"Immigration" is when you go into a US government office and there's a hundred people filling in paperwork to live in America, and there are a couple of Slovaks, couple of Bangladeshis, couple of New Zealanders, couple of Botswanans, couple of this, couple of that. Assimilation is not in doubt because, if you're a lonely Slovak in Des Moines, it's extremely difficult to stay unassimilated.
http://www.nysun.com/article/33157?page_no=2
Call It a Banana'

By MARK STEYN
May 22, 2006


From The Washington Times:

"The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment."

Well, I think that's the kind of moderate compromise "comprehensive immigration reform" package all Americans can support, don't you?
Some mean-spirited extremist House Republicans had proposed that illegal aliens should only receive 75% of the benefits to which they're illegally entitled for having broken the law.

On the other hand, President Bush had proposed that illegal aliens should also be able to collect Social Security benefits for any work they'd done in Mexico (assuming, for the purposes of argument, there is any work to be done in Mexico).
On the other other hand, Senator Trent Lott (R, Mississippi) and Senator Ted Stevens (R, Alaska) had added earmarks to the bill proposing that the family of Mohammed Atta should be entitled to receive survivor benefits plus an American Airlines pilot's pension based on past illegal employment flying jets over the northeast corridor on Tuesday mornings in late 2001.

Fortunately, the world's greatest deliberative body was able to agree on this sensible moderate compromise.
Meanwhile, from the Associated Press:

"Mexico warned Tuesday it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops detain migrants on the border."

On what basis? Posse Comitatus? It's unconstitutional to use the US military against foreign nationals before they've had a chance to break into the country and become fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community?

Or is Mexico taking legal action on the broader grounds that in America it's now illegal to enforce the law? Which, given that Senate bill, is a not unreasonable supposition.

Whatever. Under the new "comprehensive immigration reform" bill (Posse Como Estas?), a posse of National Guardsmen will be stationed in the Arizona desert but only as Wal-Mart greeters to escort members of the Illegal-American community to the nearest Social Security Office to register for benefits backdated to 1973.

Meanwhile, Senator John McCain, in a quintessentialy McCainiac contribution to the debate, angrily denied that the Senate legislation was an "amnesty." "Call it a banana if you want to," he told his fellow world's greatest deliberators. "To call the process that we require under this legislation amnesty frankly distorts the debate and it's an unfair interpretation of it."

He has a point. Technically, an "amnesty" only involves pardoning a person for a crime rather than, as this moderate compromise legislation does, pardoning him for a crime and also giving him a cash bonus for committing it. In fact, having skimmed my Webster's, I can't seem to find a word that does cover what the Senate is proposing, it having never previously occurred to any other society in the course of human history. Whether or not, as Senator McCain says, we should call it a singular banana, it's certainly plural bananas.
The Senator raises an interesting point. In Confucius' Analects, there's a moment when Zilu swings by and says, "Sir, the Prince of Wei is waiting for you to conduct his state affairs. What would you do first?" And Confucius say, "It must be the rectification of characters." By "characters", he doesn't mean lovable characters like Arlen Specter and Trent Lott, but "characters" in the Chinese-language sense — ie, words. Confucius means that, if the words you're using aren't correct, it becomes impossible to conduct public policy. If you're misusing language, your legislation will be false — or, as Confucius puts it, your "tortures and penalties will not be just right." When the "torture and penalty" for breaking US law over many years is that you get a big check from the US government that would seem to be an almost parodic confirmation of Confucius' point.

This is not an "immigration" issue. "Immigration" is when you go into a US government office and there's a hundred people filling in paperwork to live in America, and there are a couple of Slovaks, couple of Bangladeshis, couple of New Zealanders, couple of Botswanans, couple of this, couple of that. Assimilation is not in doubt because, if you're a lonely Slovak in Des Moines, it's extremely difficult to stay unassimilated.

This is not an "illegal immigration" issue. That's when one of the Slovaks or Botswanans gets tired of waiting in line for 12 years and comes in anyway, and lives and works here and doesn't pay any taxes, so the money he earns gets sluiced around the neighborhood supermarket and gas station and topless bar and the rest of the local economy, instead of being given to Trent and Arlen and co to toss into the great sucking maw of the Federal budget.

But a "worker class" drawn overwhelmingly from a neighboring jurisdiction with another language and ancient claims on your territory and whose people now send so much money back home in the form of "remittances" that it's Mexico's largest source of foreign income (bigger than oil or tourism) is not "immigration" at all, but a vast experiment in societal transformation. Indeed, given the international track record of bilingual societies and neighboring jurisdictions with territorial claims, it's not much of an experiment so much as a safe bet on political instability.

By some counts, up to five per cent of the US population is now "undocumented". Why? In part because American business is so over-regulated that there is a compelling economic logic to the employment of illegals. In essence, a chunk of the American economy has seceded from the Union. But, even if you succeeded in re-annexing it, a large-scale "guest worker" class entirely drawn from one particular demographic has been a recipe for disaster everywhere it's been tried. Fiji, for example, comprises native Fijians and ethnic Indians brought in as indentured workers by the British. If memory serves, currently 46.2 per cent are native Fijians and 48.6 per cent are Indo-Fijians. In 1987, the first Indian-majority government came to power. A month later, Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka staged the first of his two coups.

Don't worry, I'm not predicting any coups just yet. But, even in relatively peaceful bicultural societies, politics becomes tribal: loyalists vs nationalists in Northern Ireland, separatists vs federalists in Quebec. Sometimes the differences are huge — as between, say, anything-goes pot-head bisexual Dutch swingers and anti-gay anti-drugs anti-prostitution Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands. But sometimes the differences can be comparatively modest and still destabilizing. Pointing out that America has a young fast-growing Hispanic population and an aging non-Hispanic population, The Washington Post's Bob Samuelson wrote that "we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict".

The key words are "unnecessarily heightened." In Europe, the political class sowed the seeds of massive social upheaval for the most short-sighted of reasons. If America's political class wants to do the same, it could at least have the integrity to discuss the issue in honest terms.

The Ensign Amendment Fiasco Ross Kaminsky
Sat May 20, 7:18 AM ET

http://news.yahoo.com/s/realclearpoliti ... ent_fiasco

The Senate has by a 50-49 vote allowed a provision to remain in the Immigration Bill allowing illegal aliens to claim Social Security benefits. There is no way to sugar-coat what a disaster this is for Republicans and for the country.

Democrats had many reasons for voting against Senator Ensign's amendment, which was designed to insure that "persons who receive an adjustment of status under this bill (The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006) are not able to receive Social Security benefits as a result of unlawful activity."

1. The Democrats are well aware that they can even further dishearten GOP voters by keeping provisions like this in the Immigration Bill. While the President tries to find a middle ground that Republicans can support, the inclusion of provisions which insult basic sensibilities of right and wrong, i.e. allowing a taxpayer-provided benefit for illegal behavior, makes that middle ground nothing but a mirage and further disunifies the Party.

2. The Democrats know that keeping provisions like this in the bill make a successful House-Senate conference that much more difficult to achieve and the passage of Immigration Reform is less likely. This gives them a great election issue, painting the Republicans as the party that can't get anything done. And who could say they are wrong?

3. The Democrats are in favor of anything that keeps more people addicted to government. In this case, the idea that millions of people would suddenly have claims on Social Security is a dream come true for them, second only to giving illegal aliens both claims on government funds and the right to vote for the politicians who promise to give them more of it.

4. On a similar note, if this provision becomes law, the future liability of the Social Security system will explode along with estimates of future budget deficits, allowing the Democrats to call the (Republican) Immigration Bill another example of GOP fiscal irresponsibility. And again, who could say they are wrong?

Senator Patrick Leahy demonstrated the standard (though still jaw-dropping) Democratic hypocrisy on the issue. Quoting from the Washington Times: Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (news, bio, voting record), Vermont Democrat, said it would be unfair to deny illegals the benefits. "We should not steal their funds or empty their Social Security accounts," he said. "That is not fair. It does not reward their hard work or their financial contributions. It violates the trust that underlies the Social Security Trust Fund."

I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I read such things, given the Democrats' primary purpose of spending every penny that comes in to the Treasury, including all Social Security taxes. The idea that senior politicians still claim there are real Social Security accounts or a solvent trust fund is both funny and frightening. However, the Democrats are at least consistent on this.

More disconcerting is the Republican participation in this travesty. The list of GOP Senators who voted against the Ensign Amendment includes some of the usual RINO (Republican in Name Only) suspects such as Chafee, DeWine, and Voinovich. More interesting was the rest of the list of Republican senators who opposed the amendment: Brownback, Hagel, Lugar, Stevens, Specter, and McCain.

At least three of these men have Presidential aspirations. I can not imagine that they believe the potential benefit from getting Hispanic or Democrat crossover votes would outweigh the tremendous damage to their support among the Republican base and the strength of the issue they would be handing primary opponents. Noting that the vote was 50-49, if any one of these Republicans had voted for the amendment, it would have passed. Given the apparent huge political miscalculation here, and assuming that these are not stupid men, I presume that I am missing something. But try as I might, when thinking about this vote, I keep coming up with "Error".

I can just picture the campaign commercial: A Hispanic-looking man walks up to a Social Security office window holding an identification document that the viewer can tell is a forgery. He asks for some money (from a window labeled "funded by American taxpayers") and when he is lightly questioned about his ID, he replies that it was good enough to get him a job so it should be good enough to get him some cash. The voice-over says "John McCain voted to do this to Social Security...."

The immigration issue was probably a neutral for the GOP until recently. Most Americans are not as aggressively anti-immigrant as the House of Representatives, so a middle ground on the issue that could be acceptable to most Republican voters was theoretically achievable. But as the Republicans continue to permit such things as Social Security benefits and in-state tuition rates for illegal aliens, any such common ground all but vanishes. The Republicans have maneuvered themselves into the worst possible position on immigration, with the Democrats politely helping out by doing nothing. Given the disheartening performance by the GOP in nearly every other area, and particularly with the massive increase in government spending while all branches of government were controlled by Republicans, it is increasingly likely that Republican voters will be too disgusted to go to the polls in November.

The Democrats offer nothing better. They truly are the Party of No Ideas. But when your opponent is beating himself with one strategic and tactical error after another, why take the risk of going on offense? Nancy Pelosi can picture herself sitting in the Speaker's chair soon, and she will hardly have had to break a sweat. She'll have to write a big thank you note to John McCain and friends.