From the Steve Sailer Archive
- confirmation comes from Jason Richwine
PS In England there are
Superior Rights For Illegal
Immigrants
Immigrant:
Who,
Whom?
by Steve
Sailer As Lenin said, the eternal question is always
"Who,
whom?" And when it comes to understanding America's current immigration
policy, the old mass-murderer sure had it right. It's time to point fingers. More immigrants are admitted under the
"family-reunification" policy than for any other reason. Unfortunately, the
impact of the family-reunification quota, especially the harm it's done to
African-Americans, is shrouded by the American phobia about thinking honestly
about race. This purportedly idealistic smokescreen is actually concocted by the
clever in order to wage class war on the clueless. Maybe not intentionally, but
isn't it funny how people tend to come up with ideals that are in their
interests? Serious discussions of immigration reform have
been off the table for years in America precisely because the current
immigration policies provide America's verbal elite with a new, improved servant
class at no cost to themselves in terms of greater competition. Mexicans may be
flooding into the U.S., but they are not taking jobs away from American lawyers,
media people, politicians, business executives and the like. The Mexicans with
the verbal skills to do these jobs stay home in Mexico speaking Spanish.
Instead, small, brown, diligent, and submissive immigrants have displaced large,
black, unmotivated, and surly native Americans as our auto mechanics, waiters,
gardeners, cleaning ladies, child-minders, and the like. We consumers of these
services get better workers for less money. The African-American elites go along with this
scheme. They sell out the black working class on immigration because more
immigrants means more pressure for identity politics and multiculturalism (i.e.,
quotas, jobs as diversity sensitivity consultants, ethnic pride educators,
etc.), which means more easy money for the black verbal elite. There are two prominent intellectual positions
on immigration: The extremely unpopular one is that ethnicity matters, and that
immigration policy should not be used to change the current ethnic makeup of
America. The much more popular view, which dominates both the liberal and
conservative media establishments (e.g., the Wall Street Journal editorial
page), argues that high immigration is good for the country, and we should be
color-blind in our immigration policy, because America is a "proposition" nation
(e.g., "All men are created equal", etc.) rather than a nation of blood and
soil. The first view appears to be a political
nonstarter, because of the nonstop indoctrination of whites against them
personally feeling any ethnocentrism. The second view, colorblindness, hits all the
right notes in today's American zeitgeist but, as we've seen, its effects are
hardly colorblind: the current system hurts Americans on the left side of the
bell curve in order to help those on the right side. It damages
African-Americans and, at least economically, Mexican-American citizens. For
example, Cesar Chavez volunteered his United Farm Worker staff to patrol the
border to keep out the Mexican immigrants who were driving down the wages of the
Mexican-American stoop laborers in his union. By cutting down the supply of
farmworkers competing for jobs, Chavez managed to drive up their wages during
the Seventies. But the Mexican economic crisis of the early Eighties and the
lack of any real effort to keep new immigrants out overwhelmed his efforts under
a flood of cheap immigrant workers. Stoop laborers' wages stopped growing in
1981. On the other end of the bell curve, however,
are highly intelligent whites with outstanding verbal skills, who face little
immigrant competition (other than from the occasional immigrant English magazine
editor), but who desperately want the government's help with their servant
problem. I'll propose an alternative to these two
ideas, based on American patriotism. Let's set up America's immigration system
to maximally benefit the people of whatever ethnic group who are American
citizens as of today. Further, the bias in the system should be toward helping
those Americans less able to compete intellectually with future immigrants. To my mind, the fundamental goal of
immigration policy is to maximize the benefit to existing citizens, just as the
fundamental goal of a public corporation's management is to maximize the wealth
of its current stockholders, not of people who might buy stock later. Think of
the U.S. as an employee-owned corporation like United Airlines. Immigration
policy is thus like United's hiring policy. The goal of United Airline's hiring
policy is to optimize the benefits to the existing stockholder-employees by
hiring the new stockholder-employees who have the most to contribute at the
lowest cost. Similarly, the goal of America's immigration policy logically ought
to be to brain drain the rest of the world of the people who can contribute the
most to the welfare of current American citizens. Thus, we should be actively recruiting the
most intelligent and most entrepreneurial -- they'll produce the most new wealth
and new jobs in America, and the Americans they'll be competing with can best
afford the new competition. In contrast, we should be diligently keeping out
run-of-the-mill would-be immigrants who would merely add to the competition
faced by our less intelligent citizens, since lower IQ American citizens can
least afford additional wage competition. The most important part of our current
immigration law, family reunification, is the equivalent of United Airlines
letting its newest employees nepotistically determine its next hires. Obviously,
UA would never even consider such an absurd policy, but that's what the USA
does. The second largest contributor of new
immigrants under the current law, the need of American corporations for
particular skills, has worked well in itself, but when combined with family
reunification it just ends up lowering wages for African-Americans and others
who can least afford it. Say, Intel imports the next Andy Grove, who soon begins
creating new jobs for Americans through his brilliance. However, Mrs. Grove2 is
allowed under the law to bring over her sister, who brings her husband, who
brings his deadbeat brother, who brings his nothing-special daughter, who is
married to Mr. Nobody, etcetera etcetera. Regression to the mean takes its
terrible toll. Eventually, we've brought in a bunch of people of no particular
talent other than they will no doubt work harder for less money than current
blue-collar white and black Americans. This will keep down wage inflation, which
today seems to be automatically assumed to be a Good Thing. But shouldn't one of
the goals of America be to see the wages of the bottom half of our bell curve
rise over time?
Jason Richwine
http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/r/jason-richwine Executive Summary Unlawful immigration and amnesty for current
unlawful immigrants can pose large fiscal costs for U.S. taxpayers. Government
provides four types of…
Read more The Congressional Budget Office has applied a risk-appropriate
discount rate to student loans based on what private lenders would offer for a…
Read more As Congress again considers preventing the interest rate on
federal student loans from doubling, the cost to taxpayers should be a central…
Read more The cost of pensions for public school teachers is a major focus
of debates over education spending. In Wisconsin, for example, Democrats…
Read more The high cost of teacher pensions looms over the American public
school system, but some defenders of the system would prefer that…
Read more The generosity of retirement benefits for government employees
has become a major political issue, as policymakers at all levels of government
struggle…
Read more Edited by Lindsey M. Burke In his enduring 1964 convention
speech “A Time for Choosing,” Ronald Reagan remarked that “outside of its
legitimate…
Read more Bill the engineer wants to become a teacher. He has 10 years of
experience working in the engineering division of Lockheed Martin, and…
Read more If public employees are underpaid, they ought to get raises when
they switch to the private sector. But they don’t, and that…
Read more With state and local governments struggling to balance budgets
in a still sluggish economy, government employment has fallen by 562,000 jobs
since…
Read more Errors & omissions, broken links,
cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if
you find any I am open to comment. Updated on
23/06/2018 21:29
Doctor Richwine worked for the
Heritage Foundation, which is
written up by the
Wikipedia as an
American
conservative
think tank
based in
Washington, D.C. The
Wikipedia
chooses to allege that its stated mission is to "formulate and promote
conservative
public policies based on the principles of
free
enterprise,
limited government,
individual freedom, traditional
American values, and a strong
national defense". This sounds reasonable to me. Here are some of his
essays. If they disappear contact me.
Email
me at Mike Emery. All
financial contributions are cheerfully accepted. If you want to keep
it private, use my PGP Key. Home
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