ninme

NRO – Mark Steyn: What Arizona Must Live With
Gordon Brown called Gillian Duffy a “bigot,” then got into his limo and drove away. Remind you of anybody?

I’m skipping some rather good lines, here. It was a struggle, but I overcame.

Gillian Duffy lives in the world Gordon Brown has created. He, on the other hand, gets into his chauffeured limo and is whisked far away from it.

That’s Arizona. To the coastal commentariat, “undocumented immigrants” are the people who mow your lawn while you’re at work and clean your office while you’re at home. (That, for the benefit of Linda Greenhouse, is the real apartheid: the acceptance of a permanent “undocumented” servant class by far too many “documented” Americans who assuage their guilt by pathetic sentimentalization of immigration.) But in border states, illegal immigration is life and death. I spoke this week to a lady who has a camp of illegals on the edge of her land: She lies awake at night, fearful for her children and alert to strange noises in the yard. President Obama, shooting from his lip, attacked the new law as an offense against “fairness.” Where’s the fairness for this woman’s family? Because her home is in Arizona rather than Hyde Park, Chicago, she’s just supposed to get used to living under siege? Like Gillian Duffy in northern England, this lady has to live there, while the political class that created this situation climbs back into the limo and gets driven far away.

Almost every claim made for the benefits of mass immigration is false. Europeans were told that they needed immigrants to help prop up their otherwise unaffordable social entitlements: In reality, Turks in Germany have three times the rate of welfare dependency as ethnic Germans, and their average retirement age is 50. Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole.

But wait: What about the broader economic benefits? The World Bank calculated that if rich countries increased their workforce by a mere 3 percent through admitting an extra 14 million people from developing countries, it would benefit the populations of those rich countries by $139 billion. Wow!

…$139 billion works out to a spectacular 0.35 percent. Caldwell compares the World Bank argument to Austin Powers’s nemesis, Dr. Evil, holding the world hostage for one million dollars! “Sacrificing 0.0035 of your economy would be a pittance to pay for starting to get your country back.” A dependence on mass immigration is not a gold-mine or an opportunity to flaunt your multicultural bona fides, but a structural weakness, and should be addressed as such.

The majority of Arizona’s schoolchildren are already Hispanic. So, even if you sealed the border today, the state’s future is as a Hispanic society; that’s a given. Maybe it’ll all work out swell. The citizenry never voted for it, but they got it anyway. Because all the smart guys in the limos bemoaning the bigots knew what was best for them.

I think (and I was going to tweet right away but people I know in real life are on Twitter so I chickened out) that this boycott Arizona thing is hilarious. If the illegals take their advice, the law will have worked! Ipso facto, ergo, quod erat demonstrandum, et cetera et cetera.

I saw somewhere else someone very correct-thinking who thought this whole topic of whether or not we can talk about immigration is absurd, since if you search British newspapers you get x-number of articles about how we can’t talk about immigration. Of course, there’s probably a corresponding number of articles in other newspapers calling that first number of articles’ columnists racists, so maybe people should switch their complaint to being sick of being unable to talk about racism without another viewpoint to talk about it with. Since I’ve never actually seen an argument about it more coherent than “it would be racist not to”.