Ramifications of ideology

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

We don’t know how many illegal immigrants are in the United States, only that the proverbial figure of “11 million” exists in amber since the last century, and despite massive influxes each year. So there is no way to ascertain either the size of the pool of illegal immigrants or how many have committed crimes. Rounding up every illegal alien and immediately deporting them is not feasible, but that does not mean that over one million with criminal records could not be returned to their home countries as undesirables.

...Some states report a fourth to a third of their murders are likely committed by illegal aliens. That cohort makes up over 25% of federal prisoners.

...Make Mexico Pay?

Sending Mexico a bill, or charging tariffs on trade, to finish the wall as penance for its cynical manipulation of American magnanimity is childish and unnecessary. Instead, we should look at some $40-50 billion that are sent as remittances home to Central America and Mexico each year, largely by illegal aliens themselves. Such a staggering sum might represent on average a $200-500 a month expense per illegal alien, a disposable sum that at best suggests existential poverty may not necessarily haunt every illegal alien resident, and at worse might remind us that government subsidies are sometimes used to free up income to send out of the country. Imagine if $40-50 billion were instead infused into the U.S. health care and legal systems for the indigent.

All the government would have to do, in the manner that most nations abroad already do, would be to impose a federal surcharge on all remittances by any sender who could not provide a U.S. passport to substantiate the transaction. At a 10% rate, billions could be raised ($4-5 billion a year?), and applied to the completion of the border fence. Within four or five years, the cost ($20 billion?) could be easily met by those whose illegality prompted the wall to be built.

Anchor Babies? ...In a practical sense, anyone who lives in an area with a large population of illegal aliens knows that it is a common tact for pregnant foreign nationals to deliberately plan on giving birth in the U.S., both to ensure citizenship for their children, and to create a proverbial anchor, by which they can either obtain legal residency for themselves or cite familial humanitarian claims later on if deportation suddenly looms. Is that not a means of circumventing and subverting the law by avoiding an application for legal green-card resident status? If “anchor baby” is a pejorative term, what then is the politically correct expression for that real fact?

Euphemisms...Breaking federal law is not a neutral matter of being without documents, but simply deliberately choosing never to obtain them at all. Alien (“not of this locale”) is not a pejorative term, but recognizes that Mexico and the United States are two different legal entities. Oddly, what is an offensive noun is La Raza (“the race”), racial chauvinism at its worse. Raza has a terrible history of modern usage in fascist Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy, and has disappeared from popular accepted usage in both countries. Raza was brought back into contemporary American parlance by racial separatists, particularly in the 1960s. Mrs. Clinton just spoke at the National Council of La Raza, and yet has been vocal about accusing others of polarizing the debate through charged language. That is absurd.

Absurd? ...Elites have branded Trump’s immigration proposals as absurd, especially the inflated rhetoric about a wall, and good and bad people. His idea of mass deportations en masse is unworkable, but not an argument against weeding out criminals and those without work histories in the United States.

Jeb Bush implied that elements of illegal immigration are an act of love. Perhaps that is true for millions of illegal aliens, who work hard and for little pay, and usually do not violate further state and federal laws. I see them every day.

But not all foreign nationals from Mexico and Central America do that.

One would accept Bush’s blanket generalization only if he had the clout or capital to be exempt from the ramifications of his own ideology. When a car zoomed into the barnyard last night and tossed out a brood of puppies (twice now in one month), and when last week a man threw wet garbage from his pickup next to my mailbox (full of Spanish language magazines, diapers, and used baby clothes), and when last month someone stole my pickup (found by police abandoned and damaged in a Fresno alleyway, with Mexican beer, food, and Spanish-language ads inside), and when two weeks ago a non-English speaker came in the driveway looking for trailers of prostitution (caravanas) down the road, I felt that they all had expressed little love for animals, the environment, or young women, or for that matter themselves — or me.

In other words, I sensed no act of love.

Read more here.