Between having Republican presidential candidates fly to Las Vegas to kiss his ring, billionaire Sheldon Adelson has managed to fit in time to talk Sen. Lindsey Graham into sponsoring a bill banning Internet gambling.
As you may know, Sheldon Adelson is a CASINO OWNER. Internet gambling would compete with his casino business.
On the other hand, when it comes to the services Adelson isn't selling, but buying -- low-skilled workers -- he's for unbridled competition, preferring not to limit the supply even to people who are legally in the United States. (Weirdly, so is Lindsey Graham!)
Adelson is a big backer of amnesty, telling The Wall Street Journal: "It would be inhumane to send those people back, to send 12 million people out of this country. ... So we've got to find a way, find a route for those people to get legal citizenship."
As Milton Friedman said, "With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves."
Adelson is an especially telling example of the self-interest of businessmen on immigration. His newspaper, Israel Today, the largest newspaper in Israel, is wildly patriotic on immigration (and everything else).
Israel Today has trumpeted the success of the 15-foot razor-wire fence along Israel's 140-mile border with Egypt, triumphantly noting last August that, for the first time, "no infiltrations were recorded from the Egyptian border, compared to 193 from the same month last year."
Adelson himself had suggested just such a policy to the Los Angeles Times last year, saying he wanted to "Put a big fence around our country."
By "our country," he, of course, meant Israel. In America, he wants illegal immigrants pouring across the border to provide him with an endless supply of cheap labor.
Recently, Israel has been "rounding up" African refugees, giving them $3,500 and plane tickets to Uganda, to encourage them to "self-deport." Welcome to El Al Airlines. We're about to begin pre-boarding for Flight 259, offering non-stop, one-way service to Kampala, Uganda. At this time we'd like to invite our premium-plus illegal immigrants to board.
Wait! I thought we couldn't "round up" any illegal immigrants! I thought "self-deportation" was a laughable idea! Say, could Adelson buy The New York Times and start pushing those policies here?
For years, the cheap-labor lobby has told us: Immigrants are doing the work Americans simply will not do! We're tired of people who know nothing about our business telling us to pay our workers more. Where are they when beds are unmade? Where are they when crops are rotting in the field? It's not about how much we pay them per hour! Americans don't want these jobs.
But in last week's New York Times story about multimillionaire farmers who need taxpayer-subsidized cheap labor, the Times lost focus and forgot to lie. In one blockbuster sentence, the paper admitted that, last year, "the diminished supply of workers led average farm wages in the region to increase by roughly $1 an hour."
I believe we have an Earth-shattering revelation there! In other words, people were willing to do the work -- as soon as wages were raised. So, apparently, employers were not exploring every option to get workers, such as, for example, paying their employees ONE DOLLAR MORE.
In a catastrophic blunder of epic proportions, The New York Times had inadvertently stumbled across the laws of supply and demand.
Adelson might want to hang onto that Israeli citizenship, in case his preferred policy of amnesty ever does go through: His low-wage workers don't have especially enlightened views of the Jewish people.
The Anti-Defamation League has been taking polls on anti-Semitism in America for decades. In 2013, the ADL reported that -- "once again" -- foreign-born Hispanics had the highest rates of anti-Semitic views: 36 percent compared with 14 percent of all Americans and 20 percent of African-Americans. This was an improvement over 2011, when 42 percent of foreign-born Hispanics were found to have anti-Semitic views.
How might America's support for Israel be affected by having a populace that's 30 or 40 percent Hispanic?
The importation of more than a million poor people to America every year also has the effect of admitting a fair number of terrorists. Among them: Rasmieh Yousef Odeh, Mohammad Hassan Hamdan, Nidal Hasan, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Najibullah Zazi, Sulejman Talovic, Peter Odighizuwa, Ali Hassan Abu Kamal, dozens of Somali terrorists living in Minnesota, Omar Abdel-Rahman and the 9/11 terrorists.
I would think that this country's open-door policy toward terrorists would be of some concern to the owner of any Las Vegas casino -- a well-known terrorist target.
They won't be coming to kiss Adelson's ring.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member