The Hill(Op-Ed)
By Ian M. Smith
July 7, 2015
Recently,
The New York Times unintentionally lent its support to a key argument
immigration enforcement advocates have used for years in their fight
against open borders.
In her piece “Stay Home, Pleads a Son of Eritrea,” Celestine Bohlen
profiled a Eritrean activist who appealed to the waves of people leaving
his country, which has long suffered under a despotic regime, telling
them that “[t]he government is the problem and
leaving doesn’t solve it ... escaping is not the solution.”
The
article goes on to report that around 5,000 Eritreans leave their
native land every month. Traditionally, they migrated to nearby Israel,
but since that country’s
government erected a giant fence to keep out “intruders,” the Eritreans
now cross the Mediterranean into Italy. The activist’s plea flies in
the face of the liberal elite who argue that letting in all the
developing world’s oppressed is simply the moral and
compassionate thing to do. But as the Times article indirectly argues,
is it?
The
Eritrean activist’s sentiment is a perfect example of what
immigration-watchers call the “safety valve” argument. It’s one of the
most effective ways to show open-borders
liberals that what they’re advocating for cannot solve the world’s
problems — and actually compounds them.
Professor
and columnist Victor Davis Hansen may have been the first to use the
term “safety valve,” which refers to the pressure that’s let off
kleptocratic rulers of
failed nations when their oppressed subjects are enabled to simply
migrate elsewhere. The ability to simply leave keeps the status quo in
place when it should be directly challenged with necessary reforms
forced upon leadership.
Using
the example of Mexico in his 2003 book, Mexifornia, Hansen says
America’s porous borders work to “postpone an evolution in Mexican
society that could finally force
a rapacious aristocracy to the table for needed concessions.” Enforcing
border controls, like what Israeli’s done, would keep millions of
Mexico’s poor at home where they can act as a “vocal force for further
change, rather than push millions and their problems
northwards.”
An
example of Hansen’s ‘rapacious aristocracy’ perhaps is the Times’s own
Carlos Slim. Slim, a Mexican telecom magnate and top shareholder in the
paper, commands a net
worth of $72 billion, a full 6 percent of his nation’s GDP — America’s
top billionaire by contrast, Bill Gates, is worth 0.04 percent of U.S.
GDP. Besides his paper’s lockstep dedication to open-borders, there’s
certainly a connection between Slim and America’s
immigration policy.
Over
half of America’s illegal aliens are from Mexico. Through his largest
holding, America Movil, Slim for years has controlled around 75 percent
of the Mexican landline,
mobile and broadband markets. One OECD study found that his company
overcharges its customers by over $13 billion every year. It’s been
estimated that economic growth would be a full percentage point higher
but for monopolies like Slim’s. This kind of economic
oppression in Mexico is from just one of its tycoons.
As
for Mexico’s political elite, their support for America’s safety
valve-immigration policies is out in the open. Both current President
Enrique Pena Nieto and former
President Vincente Fox recently praised President Obama for his latest
unilateral legalization directives. Meanwhile, the Mexican government
provides manuals to its poor on how to break in to the U.S., has
provided free legal counsel to illegal aliens caught
in the U.S., issues “matricular” ID cards to illegal aliens through
their 50 consulates to help them get state and federal benefits and,
most troublingly, teach Mexican students that our entire South West
region actually belongs to Mexico. In his memoirs as
U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Jeffrey Davidow notes seeing polls that show
nearly 60 percent of Mexicans believed the region should really be
theirs. The truth is of course, as Hansen notes in Mexifornia, when the
U.S. “stole” the Southwest there were “fewer
than 10,000 Mexicans living in a vast uninhabited area, one that itself
had been stolen from Spain, which in turn had stolen it from the
Indians.”
More
thoughtful liberals have discussed the safety valve argument as well as
other problems caused by our immigration policies. Oxford developmental
economist Paul Collier,
in his 2014 book Exodus, notes that the country of Haiti has lost 85
percent of its educated people due to mass emigration, mostly to the
U.S. That such a mass draining of brain power hasn’t contributed to that
country’s chronic malaise would take an argument
of Houdini-esque contortions. Perhaps Collier’s Haiti example could be
put to Jeb Bush during the GOP primary debates, as he’s someone who
purports to understand the social benefits of education and yet is
absolutely whetted to the “acts of love” committed
by illegal immigrants when they violate our national boundaries.
Environmentalist
and progressive Philip Cafaro in his newly published book How Many Is
Too Many? adds ecological and overpopulation concerns to the list of
problems created
in migrant-source countries by our expansive immigration policies.
Guatemala, he notes, a country that has 10 percent of its adult citizens
living in the U.S., has an annual population growth rate of 2.5 percent
(all due to its high birth rate). Cafaro rightly
claims that the negative effects of overpopulation wrought on that
country (i.e., rampant deforestation, social inequality) are “lessened
through immigration” and are “counterbalanced” to a large extent “by the
positive incentives of having more remittances
from family members in the United States.”
Instead
of working as maids for the corporate elite in the U.S. or picking
lettuce for Big Agribusinesses that refuse to pay domestic market wages,
these “strivers,” Cafaro
writes, “might have fought for opportunities and rewards within their
own country.”
In
what could be a rallying cry for both a “Citizens First” movement in
this country and for economic equality reforms abroad, Cafaro writes:
“People who want to create
good lives for themselves and their families need to do so where they
are.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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