"Democrats Must Fight Illegal Immigration"

Posted Thu, May 4, 2006 at 12:47 am
From this:
...the most important domestic policy challenge in the 21st century is found in the labor market. Alone among industrialized nations, the United States has a massive class of unskilled workers. This unskilled workforce is being buffeted by globalization-enabled labor arbitrage, the automation of blue-collar jobs, and, yes, the arrival of millions of low-skilled laborers through illegal immigration. Tragically, this class of workers is only going to grow in the future, just as the returns to schooling will become higher than ever. Let me offer an underreported but rather shocking fact: the number of young people who graduate from high school, as opposed to receiving a GED, is declining. And, as James Heckman of the University of Chicago has shown, workers with a GED have the same economic prospects as workers who drop out of high school and never get an equivalency degree. In sum, a greater proportion of American young people are low-skilled dropouts than thirty years ago. Close to 50% of these dropouts are immigrants. Now there's a problem for the overclass to consider.

America tolerates an immigration policy that adds millions of very low-skilled workers every decade, who come to this country at the expense of low-skilled native workers. Why? There is no good explanation, especially for Democrats, who like to believe that their core constituencies are the middle and lower classes of America...

...For Democrats, fighting illegal immigration would not only be good policy, but would have the welcome effect of being good politics, too. Democrats' major political obstacle is the increasingly intractable opposition of the non-union working and middle class, exactly the groups who most fervently oppose illegal immigration. While the opponents of immigration no doubt include nativists and xenophobes, the vast majority of those who oppose illegal immigration do so on sound public policy grounds. Illegal immigration is seen rightly as a threat to their economic livelihood. So when the Republican Party offers a platform that not only comports with their social and religious beliefs, but also addresses the one economic threat that is open to government solution, is there any wonder that the working and middle classes find solace in the GOP? Democrats should find a way to bust up this alliance between economic populists and social conservatives, and make many current Republican voters choose which of these movements matters most...

Comments

Ivor Manuel prophet (not verified)

Wed, 06/07/2006 - 08:26

Thus says the Lord God of ISRAEL, Let my People go!
When the Great God of Israel, the Mighty Lord, the only God appeared unto Moses in a flame of fire out of the midst of a

Fred Dawes (not verified)

Wed, 05/10/2006 - 04:36

dchamil so cal is now in the hands of mexico and its rulers, this has been going on for over 30 years, people should understand that this is now a fight for our nation, but also understand our own government is not in our hands but is being ran by our enemies.

freedom is not free, and its about time for blood, sadly most of you can't fight for freedom way to old, and the mexican\terrorists\politicians\hillary\bush\one world guys\world banks knows that all to well. but some of us will do the killing it takes to free a nation from evil doers of all races.

ask how long before the death camps open for you?

by the way remember the IOB, Its the start of the third world war.

dchamil (not verified)

Thu, 05/04/2006 - 15:04

I graduated from the high school in Los Gatos, California, in 1956. Little did I know how lucky I was, and I certainly didn't expect the remarkable demographic transformation of California since then. We left California in 1977. I first became alarmed when I read Victor Davis Hanson's Mexifornia, and I contrasted the California described there with the California I used to know.

D Flinchum (not verified)

Thu, 05/04/2006 - 14:16

boofugg, I graduated from HS in Virginia in 1965 and back then, California was the Gold Standard. Their secondary schools rated in the top 2 or 3 in the country. Now they are in the bottom with Alabama and Mississippi. It's sad to see.

boofugg (not verified)

Thu, 05/04/2006 - 10:16

I graduated from high school in 1962. Since that time I have had hundreds of occassions over the years to be inside many, many high schools. Public high schools in the central valley of California have turned into cess pools. Nothing is learned, nothing is expected, and nothing is demanded. Whenever something is demanded, such as the relatively new "exit test," nobody can cut the mustard. I know for a fact (because I have personally witnessed it) that high schools are giving away graduation certificates to students who can barely write their own names legibly. I even saw one high school graduate who had to print his name in block letters as if he was a five year old kid.

D Flinchum (not verified)

Thu, 05/04/2006 - 04:02

What the US is doing is importing wholesale poverty while at the same time "fighting" poverty here at home. This will not work. It's like bailing out your flooded basement instead of fixing the broken pipe that is causing the flooding. There'll always be more water to bail.

Also, as for the "education is your salvation" mantra, the plain fact is that you cannot have good schools while sytematically flooding them with poorly prepared third-world students, which is what we are also trying to do. You can emphasize excellence and science/math education or you can constantly try to bring the latest wave of new ESL students up to a level where they may be prepared to go mainstream. You can't do both.

One by-product of the proposed Senate amnesty and guest-worker program will be the almost immediate flooding of our K-12 schools with the minor children of the amnestied workers who are re-united with their parent(s). These children - probably in the millions - will be all ages from babies to teenagers, mostly poorly educated in their own countries, will not speak English, and will overwhelm schools, usually in already overcrowded areas. A guest-wowker program will simply keep the flow going.

Of course, none of this will affect those "elites" whose children do not attend those schools so don't expect them to care.

eh (not verified)

Thu, 05/04/2006 - 03:03

"There is no good explanation,..."

Depends on what you mean by "good", I guess.

Because (IMO) there is a perfectly "good", meaning mostly accurate, or at least serviceable, and in today's political context certainly quite understandable, "explanation": racially sensitive political correctness.

While the author is careful to make a distinction between "American young people" and "immigrants", it would've been better and more accurate if he had honestly said outright what we all know is true: the vast majority of these "immigrants" who do poorly in school are Hispanic, while the (not so vast as it used to be) majority of "American young people" are white. Note: there is also a proven and significant academic discrepancy between whites and Hispanics who are not immigrants.

But, yeah, OK, if you're looking for some logic to make it clear how it can be a good idea for the US to import a huge population of people with a (comparative) demographic profile as bad as that of Hispanics, you will not find a "good explanation" of that.