As
I go to pixel, the congresscritters are still fighting over whether to close
down the federal government in the name of 800,000 illegal aliens. I’ll leave
you to find out the result in tomorrow morning’s news.
As I noted last week, the standard of debate
over immigration is higher than it used to be—better for sure than it was in
the previous recent attempts at immigration legislation in 2006, 2007, and
2013. I’d like to think that we here at VDARE.com have had something to do with
that.
But the so-called Gang of Six bill, the attempted Senate solution,
was still advertisedbrightly as “bipartisan.” Uh-oh.
The “six” in “Gang of Six” are six senators, three Republicans and
three Democrats. To be precise they are Republican Senators Lindsey Graham (SC), Jeff Flake (AZ), Cory Gardner (CO),
and Democratic Senators Dick Durbin (IL), Michael Bennet (CO)
and Robert Menendez (NJ). [New Gang of Six ‘Bipartisan Deal’ on DACA Amnesty Is Not
Serious, By Jessica Vaughan, CNS,
January 15, 2018] As is my habit I shall just read off to you the NumbersUSA
grades for those senators on immigration votes in the Senate, 2015-2018:
F-minus, C-minus, D-minus, F, F-minus, F. The median grade there is F.
What
did it propose to do, this Gang of Six bill? Executive summary: It offered
the same bait-and-switch as the old Gang of Eight Rubio-Schumer effort
five years ago. Permanent residency leading to citizenship for Dreamers,
temporary—and we know what “temporary” means in an
immigration context, don’t we?—temporary status for their parents, promises of
improvements to border security …
Jessica Vaughan at the Center for Immigration Studies summarized
the aim of the bill in the CNS story cited above: “maximum amnesty, minimum
border security and no cuts to legal immigration,”
The Gang of Six bill claimed to end the Diversity Visa lottery, but when you
read the fine print it didn’t reduce numbers, nor even the diversity idea.
Instead of a lottery, half the visas were to go to those same countries, the
ones thought to bring in maximum diversity, but now on a merit basis, while the
other half were to go to the Temporary Protected Status aliens.
Merit-based immigration is in fact
the new fad. The proposed House solution incorporated it, too. This was not the
Gang of Six Senate bill; this was a different thing, properly the Securing America’s Future Act of
2018. It also had six proposers: Bob Goodlatte (VA), Mike McCaul (TX), Raul
Labrador (ID), Martha McSally (AZ), Jim Sensenbrenner (WI), and John Carter
(TX). Here are their NumbersUSA grades on recent immigration votes: A, B-plus,
A-plus, D, B, B, for a median grade B to B-plus.
As you’d expect, this House bill was more realistic. It really
ended the Diversity Visa lottery but distributes those 55,000
lottery visas to the skilled employment-based visa category.
Well, 55,000 people with skills is better than 55,000 people with blind luck…I guess.
Merit-based immigration, at any rate below the Nobel Prize level, is still
just a cheap labor racket, though.
We have all the skilled people we need. The U.S.
population passed the 200-million mark late in November
1968, a few months before we landed men on the Moon. If we could land men on the Moon with just 200
million people here, what can’t we
do with 320 million?
Here’s black patriot Booker T. Washingtonspeaking in Atlanta, September 18th, 1895:
To
those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and
strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I
would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.”
Washington
was of course making a plea to employers to hire black Americans rather than
immigrants. The same plea, in a broader sense, can be made today:
Let’s staff our offices and workshops from our own people—American people—of whom there are surely
enough to keep a modern economy thriving.
Let’s confront the cheap-labor racketeers with Booker T.
Washington’s slogan: “Cast down your bucket where you are!”
And let’s ask those racketeers, too, where the morality lies in
strip-mining poor countries of their smart people. Last week, I mentioned the
failure of Haiti to build and keep sewage treatment plants. One cause of that
failure is that the small proportionof Haiti’s population
capable of maintaining a modern plant in operation all left the country years ago to come to the U.S.A.
So tell me how our immigration policy helps Haiti?
Immigration
enthusiasts love to moralize about how good and noble we are to let so many
people in. With this new fad for merit-based immigration, you can put the
adjective “skilled” in front of “people.” One more skilled person settling in
the U.S.A., though, is one less to keep things running in Haiti, or Ghana, or
El Salvador. Why does no-one ever make this point to the open-borders people?
Let me end with everybody’s favorite story of the week: the Dutch
lady who was denied Swiss citizenship because she’s too a nnoying.
This is 42-year-old Nancy Holten, who’s been living in Switzerland
since she was eight years old and has children who are Swiss citizens. Ms.
Holten applied for Swiss citizenship herself, but was turned down.
In
Switzerland, to be naturalized as a citizen you have to get the approval of
your district. In Ms. Holten’s district, she is very unpopular. She’s an animal
rights activist, you see, and it’s a country district with lots of cows. Ms.
Holten has campaigned against the use of cowbells, which she says are too loud.
Quote from her: “The sound that cow bells make is a hundred decibels. It is
comparable with a pneumatic drill. We wouldn’t want such a thing hanging close
to our ears, would we?” [Left-wing Dutch vegan who moved to Switzerland is denied
a Swiss passport because she is too annoying, By
Kelly Mclaughlin, January 10,2017]
The lady’s physics is a little off. The Industrial Noise Control
website does indeed list a hundred decibels as “Jet
take-off (at 305 meters), use of outboard motor, power lawn mower, motorcycle,
farm tractor, jackhammer, garbage truck;” but, I dunno, cowbells don’t seem to
me to belong in that list. Even if they do, her concern is how loud it
sounds to the cow.
You have to love the concept, though, of denying citizenship to
someone for being annoying.
There’s
the solution to the DACA issue right there. This whole DACA fuss has been
annoying the hell out of me.