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Heather Mac Donald: Rule of law and other conservative principles do not allow for amnesty

02:36 PM CDT on Sunday, August 13, 2006

The immigration debate has divided the conservative movement, with each side accusing the other of betraying core conservative principles.

AP
Congress' immigration debate this year has drawn thousands of Americans into the streets to protest, including this one in Chicago. Amnesty proponents argue that America's best traditions require legalizing the estimated 12 million illegal aliens already here and opening the door wide to would-be migrants the world over.

Illegal immigration, these conservative advocates say, is the inevitable and blameless consequence of misguided laws that foolishly – and vainly – seek to prevent willing workers and labor-hungry employers from finding each other. Hispanics – the vast majority of aliens and the real center of the immigration debate – bring much-needed family values and a work ethic to the American polity; refusing to grant them legal status would destroy Republican hopes for a large new voting bloc. Since popular opposition to large-scale Hispanic immigration stems from economic ignorance and nativist fear, policymakers should protect America from its own worst impulses and ignore the anti-immigration revolt.

Conservative opponents of amnesty and liberalized immigration respond that the rule of law is at stake. Rewarding large-scale lawbreaking with legal status and financial benefits will spark further violations. The mass amnesty protests of the spring were part of a growing international movement challenging national sovereignty. Conservative respect for facts should encourage skepticism toward claims of superior Hispanic values. And the conservative preference for local decision-making cautions against dismissing the popular backlash against illegal immigration; it is just possible that people closest to the problem know something that Beltway insiders do not.

Since criticizing illegal immigration often draws charges of racism, few relish going further and challenging the wisdom of our immigration flows, legal or not. Yet unless we accurately diagnose the immigration problem, any legislative fix that merely converts the illegal flow to a legal one will fail both as policy and as politics. Herewith – in an effort to sharpen the internal debate – are the conservative principles that militate against amnesty and for immigration-law enforcement and a radical change in immigration priorities.


Principle 1: Respect the law.

This year's illegal-alien demonstrators put forward a novel theory of entitlement: because we are here, we have a right to be here. Protesters in Santa Ana, Calif., shouted: "We are here and we're not going anywhere," reports The Los Angeles Times. Anger at the widespread contempt for American law contained in such defiant assertions drives much of the public hostility toward illegal aliens. Conservatives, with their respect for the rule of law and appreciation for its fragility would ordinarily honor this gut reaction, rather than dismissing it as some atavistic tribal impulse. Poverty and other grounds for victim status do not, in the conservative worldview, create a license for lawbreaking.



Principle 2: Protect sovereignty.

Today's international elites seek to dissolve "discriminatory" distinctions between citizens and noncitizens and to discredit border laws aiming to control the flow of migrants. The spring amnesty demonstrations are a measure of how far such new anti-national-sovereignty ideas have spread. The last large-scale amnesty in 1986 was not preceded by mass demonstrations by illegal aliens. By contrast, this year's protesters spoke the language of the anti-sovereignty intelligentsia, which defines migration as a fundamental human right.

What, exactly, are the "human rights" that the U.S. is denying illegal aliens? They have unfettered access to free medical care, free education, welfare for their children, free representation in court when they commit crimes, every due-process protection during criminal prosecution that the Constitution guarantees citizens and legal immigrants, the shelter of labor laws and the miracles of modern industrial society like clean water, the control of infectious diseases and plumbing. The only putative "right" that they lack is the right to legal status regardless of illegal entry.

When the illegal-alien demonstrators and their government representatives demand respect for migrants' "human rights," they are asserting that U.S. immigration laws must fall before a more powerful claim. The Bush administration and its conservative supporters have defended American law against international claims to override it. Yet when it comes to immigration law, conservative open-borders advocates and the White House downplay the violation of our border law and elevate the "rights" of the illegal migrant to sovereign status. If the Bush administration and its supporters believe that they can reassert the supremacy of American immigration law after yet another amnesty, they are fooling themselves.


Principle 3: Support law enforcement.

Come-and-get-it immigration advocates endlessly assert that immigration enforcement can't work. This claim ignores the most important demonstration of conservative principles in the last 20 years.

Elite wisdom for decades held that social forces pushing criminals to break the law – poverty, racism, addiction – were too powerful; policing could at best try to solve crimes after they happened. New York's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his first police chief, William Bratton, rejected that fatalism and brought crime down 70 percent in a decade. It turns out that the well-founded fear of getting caught changes behavior.

Conservative open-borders advocates do not explain why policing brings domestic crime down but can have no effect on border crime. Nor can they point to any evidence to support their claim, since immigration laws have never been enforced in the interior of the country.

Not only is the claim that enforcement doesn't work based on no evidence whatsoever, but in fact what evidence there is runs in the opposite direction. The merest hint of enforcement leads employers and illegal aliens to make different calculations about the advantages of breaking the law. For example, employers in Gwinnett County, north of Atlanta, have grown reluctant to hire illegals after highly publicized federal raids on an international pallet company in April and the passage of an omnibus Georgia law that, among other measures, punishes employers for breaking the immigration rules. A Mexican from Guanajuato told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he is going back home if the jobs picture doesn't pick up soon; others like him may be making similar plans.Immigration liberalizers wield the threat of mass deportations as the only alternative to amnesty. By now this argument borders on bad faith, since it has been refuted so many times. The attrition strategy – relying on illegal aliens to leave voluntarily as their access to American benefits diminishes – would work just as effectively, without coercion.

Many open-borders boosters are hawks in the war on terror. But since many of the methods that maintain the border's integrity overall are essential to keeping terrorists out of the country, these boosters should explain why they think we can wink at immigration-border violations and still protect the public against foreign enemies.


Principle 4: Pay attention to facts on the ground.

If someone proposed a program to boost the number of Americans who lack a high school diploma, have children out of wedlock, sell drugs, steal or use welfare, he'd be deemed mad. Yet liberalized immigration rules would do just that. Conservatives pride themselves on reality-based thinking that rejects utopian theories in favor of facts on the ground. Yet when it comes to immigration, they cling, against all contrary evidence, to the myth of the redeeming power of Hispanic family values, the Hispanic work ethic and Hispanic virtue.

Without doubt, many Latinos are upwardly mobile. But a significant portion of their children are getting sucked into street life, as a trip to almost any urban high school and conversations with almost any Hispanic student will verify. In the field, the conservative fact-finder would learn that teen pregnancy is pervasive and that Hispanic boys increasingly regard fathering children as the prerequisite to becoming a "playah."

Conservatives have never shrunk from pointing out that dysfunctional behavior creates long-term poverty among inner-city blacks. But when Hispanics engage in the same behavior, they fall silent. From 1990 to 2004, the number of Hispanics in poverty rose 52 percent, accounting for 92 percent of the increase in poor people. The number of poor Hispanic children rose 43 percent, reports Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson. By contrast, the number of poor black children has declined 17 percent since 1990. The influx of dirt-poor Mexicans drives the Hispanic poverty increase, of course, but their behavior once here doesn't help.

Given the rapid increase in the Hispanic population, the prevalence of the following socially destructive behavior among Hispanics should be cause for serious concern:

Illegitimacy. Half of all children born to Hispanic Americans in 2002 were illegitimate, twice the rate for American whites and 42 percent higher than the overall American rate. The birthrate for Hispanic teens is higher than that for black teens. This predilection for out-of-wedlock childbearing cannot be blamed solely on corrosive American culture, since the illegitimacy rate for foreign-born Hispanics is 40 percent. The illegitimacy rate in Mexico is 38 percent; in El Salvador, it is 72 percent. It is hard to reconcile these statistics with the durable myth of superior Hispanic family values.

Academic failure. It would be useful for open-borders optimists to spend some time in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is 73 percent Hispanic and where just 40 percent of Hispanic students graduate. (Nationwide, 53 percent of Hispanics graduate from high school, according to the Manhattan Institute's Jay Greene – the lowest rate among all ethnic groups.) Of those Hispanic students who do graduate, just 22 percent have completed the course work necessary for admission to a four-year state college – which means that of all Hispanic students who enter in ninth grade, fewer than 15 percent will graduate ready for college.

Schools spend huge sums trying to improve the Hispanic graduation rate, but Hispanic school failure derives from parents who don't demand rigorous academic application and don't stand up to corrosive popular influences. It is the cultural capital that immigrants bring with them that most determines their success; the work ethic of poor Mexicans does not carry over to their children's schooling, and we are all paying the price.

Uncertain assimilation. Multicultural cheerleaders argue that assimilation is proceeding apace by pointing to the fact that virtually all third-generation Hispanics can speak English. Even so, linguistic and cultural segregation among Hispanics is increasing. The percentage of Hispanics living in Hispanic enclaves rose from 39 percent in 1990 to 43 percent in 2000, reports Mr. Samuelson, and as more and more aliens from Mexico and Central America enter, the size of Spanish-speaking-only areas expands.

Pro-amnesty forces promote the Ellis Island conceit that illegal immigrants "risk everything for the dream of freedom," as President Bush put it in a May address. The president's assessment, while flattering, is not particularly accurate. However lousy the Mexican economy, there are few if any political freedoms enjoyed by Americans that Mexico denies. It is the Yanqui dollar, not untasted freedom, that brings the vast majority of illegals here. Mexican immigrants naturalize at half the rate of Asians or Europeans. This is not a recipe for assimilation.


Principle 5: Prefer local decision makers over remote elites.

Illegal immigration has prompted a powerful grass-roots democratic reaction, as people in areas most affected by Hispanic immigration try to regain control of their communities. Cities, counties and states have passed laws to regulate day-laborer sites, to push employers into compliance with immigration laws, to allow police to cooperate with federal immigration agents, to prevent illegal aliens from collecting welfare and voting, and to tighten driver's license requirements, among other initiatives.

After appeals from illegal-alien advocacy groups, judges have struck down many of these laws. Ordinarily, conservatives would deplore such thwarting of the people's will. When it comes to illegal immigration, however, they side with the elites in robes and on Capitol Hill who dismiss the public as know-nothing rubes.

Conservatives have historically trusted local decision-making over distant Washington solutions. The tradition of federalism holds that people closest to a problem are best able to assess and resolve it. Yet the open-borders right waves away the fervent local lawmaking around illegal immigration as merely an outbreak of xenophobia. Do such conservative legalizers really think that they themselves see matters more clearly than angry local residents whose local hospital has gone bankrupt under the strain of serving immigrants with no insurance, or than parents who no longer feel welcome in their local schools, or than business owners harmed by the crowds of day laborers on the sidewalk who scare their customers away?

Lived experience fuels citizen movements for immigration control. If conservatives dismiss them as delusional, the Republican Party will pay dearly at the polls. Rather than dismissing the public's anguish over large-scale lawbreaking, conservatives should honor the public's commitment to the sanctity of the legislative will.


The most important value that conservatives can bring to this debate is honesty. Many of the costs imposed by Mexican immigrants are a function of their lack of education, their low incomes and their own and their children's behavior, not their legal status. Without question, we must balance those costs against the immigrant generation's admirable work ethic. But immigration reform that institutionalizes the present immigration mix – or, worse, increases its volume by three to five times – is certain to expand the Hispanic underclass.

There are many educated foreigners patiently waiting for permission to migrate to the United States. The United States can better honor its immigrant heritage by accelerating their entry rather than by continuing to favor the most low-skilled of our neighboring populations.

Heather Mac Donald is a senior fellow at The Manhattan Institute and a writer for City Journal (www.city-journal.org) in the Summer 2006 issue, of which a longer version of this essay appears. Her e-mail address is editor@city-journal.org.

On many occasions, I've asked the OBL at FR when rewarding criminals became a conservative principle.

They never answer.

Illegal aliens are taking rights away from American citizens. We have a right to secure our borders. Our politicians took an oath of office to uphold our constitution and our laws. We should have the right to be protected from gangs like ms-13, the mexican mafia, etc. A right to live in a country that does not have illegal drugs pouring across it's southern border. A right to enforce our laws. Illegal aliens rights exist only in the countries they are citizens of. A right to deny welfare and other benefits to anyone in the country illegally. American citizens should be put in a position where they have to demand the rights that are rightfully theirs.