Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door! – Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”
When my husband and I first met he lived in the Los Angeles area, and after we were engaged I would travel there several times a year to spend a few weeks with him, leaving Grace to run the agency except for my shift on the phones. Occasionally we had to run down to San Diego, north of which (along Interstate 5) lies an immigration control center which in those days was rarely open, thus allowing undocumented migrants to pass through the area unmolested. Whenever we would pass and see this, my husband would say something like “I guess they must need dishwashers in Los Angeles or vegetable pickers in the Sacramento Valley.”
This was his way of pointing out what Americans who support greater restrictions on immigration love to ignore: that the majority of jobs they whine about immigrants “stealing” from “real Americans” (most of whom are themselves no more than three generations removed from immigrants) are those no native American would touch, such as agricultural labor. Some of them have an answer for that: “if they paid higher wages they could get American workers.” Of course, increased production costs would increase the price of the produce and any finished product which relied on it, which the anti-immigrant people would then complain about; perhaps these good Americans believe the farmers should simply accept decreased profits, or that the federal government should subsidize the greater costs? But that would be socialism, wouldn’t it? And judging by the noise these folks raise about the costs of “illegals” (as they’re so fond of calling them), they obviously aren’t in favor of that.
Proponents of tighter immigration are fond of saying immigrants need to “get in line”. Here, courtesy of Reason magazine, is a flow chart of that “line” (click to enlarge, and again to magnify).
I’m not denying that there are migrants who cross into welfare states in order to sponge off of their largesse, but how are they different from home-grown freeloaders? A parasite is a parasite, and judging by America’s ever-increasing government bureaucracies, we have nothing against them. Contrary to what the pundits claim, the majority of migrants want to work for a living, just as the majority of native-born citizens do, and since they are often willing to work harder, longer and more cheaply at less-pleasant jobs than those born to the softer life of a developed nation, they can out-compete natives at such jobs. That’s called capitalism, folks; it’s what made this country the wealthiest one in the world, and if you don’t like it I’m sure there are a number of nice socialist (and a couple of leftover communist) countries to which you could yourself migrate.
So why am I discussing this topic? Well, it’s partly because as I mentioned in my columns of June 22nd and 29th, increasing anxiety about unorthodox methods of migration is one of the root causes of “trafficking” hysteria, which is then conflated with prostitution and results in ever-more-Draconian prostitution laws and greatly increased anti-whore police activity, and that makes it my business. But it’s also because I’m really sick of hearing the lawhead phrase “illegal alien”, which is of course intended to make them sound like criminals. How, pray tell, are arbitrary immigration laws any different from the arbitrary laws you break? Don’t say you don’t break laws, because everyone does. And I don’t mean Silverglate’s inadvertent felonies (which are an entirely different issue); I mean the victimless “crimes” that you, I and everyone else purposefully choose to commit on a regular basis. There is no moral difference between a migrant choosing to violate an arbitrary immigration law in order to have a chance for a better life, my violating arbitrary laws against my profession, your failing to pay state use taxes for online purchases, or your brother-in-law smoking weed. And all of those actions are far more moral than the rampant violations we as a nation allow cops and prosecutors to commit every day, because their actions genuinely hurt people (often grievously), whereas breaking of arbitrary codes, statutes, ordinances and rules almost never does.
I’ve been thinking about this a great deal lately, and when I read this New York Times article posted on June 22nd, I felt it was time to write a column about the subject. The article is the story of Jose Antonio Vargas, an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines who came to the U.S. in 1993 when he was 12, worked hard to learn English,
discovered he was “illegal” when he was 16, excelled in school and became a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist…only to be told that the only way he could ever become “legal” was to accept a ten-year exile before reapplying (presumably this is intended as a paternalistic “punishment”, the governmental equivalent of “go to your room and don’t come out until I tell you”). Vargas decided it was time to to tell his story in the hopes of educating people about the myths and realities of undocumented migrants, and a few of the things he said in his article may sound very familiar to my prostitute readers:
…I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am…There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.
This is one of those issues that tears me apart …
On the one hand – I SAW how migrants flooded into the New Orleans area after Katrina to help rebuild the place. They, like many of us, were living in some pretty squalid conditions and working in the overwhelming heat to rebuild the place. Yeah, they were there for profit – but that doesn’t bother me because, they were THERE. I was there trying to re-assemble my life and I was thankful they were there to help with the things (like roofing) that I just don’t know how to do. Without them – the labor shortage in the construction industry would have been ten times worse than it was – and that means none of us would have rebuilt in the astonishly short amount of time that we did.
And you know – a certain “Darwinian” aspect of me says that people who are willing to move around and work like this SHOULD inherit the earth before the rich before fat, lazy, white guys sitting on their couches …
But …
Then again … I think about “open borders” … and logic tells me that opening them will likely be the end of the US – at least as we know it. I mean – Mexico is a poor country and most of the people will want to come here – and won’t that drag our economy down? It’ll certainly help pick Mexico’s up a bit – but I think it necessarily means our comes down quite a bit.
I just don’t know.
The Capitalist part of me says that only those who can live and work here (find jobs) – will come, so even an open borders policy would kind of be self-regulating.
But I’m deathly afraid of committing to that – because, if I’m wrong … there’s a lot to lose.
It stands to reason that an open-border policy would be self-regulating as long as people are required to support themselves. Politicians distributing largess from the public treasury in order to win votes is a separate issue which is conflated with immigration, just as “child trafficking” is conflated with prostitution. I always shake my head when I hear people bitching about “illegal immigrants on welfare”; if that’s their gripe shouldn’t they be supporting tighter controls on welfare rather than tighter controls on immigration? The “hang ’em all” approach to immigration, prostitution, drugs, etc has never worked, but has become increasingly popular anyhow.
As for “illegal” immigration from Mexico, that’s less of a problem than the alarmists pretend.
My only real problem with illegal immigration is they blatent hypocricy of mexican nationals and government officers decrying the US policies and draconian and boarding on abusive of human rights when the Mexican governments policies on illegal immgration are far more harsh.
I live in AZ, a hot bed for the immigration ‘debate’, and both sides have good points, both sides have blatant racisits, and both sides refuse to listen to each other.
Personally I’m of the opinion that people should put their money where there mouth is. I’d support the dream act if it was whittled down to any children brought here illegally by their parents had to agree to seve a 6 yr term in the militray and recive an honerable dischrge, if they wanted citizenship and their parent had to turn themselves in to be deported and could never be eligable for citizenship.
They say they are sacrficing to provide their kids a better life, so prove it and sacrifce.
In the mean time a better temporary work visa syatem needs to be worked out, because I dont care what any american says, even in tough economic times like these they arent willing to work 10 hours a day working a field digging up head of cabbage
Yeah … see … this is why I like your mind Maggie. I’m kind of new to the libertarian thought process – not saying you’re a libertarian but a lot of what you talk about seems to jibe with what I know about that political philosophy.
Everything has a “cause” and “effect” … and people will scream across the border as long as they have a reason to. You’re right – I don’t care too much about hard working Mexicans being here in the United States, and I think I outlined my own anecdotal (positive) experience with that. The major concern is those who come here for a free ride and … you can eliminate that problem by simply eliminating “free rides”.
I think there is also a “racial” component to the resistance to migrants – or, at least an “unconscious” one. I get over that by simply realizing that – at the end of the line here – we all blend into one race eventually. That’s just the natural order of things and there is no since in getting all worked up about temporal elements having to do with race.
Anyway … I think another economic meltdown will be visited upon the US soon – I think all we have done over the last two years is stave off the inevitable, and the plane is going crash eventually. At that point – maybe we can get on to “United States Ver. 2.0”, which will have to be more streamlined and sustainable than the current leviathan government is – think maybe we can draft you to lead the effort?
“Libertarian” is about as close as one label can come to describing my political views, Mark; I’m also a bit of an agorist if that helps.
About the free ride…yes, exactly. If the issue is too many freeloaders, work on that issue. Attacking every member of a group for the actions of a small minority is bigotry of the worst kind.
As for my leading the effort: I would never agree to be president because the office has no real power to change anything any more (as everyone since at least Nixon has discovered). I’d only accept the position of dictatrix, and my first action would be to increase my own personal security because there would be a lot of people gunning for me once my budgetary and organizational scalpels started going to work.
Yeah … you’d be “fragged” for sure!!
I would cut a few things with my budgetary scalpels, but they wouldn’t be the same things as you would cut, because I’m not a libertarian:
1) The military. Bring home the troops from A’stan and Iraq alot of other places. End the so-called “oil wars”. Put the money saved into alternative energy.
2) Cut farm subsidies. No more paying people not to grow food. They only get help if their crops fail.
I’m sure there are many other things I would cut, but it would be too many to mention. Here are things I would NOT cut:
1) Food Stamps, WIC, Welfare, Disability, SSI, Social Security, Veterans Benefits, Healthcare, Schools, the Park Service, etc.
These things stay, no matter what.
There are a lot of things I’d just cut period, but most things I would simply cut out the waste by cutting out 90% of the bureaucracy which consumes most of the funds.
There’s ALOT of that to cut 🙂
FYI, Susan… Libertarians are generally opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: see Reason cover story on money wasted on wars and farm subsidies as rent seeking or corporate welfare (since the larger the farm, the larger the subsidy).
It’ll certainly help pick Mexico’s up a bit – but I think it necessarily means our comes down quite a bit.
You’re treating immigration as a zero-sum game, which is incorrect. When people move from a depressed area to a booming area, both areas gain, as do the immigrants themselves.
Of course, as long as the U.S. steals from the productive to give to the shiftless, there WILL be a temptation for people to move to the U.S. just to sponge off us. Like you, I oppose that. But my opposition is to the welfare state, not to unrestricted immigration.
I’ve read that in the not-so-distant past, people could travel to most parts of the world without restriction. No photo ID required, no passport, no visa. Terrorists? Unless you count old-time pirates, there were none. Contrast that with today: you can either sneak across a border, and live in constant fear of discovery and deportation, or you can get an endless stack of documents and STILL be subjected to naked body scans, groping, intrusive questions, and confiscation of your electronic gear at the whim of government thugs.
Oh yes, I know, we’ve got terrorism today. It never seems to sink through the tiny heads of “security” supporters that the reason people around the world hate the U.S. is because the U.S. has been meddling in their countries for decades, sometimes just propping up brutal dictators, sometimes actually blowing up innocents. We could achieve peace with the world again if we’d stop shooting guns where we don’t belong, but the mindset “We’ve got to kill our way to a brighter future!” is quite entrenched among the booboisie (which includes 99% of government parasites).
Everyone meddles in other countries, and while I dont think the US should act as the worlds police the fact reamins that out involvemt on the whole has been generally benifical.
And while I dont know about you personally JdL, I uually find most of the people who complain about amercias involvment in the affairs of some forgien nations are just as quick to decry americas lack of involvment in other forgien nations.
And usually the brutal dicatoers we wind up supporting are the lesser evil of the avalible choices. Not always, but usually.
the fact reamins that out involvemt on the whole has been generally benifical.
Couldn’t disagree more. Could you give an example of U.S. involvement in another nation that has been beneficial for the U.S.?
Our involment in the middle east has kept oil prices from fluctuating wildly by proping up political regimes which prevented intertriabl warfre prone to the region.
Our involment in afganistain in the 80’s helped tie up the russias to the point where they bankrupted themselves
Our invloment in WW2 is a bit more trickey, we did help stop the spread of the 3rd Reich, but it did result in the formation of the USSR.
20+ yrs of hindsight always highlights the errors in judgemnt. it becomes obvious that almost all of international intervention is just an atempt to mitigate the damages caused by the last round of intervention. But those errors are not knowable until years after the fact.
It like a maze, you ever done one of those books of mazes? going from strat to finish the way isnt always clear, but starting at the end of the maze ans working your way backwards and it seems like the path is highlighted in neon colors.
History is the same way, looking backwards the various twists and turns seem almost inevitable in the way things progressed. Ofcourse had the path of history go in the completly opposite direction people would still view it as just as inevitable.
But from the perspective of tht point looking forward into an unknown future outcomes arent nearly as forseeable – usually
The Soviet Union was formed around the end of WW1. WW2 cannot be blamed for it.
Actually, JdL, there are countries such as Haiti that require no passports or visas. I don’t know how many of these are, but even if there are 60 it wouldn’t negate your overall statement. The US and Britain are definitely headed for a fascist future. There was a recent British public television series (fictional) about over the top government intrusion, called Total Information Awareness.
To which government department did George Washington apply for permission to reside in the USA?
None, he was born in Virginia, as a legal resident of the British Empire
Lujlp,
One note: the USSR was fully established by WWII. It was established during and after the first world war; the Russian Revolution started in and around 1917 (depending on when you count it really starting). It was”communist” in a Leninist-Stalinist vein after the Mensheviks were ousted by the Bolsheviks. Revolutions never go as you expect them to.
I am aware of that, my point was that the infux of troops and support from America to the western european allies impacted the Nazi war effort to the east, and Stalins betral by Hitler lead to increased militirazation after WW2.
Had americ not entered the war or offered any support it is well within the realm of possibility that russia would have fallen
Yeah. We also supplied the USSR mountains of materiel through Murmansk and up through Iran. Most of what we supplied was logistical equipment and commodities such as large amounts of aviation fuel. Also 400,000 trucks, all of the new train locomotives save 8 the they acquired during the war — this allowed the USSR to turn it’s train and truck factories over to making tanks and artillery. Also 3000 planes. All kinds of other stuff.
yes, I too am quite sick of the term “illegal alien”. Lovely display of dehumanization there, no?
I’m not entirely sure what the biggest issue with the border is….from what I can make out it’s mostly an issue of sovereignty (issues with the now confirmed North American Union), partly an issue of drug/firearm smuggling and money laundering (cartels and corrupt corporatist gov’t entities), partly economical (construction in AZ used to be a good job), part questions of entitlement (why should they come here and receive welfare), a bit cultural (welcome to America, now speak English), and yes a bit racist (what can be expected when the legal term for immigrant is “illegal alien”). Personally, my opinion is that it’s a free world and people ought to be able to travel as they wish and they ought to be welcomed if they’re not burdening others. If such an ideal were met, by all means, close the borders…since why would people then have any need to sneak in? Unfortunately however the current situation is far from the ideal in every possible sense.
@Maggie,
This is long, but I respect your commentary and insight, so I thought I’d show you some respect by giving this post some serious consideration.
It stands to reason that an open-border policy would be self-regulating as long as people are required to support themselves.
This is a standard libertarian viewpoint. I see the logic. However, like all libertarian social logic, it’s far too rational and straightforward to apply to directly to something as complex as human states/ethnic relations. Humans aren’t rational most of the time – and this is why economists have such trouble. it’s not that economics can’t be a “science” – it’s that humans as a group aren’t mutually interchangeable logic units. In fact, it’s the human factor that muddles analysis.
If there’s no welfare state – including free education, that’s also key, you need to eliminate all free services of any kind – then there’s no welfare state for anyone. It means we can’t help “our own” in a tight situation. I may not be opposed to this, but humans are all for helping out “their own” – we’re naturally as socialist as we are individualist/capitalist. We help out our family and view outsiders as obstacles and objects – this is our natural state. And beyond language and cultural barriers, it’s almost impossible for humans to see others as “us”. Language and culture seem to be the litmus test for ultimate “inclusiveness”.
“Diversity” isn’t always a strength. In fact, societies that manage diversity are usually successful in spite of their “diversity” – not because of it.
And this libertarian view, while reductionist and logical from an economic standpoint, disregards the effect of ethnicity, language and race. Imagine if hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Iranians, Pakistanis and Philippinos converged on Japan. What effect would it have on Japanese society? How about 100 million Africans in China?
You can argue that Japanese racism would cause problems, or that minority-immigrant inflexibility would be a problem – either side – but it’s irrelevant to the very real social issue:
A formerly homogenous society would become fractured and ethnically/racially/culturally divided. American society actively excluded non-“type” humans; it functioned very well, unless you were non-standard, in which case it was awful. In many ways, the benefits accrued to this society because it was somewhat monolithic. To truly participate, even my ancestors had to suck it up (Irish catholic); only when they surrendered their differences were they allowed in. They did so, … resentfully. It lingers even now. Some could never quite fit – blacks and those who refused to surrender their languages. And those who ideologically couldn’t be let in, like Indians, whose land we’d stolen in the first place.
But this isn’t about guilt: it’s about what is.
This is what’s happening here. Masses of immigrants are coming who share none of the cultural, linguistic or social backgrounds of those who are already here; the numbers are what matter. It’s essentially population replacement. It’s what happened to the Celts in England. That should be a manifest lesson for us. We – as members of a post-colonial Anglo-American state – will lose control of our state/territory and eventually our culture, swarmed by immigrants unless we control border admissions. This process is well under way in many countries and is more common than invasion and warfare in the elimination or transformation of societies.
Contrary to popular belief, migration is the main way cultures are supplanted, forcibly changed or relegated to the dustbin of history. Most “invasions” are non-military.
“Alternate America” (Canada) wasn’t conquered by force of arms after the war against the French: immigrants just flooded in after treaties were signed. Canadians I know are proud of their non-violent past this way, but look at it: they didn’t slaughter Indians, at all, they just swamped them with millions of people. The Indians were rendered irrelevant, pushed aside through a thousand indignities and overwhelming numbers.
This is the fate of societies that let strangers come in.
Analogy:
Say you own a huge estate, a nice profitable one. You divide it up between your sons and daughters, etc. Then migrants come and start picking off pieces of it. They submit to your authority – for now – as patriarch of your family’s interests. But eventually, they’ll form a sizeable population, and then, … your concern for your family will conflict with their concern for themselves.
It’s about our ability to look after “our own”. With no borders, there’s no state, with no state, there’s no collective action possible – and cultures in action are defined by their ability to take actions for mutual benefit.
What’s more, it’s become a standard liberal shibboleth that any discussion of immigration is verboten.
This guy dissects this well:
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson070311.html
As a country that has borders and a distinct population, it’s entirely within our purview to allow those we want in to come or to keep those we want out to stay out. Any nation or cultural group that gives up this control effectively asks for its own demise – or at least the surrender of its control over its own polity and land.
It’s essentially like inviting the Germans to move into Italy. What you get is “Italy” in name, but not in its traditional or meaningful sense. It becomes an extension of “Germany”. The name “Italy” may hang around for a while. The region of Austria called Bohemia is named after the Boii;Reims after the Remi; Schwabia after the Suebi of ancient name; … some are definitely gone (Dacia is now Romania, rather dramatically rem=named and repopulated).
Matters of language and identity are not negligible or irrelevant. Cultures exist in conflict with each other, by the mere fact of their existence: I am not You. Languages are the ultimate barriers.
A country like Canada can stumble along, but nobody outside Canada is convinced the English and French can live together – and the Canadians I know are equally unconvinced. It’s a convenient fiction that they can, and this fiction keeps them going. As long as they believe it, they can paper over the significant differences even I can see – but not forever.
Note that England is called “England” – “Angle-Land”; it was a bad day when the Roman-Celts invited itinerant families from a spit of land to the coasts of Britain to help defend it. The legend of Arthur came from real kings who attempted to defend the Celtic lands from the later depredations and expansions of the Angles and Germanic peoples. Otherwise, we’d just be using the old term, “Pryttani” – “Britain”. And speaking something much more similar to Welsh and Pictish (or possibly old Irish – they would likely have still invaded northern Britain; maybe Danish?).
We all know who won that cultural conflict. Ahem. I’m not speaking Welsh.
That there are Celts left at all who aren’t absolutely assimilated is a testament to the tenacity of those cultures and those identities, even in the face of near-total extermination.
Ask the Mexican Indians what they think of Hispanic “arrivals”. They had no trouble building some of the most impressive civilizations on Earth until along came the Spaniards. The invasions were one thing – you might have expected a future decolonization a la Africa – but for the massive depopulation of Indian Mexico through disease, mostly, but also abuse and interbreeding – to the point where the Maya, once one of the most accomplished and successful people on Earth, are beggars in the ruins of their own cities, managed by Mestizo and largely White/Spanish-Speaking archaeologists who have turned the relics of Mayan culture and modern Mayan society into museum pieces for study. Not that I dislike museum pieces – but instead of an active, aggressive, expanding and healthy culture, Mexican Indians are tenants in their own lands. They don’t even own their own cultural relics. Their past has become the property of the descendants of their “immigrants.”
So while libertarian ideology is logical, ethnic affiliation and cultural identity is not. It’s not a minor part of human life. Add in racial identity. Ask blacks to give up their own racial identity for a universal American one. More blacks are resistant to this than whites.
It’s not rational. Humans are, by and large, not rational actors when it comes to this. It’s never been true. And despising this instinct and wanting to change it makes you a wishful thinker – it’s commendable, but the larger question is–
Is it reasonable?
In a very real sense, good fences make good neighbors. Only when neighbors are comfortable with each other can they mix freely without anxiety. All cultures and groups have this anxiety.
Mexico is brutal to other Hispanic migrants who arrive at its borders – its policies are much more savage to “immigrants” than ours. It’s rank hypocrisy for Mexico to promote an open border for Mexicans with the United States but to slam shut their own borders with other Hispanic countries. Nobody ever addresses this.
What it says is that the drive to open the border is purely an issue of white / anglo self-hatred (well evidenced by the left here) and Mexican self-interest.
Libertarians are (unconsciously?) abetting this through a very logical and rational argument that unfortunately has little to do with human reality.
Enlightened self-interest is the norm in all human societies. For us to abandon it while even Mexico doesn’t is for us to culturally surrender our identity – out of guilt, shame, economic logic or whatever – without requiring that others do the same.
In short, it’s cultural self-annihilation.
This is fine, but it needs to be seen for what it is. Remember one thing, one rule that absolutely dominates all aspects of human society everywhere and everywhere:
Demographics are everything. And even when they don’t seem to be, they’re still everything.
No economy in history has grown when its population was contracting. No culture has thrived when outsiders had more babies and too control of the means of production or land or institutions. Demographics are everything.
By not having babies, Greeks guaranteed conquest eventually by someone – the Romans, say. It’s really that simple. 300 guys can hold off millions of barbarians at a mountain pass for a while, but unless you’re mobilizing 50,000 supporters to come out next year and fight, those 300 lives will be lost in history.
These are not minor points: they’re the stuff of history. This “immigration” issue is literally a wave of history happening as we watch. It’s the same as the American expansion west. The issue now isn’t “justice”. We’re in a position analogous to the Celts of Britain. if we invite the Angles in, sure, we might get some help in the short-term: But I guarantee you, and history only teaches this one lesson, that long-term, the prognosis isn’t good. At some point, the US will become more and more like Mexico, possibly resembling a slightly more nostalgic Brazil; a tiny white minority will wield al wealth, and the people they rule will be largely Mestizo.
Blacks will be further marginalized by an even more profoundly racist Hispanic population; and the direct competition for the jobs they want will cause intense competition with the newcomers, who operate initially and likely for some time at the same social level.
We’re doing a grotesque disservice to our own (black and white) lower classes by allowing foreigners in.
It’s a recipe for cultural decay and social disaster. There’s no place this has worked out well for the original inhabitants. Ask the Cherokee or the Tinasi or the Alabami or the Natchez or the Pueblo or the Six Nations or even the Cajuns. Thanks, Napoleon.
Also it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to dismantle free education, which means that, like in California, school boards have little to look forward to but poorer students, overall bankruptcy and overcrowding, like in California, where the principal problem appears to be with the student body and the outrageous expense of teaching students who, quite simply, shouldn’t be there – not the schools. That’s been shown endlessly but is one of the “non discussables” in education. Virtually no teachers or public-system accountants will privately deny that that’s one of California’s major problems. They’re the least privately politically correct people in the country.
And the Hispanic population has started to do what all democracy bashers throughout history have said the rabble would do: They discovered that they can vote themselves goodies.
We all love democracy, but as soon as you can vote yourself goodies that you didn’t build yourself, the game is up. That’s a trick that “oppressed:” minorities learn, and then go on to hobble themselves with a sense of general entitlement, sapping their people of the desperate need and hence the desire to achieve on their own steam.
And our cities begin to resemble Cancun (Mexican Cancun) and Monterrey.
None of this is to belittle Mexicans or their entrepreneurial spirit: only to shift the focus to our own self-interest.
As a counter to this model, may I again point to “alternate America”?
Canada has a “points” system for immigration and absurdly tight requirements. We could never implement this here. Their system amounts to:”
– Eugenic selection. Only those with success/education/connections are allowed in. Their minority populations are cut from the a better foreign cloth than ours. Don’t have what it takes to get by, and do well? Get out. Canadians won’t admit it to me, but this is a highly Eugenic philosophy – in fact, it’s so quietly Eugenic in nature, though based in national self-interest, it’s surprising their left-wing hasn’t dismantled the system. Hitler couldn’t have invented something more clever.
– Enlightened self-interest. The point of immigration is propping up their vastly overinflated welfare state and they need top quality to do it. I checked into what you need to live there. They favor young, smart, educated immigrants with money and if you have kids, all the better. That’s smart.
– Family reunification: I wasn’t convinced this was a good idea, until it was pointed out that elders often provide things like free baby care. I read one study that showed that the support among immigrants for universal daycare was the lowest in the country – because they have grandparents to look after the kids while both parents work. Very clever. Also promotes solid families.
– No forced assimilation. The result: on a recent trip through Canada on my way back from Chicago, saw again hordes of mixed couples/groups there I’d never see in Boston. They were all speaking English with a native Canadian accent. In essence, they let people settle, and then culturally steal the children.
It’s still a form of population replacement, but they’re selecting from the top of the gene and culture pool. In effect, they’re draining the upper middle and middle classes of other countries. If I were a Haitian, I’d be pissed off – my elite, the only people capable of running the place, get to go and live in cold Utopia and Haiti or its equivalent are left in squalor, corruption and filth.
But if you’re going to have immigration, *THAT* is the the only kind you want.
Self-interested.
Canada is a deeply socialist place, and yet no anti-racist Pro-Raza groups are fulminating and angry over immigration policy. Everyone sees that it’s Canadian self-interest alone that justifies any policy. Both the right and left have no problem with this.
In fact, the left there attacks any immigration because it devalues the labor of the native-born. Why export jobs? More to the point, why bring in more cheap labor to lower and depress wages?
The debate there seems entirely different, and on both sides, far more intelligent and connected to reality. Also, their immigration is from all over the world.
Ours is almost exclusively from Latin America, and almost all of that is Mexican.
Numbers matter. Scale and scope matters. Canada can take in a few immigrants and tolerate some social issues, because it has a policy of active self-interest that it controls tightly.
We have no ability to articulate self-interest, because debate is stifled by cries of “racism” (which means cultural chauvinism, not racism). Being pro-“American” is no longer fashionable. Wanting to live in America and not Amexica, even while being friendly with Mexico, is now seen as Nazi-like on one side or “irrational” because immigration is irrelevant to economic logic.
Like their banking system, Canadians have lots of institutions that could teach us a lot. It’s like Alternate America, where the weather is shit but the elite are far smarter when it comes to doing things in their own interests.
The more polarized diversity we allow, the more fractious we let our society become, the less rational any debate on this subject will be.
The best thing we could do would be to shut the border to further migration, force consumers to pay higher prices for onions, or better, outsource the growing of onions where Mexicans can pick them – in Mexico.
We’re not in government to look after the interests of Mexico. That’s what the Mexican government is for, and they’re doing a fantastic job of it on this issue.
We need to stop being ashamed of our own self-interested and stop being blindly ideological – whether on the anti-“racist” left or the anti-immigrant right or the libertarian wishful thinking wing.
Humans are animals. We need to take into account our natural propensities. In all things.
In this issue, above all else.
tens of millions of illegal immigrants can go home. Maybe we can alow a buy-in: those who have made themselves successful can pay a fee for an amnesty, not for revenue but to prove they’re successful. Any associated with crime go to jail and are then deported (to get drug dealers). Then shut down that border.
We can spend billions more on policing and schools or spend half that on good border protection. We can field high-tech armies in Iraq but not Texas?
Hell, Mexico polices its borders better than we do on a fraction of the budget.
We need will power and positive self-identity. This isn’t a racial one: It’s cultural. Black and white and already-integrated Hispanic America: this is *OUR* country.
We need to say this with actions. Or we’ll have no country at all.
And if having no country at all is the goal – then pro-open-immigration activists should just say this, so we know where they really stand.
Nations are organisms; they are born, grow, mature, decay and die. This is inevitable.
Democracies can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largesse out of the public treasury; this, too is inevitable.
Somebody has to do the slave labor; if peasants are not available domestically they must be imported (or the slave labor outsourced). If every man thinks he’s too good to work, soon there’s nobody to harvest the fields and nobody can afford to repair the roads, and the infrastructure crumbles.
I think you see what I’m getting at; politicians doomed this country long ago by placing personal power above all else and by selling the American dream for votes. This country as it is now is doomed; only a revolution (whether violent or peaceful) can hope to salvage the good parts that are left. And anything which delays the inevitable collapse of the bloated, evil, oppressive system our government has become is undesirable.
i agree with you on all points in your response.
However, as an American, I rage, rage against the dying of the light.
It would be nice to stem the tide, the wave of population replacement while we sort ourselves out politically. if we keep hitting each other while other people replace us, we’ll wake up and our domestic squabbles will be rendered irrelevant by the fact that it’s not our country any more.
You’re more optimistic than I am; this stopped being my country almost twenty years ago. 🙁
20 years ago?
I must have missed it.
I just hope people wake up at some point, before they’re outvoted and outnumbered
Though it may be too late: democracy is slow to respond to threats like this, and when it does, it tends to overreact harshly. I can imagine some of the right-wing response when the situation advances far enough.
Almost 20 years ago. Hard to pin down exactly, but I guess about 1992. It was a number of things, including the height of neofeminist power, the rise of political correctness, the widespread pretense that the government could solve the “health care crisis” it had created through bad laws, and the government’s ordering banks to lend money to people who couldn’t pay it back. 🙁
neofeminists seem to be pretty entrenched.
Political correctness is flailing under the assaults of reality – on race, with the endless assaults of black “flash mobs” and random assaults, many of them deadly, and all of them pointless, by “teens” that otherwise seem shiftless but not criminal. And with feminism, a real revolt by many women who dislike the men feminism has created (weak and submissive) – women didn’t react to a feminist-driven world the way neofeminists thought they would. Oh, and the growing reticence of men to sit back and let family courts destroy worlds. Being called to respect “equality” wasn’t something the PCers thought they’d have to face.
Health care: There’s no way the state could ever have fixed this. The state can barely run a postal service.
And as for lending money – much of the latest financial crisis will have to be laid at the feet of giving money to people – mostly lower-class – who could never have paid it back if the economy were booming.
You can’t endlessly buy votes with the people’s own money. At some point the bills come due.
And eventually, people see your hypocrisies.
That was another of my Cassandra moments; the day I read in the paper that the government would start (basically) forcing banks to give loans to people who couldn’t pay them back, I told Jack “that is going to come back to bite us; it may even cause another depression”. I wish I had been wrong, and I also wish my 1990 prediction that the “health care” hysteria would soon result in Draconian laws against “unhealthy” behaviors had been wrong as well. 🙁
The logic of this is obvious, but the left generally doesn’t see it as problems. They look for structural issues, the people who made money off this, etc. – but they don’t see the root problem because the root problem denies their ideologically-driven dreams of revolutionizing America.
Utopias are dangerous.
I wonder how Canada escaped this. I’m told their society and elites are much more conservative, but they all seem as sheeplish as we are. I think a big difference, frankly, is the lack of an entrenched, more or less disabled underclass unable to function in a modern economy.
And I’m convinced that immigration is different there than here. Their policies are breeding exactly what you’d expect. I drove from Boston – Niagara Falls NY – Niagara Falls Canada – Windsor Canada – Detroit – Chicago.
Everything I saw in the US was a nightmare. Crossing from NY to Ontario province was like crossing from some abandoned, half-nightmarish slum to a promised land; and Canadians think Niagara Falls Canada is the armpit of their country.
Windsor to Detroit – the only words you can use are Holy Shit. Like going from some quiet, beautiful idyll to some nightmarish post-war disaster. It’ll be hard to redeem Detroit.
Chicago – again, the contrast: I stopped in Toronto on the way back for some meetings, and the contrast between the two cities couldn’t’ be more palpable. Chicago may have had some power, but Toronto was clean, safe, and happy: by comparison, paved with gold. Chicago had areas you couldn’t stop your car in. Parts of the city looked like Beirut never did.
Americans needs to wake up. If Canadians can build this in North America, we can.
But we know we have unique problems that need to be overcome.
“I wonder how Canada escaped this.”
They didnt, they just have a much smaller population so the effects arent as noticable -yet, the cracks are starting to show however
BTW if you are ever up there, dont eat at McDonalds, a woman sued under human rights laws, court ordered that McDonalds could not make her wash her hands due to a ‘medical’ condition which dried out her skin if she washed thm too much with antibacterial soap.
What bad laws prevented Healthcare? Because as far as the State is concerned, it is quite capable of providing health care. I lived within 100 miles of the Canadian border the first 30 years of my life, and there were no desperate Canadians coming across the border to the US for healthcare, as the conservatives say. In fact, there were and still are people on this side of the border going to Canada for just that thing.
So, yes, the government is capable of providing healthcare. It’s just that in our case, it chooses not to.
I didn’t say bad laws prevented socialized medicine, I said bad laws created the health care “crisis”. The reason for the “crisis” is that medical costs in the U.S. have skyrocketed since the 1980s, and that happened because U.S. law allowed sleazy lawyers to sue the pants off of doctors, nurses, hospitals and everyone else for bad outcomes that had nothing to do with malpractice; it’s also the reason virtually nobody goes into obstetrics any more.
Of course, you’ve got people whining that eliminating malpractice suits would allow doctors to get sloppy, so here’s a simple solution: make malpractice a criminal offense. Now there’s no money to be made in spurious lawsuits, but real negligence can still be pursued and the burden of proof is where it belongs, on the accuser. 75% of the “health care crisis” solved with the stroke of a pen, and it wouldn’t cost the taxpayers squat. But it won’t happen because the government is infested by lawyers (e.g., John Edwards made millions suing OB/GYNs) who want to protect their own.
The much-maligned “Canadian health-care system” (which works fine) is a single-payer plan, not socialized medicine. We have single-payer in the US and it is called Medicare. It works fine.
Here in the US we also have socialized medicine. The difference between this and single-payer is a simple one: in single-payer the government is your insurance company. The government does not own the hospitals or hire the doctors; they just provide insurance.
But we do have socialized medicine in the US, complete with government ownership of hospitals and government employment of the doctors. It’s called the Veterans Administration, and yes there’s a lot red tape, but it too works.
I’ll have to think over this “medical malpractice as a criminal offense” idea. I can see the basic logic, but I need more time.
They’re different because they don’t have a right to be here, we have the right to deport them, and we hardly need more parasites.
It is perhaps true that most low skilled farm field labor not driving tractors etc. (particularly with fruits and vegetables which often require hand picking) is done by illegal aliens or aliens with temporary visas for that purpose who then jump them. However by far most illegal aliens are not doing agricultural work, but rather work in construction, restaurants, meat packing plants, as maids and gardeners, etc. These are taking jobs Americans would do, yes for somewhat hirer wages.
Capitalism doesn’t require open borders with no checks on immigration. Even that great libertarian economist Milton Friedman said that open borders doesn’t work well in a welfare state. America has very high levels of legal immigration. Few people in favor of more immigration enforcement or even somewhat greater legal immigration restriction want to end all immigration. The highly skilled and intelligent immigrants do contribute to national wealth and growth.
Most illegal immigrants are net tax eaters, rather than net tax payers. Yes they advantage those that hire them but disadvantage the unemployed, low wage earners generally, and tax payers. They’re a net negative, especially at a time of high unemployment that looks to be continuing for a long time.
As well the vast amounts of illegal heavily Amerindian Hispanic immigration mostly from the peasant and unemployed class in Mexico and Central America is rapidly and significantly changing the demographics of this country. Completely wrongly as voluntary though illegal immigrants they also get affirmative action, which discriminates against whites and Asians. Because of this flood and their way above replacement rate fertility, a Euro descended Americans no longer make up a majority of 2 year olds in the US. This country becoming Mexico north more or less doesn’t appeal to me. This flood is “electing” a new population, although the majority of the electorate isn’t and hasn’t voted for this and doesn’t want it. It’s the PC media and to a lesser extent political elites that do, and some business interests.
I agree, but then I’m against the welfare state, affirmative action and the lack of an official language.
Me too, but lets not do open borders before we undo those three things, and other related ones.
As you may have gathered from some of my comments on other posts, I am what is technically called a Crank. As with many political issues of the day, I find myself in no-man’s land muttering “A pox on BOTH your houses” or, indeed, “to hell with the whole boiling”.
In the first place, the problem comes from literally decades, maybe as much as a century, of two-faced immigration policy. ‘Statesmen’ of both major parties have passed laws restricting legal immigration from Mexico (and elsewhere, but Mexico is the problem) with absolutely no intention of seeing those laws enforced. That way they get the votes of Nativists and labor organizers AND people who like cheap labor. All of which demonstrates my long held belief that there is nothing wrong with the average Congresscritter that deep fat frying wouldn’t solve.
I sympathize with landholders along the border who are sick and tired of the damage done by border-running illegals. I sympathize, up to a point, with people who don’t want tax money being spent on services to non-citizens … and I have grave reservations about the arguments that I have read that the illegal workers are paying their way. BUT, on the other hand the rhetoric about the illegals reminds me an awful lot of the anti-Irish swill popular in certain quarters in the 19th century. This is emphasized by my frequently cordial encounters with people I suspect are illegal immigrant Hispanics; they strike me as at least as pleasant as the Irish.
I also believe that I know why George Bush didn’t act more forcefully to impede the migration north. Aside from having too much on his plate to begin with (which is arguably true of any President in history), he faced the question of what would happen in Mexico is the flow of money being ‘sent home’ was halted to any great degree. I remember reading that such monies amounted to the second or third (depending on whose numbers you trusted) biggest source of hard money in the Mexican economy. It strikes me as obvious (and if I’m wrong, please let me know) that cutting off that flow of money might bring the Mexican economy (never in its entire history particularly robust) crashing down, followed by what remains of its government. As bad as things are in parts of Mexico now, absolute anarchy would clearly be worse, and we share about 2000 miles of border with them. Yuck.
For those that worry that Spanish will take over from English as the language of the Nation, I offer this thought; Romance Languages (such as Spanish) have vocabularies of around 60,000 to 80,000 words and common phrases. The latest edition of the OED had around 650,000 entries. If the entire population of Mexico moves north of the Rio Grande English will swallow Mexican-Spanish, burp, and move forward.
I don’t hear any proposals that I think have the chance of a fiddler’s bitch of working out. I’m not even sure what one would look like, unless you count annexing Mexico and sending a draft of the idiot politicians (Present Governor tentatively excepted) who have made such a hash of things in New Jersey to run the place …. thereby improving the governments in both places.
CSP Schofield said,
For those that worry that Spanish will take over from English as the language of the Nation, I offer this thought; Romance Languages (such as Spanish) have vocabularies of around 60,000 to 80,000 words and common phrases. The latest edition of the OED had around 650,000 entries. If the entire population of Mexico moves north of the Rio Grande English will swallow Mexican-Spanish, burp, and move forward.
Karma Plus 10, I’d say.
I don’t remember where I read it but someone described the evolution of English as due “to Norman men-at-arms attempting to pickup Saxon bar-maids.”
I agree, but then I’m against the welfare state, affirmative action and the lack of an official language.
As am I – but until they’re gone, immigration remains a danger.
If we simply allow immigration without first ridding ourselves of these things, we get the worst of all possible worlds.
First steps first.
Filipinos are supposedly our allies, so why must the government try so hard to rub this guy’s face in shit? It’s because we have active sadists in government on every level whose only agenda is punishment. We have a right to revolt, but if we try, we’re traitors.
I offer this as a comment: Bursting of the Spleen
Gawaine Caldwater Ross
Rage is my shelter against despair:
it keepeth me aloft amongst fools,
it provideth me with ammunition;
it offereth me the cell and the noose.
It maketh me fester with indignation
and leadeth me into Revolution.
I war against Republican
deniers of human rights;
I spit in the eyes of Fundies in Texas,
I cast those pastors head first into sties,
take all the priests and cram them
into boxcars because these
are the holy ones who never shut up!
I piss on the grave of Ronald Raygun,
shit in the mouth of Richard Nixon,
disembowel Dick Cheney
and pray for the hanging of
evangelists all!
The list of their crimes is longer than hatred,
how many Popes have wallowed in splendor
and the squalor of wealth obtained by the rack?
Damn the tradition we call Abrahamic!
The Koran and Bible have poisoned the world.
Their God is a sadist, a vengeful mad demon
Who’d torture his children for eternity
For every single minor infraction of the Rules,
I’d destroy every copy of the Koran or Bible
all over the world.
These books are a crime against humanity.
No more do I stand with Lennon and Gandhi,
The bright men of Concord, Thoreau and his pals;
I stand now with the French Revolution
With Mirabeau, Babeuf, Condorcet and Danton,
and scream for the beheading of nobles.
Tiny Robespierre picked up a pen
and undercut the thrones of Europe.
He set the stage for the death of religion,
the secular state, and the lion of freedom,
the tricolor banner, and Physics the law.
After all the killing is over
and I lay upon a mountain of corpses
the stench of their bodies will penetrate Heaven,
and I will be alone with it all.
With no one to talk to, no one to cherish,
a leper, an outcast, a mad dog corralled;
But Rage is my fortress,
And Rage is my keeper,
Rage is my armor,
My mother, my home.
@Susan,
Lrt’s see where we agree and disagree:
I would cut a few things with my budgetary scalpels, but they wouldn’t be the same things as you would cut, because I’m not a libertarian:
1) The military. Bring home the troops from A’stan and Iraq alot of other places. End the so-called “oil wars”. Put the money saved into alternative energy.
I wholeheartedly agree.
2) Cut farm subsidies. No more paying people not to grow food. They only get help if their crops fail.
I’d modify:
They get no help at all. They’re free to buy crop failure insurance on their own dime. if they fail to do so, from poverty or whatever – tough noogies. We might create a break-even Federal Crop Insurance company as a last-resort solution, but given than almost all farms are huge agribusiness anyway, there hardly seems any point.
No subsidies of any kind. Nothing. In fact, I’d subtract the hidden subsidies, too – transport underwriting, infrastructure payments, etc. – that allow farmers or any other businesses to do things more cheaply.
Real economics have to hit all producers properly.
I’m sure there are many other things I would cut, but it would be too many to mention. Here are things I would NOT cut:
1) Food Stamps,
As a desperation relief item – maybe.
I’d set up distribution centers instead. it would be humiliating and the food quality would be second-rate, but that’s what you get for being poor. You get to stay alive: beyond that, get a job.
WIC,
Okay.
Welfare,
I’d definitely phase this out. It’s a gift to the poor to get rid of this. it does nothing but encourage loafing and long-term dependence. Maybe make it last max of 6-12 months, then you’re on your own.
Disability,
This can’t come out of general revenues. Perhaps a dedicated tax on the abled? We should know what we’re paying for.
SSI, Social Security, Veterans Benefits,
Can’t cut veteran’s benefits. They… vote. Also fought for us. These are the only benefits we should absolutely keep.
Healthcare,
We need some actual solution, not this mess. Just getting everyone else to pay for it is no solution.
Schools,
Vouchers. Introduce real competition. Utterly devastate unions: Teachers’ unions are actually antagonistic towards students.
All schools are independent. Anyone can set one up. You get X amount of dollars per pupil – no more. For capital, you’d better raise it. Get some families together. Get a benefactor. Imagine the scope for philanthropy: Rich locals could help create schools all over. Corporations, even. You could sanitize it by making anonymous. Corporate influence could be minimized. All school bureaucracies would be gone: Eliminate all support staff completely.
Create an Examination Board. Have tests. Enforce standards through the use of inspectors. No other bureaucracy is necessary.
All schools get the same per student funding: No more by-district inequalities. You like equality, yes? This way, the tax dollars spent on a black student in Chicago will be identical to the tax dollars spent on a student in Georgetown or Upper Manhattan or Palos Verdes.
Any benefits, including education, require full legal documentation: schools can educate whoever they want to. They’re independent. They can create sprawling, gorgeous campuses, weird music schools, experiment with off-the-wall teaching methods, do whatever they have the impetus *and the budget* for. They get the same $ and not a penny more from the government. The government only enforces standards for academic subjects. Diplomas get awarded in any form by any school; to graduate, students must pass a state/federal board of examinations. Colleges can use whatever criteria they want to to let students in, so long as they’re RACE NEUTRAL. In other words: No taking into account the race of the applicants.
Make names, photos, and background stories verboten on applications. FOllow California’s lead in banning selective admissions. It favors no-one.
For really poor districts, create family-run organizations and incorporate non-profits (observed by the same rules that cover other non-profits) to run the district. Sell the schools to the non-profits.
Privatize it all. Everything.
let competition sort it out.
I expect that this is the only decent way to serve minority students and everyone else equitably.
There’d be no system to complain about – it would be atomized. Of course there would be general standards and benchmarks to be met – schools could be shut down or the administrators replaced; you could have parent boards supervising it (though the local busybodies will inevitably wreck these).
The results:
– A vicious but highly competitive market for schooling. Expect some freaking awesome schools to result, and lots of mediocre and specialized ones. A few bad ones. Now, we have mostly bad ones.
– Lower costs. I expect radically lower costs. All bureaucracy eliminated; general requirements for work increased; general payment the same. it’ll be much, much cheaper.
Better education for less money. It’s possible.
the Park Service, etc.
I’d privatize most of this, too. The public services are generally far inferior to the private ones. In almost all cases, private stewardship of land, in environmentally-conscious non-government agencies, usually non-profits, are stupidly better at doing everything than any level of government. The Parks Service is a bad joke.
I spent time last fall in Canada, hunting deer (tagged one). It’s like America’s parkland or back yard: but well-managed. They have decent public agencies, but they’re all semi-privatized. All of the operations are contracted out, including even reservations for camping.
The Canadian parks system makes us look like Mickey Mouse planning a picnic. It’s humiliating. All the other Americans there say the same thing: The Parks Service in the US means dilapidated, outdated, collapsing infrastructure for huge prices. In Canada, all the parks services turn a profit, are incredibly well-run, and are so much better than ours at preserving and showcasing wilderness it makes me want to emigrate. Hunting is a big deal in my family; the Canadians have sensible management strategies. I can’t even get into the specifics without writing a book on it, but what I saw shocked me. I had no idea a government could be so competent.
And it’s not the government. it’s all arms-length and contracted out. They learned lessons we never did.
These things stay, no matter what.
One thing about “no matter what” – virtually every service run by the government except for backbone necessities is third-rate. I don’t know anything about Canadian medical care or schools, I don’t have enough experience of daily life there, but I know about their parks service and use of public land (“Crown Land” – hah, like every town has “King” and “Queen” street – very cute).
I’ve hunted there three times now, and camped there whenever I’m in the country. I’m always shocked.
I spoke to one teenager staffing the entrance to a public park there last September. To park, you paid $5 a day (pretty cheap considering demand). The beach was free for access. It was clean, filled with quiet, respectful families and barbecueing groups, especially little clumps of Indians with Indian kids and Canada t-shirts. Camping cost you $17 a night for a full-service site in a safe, clean campground with full facilities. The facilities blew my mind: showers and restroom stalls that belonged in an institution, not in the wilderness.
Get this.
The government used to have shitty services, then they contracted it out about 20 years ago. The facilities were all renovated with private cash, to minimum (high) standards, the same as any building code structure. The private companies leased them from the government. Park rangers were trained by the government and paid; local staff were teenage hires from the local communities, giving them local jobs and keeping them in money for the summer. They loved it. The cash to pay them came half from operations and half from the *federal* government under a program for hiring young people: All companies qualified for this funding, the parks were no different. it meant the parks could provide decent wages and get decent teenagers.
There was so much wildlife my SO was terrified of bears and raccoons at night. She was entranced with the mild-mannered, calm, intelligent staff and fellow campers.
Some parks allow alcohol, some don’t. Some allow it at different times.
All of the hunting lodges I’ve been to were well-maintained private affairs.
To go fishing, you need a license – very cheap. But they enforce it. The revenue goes straight to conservation. It’s all separately accounted.
Each park is run independently.
The booking system is contracted out to a very efficient, very friendly private company. They manage the “government” website, as well.
Each of the parks has “friends of X park” associations, with memberships, programs, and etc. – and are integrated into tourism initiatives run by local counties and towns. They cross-promote without useless government jealousies.
They have more parks than we do, by far, all of them gorgeous, all of them accessible, some of them as big as New Jersey.
The system is a bizarre example of profound government success.
And why?
They had the wisdom to
NOT LET THE GOVERNMENT RUN THE SYSTEM.
It makes a profit, is better-managed and better-staffed. Canucks know where every tax dollar goes and where the revenue is spent.
Holy shit, was my response. I wanted to do a doc series on Canadian parks and the outdoors. Their system is a wet dream for an outdoors addict like me. Our Parks Service is a humiliation of a thousand orders of magnitude greater than the post office by comparison.
We think we’re the big shit. We think the government is all great and mighty. Our government is barely competent. It has no idea what the national interest is. Its sole job is fucking up the lives of Americans.
The best thing we could do is starve this bastard government of every penny it needs to function, declare a new – limited – government, and let this one rot.
And don’t get me started on Massachusetts. The follies of my state just boggle the mind. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the shittiest part of Canada or Australia are better run than Mass, despite the disgusting wealth here and the relative richness of the Mass state government.
If Canadians can do this – we can. They were our poor, stupid brain-addled cousins. How the hell they pulled this shit off baffles me.
But I have some ideas.
Any benefits, including education, require full legal documentation: schools can educate whoever they want to. They’re independent.
I wanted to add:
They can educate illegal immigrants if they want to. Hell, they can educate Laotians in Laos by video if they feel like it. But they don’t get a dime of government money for this. Not a penny. They’re free to refuse any student for any reason, but especially because they have no money for it.
Some schools will have long waiting lists. That’s fine.
governments can revoke the charters of schools that fail repeatedly. They can impose criminal investigations of cheating; set up a department for this. Already, public schools are famous for cheating to “achieve higher standards” across the country, but the bureaucrats and teachers are pensioned civil servants protected by self interested unions.
Make schools publish the salaries and perks of the administrators. As non-profits, they’d have to publish annual accounts in full detail.
You’d get programs in “school management”, with schools hiring a “manager” responsible for all of these details: Accounting, standards and regulations, etc. Think of the new jobs for people who want to work in education but are better managers.
Remove the education-schools from having a monopoly on ed school education. Have exams and practicum-teacher training. No more 4-year degrees in Ideology and Useless Words. Allow schools to hire experts who go through a minimum of teacher training and rules/regulations to teach, as well. There’s no reason a gifted engineer might not want to teach a math class three days a week for a year – let the bastard do it. The only reason this isn’t allowed is because of 1) Ideology (he won’t be ideologically guaranteeable); 2) union rules (don’t want someone touching our turf); 3) risks.
Well, given the sheer number of unionized, “qualified” teachers who abuse students, I can’t imagine any greater risk.
Given the level of sheer uneducated stupidity on the part of our teachers, who remain some of the least well-educated people in our society, it can’t be any worse.
Let the schools decide. let the schools sink or swim based on their reputations and results. Let administrators go to jail for cheating if they do.
You’ll be surprised how amazing our education “system” gets within ten years.
More variety. More choice. Higher standards.
private schools: Don’t want money going to rich people? Fine. It offends me, but why not do this:
Disallow schools from charging students so much as a penny in extra costs for school-related expenses. No extra fees. If a school charges more, it loses its voucher payments.
That way, private schools keep going on as they do now. The parents who send their kids to these places notice no changes. Public school kids’ parents never have to pay a dime more.
This is so obviously better a “system” that any attempt to create it – like the charter school movement in NY and NJ- elicits virtual war from public school supporters, mostly unionized employees.
In most cases, they get better results for much less money. And with much more variety.
How’s that?
get government out of everything.
Well, you guys are way over my head with all of that political stuff…. but what I would like to say is that I have never heard anyone articulate what it is like to be a sex worker quite like Jose Antonio Vargas did.
I was fortunate in someone “outing” me to everyone I know. I mean everyone. It was a good thing really, once the “secret” is out, there is nothing to hide, nothing to lie about. I can be myself. When I meet someone, if I am going to know them for any amount of time, they will know who I am, and what I do. I do not lie anymore.
I hope that can be one small contribution that I make to the sex worker rights movement. Maybe if those of us that are in a position to admit who and what we are actually do admit it, (and I know we are not all in that position) maybe it will help stop the negative stereotyping. Maybe the Ashtons of the world will stop saying “What if it were your mother? sister? daughter?” and realize that we are mothers, sisters, and daughters. And we are okay.
I think that sex workers are following closely in the footsteps of the Gay rights movement. It wasn’t until Stonewall that the general public became aware of the deplorable treatment the Gay community endured. When they found out, they began to empathize. The more that gay celebrities, politicians and even just ordinary people came out, the more the straight community had to recognize that Gay people are people. They are mothers and fathers. Sisters and brothers. Sons and daughters. They needed protection, and we finally gave it to them. Little by little. It doesn’t matter what they do when they’re naked.
Just like it doesn’t matter if there is a few hundred bucks on my desk to persuade me to get naked. I am still just a naked person, like every other person when they take their clothes off without cash on a desk. The more that the public can recognize that we are people too through prostitute’s “outing” themselves when possible – the more we are going to show that prostitutes are people too. We too are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. Maybe when people recognize that, they will be outraged at the injustices that we suffer, and finally take a stand against it.
Let us learn from the gay community. We are fighting a similar battle. A battle for social equality. Human rights. Protection from discrimination. Safety in our lifestyle. Freedom.
Kelly, the political stuff is mostly bullshit the ruling classes conjure up to convince the sheeple that the government exists to serve them rather than vice-versa. Here’s a great video on the other Kelly’s website which explains the reality of politics.
LOL Momma – I love “The Story of Your Enslavement”. Quite succinct, isn’t it? Quite an impressive discussion going on here as well.
It is! You have a knack for finding great stuff like that; my husband sent me that Facebook CIA thing from your site and it was perfect, too, though in a different way.
I lived in Chicago for a while. There, the meat packing and construction industries had been taken over by immigrants, it was hard to find a construction site where English was spoken. And those jobs used to be middle-class, union jobs, back in the 60’s. But the immigrants flooded in, and took them over.
I have been in favor of a sort of “European Union” sort of deal between the USA and some nations. Free travel and movement between the USA and trusted nations, most of which would probably be European.
But not Mexico. Mexico’s a failed state, a corrupt narco state on the verge of collapse. (Of course, if it were up to me I’d legalize drugs.)
>Matters of language and identity are not negligible or irrelevant. Cultures exist in conflict with each other, by the mere fact of their existence: I am not You. Languages are the ultimate barriers.
This is very true. I saw it when I lived in the UK, with so many immigrants from the middle east.
I’m very much in favor of cleaning up, and streamlining our immigration system, frankly, it’s a mess. But I do maintain that we need one.
I’m not denying that there are migrants who cross into welfare states in order to sponge off of their largesse, but how are they different from home-grown freeloaders?
They aren’t. But inviting in even more parasites in addition to the ones you’re already stuck with makes about as much sense as hitting yourself over the head with a hammer to cure a headache. Already being $1000 in debt is not a great rationale for getting $10,000 more in debt.
But we aren’t stuck with them; we choose to support them. If you’re going to stand on a street corner spreading breadcrumbs around willy-nilly, you shouldn’t be surprised when every pigeon in the area shows up. The solution isn’t to go more into debt hiring armed men with fowling rifles to shoot only the pigeons you don’t want (which anyone could see is impossible); the solution is to stop spreading breadcrumbs.
It stands to reason that an open-border policy would be self-regulating as long as people are required to support themselves.
That’s the problem,though, if they don’t support themselves do you leave them to starve? Do you leave their children to starve?
Many immigrants to the UK are desperate to get here because of the benefits. Under “human rights” legislation we cannot send them back if they are able to claim that they would be in fear of their life in their own country – even if they’ve engaged in criminal activity from the moment they’arrive here.
But if they wouldn’t work, they were starving in their own countries as well. Is starving in a developed country worse than starving in an undeveloped one?
There’s another difference, too; after 1066 England wasn’t exactly built on immigration, whereas the United States was.
Actually, England never had a stable population base. After 1066 came the viking and danish depredations, significantly altering the ethnic and cultural makeup of the entire Danelaw – a huge chunk of the country the Anglo-Saxons had carved out for themselves. Then along came the Scotti, absorbing the Picts and the other remnants and fighting among themselves and others, with constant raids; the Cornish and Welsh faded into the background, but not for a while.
And don’t forget the Reformation. Huguenots, Dutch fleeing the Spanish Inquisition in Holland, Italians for a while, and then Gypsies in pretty big numbers and Jews. England had open borders, remember.
The Jews mixed pretty widely, with both the nobility and the petty bourgeois. Once the empire got started–
The Empire brought a massive infux of people and an outflow of people – but the inflow was significant even at the beginning. There were small groups of Chinese there in the 1700’s. Sailors would jump ship. Prostitutes traveled from France. Traders arrived from Russia, who often weren’t Russian but were southern Slavs or even Turks, who were living in Russia.
The English has a time when there was tight trade with Russia via Sweden and the north- Brits were common in St Petersburg, and very welcome, and usually neutral in anything the Russians were involved in. “Deal” was the watchword for timber – and the word was used right into this century to refer to rough-hewn logs. When the Colonies started supplying timber, this waned, but the cultural connections remained.
WWII brought lots of Poles and refugees, and after the war it was chaos; for every Brit that left for the colonies, European refugees arrived.
In al of that, it remained England, because the groups were small, easily controlled and had nothing in common with each other. That’s utterly unlike the numbers today or the ethnic affiliations now. Vast numbers, hostile religions.
>Many immigrants to the UK are desperate to get here because of the benefits. Under “human rights” legislation we cannot send them back if they are able to claim that they would be in fear of their life in their own country – even if they’ve engaged in criminal activity from the moment they arrive here.
What gets me are the ones who come to the UK to enjoy the benefits of the human rights, and a liberal society, fleeing the repressive regimes of their home, and then as soon as they get to the UK, begin repression themselves. In the UK, for example, your wife and daughter are not property.
I believe it is the obligation of the immigrant to learn, and adopt the mores of their new home, not expect their new society to adapt to them. (regardless of what the archbishop of Canterbury says)
I came to the USA from the UK as a teenager, so I’ve an interest in this.
As selfish as this sounds, I oppose non-documented immigration for 1 reason: following the legal path ruined my childhood. My family is Jamaican. After enjoying the “welcoming arms” of native-born black people, every relative that I have has paid to send their children to private/Catholic school(s). in order to afford paid education and immigration fees, my antecedents raised the children of my generation on exotic meals such as PBJ sandwiches, canned tuna croquettes and scrambled eggs mixed with rice. On top of this, the relatives who were brought to America were drains of future funds ( because they needed to be acclimated to American life as well), so i wore old clothes that didn’t fit for years (being a black boy with glasses and high water pants in the 90’s cemented my status as Urkel. Yay me.) All of this was done to comply with regulations.
In contrast, any border dweller with a hook-up can walk from tijuana to San Diego and start cleaning houses the same day. It’s the reason why I never blame liberals for leaky borders: conservatives (by political affiliation and mental inclination) had no issue with cheap labor from illegal of all stripes. Nannies begot landscapers begot taco vans begot favorable/exploitave renters… People complained about the hundreds of “new niggers” from the West Indies (all races) while the conservatives in the Southwest allowed thousands of Latinos to establish themselves in America for the sake of convenience. I can’t even find a Puerto Rican restaurant in New York now because every Hispanic restaurant in NYC caters to central Americans (because every other Latino here is from the continent now.) I have family members who fought off deportation tooth and nail (because they talked funny, despite the fact that they spoke clear English and had their documents) while Mexicans cook steak and drive drunk not even a mile from my home without embracing our language, but I’m a bad guy for not toeing the line? Bugger that for a game of soldiers, if I (and mine) have to suffer, everyone suffers.
@MaMu,
Exactly.
MaMu, I’ve hear another person, who came in legally say pretty much the same thing.
What’s going to happen when machinery can pick the fruits and vegetables?
The last small farmers will go out of business. The reason so many have already is that they all mortgaged their farms to the hilt buying combine harvesters and other fabulously expensive machines to keep up with the big farm conglomerates, and when prices slumped the banks foreclosed. It was going on all through the ’70s, and has continued at a slower pace since; when the next “technological revolution” comes along all the little farmers will go the way of the blacksmith, the cobbler and the corner market.
Perhaps it will be just as well. The fewer people who are trying to maintain the family tradition of making buggy whips, the fewer lives have to be ruined trying to live in the past.
Well, maybe. But putting all the food-producing capacity of the country in the hands of a few huge companies strikes me as kinda like something that’s happened before in other industries with really bad results for the American public.
Yeah, there is that. I’d rather it be a large collection of smaller companies. But will it be that? Probably not, except maybe for specialty items (amaranth may not be popular enough to interest Monsanto).