Grover Norquist’s piece last week at National Review Online was the usual we-were-mean-to-the-Irish-so-we-need-open-borders stuff, but three points I think are worth making.
First, Norquist misrepresents the central feature of the Schumer-Rubio bill when he writes that:
It allows the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States to earn legal status if they pay fines, undergo a background check, wait ten years during which they have to prove they are working and earning enough to show they would not become a ward of the state. It is a good start.
Whether this is a deception or simply the result of ignorance doesn’t affect that fact this it is false. “Undocumented” immigrants (notice that he’s adopted the Left’s terminology) don’t have to wait ten years to get “legal status” — they get it within a few months of Obama’s signing ceremony, without doing anything to “earn” it. The ten-year wait is merely for an upgrade from Green-Card-Lite to Green-Card-Premium, but virtually all illegal aliens will immediately get a work permit, Social Security account, driver’s license, travel documents to go abroad and return, inclusion in affirmative-action programs, and a variety of state and local welfare benefits. Once that happens the chances are zero that the Obama administration, in which Norquist puts such trust, will actually follow through on enforcement promises, guaranteeing the growth of a whole new illegal population.
It is this fact — that the bill puts amnesty before enforcement — which makes S.744 so problematic. And that basic feature was reinforced in last week’s Judiciary Committee markup, which saw the defeat of Senator Grassley’s amendment to make the bill more like Norquist’s description in that the grant of legal status would be on hold until the Mexican border was certified as secure. All of the committee’s ten Democrats and the two Gang of Eight Republicans voted to preserve the basic amnesty-before-enforcement architecture of the bill.
Second, Norquist repeats the libertarian talking point that the 1950s Bracero Program for Mexican farmworkers was a success in preventing illegal immigration and that we should learn from Eisenhower and go back to large-scale use of “temporary” foreign labor. He says the Schumer-Rubio bill’s foreign-worker programs are “modest” and “certainly inadequate” — though I wouldn’t describe as “modest” an average of 2.5 million a year during the bill’s first decade, as estimated by Senator Sessions (the bill’s sponsors have refused to offer their own estimate). In any case, the underlying claim is that admitting more legal “temporary” workers reduces illegal immigration.
But the Bracero Program was not as Norquist describes it. See this from Professor Philip Martin, the nation’s leading authority on farm labor and U.S. immigration policy:
The Bracero program sowed the seeds for later Mexico-US. migration in several ways. The availability of Braceros permitted labor-intensive agriculture to expand to meet a growing demand for fruits and vegetables, creating a demand-pull for Mexican workers. Many areas of rural Mexico became dependent on money earned from U.S. jobs, and networks were soon established to link rural Mexican villages with U.S. farm jobs. US workers who faced Bracero competition in the fields, but not in nonfarm labor markets, exited for nonfarm jobs, leading to “farm labor shortages” that brought more Braceros. The Bracero share of the work force in citrus, tomatoes, and other major California commodities soon exceeded 50 percent, and farm wages as a percentage of manufacturing wages fell during the 1950s.
One argument for Braceros was that allowing Mexicans to come legally would reduce illegal migration. This argument was proven wrong. Between 1942 and 1964, there were 4.6 million Braceros admitted and 4.9 million Mexicans apprehended in the United States; it should be emphasized that both numbers double count individuals who entered the United States as a Bracero several times or were apprehended multiple times. The number of Braceros and “wetbacks” increased together in the 1950s, prompting the Immigration and Naturalization Service to launch “Operation Wetback” in June 1954, which removed 1.1 million Mexicans, including US-born and thus US citizen children of Braceros.
Norquist ends the piece with references to the bogeyman, to scare conservatives away from questioning the Schumer-Rubio bill:
Let’s focus on winning the future and leave Malthus and labor-union and green economics on the trash heap of history.
The hilarious thing about this is that the greens and the unions are on his side. The Sierra Club has endorsed the bill. The AFL-CIO was central to writing the bill; in fact, Norquist was yukking it up on stage at the bill’s unveiling last month with none other than AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, along with SEIU Secretary Treasurer (and Democratic Socialists of America official) Eliseo Medina.
And you want Malthusians? I got Malthusians. How about Bill McKibben, described by Time magazine as “the world’s best green journalist” and named by Steve Hayward at Powerline as one of the top five “New Malthusians.” He even wrote a book entitled Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single Child Families. (“Maybe”!)
So, a scary and evil Malthusian in bed with evil and scary restrictionists, right?
Wrong.
It turns out he’s a high-profile Norquist ally. This recent L.A. Times op-ed endorsing amnesty and increased immigration is a real piece of work. Here’s the core of the article:
But there’s a higher math here that matters much more. At this point, there’s no chance we’re going to deal with global warming one household at a time — scientists, policy wonks and economists have concluded it will also require structural change. We may need, for example, things such as a serious tax on carbon; that will require mustering political will to stand up to the fossil fuel industry.
And that’s precisely where white America has fallen short. Election after election, native-born and long-standing citizens pull the lever for climate deniers, for people who want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, for the politicians who take huge quantities of cash from the Koch brothers and other oil barons. By contrast, a 2012 report by the Sierra Club and the National Council of La Raza found that Latinos were eager for environmental progress. Seventy-seven percent of Latino voters think climate change is already happening, compared with just 52 percent of the general population; 92 percent of Latinos think we have “a moral responsibility to take care of God’s creation here on Earth.”
So, Norquist’s confederate is pushing the Schumer-Rubio bill specifically to replace the existing American electorate with one more to his liking, one that will “stand up to the fossil fuel industry,” defend the EPA, and fight the “climate deniers.” And I’m the Malthusian? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
To adapt a line from Fred Thompson, Norquist’s advocacy on the immigration issue makes me yearn for the honesty and sincerity of Hollywood.
