Immigration Numbers

Supply-sider Alan Reynolds has had it with all the rhetoric on immigration.  Says he: 

Rational discussion of the Senate immigration bill is being stifled and befuddled by a few misused words and phrases that generate irrational anger and very little understanding.

So he comes up with the numbers.  And they are pretty impressive.

• 175 million foreign visitors per year
• 4.7 million business visitors per year
• 1.25 million new permanent residents per year
• 0.9 million temporary workers per year
• 0.6 million new citizens per year
• 0.5 million illegals per year 
• 56 percent of illegals from Mexico
• 30 percent of illegals from Asia
• 40-50 percent of illegals arrived legally

That is pretty interesting stuff.

"Hook-up" Culture: Girls Still Confused

You can see what a job that feminists have done on our young college women.  When it comes to the hook-up culture they can barely articulate the idea that it is tearing them to bits, as Ashley Herzog illustrates in this quote from an Ohio University co-ed freshman:

I think for guys, it’s a lot about hooking up; for girls it’s more of an emotional thing. Maybe the guy will call you; maybe he’ll just say ‘hi’ on the street. But he sees you as an object, while you’re upset. The guys are over-empowered.

No kidding!  But as a well-indoctrinated young women she can’t bear to be judgmental.

Even at the basic level, the sexual revolution was bad news for women:

While women bear the unwanted pregnancies, abortions, and emotional pain wrought by casual sex, men are free to move on to the next bedmate.

It’s enough to make you realize what the old rules about courting and commitment and marriage were all about.

It wasn’t really about the patriarchy or male power.  It was just about protecting women from male predation.

And, as the co-ed says, the hook-up culture makes the guys “over-empowered.”

Unfortunately, modern woman has to learn this the hard way, individually, in every female life.

And unfortunately, it takes her about half a life to realize that she’s been taken for a ride.

So which is worse: the old patriarchy in which women were chattels or the new hook-archy in which the guys are “over-empowered?”

The Unenforced Immigration Laws

No doubt, as our political leaders insist, there is a major immigration problem that requires an immigration amnesty law to be rushed through Congress.  It’s a pity that we don’t care to enforce the laws already on the books, writes Mark Krikorian:

Let’s look at a few of the initiatives already on the books that have languished in bureaucratic or political purgatory rather than getting done:

First of all, of course, there’s the fence. Only two miles have been built on the southern border yet, and there are 370 miles scheduled to be built before the end of 2008.

There’s the issue of state and local police forces helping to arrest illegals.  In 2002, the Justice Department issued an opinion that clarified the right of state and local law enforcement authorities to detain illegals, but the Bush Administration put it on ice, “keeping in effect a Clinton-era policy directive discouraging state and local use of immigration law.”

There’s the policy of the Treasury Department that has told banks that it’s ok to offer bank accounts to people with Mexican “matricula consular.”  And the IRS allows illegals to use a Tax Identification Number (i.e., a Social Security number in all but name).

Obviously, when the government makes it difficult to arrest illegals and makes it easy to live as an illegal in the United States, then people will come.

That’s fine, as long as it is the official policy of the United States.

Last time I looked, it wasn’t.

Committing Politics in Britain

Here in the United States our leaders are busy rushing a immigration amnesty bill to the president’s desk before the voters notice and get mobilized against it.  The last thing they want is an open discussion of the issues.

But in Britain Conservative Party leader David Cameron is having an open discussion of education policy with his Tory Party rank-and-file.  In an op-ed in the London Times he writes:

This is the week when the Conservative Party got serious about education reform. Our approach rests on two things. First, an instinctive Conservative belief in rigour, parental choice and competition as the best way of raising standards. Secondly, on the evidence of what works — both in Britain and around the world.

That’s a polite way of saying that his spokesman’s speech the previous week about “grammar schools” set off a firestorm of criticism.  Many Tories want a return to academic, selective grammar schools and away from the current system of “bog-standard” comprehensive secondary schools.

But you have to give Cameron a tip of the hat.  He didn’t hide from his critics.  He came right out and confronted them.

First thing he cite in his article is the success of school choice in Sweden, the Netherlands, and “some states in the US.” 

Oh?  You didn’t know that they have school choice in socialist Sweden and liberal Netherlands?  No doubt you get your information from the mainstream media.  But here at Road to the Middle Class we are right on top of it.

Like conservatives in the United States, Cameron wants to avoid “selection” and wants students choosing schools not schools choosing students.

Notice how he gives Tony Blair a half-hearted pat on the back:

David Willetts and I are applying Conservative principles and best-practice education reform from around the world to our schools in England. This is what Tony Blair came to realise was necessary and has been moving towards in the latter stages of his premiership. His education Act last year was a step in the right direction, which is why we backed it.

That issues from his strategic decision to avoid opposition for the sake of opposition.  He wants to support good ideas even if they come from the other party.

Of course, he goes on to say that Blair’s party has since given up on reform.  Only Conservatives can be trusted to have their hearts in the job.  And it doesn’t hurt to talk about discipline in schools.

There’s a word for Cameron’s open advocacy and willingness to debate his party’s critics in public.  Politics.

What a concept.

The Immigration Bill and the Big Picture

 It is, as  writes, an outrage when the governing classes try to rush a major revision of the nation’s immigration law past the voters and past their legislators without what our liberal friends call “a national conversation.”

He has thoughtfully provided a critique of the Senate bill as it became available over the weekend.

Today he has listed a number of proposed amendments to the bill.  One of them is to establish a special category of aliens from jihadist countries.  No quick Z-visa for them!

 In the frenzy of day-to-day political combat, let us not forget the big picture.  It was one of President Eisenhower’s maxims that if he couldn’t see the solution to a problem he tried to make it bigger.

The big picture is that we are in the middle of a great human migration, perhaps the greatest ever since modern humans first crossed the Straits of Hormuz 50,000 years ago and spread across the whole world.

Today’s great migration is from the country to the city.  In China at this moment, about 25 million people are moving to the city each year. 

Not surprisingly, people are migrating to the best city they know about.  For many Mexicans the best place to go is not Mexico City or Monterrey.  As one Mexican immigrant said to me from the driver’s seat of his mammoth Chevy Suburban SUV: “In Mexico you have to pay someone to get a job.”

So they come to the great job-creating cities of the United States.

For us, this is all very well.  Just don’t all come at once.

It is the job of of our government, legislators, executive, and judges, to control the flow of immigration so that it does not create hardships for the American people.  We care about the Mexican people, of course.  But first we must take care of our own.

So the job of the government is to control, channel, and limit the flow.  That is something that the government has clearly not been doing very well at all.

That is why folks like Hugh Hewitt are right when they insist that before we start handing out amnesty to illegal immigrants the government must demonstrate that it has gotten control of the borders. 

How Much Does the Elite Know?

The great presumption of the twentieth century was that an educated elite capable of “rational, factual, socialist argument” was much better way at running the country than the higgling and the chaos of the market.

So it wrong to suggest, Thomas Sowell writes, that either economic interests rule (Marx) or that ideas rule (Keynes).   

My own view is that differences in bedrock assumptions underlying ideas play a major role in determining how people differ in what policies, principles or ideologies they favor.

But suppose that the bedrock assumption of our age, that the best government is government by a rational elite of experts, is wrong? 

No big deal.  It just explains most of the famines and economic disasters of the twentieth century, from the Ukrainian famine to the Great Leap Forward famine, to the extended Great Depression and the stagflation of the 1970s.

Opposed to this conventional wisdom that an educated elite knows best is the insurgent view of people like Thomas Sowell.

If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on Earth does not have even 1 percent of the total knowledge on Earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.
If no one has even 1 percent of the knowledge available, not counting the vast amount yet to be discovered, imposing from the top of the notions favored by elites convinced of their own superior knowledge and virtue is a formula for disaster.

What Sowell is doing here is dumbing down the central insight of two experts, Lugwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. 

Mises said that the socialist commonwealth would fail because it could not compute prices (i.e., would lack the knowledge to know what to produce and what not to produce). 

Hayek said that the brilliant man in Whitehall or Washington could not outperform the millions of economic actors with their intimate knowledge of economic facts on the ground.

Today we have a report from Peter Ferrara that the Democrats in Congress are ramping up taxes and spending in their budget resolutions.

That is another way of saying that we, the committee of 535 best people assisted by government experts, know what is best for America.  We know how to spend Americans’ money better than they do.

Our Democratic friends are liable to wake up pretty soon with a bad cold.

Who Needs School Anyway?

Pity poor Marilee Jones, formerly Dean of Admissions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She figured she needed a bushel of degrees to work at MIT so she faked ’em, according to James Taranto.  Fortunately, Taranto only works for The Wall Street Journal edit page.  So he doesn’t need all those sheepskins. 

I feel her pain, for school never agreed with me. I repeatedly found myself in conflict with teachers and professors. I left high school after my sophomore year; and although I spent several years in college, I never bothered to graduate.

Actually, it’s probably true that school disagrees with most boys.  Especially now that school is so feminized and gun-free.  As Ruth Dudley Edwards puts it:

The feminisation of education and the ensuing triumph of political correctness have turned generations of boys off reading, not least by urging them to get in touch with their feelings and despise that part of themselves that wants to see heroes biffing villains.

You mean the way that Brigadier Ritchie Hook used to go on about “biffing” in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour series?

Perhaps they could read The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden and

swot up on the solar system, learn about famous battles and read inspiring stories of incredible courage and bravery. Teach your old dog new tricks. Make a pinhole camera

and so on.  But it’s not just school that boys don’t like.  It’s classes in general.

Women are always going to classes to learn something, even if it is “tennis, wine-tasting, sailing.”  Then they complain because they don’t meet any men there, writes Ann Althouse.  It’s the old story.

Because, after all, you know that if you’re going to explain gender difference, you’ve got to assume that whatever the women are doing is good, and it’s the men who have the problem. So: You know those men. They think they’re so smart. You can’t tell them anything. They won’t ask for directions.

Let’s look at the male side of this, shall we?  Althouse continues.

Men prefer to look at something they have decided to do and figure it out on their own. They like to observe, analyze, and discover. They accept the risks and enjoy the excitement of trial and error. They don’t like sitting around having someone tell them what to do, and they aren’t intrigued by the prospect of meeting women who spend so much time doing something they loathe.

OK, she admits.  She made that up.

Then there’s this from Althouse’s comment section.

My daughter, just yesterday, looks at me as we were watching television and says, "What’s with this stupid female superiority thing?"
She elaborated a little bit... no matter what[,] the girls on TV were always right. Smarter, wiser, etc.

Out of the mouths of babes...