Sunday, January 11, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: Open the borders, close the schools
President Bush on Wednesday proposed an amnesty for illegal immigrants already in this country. Though of course, being a politician, he couldn't call it that, because calling it an "amnesty" would be, you know ... "the truth."
Under the plan -- which Congress won't pass without making it considerably more complex, loophole-ridden and hard to enforce -- illegal workers would present written proof from their employers that they have a job, at which point they'd be granted a temporary residency permit "for three years," which really means forever.
As an example of political pragmatism seeking a short-term "fix" for a problem rivaling the Gordian Knot, Mr. Bush deserves some credit.
This country is awash in illegal foreigners, changing hotel bedsheets and loading dishwashing machines and picking celery and mowing lawns -- jobs which few American citizens want or could even afford to take (thank the zoning codes) at $6 an hour.
Rousting all these illegals would leave a lot of lettuce rotting in the fields. Jailing all their employers would be politically unsustainable.
The obvious solution is to create a "second-class citizenship" for "guest workers," giving them legal status here so they're not afraid of being arrested if they have to visit the hospital emergency room or report a crime to police.
But now we enter the labyrinth of longer-term problems presented by this "pragmatic short-term solution."
Claiming this solution is right and proper because, "They're already here; face it!" is morally bankrupt. Shall we announce a similar amnesty for rapists?
Rewarding those who have broken the law is a problem. Especially when there are American citizens serving prison sentences right now for "fraudulent marriage" -- accepting compensation to briefly marry some foreigner till he or she could gain American citizenship.
Are those inmates about to walk free? Why not? What about the hundreds of thousands of Asians and Africans and Europeans who would come here tomorrow if they learned our borders were open? Are they welcome? Why not?
The argument is often made, by misguided fans of open immigration (as opposed to me, a wise and sensible fan of open immigration), that Hispanic immigrants are hard-working, taxpaying folk who do not overly burden our social welfare programs. I'm sure they are mostly hard-working. But asserting they do not burden our welfare programs is ridiculous.
America's largest make-work social welfare "jobs" program is, by far, the government schools. They are bleeding us dry. Here in the Southwest, the government schools are awash with the children of illiterate families from Mexico and Central America.
For the record, I did not just say that everyone south of the border is illiterate, or that folks of Hispanic (or Indian) descent are racially inferior.
The problem in the schools is neither racial nor linguistic. Our East Coast government schools were equally swamped with immigrant Italians and Poles and Hungarians and Jews who spoke no English in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. California has faced waves of immigration from Asia for more than a century.
What happened to those kids? Thanks in part to phonetic instruction in English and "total English immersion," some of those kids grew up to run the Manhattan Project. To this day, kids of Indian and Chinese and German-Jewish extraction are statistically over-represented -- over-represented -- in our most prestigious graduate schools.
Not speaking English is a small hurdle if you come from a family that cherishes and sets a high value on literacy and education.
Integrating this current wave of immigrants will be difficult, and the problem is cultural. The worst-case risk is the situation we now see in much of Western Europe, where Arab "guest workers" demonstrate no desire to become truly French or German or Danish, but instead maintain their own insular communities, whereupon they start to exercise their strength of numbers, trying to get the government to forbid French and German girls from visiting the public swimming pools and beaches in skimpy bathing suits.
The Libertarian solution is the only moral, practical, ethically consistent remedy. The solution comes in two parts. The second part is open immigration. Anyone who wants to come here can come here. They can even bring their guns. Open the borders. If you blow things up, we'll shoot you on the spot. Otherwise, welcome to the land of freedom. And when you get here, we'll hand you ... nothing.
Such a plan would bankrupt any social welfare state inside a decade. That's why that has to be "part two." The first part is: Shut down the social welfare state. Get government entirely out of the health care and retirement annuity businesses. Re-privatize the hospitals and encourage folks to make charitable donations to fund charity wards. (We'll be able to afford it. With the end of taxation, which is the organized theft of the property of the productive class, the buying power of our doubled take-home paychecks will more than triple.)
Close down the government schools, which exist not to educate anyone, but rather to dumb down the working class, rendering the peasants incapable of reasoned thought.
("The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality," pointed out H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun. Read the books of John Taylor Gatto.)
There were no tax-funded schools as we know them today in this nation from 1607 to 1850, the era which produced all the great American minds of the 18th and 19th centuries.
It's called "freedom." It's been tried, and it worked.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." His Web sites is www.privacyalert.us
