Tag Archives: immigration

It’s Time

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…for the Party of No to get out of the way and let legislation happen. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) had this to say through her spokesman Drew Hammill about her fellow Democrats’ insistence on shutting down DHS* in favor of protecting President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional “executive actions” concerning immigration:

With only four legislative days left until the Republican Homeland Security Shutdown, Speaker Boehner made it clear that he has no plan to avoid a government shutdown. The speaker’s reliance on talking points and finger-pointing was a sad reflection of the fact that the Tea Party continues to hold the gavel as they insist on their futile anti-immigrant grandstanding.

Government shutdown. Not DHS shutdown. No exaggeration there. Pelosi’s proxy statement more honestly reads

With only four legislative days left until the Senate Democrats’ Homeland Security Shutdown, Minority Leader Pelosi made it clear that neither she nor her Senate colleagues have a plan to avoid a department shutdown. The Minority Leader’s reliance on talking points and finger-pointing was a sad reflection of the fact that the Democratic Party insists on its futile illegal immigrant grandstanding and vote pandering.

Note, too, that the Democrats are willing to hold hostage American homeland safety against preservation of those “executive actions”—”hostage” being their term, not Republicans’.

 

*Never mind, in the Democrats’ panic mongering, that DHS won’t, in fact, shut down in any substantive way: all the protection forces, from TSA to border control will remain on the job. They just won’t be paid on time, courtesy of the Senate Democrats’ constant filibuster of the House-passed bill that fully funds DHS.

Senate Democrats and a DHS Shutdown

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The House has passed a bill fully finding the Department of Homeland Security while canceling President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional “Executive Actions” regarding immigration. The Senate Democrats have successfully filibustered the Senate version of that bill.

The Senate Democrats thus have shown themselves entirely willing to shut down the DHS, severely damaging our nation’s ability to defend itself against terrorist attack—or any man-caused disaster. These Democrats are holding American citizens hostage against their ability to impose their minority position on all of us.

Let Senator Mark Kirk (R, IL) say this about that.

If we have a successful terrorist attack—all the dead Americans from that should be laid at the feet of the Democratic caucus.…

In the end, they have to defend the country. They have sworn the allegiance to do that. They need to live up to their oaths of office. In the Democratic mind, politics is everything. I would say to them, politics is not everything. If you don’t have a country to defend, what is the purpose of politics?

What he said.

The Party of No

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Democratic Party obstructionism continues in the Senate. Recall that the Democrats refused to allow over 300 House-passed jobs-related bills even to come up for debate in the last session and how they shut down the Federal government over a House-passed spending bill that fully funded the government but that didn’t have an additional 2% of what the Democrats demanded.

They’re at it again. The House has passed a bill that fully funds the Department of Homeland Security for the year, which under the last session’s compromise passed in December, had only been funded through the end of this month. The bill also rolls back a number of President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional immigration “executive actions.” Obama’s minions in the Senate are vowing to block the bill, to filibuster it.

Obama has promised to veto the bill, should it make it past the Senate Democrats’ obstructionism. Obama and his minions are fully prepared to shut down HHS, to walk completely away from what little border security they’re willing to provide today, if they can’t have 100% of their way.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) has made the question clear:

It’s a debate that will challenge our colleagues on the other side with a simple proposition. Do they think presidents of either party should have the power to simply ignore laws that they don’t like? Well, will our Democratic colleagues work with us to defend key democratic ideals like separation of powers and the rule of law? Or will they stand tall for the idea that partisan exercises of raw power are good things? The House-passed bill we’ll consider would do two things. Fund the Department of Homeland Security and rein in executive overreach. That’s it. It’s simple….

Remember the Democrats’ behavior in 2016.

A Thought on Immigration and Human Progress

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Over at AEIdeas, James Pethokoukis has an article titled Has human progress stalled? And if so, what can we do about it? In it he talks about the apparent stagnation in human technological progress, and mentions the fact that American “productivity growth averaged nearly 3% during the period 1947-1973,” and we haven’t approached that rate since.

He quoted Aeon:

Yet there once was an age when speculation matched reality. It spluttered to a halt more than 40 years ago. Most of what has happened since has been merely incremental improvements upon what came before. That true age of innovation—I’ll call it the Golden Quarter—ran from approximately 1945 to 1971. Just about everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this time. …  The Golden Quarter was a unique period of less than a single human generation, a time when innovation appeared to be running on a mix of dragster fuel and dilithium crystals.

Then he quoted Aeon again by way of offering an explanation (that I think somewhat begs the question) of why we “spluttered to a halt more than 40 years ago.”

Could it be that the missing part of the jigsaw is our attitude towards risk? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the saying goes. …  In the 1960s, new medicines were rushed to market. Not all of them worked and a few (thalidomide) had disastrous consequences. But the overall result was a medical boom that brought huge benefits to millions. Today, this is impossible. ….

The solutions that Pethokoukis and others to whom he linked in his article, though, are governmental: “maybe too much government regulation.” He also points to demographics [links in the original]:

We are a decade older, on average, today than in 1970 and perhaps more risk averse for that reason. Younger societies tend to be more dynamic, creative, and entrepreneurial, as Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker has written. And economist Robert Gordon cites demographics as one big reason when he thinks the era of fast US economic growth is over.

I think he’s likely right on both scores, but I think government regulations, though hugely important, are the lesser of the two factors. Regulations, after all, even with political inertia, can be undone. Aging is irreversible.

Or is it? Contra Gordon, our rapid economic growth need not be a thing of the past. We can recover our nation’s youth and vitality and our ability and willingness to get out of our comfort zone and take risks, take big risks for big gains, to “land a man on a moon of Saturn and return him safely to the earth within this generation.” That’s what immigration does for us. It’s what immigration always has done for us. Keep in mind: immigrants already are risk takers, or they wouldn’t be here.

A Free Market Solution to Immigration?

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Guy Sorman wrote about a Gary Becker idea for this in a recent CapX article. According to Sorman, Becker’s idea runs something like this:

The immigrant takes a risk, and often pays intermediaries to have access to the accumulated capital available in the host country. Becker therefore proposed that the right to enter a country, and apply for a work visa for various periods of time, should be priced and sold. This is already the case in most developed countries, but it only concerns wealthy investors. Fixing a price on all work visas would allow poorer people—who may get into debt to invest for their future—to have access to privileges now reserved to the wealthiest. This right to a paying visa would suppress most of, if not all, illegal immigration and make border controls, as well as the war on evaders (who would become rarer) easier.

Or not. The idea’s presentation leaves unanswered the mechanism for how possession of a visa would make border controls easier: someone still has to be at the border checking the visa, and someone still has to be…somewhere…tracking the visa and its holder’s departure by the visa’s indicated deadline.

Also left unanswered is the mechanism that makes a bought and paid for visa suppressive of illegal immigration. The man who’s leaving his home country and entering his target country exactly because he has no money and wants a better job is unlikely to be able to afford the visa. Coyotes, you say? They only bring a fraction of illegals across.

Also left unanswered is the mechanism that makes a bought and paid for visa useful when another significant fraction of illegal immigrants enter the target country to (re)join their families who already are here. The cost of illegal entry vs bought and paid for visa entry makes that choice obvious.