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Friday, June 01, 2007
John Hawkins :: Townhall.com Columnist
Why The Senate Amnesty Bill Would Be An Unmitigated Disaster For America
by John Hawkins
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The amnesty bill in the Senate is undoubtedly one of the worst, most destructive pieces of legislation to come down the pike in the last half century and not only could it do cataclysmic damage to the Republican Party, it has the potential to send our country into a downward spiral from which it would never truly recover. Not only would this bill fail to secure the border, it would encourage millions of new illegals to pour into the country, demographically flood the conservative movement out of existence, add more than two trillion to the national debt, and it would set up a never ending cascade of amnesties that would permanently change our country for the worse.

First of all, let's start with the border. The problem with securing our border has always been that our politicians haven't wanted it to be secured. That's because the Democrats see every illegal alien who waltzes over the border as a potential voter and the Republicans in Washington don't want to cut off the supply of cheap labor to their allies in the business community.

Once you understand that, you know why George Bush has been dragging his feet on building the wall and why extremely effective programs, like Operation Vanguard in Nebraska, have been killed by the politicians: it's because they desperately want the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States to continue unabated. It's also why the "one time only" amnesty for roughly 2.7 million illegal aliens in 1986 has failed and why its much bigger, uglier stepsister in the Senate will fail again if this bill is passed -- because the politicians in D.C. only care about the amnesty and once they get it, they will methodically work to kill the enforcement and border security measures. So, if you don't get the security first, you won't ever get it.

Next, what will happen if we bring in 12-20 million illegal aliens? Well, first off, we don't know that 20 million would be the ceiling on the number of illegals. Because illegal aliens engage in document forgery the way most of us engage in breathing, it's entirely possible you could see millions of illegals pouring across the border, getting forged documents, and getting in on the deal -- and that's before the chain immigration starts that will bring in tens of millions more illegals to get in on the goodies Congress is ready to hand out with both hands.

But, let's say 20 million of these illegal aliens take advantage of the amnesty and get Z visas (By the way, despite what you may have heard from supporters of this bill, the moment the bill is signed into law, every illegal alien who was here before January 1, 2007 or who can acquire a forged document that says that he was, may be immediately eligible for a "probationary," i.e. permanent and infinitely renewable, Z visa).

First of all, hasn't one of the selling points of the pro-amnesty crowd been that illegals are manual laborers who are willing to do jobs that lazy Americans won't do? I believe it has. Well, there are a number of problems that will be caused by permanently bringing in 20 million foreign strawberry pickers and ditch diggers. The Z visa illegals themselves may not be eligible for government programs, but the moment they have an anchor baby, they can start leeching welfare, food stamps, and other government programs off of the American taxpayers. Also, the very fact that they have a child with American citizenship would make it that much more difficult to deport them if our politicians ever, by some miracle of God, get serious about enforcing our laws.

Moreover, consider this: if there's an economic downturn, and the labor market contracts, who will be the first people to get laid off? The low skilled, minimally educated, Spanish speaking Z visa holders. If you want to see the danger of that situation, look to France, where there is a staggeringly high unemployment rate among Muslim immigrants, legal and illegal, who live off the dole, join rape gangs, burn cars, riot, and have made swaths of France into no-go zones, even for the police in many cases. Think that it "couldn't happen here?" I bet that's what most Frenchmen would have told you 30 years ago.

On the other hand, let's say that these 20 million illegals become U.S. citizens. If anything, that would be an even worse situation for a variety of reasons. To begin with, Robert Rector has estimated that because we're talking about, for the most part, uneducated, manual laborers who will pay very little in taxes, the illegals are going to sponge 2.2 trillion dollars in government largesse from the rest of us over the course of their lifetimes. That means Social Security goes broke faster and we add more than two trillion dollars to our national debt to take care of people who weren't invited to this country, aren't wanted here by most people, and aren't even American citizens at the moment. How much sense does that make?

Like most Americans, I'm a compassionate person and I'm glad that we help feed the world, have helped stand up for freedom across the globe, and guarantee the security of nations like Taiwan and Israel from their hostile neighbors. But, compassion only goes so far. Asking the American people to carry 12-20 million illegal aliens on our backs, in our own country, isn't compassion; it's a shameless attempt to exploit the good nature of the American people.

Beyond that, Latinos went for the Democratic Party 70/30 in 2006. Expand those numbers out over 20 million people and you have 8 million new Democratic Party votes (which is 4 million more than George Bush's margin in 2004) -- and that is probably a very low estimate since we're mostly talking about poor people from socialist countries who don't respect America's laws and will have great difficulty improving their lot in America because of their limited English skills and lack of an education (If ever there was a group of people with "Democratic Party voter" written all over them, it's this batch of illegals). Continued...

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About The Author
John Hawkins is a professional blogger who runs Right Wing News, Linkiest, and Viral Footage.
 
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Immigrants and being an American
The year is 1907, one hundred years ago......
Theodore Roosevelt's ideas on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN in 1907.

"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

Theodore Roosevelt 1907

Every American citizen needs to read this! We do not have another 100 years to learn this lesson.



LINDA CHAVEZ BRINGS THE STATS!
HER COLUMN YESTERDAY (ANOTHER ONE THAT TOWNHALL HAS IRRESPONSIBLY BANNED)

The Great Assimilation Machine
By LINDA CHAVEZ
June 5, 2007

For more than 200 years the United States has been the great assimilation machine, churning Germans, Swedes, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Russians, Lebanese, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis and myriad others into Americans. There are many Americans today who believe, or worry, that the largest group of recent immigrants -- the nearly 20 million Hispanics who have come here in the last several decades -- are unwilling or unable to do the same.

In his 2004 book, "Who Are We? The Challenges to National Identity," Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington warned that "Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s," a sentiment I hear echoed frequently in the debate over immigration reform. Others warn that the country is playing host to a burgeoning new underclass of poorly educated, welfare-dependent Hispanics who will overwhelm us with social pathologies. Still others marshal statistics that appear to support their view that Hispanics are indeed failing to assimilate as have previous ethnic groups.

The real story of Hispanic assimilation, however, is a lot less gloomy -- although a bit more complicated -- than the critics charge. Part of the problem is the interpretation of statistics: As we are in the midst of a huge influx of new immigrants, legal and illegal, including seven million Mexicans who have arrived since 1990, any statistical snapshot that includes these newcomers (who make up about half the adult Hispanic population) will distort the overall moving picture.

Take Hispanic dropout rates. A snapshot looks bad: 42% of Hispanics, according to the Current Population Survey, had not finished high school in 2005. But nearly half of the people counted aren't dropouts in the usual sense; they've never dropped in to an American school. They are immigrants who completed their schooling, such as it was, before coming here in their late teens or 20s. Granted, low education levels will make their climb up the economic ladder slower -- 60% of Mexican-born adults have not completed high school. But the earnings of Hispanic immigrants will improve as they gain work skills and experience, and the evidence is strong that they will do so. Mexican-born men, for example, had higher labor force participation rates than native-born male workers, 88% compared with 83%, and lower unemployment rates than native workers, 4.4% compared with 5.1% in 2006. Labor force participation rates of illegal aliens are higher yet, a whopping 94%.

More importantly, the children of Hispanic immigrants are graduating from high school. The high school completion rate for young, U.S.-born Hispanics is 86%, only slightly lower than the 92% of non-Hispanic whites. Hispanic immigrant children who do enroll in school after they come here are as likely as American-born Hispanics to earn a high school diploma (although half of Mexican immigrants 15-17 years-old do not enroll in school).

Hispanics are more likely than either whites or blacks to continue their education at two-year institutions; in 2000 they represented 14% of all students enrolled in two-year institutions. Only 12% of U.S.-born Hispanics earn four-year degrees compared with 26% of non-Hispanic whites. Nonetheless, the economic returns on education are substantial for Hispanics. As a 2006 study on Hispanics by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences reported, "We consistently find that, after adjusting for the levels of human capital (e.g., schooling and English language proficiency), Hispanics do almost as well as whites with respect to both employment and labor market earnings," which the authors note is not the case for blacks, who still lag behind whites even after adjusting for observable measures of human capital.

English proficiency is, of course, essential if Hispanics are to fully assimilate into the mainstream, and one issue many Americans have expressed great concern over. But despite anxiety that Hispanics aren't learning English and will soon insist that the U.S. become bilingual, the evidence suggests otherwise. True enough, most Hispanic immigrants have poor English skills: The 2000 Census reported that 26 million people spoke Spanish at home, and of these, 14 million were unable to speak English well. But there is nothing unusual about this; historically most immigrant groups have taken a generation or more to produce fluent English speakers. In 1900, nearly 50 years after the peak period of German immigration, 600,000 students attended German bilingual schools in the U.S.

But if Hispanic immigrants have been slow to learn English, their American-born progeny have quickly adapted. English is the preferred language of virtually all U.S.-born Hispanics; according to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center, indeed, 78% of third-generation Hispanics cannot speak Spanish at all. Even in Southern California, an area with the largest population of Spanish speakers in the nation, 96% of third-generation Mexican Americans prefer to speak English at home, according to a recent study by sociologists Ruben Rumbaut, Douglas Massey and Frank Bean.

The fear that Hispanics are or will become an isolated, economically alienated group within the larger American society also does not jibe with a variety of other measures. A 2006 Commerce Department study reported that Hispanics are opening businesses at a rate three times faster than the national average. In 2002, the last year for which detailed data are available, there were 1.6 million Hispanic-owned businesses generating $222 billion in revenue. Most of these businesses are family affairs, with few employees, but some 1,500 Hispanic businesses employed 100 or more people, generating $42 billion in gross receipts.

Half of all Hispanics own homes. This is substantially below the 76% of non-Hispanic whites that are homeowners. A Department of Housing and Urban Development analysis of Hispanic home ownership trends suggests that the gap can be explained by a number of factors, including age. Home ownership increases with age, but nearly twice as many Hispanics as non-Hispanic whites are under 35, while only 10% of Hispanics, but nearly one quarter of whites, are over 65.

One genuinely disturbing trend is the increase in out-of-wedlock births among Hispanics, which has risen to 46% in 2004 from 24% in 1980, compared with 24.5% for non-Hispanic whites and 69% for blacks. (Mexican immigrants have a somewhat lower rate of unmarried childbearing, 35%.) This is not good, but it is not clear that these unmarried mothers remain so for long or that their children grow up in fatherless homes. Marriage rates for Hispanics are virtually the same as for non-Hispanic whites, suggesting many unwed mothers make it to the altar eventually, and they are no more likely to divorce than whites. The most comprehensive study of marriage and cohabitation, produced by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2002, shows that 77% of Hispanic women will marry by age 30, compared with 81% of non-Hispanic whites but only 52% of blacks. Moreover, 67% of Mexican origin children live in two parent families, compared with about 77% of whites, but only 37% of blacks.

Finally, consider that ultimate indicator of assimilation, intermarriage. One in four Hispanics marries a non-Hispanic white spouse, but nearly one-third of all U.S.-born Hispanics who are married have non-Hispanic spouses; and the percentage is slightly higher among college-educated Hispanic women (35%). There is a curious, and provocative fact buried in all this. The Population Reference Bureau notes in its 2005 study of intermarriage that, because most children of intermarriages are reported as Hispanic on Census data, "Hispanic intermarriage may have been a factor in the phenomenal growth of the U.S. Hispanic population in recent years, and it has important implications for future growth and characteristics of the Hispanic population." In other words, the widely cited prediction that by mid-century Hispanics will represent fully one third of the U.S. population fails to take into account that increasing numbers of these so-called Hispanics will have only one grandparent or great-grandparent of Hispanic heritage. At which point Hispanic ethnicity will mean little more than German, Italian or Irish ethnicity does today.

Ms. Chavez is chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity and the author of a number of books, including "Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation" (Basic Books, 1991).

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118101275193224692.html

Copyright 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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