Responses to ncordless's Three Questions
1) You've stated over the course of the debate that "the wall" would have a meaningful impact on illegal immigration, but have not really described what you think that impact would be. Given that we both agree that a wall would have no effect on those who overstay their legal entry, and that those overstayers represent roughly half of illegal immigrants. And given that current border security stops a sizable percentage of illegal entries, please provide an estimate of how many illegal immigrants will be stopped per year by building "the wall" and, if you can, provide justification for your estimate. Additionally, please explain why a robust e-verify system that would tamper down demand for illegal immigrants would not stop these illegal entries you think would be stopped by building the wall.
You're engaged in misleading arithmetic. A little less than half of all illegal aliens
living in the US came over the border. That's a sizable percentage of a sizable contingent. It's of no consequence, therefore, how many people got stopped at the border. They're not included in that arithmetic of those illegals actually living here.
Yes, the percentage of illegal aliens who illegally cross the border is getting smaller. Visa overstayers are becoming a larger proportion of all illegals. But the illegal cross-border traffic is getting smaller in part because the fences and walls and additional surveillance which were part of the
Secure Fence Act of 2006 are working. Those fences need to be improved and their parameters increased, but they have already helped to reduce cross-border traffic to a small degree. They need to be beefed up.
And given how easily most illegals can simply travel to the U.S. legally and then overstay their visa without consequence, we can assume that those illegals who make the hazardous and expensive trip across the border do so because they have to.
Fifteen to twenty percent of those foreign citizens who apply for a U.S. visa are turned down. They are often turned down because they have criminal backgrounds or other questionable background noise that's revealed during the visa application process. Thus the illegals crossing the border are often the worst kind of illegals, the ones who most need to be kept out of the country. Visa overstayers are often college students who decide to stay and work in the U.S. illegally.
Illegals crossing the border are often the worst type of offenders.
Obviously there are major exceptions to every rule. The 9/11 terrorists, for example, were all visa overstayers. They legally entered the United States with tourist or education visas and then illegally overstayed so they could carry out their plot to attack America.
Mohamed Atta was issued a legal tourist visa and then overstayed it to carry out the 9/11 attacks.
2) You have been pushing the conversation away from "the wall" and towards immigration generally. Could you please describe what sort of immigration policies you'd like to see put in place? Please include a general idea of how restrictive you'd like immigration quotas to be, and whether you'd include preferences for certain populations over others. If you do want preferences, please describe what sort of laws you'd put in place to achieve those preferences and restrictions.
I would like to see all immigration, including legal immigration of educated persons, reduced to a trickle.
My ideal policies would include not only a wall, but mandatory
E-Verify, the ending of
family chain migration, the ending of birthright citizenship, the elimination of the
visa lottery, the tracking and removing of visa overstays, lowering the number of work visas issued to foreign citizens, and dramatically reducing the number of refugees allowed into the country. And then I would focus on assimilation for all recent legal immigrants.
America ought to be for Americans. Our citizenship should be meaningful. Our country needs to be a very selective club in which the members have special privileges and the non-members have none and look on with yearning.
3) I have compared your position to other notable anti-immigrant advocates in the past such as the know-nothings, and the klu klux klan. Please explain why your position and motivations are the same as, or different than these previous anti-immigration groups.
Bringing up the KKK in this context is a red herring. The second iteration of the KKK, founded in 1915, was against immigration, but so was nearly everyone else in America at that time, including the KKK's most vocal opponents. So why focus on the KKK?
The movement to restrict immigration in the 1920s was broad and wide. It included every segment of the American population. It was supported in the south, the west, the east, and the north. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act sailed through the House and Senate almost unanimously. It passed 69 to 9 in the Senate and had similar support in the House. President Calvin Coolidge then signed it with this excellent comment:
“We are all agreed, whether we be Americans of the first or of the seventh generation on this soil, that is not desirable to receive more immigrants than can reasonably be assured of bettering their condition by coming here. For the sake both of those who would come and more especially of those already here, it has been thought wise to avoid the danger of increasing our numbers too fast. It is not a reflection on any race or creed. We might not be able to support them if their numbers were too great. In such event, the first sufferers would be the most recent immigrants, unaccustomed to our life and language and industrial methods. We want to keep wages and living conditions good for everyone who is now here or who may come here.
“As a nation, our first duty must be those who are already our inhabitants, whether native or immigrants.”
"We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America be kept American."
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The KKK was at most a marginal player in the passage of restrictionist legislation, more an extreme reflection of public sentiment toward immigrants than a cause of it.
As for the other restrictionists of the 1920s, I love them. They were good men trying their best to save their country. The U.S. at the time faced many of the same problems it faces today: too many immigrants of questionable value were causing trouble in multiple areas. This included terrorism, which at the time was perpetrated not by Muslims from the Middle East but by anarchists from Europe. Read about the
1919 Galleanists bombings to get a flavor of what was going on. (One of those bombs nearly killed FDR and his wife when he was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy living in Washington DC.) Americans decided they had had enough and wanted no more.
Galleanist Bombing on Wall Street in 1919 killed 38 people and wounded hundreds.
The reaction to the Galleanist bombings was swift and universal
Tryng to portray this widespread restrictionist sentiment in the 1920s as just a reflection of the rise of the KKK is historically misleading.
As for the Know-Nothings, no group in U.S. history has ever been so misrepresented. They too had good reasons for wanting to restrict immigration. Catholics at the time, for example, in the United States were pro-slavery. Irish neighborhoods filled with immigrants were highly prone to crime. That's why Massachusetts was dominated by Know-Nothings in the eighteen-fifties.
Here is how one book reviewer describes them:
"From this period of political upheaval [in 1854], the country came to know the Know-Nothings, a group whose name is still used as short-hand for xenophobic nativism. But the story of the Know-Nothings is far more complex. Yes, they were militantly anti-immigration, but they were also quite progressive on issues of labor rights, opposition to slavery, and the need for more government spending. Given our current age of anxiety, it’s worth dwelling on a few lessons of an earlier period, which has such obvious echoes...."
"The Know-Nothings’ time at the helm was brief. Many historians have cast their rule as a period of bigotry and incompetence, echoing the Brahmin perspective. Mulkern is more nuanced. The Know-Nothings broke the business stranglehold on legislation. They initiated large infrastructural works, laid in gas lines and sewage systems, and passed ordinances to increase the safety of the railways. They enforced standard weights and measures in markets in order to eliminate fraud. They set up commissions to regulate banks and insurance companies, measures that the businessmen abhorred. They abolished imprisonment for debt, and, at the urging of the Free-Soilers, they forbade state officers to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act. They also built a state hospital for the insane and a state school for mentally disabled children, and raised by a third the state subsidy for the Perkins School for the Blind. In other words, they addressed many of the social problems that had been ignored by the other parties."
"They also waged a war on foreigners. They tried to raise the residency requirement for naturalization to 21 years. They banned the teaching of foreign languages in public schools and enforced the reading of the King James Bible in schools, a matter that particularly irked the Catholics. They prohibited Catholics from holding state offices and dismissed Irish state workers. In the name of saving public money, they shipped 300 Irish-born wards of the state, all of them destitute or insane, back to Liverpool where they landed on the quay with no one to meet them."
Progressive on labor rights and slavery? Kind of hard to sell that group as a prototype for the KKK, isn't it?
Of course the party was different in other parts of the country. The Know-Nothings in the south were pro-slavery, but because the south was very little affected by immigration, which primarily impacted the large northern cities, the Know-Nothings gained few adherents down in Dixie.
The restrictionism I support has many echoes in the Know-Nothing Party and especially in the restrictionists of the nineteen-twenties. It has none in the KKK.