Son of Illegal Immigration Roundup

Why family reunification is stupid:

But, hey, no worries. Hillary and Barack have foolproof rationales for their proposed reforms. Introducing an amendment to extend unlimited marriage-based family unification from American citizens to green-card holders, Clinton said, “For those who often speak about family values, this is your opportunity to match your rhetoric with your action.” (Some Christian pro-family groups weren’t sure if Clinton might be right.) For his part, Obama is joining with New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez to offer a series of amendments designed to quickly gut, and eventually eliminate, the merit-based point system supposedly designed to replace family unification as the center of our immigration policy (eight years from now — assuming the already-beseiged point system won’t have to face a Clinton or Obama administration). As Obama puts it: “How many of our forefathers would have measured up under this point system? How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island?”

Here we arrive at one of the central difficulties of America’s immigration debate. Mention immigration and many of us conjure up hallowed memories of our ancestors passing through Ellis Island — and of America’s stirring, centuries-long immigration success story. America’s melting-pot is unquestionably one of this country’s great historic triumphs.

Yet the reality of that achievement too easily blinds us to the fact that not all immigration stories end happily. In an era when the assimilationist ethos has been challenged by multiculturalism, when travel, telephones, and satellite dishes continuously link immigrants with homes half-way round the world, and when the cultural gap between immigrant and host cultures can turn into a chasm, we cannot take immigration success for granted.

Nor can pro-family Christians be properly accused of hypocrisy for thinking twice about promoting Asian or Middle-Eastern family values — if those values are radically different from their own. Polygamy? Cousin marriage? Extended clans held together by transnational arranged marriages? If anything these practices (encouraged by permissive family-reunification policies) are seriously undermining Western family values in Europe. Yet neither the pro-family lobby — nor anyone else in America — seems to understand the cultural disaster family-reunification laws have wrought in Europe. After all, Europeans themselves are only just now waking up to the uncomfortable truth.

It's like inviting yourself over to a stranger's house for dinner, then demanding your brother, sisters, and Uncle Chuey get free grub too. Illegal immigrants sure have one part of assimilation licked: a highly-developed sense of entitlement.

Why the "nativist" ad hominem argument is absurd:

But Gerson’s column is flawed on another front as well: It recycles open-borders bromides that have nothing to do with the truth. In warning against a rejection of amnesty, Gerson states: “If the Republican Party cannot find ways to appeal to natural entrepreneurs, with strong family values, who are focused on education and social mobility, then the GOP is already dead.”

What planet is Gerson living on? Far from being “focused on education,” Hispanics have the highest drop-out rate in the country — 47 percent nationally, and far worse in heavily Hispanic areas. Schools in illegal-immigrant-saturated southern California spend enormous sums trying to persuade Latino students to stay in school and study, without avail. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, just 40 percent of Hispanics graduate, and those students who do finish school come out with abysmal skills. A controversial high school exit exam in California would require seniors to correctly answer just 51 percent of questions testing eighth-grade-level math and ninth-grade-level English in order to receive a diploma. Naturally, immigrant advocates have fiercely opposed this all-too-meager measure for school and student accountability. The California Research Bureau predicts that the exam will result in a Hispanic graduation rate of below 30 percent.

Behind Hispanic educational failure rate lies an apathy towards learning, as the Manhattan Institute’s Herman Badillo argues in One Nation, One Standard. Hostility towards academic achievement is higher among Hispanics than among blacks. Factor in gang involvement and teenage pregnancy, and the Hispanic drop-out rate looks almost inevitable. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that a whopping 15 percent to 20 percent of illegal immigrants may not qualify for the proposed amnesty because of their criminal records, according to the Wall Street Journal. Gerson’s claim of a culture “focused on education” is pure delusion.

Gerson’s hackneyed invocation of Hispanic “family values” is equally laughable. Nearly 50 percent of all Hispanic children are born out of wedlock, compared to 24 percent of white children and 15 percent of Asian children. Black out-of-wedlock births are higher — 68 percent — but the black population is not growing rapidly. And the fertility rate among unmarried Hispanic women is the highest in the country — over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women. The Hispanic teen-fertility rate also far outstrips other groups. Among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, the teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls. As conservative policymakers such as Gerson should know, there is no better predictor of future social pathologies than out-of-wedlock childrearing.

Low levels of education and high levels of illegitimacy help explain why, contrary to Gerson’s myths, Hispanics are not showing the “social mobility” of other immigrant groups past and present, as Harvard’s George Borjas has documented and City Journal’s Steve Malanga has reported.

I suppose the "nativists" of the WWII generation ought to have sat by until Uncle Adolf got good and ready to goosestep down Broadway. After all, what made American culture superior to good ol' Teutonic Germany? Nazis worked hard. They believed in education. Who were those Germanophobes to slaughter thousands of Americans on behalf of some outmoded abstract ideology and jingoism? How dare we criticize the Huns when we were oppressing the Tuskegee Airmen? Was it really that hard to learn a little German and maybe celebrate Hitler's birthday?

Our illegal immigrants aren't Nazis, but they aren't Americans. Why must Americans learn their language? Why must Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo and their other holidays? Why must Americans assimilate into and accommodate their culture? Why should we willingly do what we fought WWII and other wars NOT to do?

Instead, we just toss out American citizenship as though it were gutter-bound garbage:

This is not some tiny asterisk in immigration policy; hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens have benefited from TPS and its antecedents, most of them Central American, but with smaller groups of people from all over the world also getting in on the act. Although the formal mechanism for granting Temporary Protected Status was created by the 1990 Immigration Act, that was really just an example of Congress “bowing to reality,” in Michael Chertoff’s evocative phrase — the executive branch had been inventing ways of not enforcing immigration law for decades, using Orwellian formulations like “Extended Voluntary Departure” or “Deferred Enforced Departure.” (Several years ago I traced the development of this insidious practice; see here.)

The government’s site says “TPS does not lead to permanent resident status,” and strictly speaking, that is correct; the attorney general can terminate it, at which point the people in question revert to their original status — i.e., in most cases go back to being illegal aliens. But in practice, TPS is renewed as many times as necessary to ensure that no one is deported. Only in the smallest of cases, involving a few dozen or at most a few hundred people, has this “temporary” status actually been ended without everyone getting a green card, and as far as I know, no one has ever been made to leave because they lost TPS.

Earlier this month, the “temporary” status of 230,000 Salvadorans, 78,000 Hondurans and 4,000 Nicaraguans was extended by another 18 months — the Salvadorans have had this “temporary” status for six years, and the Hondurans and Nicaraguans for eight years. The explanation for the extension offered by Emilio Gonzalez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is a gem: “Although Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador have made significant progress in their recovery and rebuilding efforts, each country continues to face social and economic challenges in their efforts to restore their nations to normalcy. This 18-month extension reflects the United States’ commitment to continue assisting our Central American neighbors on their road to recovery.” It’s not obvious what “normalcy” is supposed to mean in this context, since all three countries remain in their normal state of being hapless third-world kleptocracies, but the point is clear — the Bush administration will not make these illegal aliens go home, no matter what.

The most extreme case is that of several thousand Liberians, who received “temporary” status in 1991 and had it renewed regularly ever since. Their TPS is set to expire in October — definitely, for sure, this time, though that’s what Janet Reno said nearly ten years ago.

Our experience with TPS leads to only one possible conclusion: Once an illegal alien gets legal status, no matter how “temporary,” he’s here for good. Sponsors of the Senate’s amnesty bill know this full well.

Better that than be called a "nativist", I guess.

How do you say that in Spanish? Guess we'll find out.