Capitol Ideas Immigration, Sí; Welfare, No
Bethell, Tom
Immigration, Si; Welfare, No by Tom Bethell hile in San Diego recently, I W took the electric trolley down to the Mexican border, a pleasant ride of about twelve miles, past rectangular...
...The American decline has been an indigenous, not an externally driven phenomenon...
...I went with my friend Charlie Thomas, and to keep the sun off our heads we both wore white duckster hats...
...No doubt there's more economic activity going on south of the border now...
...But his conclusion is a non-sequitur: Keep out the foreigners...
...Perhaps another $1.5 billion (in California alone) goes for health and welfare benefits for illegals...
...Meanwhile I'm trying to understand the illogical position of such anti-immigrant conservatives as Pat Buchanan...
...So many people are coming across that a huge increase in the bureaucracy would be needed to permit a more thorough inspection...
...I was expecting to see bare terrain on the Mexican side, development on the U.S...
...T he entitlement rot became conspicuous in 1982, when the U.S...
...I think I like it that way...
...They have a "profile" of likely illegals and do little more than occasional spot checks...
...Employers are threatened with steep fines if they hire illegals, and now California Democrats have suggested that employers who do so should suffer RICO-style forfeiture of farms, factories, and other assets...
...My concern is that his figures may now be out of date...
...My own position, which I should, 18 The American Spectator November 1993 have thought was widely shared but apparently is not, is that I like immigrants, wherever they come from, and in whatever numbers, as long as they come here to work...
...I had a V-8 juice...
...There has been a great and calamitous change...
...National Review seems to have more or less joined the anti-immigrant camp, and Forbes senior editor Peter Brimelow—like me, a (former) Brit—has, well, gone nativist...
...A curious feature of the recent intraconservative debate on immigration is that the availability of government services to recent immigrants, including illegals, was not much discussed until California Governor Pete Wilson brought it up in August...
...Furthermore, this discipline is potent enough to override such "cultural" or racial characteristics that he may have brought with him, and which seem to be of so much concern to many of those in the anti-immigrant camp...
...Virtue is thrust upon him...
...At that point they are "empowered" with victim status, and no doubt grievance tribunals and government-paid attorneys...
...It was the other way around—sorry about that...
...After the L.A...
...side must be "owned" by the military or maybe the Border Patrol and are mere meadows...
...but I don't like the welfare state and I would like to see it abolished for everyone, including all immigrants, legal or illegal...
...The best hope of pulling out of the nose-dive is to bring in lots of new people who have never been anywhere near Choate, Groton, or Harvard Yard...
...A newcomer who must provide forhimself and his family in a pure market economy, with only his own labor and human capital to rely upon, finds himself in a position where he must obey at least most of the Ten Commandments...
...hospitals...
...Julian Simon of the University of Maryland...
...Changes in the law since then have no doubt altered the structure of incentives, however...
...The court "struck a blow for minimal decency," the New York Times declared...
...As Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of California put it,since the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 "we have made it more risky for an illegal to apply' for a regular job than to apply for government assistance...
...Imperialism, not loss of sovereignty, is the great NAFTAworry...
...Whose culture is rotten here...
...He looks back to the United States of the 1950s, in which he grew up, and sees the huge decline that has taken place...
...probably we looked like Harvard alumni somehow separated from the reunion...
...In the early twentieth century, when proportionately far more immigrants arrived than today, the discipline of the market was in place and it was effective...
...Even liberals seem to recognize that this cannot go on indefinitely...
...It's the same with cars heading north on the interstate...
...In San Bernardino, a Public Health Department brochure proclaimed (in Spanish) the "good news" that "you do not need to be a citizen to get MediCal" (state Medicaid), and that illegals who apply need not fear being reported to the INS...
...Welfare, No by Tom Bethell hile in San Diego recently, I W took the electric trolley down to the Mexican border, a pleasant ride of about twelve miles, past rectangular warehouses and dusty oleander bushes, to Chula Vista...
...Yet that is more or less the world we live in now...
...Supporters of immigration have long claimed that immigrants contribute more in taxes than they take in government services, and a leading exponent of this view has been Prof...
...Now, they enter the degenerate arena of the entitlement culture...
...The hills on the U.S...
...I am in favor of more or less unrestricted immigration myself, with the caveat that this is feasible only if all newcomers are subjected to the discipline of the market...
...And that's not such a bad outcome...
...Then there are complaints to the local politicians...
...Those coming across from Tijuana see opportunity, which is a source of renewal...
...M ost would agree, however, that health, education, and welfare benefits cannot be readily provided to anyone who has managed to evade border guards...
...Immigrants once knew that they would have to work and were glad of the opportunity to do so...
...I mean, a lot of conservatives nowadays worry that newcomers bring a lot of strange "foreign" habits and genes with them, and we greet them with needle-exchange programs, free condoms, and access to the welfare state...
...That wouldn't be hard to believe, given the power of the environmental movement...
...It should not be disparaged as "the cult of efficiency," in Pat Buchanan's phrase...
...As I say, a few million more "undocumented" newcomers may just about finish off the welfare state: one more argument for an open border...
...So, as far as I could see, there really isn't much of a border at all...
...A concrete footbridge takes you over Interstate 5 and then you walk straight across the border, no questions asked or documents requested...
...I showed a driver's license but was told Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...I have no disagreement there...
...Until that happens, recent immigrants, legal or not, will continue to be embraced by the entitlement culture, and in some states government benefits will have to be cut for everyone (this is already happening in California...
...If unmitigated by income transfers and privileges for ethnic groups with "victim" status, the market is a potent discipline indeed...
...I worry that they will soon be able to extend their dominion to Mexico if the North American Free Trade Agreement passes...
...Then it was time to go back because our taxi driver was patiently waiting...
...But Wilson's office and California Republicans are maneuvering for changes in the law and may try to provoke a case that will return the education issue to the Supreme Court...
...What is so disastrous today is that very recent immigrants, even those who are here illegally, more and more have access to that welfare state...
...entitlement programs are going to be changed in the near future...
...But even some liberals do dimly see that if the present insanity continues, benefit levels will have to be cut, because taxes cannot be raised any higher...
...the Mexican slopes are covered with houses...
...Public housing officials also aren't allowed to ask for documents...
...you don't even have to do that...
...Crossing the border into the U.S...
...Realistically, it's very unlikely that the statutes affecting U.S...
...71 The American Spectator November 1993 19...
...As the guardians, their mothers get the welfare checks...
...Hmm, come to think of it . . . (idle daydream here) . . . maybe if enough immigrants came they would bankrupt the welfare state once and for all . . . Maybe we should bus them in by the millions to the public schools and the housing projects and the welfare offices...
...The issue is politically popular (Wilson's approval rating jumped when he raised it), and of course Wilson has been disparaged on those grounds, as though good policy were necessarily unpopular...
...precipitated by inheritors, not newcomers...
...I have no doubt that he was right in the past—he may still be today...
...Why be on the same side as Barbara Boxer on any issue...
...In Tijuana, Charlie inspected a striped burro and pronounced it to be genuine...
...If immigration is such a big problem, why does one not hear more complaints about it in San Diego...
...Today, state officials do not believe they have the right to ask children in public schools if they are in the country legally, and officials in California say they spend $1 billion annually educating illegals...
...Today, unfortunately, this is very far from being the case...
...Sometimes they are stopped and searched, but when that happens the highway instantly becomes a parking lot, and the Mexicans coming across for day-labor and housework in San Diego are three hours late on the job...
...The potential exists to turn it into a substantial barrier, but the cost of doing so is presumably reckoned to be higher than the benefits...
...citizens...
...Immigration, of course, has become a great bone of contention among conservatives...
...Meanwhile government agencies in California have been advertising for immigrant clients, openly saying that they don't mind whether they are legal or not...
...And we are the ones who are worrying about their culture...
...What this suggests, unfortunately, is that the anti-immigrant people just don't like immigrants period, whether or not they can tap into the welfare state...
...you go through a turnstile, and an INS official gives you a practiced glance...
...Federally mandated services to illegal immigrants, Wilson pointed out, now cost California taxpayers nearly $3 billion a year...
...Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that public education could not be denied to children who had not been legally admitted to the country...
...There's no escaping that this is incompatible with uncontrolled immigration...
...What has changed is not that the new immigrants are Mexican and Vietnamese rather than Italian and Irish, and therefore culturally and racially different...
...That may partly explain why Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein want to improve the policing of the Mexican border...
...It's the people whose parents were rich enough to give them sports cars for graduation who are the most likely sources of decline...
...No nation can afford to be so generous with its taxpayers' money for any length of time...
...And the fastest growing component of Aid for Families with Dependent Children, the main welfare program, goes to the offspring of illegals who give birth in U.S...
...the children become U.S...
...riots, the Federal Emergency Management Agency distributed leaflets advising that applicants "will not risk their request for legal residency under the Amnesty Program if they apply for or receive disaster assistance...
...side...
...He rebuts recent claims that immigrants take more than they give—a Los Angeles County study, another by Rice University professor emeritus Donald Huddle—with "Census Bureau data for 1970s earnings...
...while many of those who favor immigration are supporters of the welfare state, and don't mind very much if immigrants make use of it, whether they are legal or not...
...You're in Tijuana, and lots of cabdrivers want to drive you downtown...
...I think even California Assemblyman Willie Brown realizes that taxes cannot be raised any higher...
...The majority (three of whom have now left the court) said the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment applied to education because of the "lasting impact of its deprivation on the life of the child"—sociological guesswork dressed up as constitutional law...
...It's an obstacle that most of the time is "flattened" by market forces—the heavy volume of passengers who are crossing at every minute...
...It is that the free-market system has been eroded by the ever-encroaching welfare state...
...Because they got something for nothing, they see America as a land of injustice and work for "change...
Vol. 26 • November 1993 • No. 11
