Mark Krikorian writes that my article “Our Borders, Ourselves” “attempt[s] to undermine opposition” to one of our ruling class’s “most important tools,” namely “mass migration.” He charges that I want to “allow our nation to be crucified on the cross of unlimited immigration” and accuses me of “contempt for the actual people living in the actual United States of America who, whatever our manifold sins, would like to preserve whatever’s left of our country.”
Please note: My article says nothing about what tools the U.S. government ought to have with regard to immigration, much less how it ought to use them, and precisely zero about how much or how little immigration we should have.
My article’s point — which seems to be the source of Krikorian’s animus — is that “so-called border security is attractive because it lets Americans imagine that someone other than ourselves is responsible for several of the country’s biggest problems, and that the U.S. government can deal with them in a value-free, politically neutral manner.” America’s growing appetite for and accommodation of mind-bending drugs is the clearest example. Sixteen percent of our adult population admits having used cocaine, and 42 percent marijuana. The pretense that Mexican drug cartels are somehow responsible for this is escapism. Our welfare system relieves addicts of the need to earn a living. Parents don’t cut off their precious ones’ funds when they learn they’ve been snorting, much less call the cops. We elected a president who has used cocaine. No, the drug cartels, and the mayhem they visit on Mexico, exist exclusively because we Americans pay for them. No fence or border security could stop the flow of drugs, because American consumers’ pockets are deep enough to fund any and all corruption necessary for the traffic to continue.
My article points out that America has a growing labor problem. Whereas within living memory Americans did their own society’s rough, dirty work, the social changes that began in the 1960s created an underclass that is basically unemployable — and, more important, made physical labor seem dishonorable to the middle class. I pointed out that even John C. Calhoun, slavery’s most eloquent defender, was proud to do the plowing on his plantation. Today, swarms of youths in malls and campuses are no more physically or psychologically able to help with the harvest than they are of helping to care for their grandmothers. And so, yes, what would we do without Mexicans?
According to Krikorian, my pointing out that America’s problems are made in America, not Mexico, my urging our fellow citizens to look here at home for relief from those problems, constitutes an insult to today’s Americans. What would Krikorian have had me write? Don’t worry about your neighbor’s, your children’s, or your own drug use? You will have done enough by sending more troops to the Mexican border with orders to shoot first and ask questions later, never mind that the young men who scale border fences are doing so for the chance to earn $8 an hour, while the drugs roll through border checkpoints greased by five- and six-figure bribes?
What fools were our statesmen, from John Quincy Adams to William Seward to Dwight Eisenhower, who thought that our unguarded borders were the foundation of American security. We’re so much wiser.
Baloney. The current conventional wisdom, formed in substantial part by commentators such as Mark Krikorian, has made our southern border a problem such as it never was. Because of it, as my article points out, Mexico’s 2012 presidential election will usher in yet more troubles for us.
Supply and demand. Reducing supply doesn't reduce demand. It increases it. Only if there is a decreased demand will you see a decrease in supply.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseFirst things first. Mr. Codevilla's flawed response above, despite his denying it, seems to end in a plea to have "unguarded borders."
Seriously? As in, is this man plugged into reality? Just today, a gunfight at a lake on the Texas border with Mexico killed 13 members of a gang based there!
Moreover, he writes "According to Kirkorian, my pointing out that America’s problems are made in America, not Mexico, my urging our fellow citizens to look here at home for relief from those problems, constitutes an insult to today’s Americans."
Yet, Mr. Codevilla is the one who looks to Mexico to "relief from our problems" and ignores that our problems are made at home and need to be solved at home.
Mr. Codevilla correctly says too many Americans are becoming members of an unemployable welfare class, or are middle-class toffs unable to do any manual labor. Given that many of these middle-class toffs can't find jobs pushing paper (due to the collapse of the latest, greatest paper-pushing sector, the housing market; outsourcing of white-collar jobs, including legal, consulting, finance and IT work, to India; and efficiencies in these industries due to technology), they had better learn to do manual work, or they'll join the unemployable welfare-dependent class.
To that end, morally and especially given our fiscal state, there should not be any unemployable welfare-dependent class.
What all this means is that if we are to keep the middle-class employed and finally bring the welfare-dependent class into the workforce and off the taxpayer dole, we need "American solutions" for the jobs Mr. Codevilla seems to think Americans should not do but should instead be reserved for illegal trespassers from Mexico (why doesn't he suggest, by the way, that we give Filipinos, Africans, Romanians, or anyone else visas to do this work? Why must it be Mexican workers?).
Much more than Mark Krikorian, Mr. Codevilla is "passing the buck" in claiming that Americans are too important for manual labor or too dependent on welfare to do it ... and that this should never change. That problem is the first thing that needs to be changed, and it needs to be changed by finally restoring the rule of law (via E-Verify) and securing the border.
Mr. Codevilla seems to envision ever-fewer working Americans, with the number of the unemployable poor and the unemployable middle-class youth growing as far as the eye stretches, supplemented by the US-born children of the Mexican workers he wants to import. As the numbers of such Americans grow, he envisions an endless torrent of Mexican workers doing all of the jobs that welfare-collecting Americans, their skills and work ethic atrophying, do not do.
Oh, and while Mexico descends into chaos, anarchy and greater violence, he wants to apply some notion (new to me) that John Quincy Adams had in the 1820s about an unguarded border -- citing Eisenhower (who presided over the largest deportation of illegal Mexican aliens in a 1954 whose name is not allowed by the NRO language filter today) to boot!
Unbelievable. Where did NRO find this guy?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAhhh, the old canard that illegal aliens do jobs that Americans won’t do ...
A corrupt business owner can pay an illegal 10 cents on the dollar that he'd have to pay for a legal American worker. It's apples and oranges. If your point is that an American won't work for the wage that an illegal alien works for, then you're probably right, as that wage is also illegal.
Take away the supply of illegal labor, and you'll increase the demand for legal labor. Then you'll find the American workers willing to do it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMark Krikorian does not like to talk about the problems within American society that contributed to the current immigration mess. For him, all ills can and should be solved by 'attrition by enforcement.' To admit there are jobs that Americans won't do anymore - that would make you part of the ruling class with George W. Bush - and we all know how bad that is.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI spy a tempest in a teapot. Codevilla and Krikorian don't really strike me as being all that far apart, politically.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Today, swarms of youths in malls and campuses are no more physically or psychologically able to help with the harvest than they are of helping to care for their grandmothers."
stereotype much ?
You know about as much about youths in malls and campuses as you hear about from Time, Newsweek and the pages of the NYT ... which is to say myths and nonsense on stilts ...
why not toss in the race card or is that your next post ?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI can't speak for anyone else, but I want to hear more about our homegrown "basically unemployable underclass", and why they can't compete with our imported underclass.
This blog post is the first time that I've seen the argument advanced that illegal immigrants are not only doing the jobs that Americans won't do, but in fact are doing the jobs that Americans can't do.
I don't know why anyone would find that insulting and catering to the open borders lobby.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf any of those cited persons -- Adams, Seward, Eisenhower -- believed that "unguarded borders" is a "foundation of security," then they were as*es. That cannot be true. Having the ability to have unguarded borders might be a sign of security, but is not a cause of it. Having guarded borders is tough and expensive, but when people are coming and going at will, and when some of those people are members of terror cells, and the rest are allowed, to whatever degree, to take advantage of social services, then guards are necessary.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr. Codevilla,
"What fools were our statesmen, from John Quincy Adams to William Seward to Dwight Eisenhower, who thought that our unguarded borders were the foundation of American security. We’re so much wiser."
Is so wrong-headed one scarcely knows where to begin. Were there hordes of immigrant children swamping border areas with ESL schooling needs during the JQ Adams administration? Were there nation-wide gangs based in a violence-riddled Mexico under Lincoln? Did we have Medicaid and the plethora of other entitlement programs under Ike? Did we have global terrorism? Millions upon millions of illegals?
Tim C. brought up Operation W**back; that seems to be a dramatic disproving of referencing Eisenhower.
The "foundation of American security" line is just bizarre and needs considerably more backing.
The rest is the usual open borders boilerplate.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"A corrupt business owner can pay an illegal 10 cents on the dollar that he'd have to pay for a legal American worker."
10 cents on the dollar? Exaggerate much?
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"This blog post is the first time that I've seen the argument advanced that illegal immigrants are not only doing the jobs that Americans won't do, but in fact are doing the jobs that Americans can't do."
They can't do them at the rate the free market wants to pay.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDorsaiGuy,
That American teenagers of today are *on average* less capable and/or less willing to do hard work and do basic home maintenance is an established fact. One reason they don't bother with hard labor is because they don't get hired to do it, and because the rewards are not high enough. Those jobs are now filled by illegal immigrants. 18 years ago a more laborious teenage job - house painting, landscaping, etc. - would pay three times or more what you could get flipping burgers. Today the difference is far less.
This is a chicken/egg problem: Americans have grown soft and hedonistic. No doubt that would've happened to some degree without illegal immigration, but illegal immigrants have made certainly matters worse. I'm only 34, but I can still remember a time when most unskilled and laborious jobs were filled by teenagers and red necks, and can remember a time when most such people did not regularly use narcotics, or even experiment with them.
** "America’s growing appetite for and accommodation of mind-bending drugs is the clearest example. Sixteen percent of our adult population admits having used cocaine, and 42 percent marijuana. The pretense that Mexican drug cartels are somehow responsible for this is escapism." **
Drugs ARE more easily obtainable due to our failure to secure the border. Unskilled Americans are probably more likely to use them, having been told the work they do is irrelevant and that they are easily replaced. Certainly no one, inlcuding Mr. Krikorian, believes the problem would be non-existent in the absence of illegal immigration.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseConfusing cause and effect much? Yeah, in the 1960s Teddy Kennedy helped open us up to a flood of unkilled labor, undermining the job market for our citizens. It didn't happen the other way around.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSo Angelo's solution to America's problems is... SURRENDER. America wants drugs and free labor, so fsck it, throw open the borders. Yeah, that'll make things better! Hey, if Americans want to kill each other, let's "solve" that problem by getting rid of the police forces, too.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"And so, yes, what would we do without Mexicans?"
Answer: pay less taxes.
Its that simple. The notion that illegals are essential to agricultural production in the US is a myth. Only a tiny % of illegals (something like 3%) actually work in agricultural. Studies have shown that if we suddenly deported 100% of illegals working in agricultural and had to replace them with legal workers and/or productivity improvements (more mechanization), the effect on our food prices would be trivial.
Illegals get an enormous amount of their income, collectively, from various welfare programs. An estimated 70% of illegals in TX are on welfare. Many of these programs are technically for citizens only (foodstamps for instance), but little/no effort is made to enforce this requirement.
Several hundred thousand illegals currently live for free. Free room and board and free health care, all courtesy of our prison system. Sad, really, but true. The US currently has over 2 million prisoners (a number greater than the Soviets incarcerated in their notorious gulags). About 1/4 of the residents of our federal prison system are illegal aliens. This is an enormously expensive way to deal with illegal aliens. You could round up 20 million illegals and physically deport them for less money than we spend each year maintaining illegals in prison. Of course, this doesn't even consider the cost to society of the crimes these illegals commited to get themselves incarcerated in the first place. Why is it no one ever mentions the millions of victims of crime commited by illegal aliens? This is their main contribution to society, you'd think it would be mentioned, prominently, EVERY TIME the subject of illegal immigration comes up.
This is not just a federal issue. Illegals are an enormous burden on state, county and municipal budgets as well. Their tax contribution is trivial compared to the enormous costs of educating their children, paying for their emergency room visits, and paying their medicaid bills. In my home state, county/municipal authorities play immigrant whack-a-mole: when they recognize that the principle cause of their financial woes is illegal aliens, they crack down on them. But ICE refuses to pick up the detainees, so they're released. Usually, the illegals will then move to neighboring counties (its no secret which counties are currently trying to chase illegals out, and which are not) until they bankrupt it and the authorities there crackdown on them, forcing them to move again.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell, training the lazy and indigent to work will not be much of a problem. Hungry people learn fast. So, until you agree to end food stamps and Section 8, don't go advocating replacing our not-working class with a Mexican soon-to-be-not-working-class once they get amnesty, which is your real goal.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse** "They can't do them at the rate the free market wants to pay." **
NO ONE can do them at the rate the free market "wants" to pay, numbskull. The free market would prefer to pay zero or, better yet, get paid by the worker for the privilege of working.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr. Codevilla, who so brilliantly illustrated the dichotomy between the Ruling Class and the Country Class, demonstrates that he has both feet firmly planted in the Ruling Class.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAarradin is exactly right. The author of this piece is just one more open borders flack. Our illegal immigration problem is destroying this country. I refused to vote for "amnesty" McCain and I will not support any Republican presidential candidate who is tepid on border security and the problems associated with illegals.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEvery time the feds bust a meat-packing plant or some other operation flagrantly violating the law employing illegal aliens performing "jobs Americans won't so," the next day there is a line hundreds of citizens long, trying to get those jobs that the slanderers claim they/we won't do.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse