another famous maxim, Those who cannot remember the past will condemn you for bringing it up.
This is why John Boehner gets so angry with Conservatives. The inevitability of the market dynamics of supply vs. demand, and reward vs. punishment show that every claim made by the amnesty-pushing Progressives will be proven false again and again, with far-reaching, catastrophic consequences.
And yet, despite all we knew after twenty years of the culture-shocking, economy-stressing consequences of the Hart-Cellar Act, Republicans convinced Ronald Reagan to allow, “Just one, last Amnesty,” with “real” measures put in place to fix the problem. Obviously, it did not do so.
The estimates on the illegal alien population in the US vary wildly. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal published an article explaining how the estimates are made, and as you would expect, many assumptions used are not reflective of any serious, major attempt to understand the problem. Most estimates are quite low, despite the dramatic impact of illegal aliens on state and federal infrastructure.
For some reason, the number being currently bandied about is around Eleven Million people. Further, the claim is that the poor Obama economy drove those numbers down from a “high” of Twelve Million. But this Eleven/Twelve/Eleven-again number has been claimed to be holding steady despite the huge increases in population in the US, much of which is driven by immigrant (legal and illegal) populations.
To see why this notion that the illegal population holding steady for many years is hard to believe, take a look at the following brief discussion about US population numbers and legal immigration. Then ask yourself why no one has noticed a relative shrinking of the percentage of illegals, relative to the population at large.
With numbers like that, the “Eleven-Million Illegals” estimates seem laughable. Note also that if the “immigrant” population is expanding so rapidly, it would seem that the US Chamber of Commerce would have no economic need to call for legalizing the illegal aliens. Job growth is well below population growth.
More than Twenty-Seven years after passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which proved that amnesty and border-control language in the law does nothing to curb the influx of illegal residents, far too many Republicans now believe the immutable aspects of economics have magically changed. Like some theatrical fortune teller in a gaudy, purple silk turban with shiny, plastic baubles bouncing around as if to punctuate their ridiculous pronouncements, the Republicans assure us that what is rewarded will not increase, and increasing supply (of legal status) will somehow quench demand.
In short, Republicans may not know much, but what little they know is that you are all quite gullible.
3. A Serious timetable, not a rush to quell special interests
As bad as the illegal alien problem is, it took decades to rise to the level of “significant problem.” We should be under no illusions that it will also take decades to fix it. That’s not really a bad thing.
We are operating under enormous stress thanks to the flood of illegals, but we are still operating, and the basic structure of our Republic remains intact, for the near future, at least. This means that even a simple change in effectiveness of our border enforcement and hiring laws will have impact that will be measurable within five years. In other words, when you repair the levee, the flood dries up. …Just not overnight.
Thus, what we need from rational politicians (yes, they do exist) is insistence that the law be enforced. If all we accomplish in the next two years is requiring that the provisions of the 1986 Amnesty law and the more recent Secure Fence Act of 2006 are enforced, the pressure to, “Do something” will become lessened, and sanity will have a chance to prevail.
Those of you who have followed these articles know that a common theme is the statement that:
We do not have an “immigration” problem, we have an illegal alien problem
is a common theme here. The reason we take this approach, despite the obvious things that should be fixed with regard to immigration policy and law, is because the enormity of the other problems we face as a nation dwarfs all of the concerns over illegals and immigration policy. Further, the problems we have with illegal aliens dwarfs all problems we have with actual immigration law and policy. Americans know this in their bones. Poll after poll shows that Americans know we have bigger problems to address.
So the real problem throughout these discussions of “immigration reform,” especially when they are led by Republicans, is that Americans know the real reason behind the push for Amnesty. It has nothing to do with social justice. It has nothing to do with the small list of genuine problems in immigration policy. It has everything to do with appeasing big business, floating another massive regulatory bill to further weaken the Constitution, and providing yet another captive group of Democrat voters.
We need politicians who understand this. Men like Steve King, who understand both the economic aspects as well as the political and infrastructure aspects. We need men who support An American Solution to the Illegal Alien problem, without being vilified by those on the right who would rather have perfection on Amnesty than an actual “no-amnesty” candidate.
Please take the time to get familiar with the resources linked in this article. We cannot restore the Constitution without understanding the problems we have. More importantly, we must move beyond slogans and into serious discussion of what we expect from those we send to Congress.
Recent Articles in The Amnesty Papers series:
Discussion #3 – Take it away, Steve
Discussion #2 – Take Back the Language
Discussion #1 – Amnesty. What does it mean?
Recent articles in The Liberty Amendments series:
Discussion #24 – (but really #25) Can We Really Do This?
Discussion #24 – No, Not The Hamburger Chain
Discussion #23 – Because the Internet, that’s why
Discussion #22 – Just the Video
The first article in the Liberty Amendments Mondays series:
Discussion #1: Zombie Doctrine, Tactics, and the Liberty Amendments