Category Archives: IMMIGRATION

Democracy And The Immigration Political Steamroller

Constitution, Democracy, Elections, Federalism, Government, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, States' Rights

The essence of democracy is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “general will,” a “national purpose” that must be implemented by an all-powerful state. “Democratic voting is done, not only to select officials but also to determine the functions and goals and powers of the government,” writes legal scholar (and friend) James Ostrowski. “The guiding principle of republics is that they exercise narrow powers delegated to them by the people, who themselves, as individuals, possess such powers.”

James Madison was not a democrat. He denounced popular rule as “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” Democracy, he observed, must be confined to a “small spot” (like Athens). Madison and the other founders attempted to forestall democracy by devising a republic, the hallmark of which was the preservation of individual liberty. To that end, they restricted the federal government to a handful of enumerated powers.

Decentralization, devolution of authority, and the restrictions on government imposed by a Bill of Rights were to ensure that few issues were left to the adjudication of a national majority.

When you consider every bit of legislation written by our democratically elected despotic lawmakers—the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S.744),” for example—contemplate the words of Benjamin Barber:

It is hard to find in all the daily activities of bureaucratic administration, judicial legislation, executive leadership, and paltry policy-making anything that resembles citizen engagement in the creation of civic communities and in the forging of public ends. Politics has become what politicians do; what citizens do (when they do anything) is to vote for politicians.

And where, pray tell, in the immigration tyranny is the Tenth-Amendment Center? Its scholars used to advocate for the right of the residents of the states to determine how they lived their lives. Unless I am doing him a disservice—in which case I apologize profusely—the last time Michael Boldin applied the Tenth Amendment creatively to the political steamroller that is immigration was when he distinguished between immigration and naturalization in 18th century nomenclature, back in … April 28, 2010.

Has the Tenth Amendment Center fallen to the Beltway bigwigs of the Cato Institute?

Join the conversation on my Facebook page.

UPDATE IV: Ann Coulter Is Sally-Come-Lately To Mass Immigration Vexation, But She’s Still Splendid

Ann Coulter, Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Reason

As I’ve written before, Ann Coulter has been late to blossom politically (otherwise she’s very pretty). Having avoided the immigration vexation until recently, Ms. Coulter has realized the need to become a single-issue powerhouse NOW, so as to make up for her past, politically correct driven neglect.

Sean Hannity cowered in the corner, tonight (June 20, 2013), preferring to cleave to a “gaffe President Obama made in Ireland.” Not Ms. Coulter. As Mediaite (?) puts it, “Coulter quickly shifted to immigration reform, ‘the most important issue facing our nation’ right now.'”

“But before the Obama bashing could go much further, Coulter quickly [more like masterfully] pivoted to immigration. She said that a lot of TV hosts are misleading the public on the bill, and slammed Republicans supporting immigration reform for using the same ‘silly’ arguments and ‘lies’ the Democrats are to justify the bill’s passage. Hannity couldn’t fathom why securing the border first is such a controversial idea in the first place.”

Coulter declared that the Democrats only want reform ‘“because it will help them electorally,” and smacked down the “idiot argument” that Hispanics will somehow “hate Republicans more” if this doesn’t pass. …
Coulter concluded that the Republicans cannot take up any bill that even mentions immigration until the Senate is majority-Republican. She sent a direct message to anyone with a Republican representative who backs the reform bill: “Punish them, voters.”

More regaling than the humdrum report above was watching Ms. Coulter point out that Irish doctors and engineers listening to Hussein’s silly speeches are not favored immigration candidates under Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration bill.

It’s easy to forgive Annie-come-lately for years of silence when she invokes her trademark power syllogisms. For example, likening the silly liberal “argumentation” regarding “de facto amnesty” thus:

“We have de facto amnesty for murderers in America as thousands of murderer are not caught. Do we grant them amnesty?”

Splendid.

By the way, there is someone who has been covering “The Immigration Scene” forever.

Click “Immigration “ on the Articles Search, for four pages of columns going back to 1/30/2002. Some of us are consistent and consistently correct.

UPDATED I (June 20): James Huggins (on Facebook): Ms. Coulter is spot on but a decade late. That’s a big and calculated “mistake.” Unless you recognize how PC she’s been—you cannot appreciate how professionally suicidal the folks at VDARE, NumbersUSA, Michelle Malkin, and yours truly have been all along.

UPDATE II (6/22): From Facebook thread, again: I mean, James Huggins—and you should know what I mean by now—that Ann Coulter could have effected change a long time ago. You and I know she’s smart enough to have done what she’s doing now, back WHEN IT COUNTED. She’s jumping into the immigration debate now, when it no longer matters. We’ve passed the tipping point. “The D-Bomb Has Dropped.” Ultimately, the woman does what’s safe. There is nothing dangerous or admirable about that.

UPDATE III: Immigration Reform Bill: Full text. Try making sense of this bit of proposed legislation. It ought to be forbidden to write, much less pass, a bill written in such impenetrable legalese.

UPDATE IV: Jack Kerwick:

Whether border security attracts or alienates voters is of no consequence: a country’s borders must be secured. It is conditional upon nothing other than the relationship that obtains between a citizenry and its government.

Join the conversation on my Facebook page.

Once There Were Great Immigrants: How The Paulis Came To America

America, Family, Human Accomplishment, IMMIGRATION

The gifted Dr. Myron Robert Pauli (who is related to Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer in quantum mechanics) is a wonderful dad to daughter Anna. Here Myron shares with us the remarkable story of the patriarch Pauli, who came to America the old-fashioned—when no “welfare-bums” were allowed—and sired Myron.

How The Paulis Came to America
By Myron Pauli

At the request of my good friend Ilana Mercer and in honor of Father’s Day, I am writing about how/why relatives named Pauli got to America. My paternal ancestors were Pascheles – but Vienna under Karl Lueger had its own “affirmative action” policy with the goal of 100% non-Jews in the faculty of the University of Vienna. Thus my granduncle Wolf Pascheles became Wolfgang Joseph Pauli. He later had two famous children – Wolfgang Ernst and Hertha Ernestine – both baptized at Mach 1 (Ernst Mach was their godfather!). Grandfather Isadore Pascheles became John Pauli but brother Oscar kept Pascheles and had the good luck to be a Swiss citizen…..

In 1938, Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria meant beatings and sleep deprivation for WWI Captain John Pauli – to relinquish his money to the National Socialists. Grandmother Frederica (related to Jewish Austrian admiral Siegfried Popper!) and John were allowed to leave provided they had a destination. Thankfully, the Chinese consul, Feng-Shan-Ho, defying his own government, issued exit visas to Singapore to thousands of Viennese Jews. However, Prague-born, they faced a small Czech quota and apparently received some help from Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy – to get to America.

My father was in Innsbruck and snuck over the border into Switzerland with a companion who was immediately turned over to the Gestapo by the (very nice!) Swiss but since my father had the excuse of visiting his uncle Oscar in Zurich; they let him in temporarily provided he leave within a month or two. There are actually 3 letters written by his cousin Wolfgang (inventor of the neutrino) to Paul Dirac (inventor of antimatter) to try to get my dad to England because he had a job offer in America provided he made it to England. I don’t know if Dirac helped, but he eventually made it over here! A cousin in Texas, James Utitz, had to certify that my dad would not be a welfare-bum! My father showed up speaking with an English accent and became a stickler for proper English even in Noo-Yawk! Not only did he go ballistic at ads for the “Green Witch Savings Bank” (Greenwich!) – but he complained about Puerto Ricans speaking poor Spanish. Fortunately, he never lived to hear Ebonics!

Cousin Hertha, an actress and historian-author, with the honor of having her books banned by Nazi Germany – went to France and got smuggled out of France through Lisbon (helped by Varian Fry and the “Emergency Rescue Committee”) to the US with her husband and friends Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel and Franz Werfel. Both Hertha and Franz stopped at the Lady of Lourdes and each wrote a book and a movie (Franz’s – more famous) about the Song of Bernadette.

Wolfgang tried to get Swiss citizenship but the Swiss decided that he “did not satisfy the requirement of assimilation” – so he and wife Franca – with the help of French colleagues – got over to Lisbon and then to Princeton to his old pal Albert Einstein and the Institute of Advanced Studies which labeled Wolfgang as his “spiritual heir.” After 1946, Wolfgang returned to work in Switzerland because he objected to excessive military influence on American physics (which, if nothing else, proves both intelligence and integrity).

Granduncle Oscar held the fort in Switzerland and tried to get family out as best he could. Poignant letters from a distant cousin from the Nazi Kielce ghetto to Oscar prior to her extermination exist (Switzerland was neutral with postal relations with Germany). Oscar’s grandson is Vice President of Global Commercial Intelligence for Merck.

My dad settled in Sunnyside, Queens and wound up with a wife and 2 kids. He loved the country and we had a small country house. We rented out our upstairs to what appeared to be 10% of Puerto Rico (whom, thanks to rent control, we could not evict!) and eventually rented the rest and bought a third house for us. Dad preferred Adlai Stevenson’s erudite English over Eisenhower’s garbled Army-speak, but after rent control, opposing LBJ’s War in Vietnam and inflation, he voted for Nixon! I don’t know what he would think of events nowadays but his work ethic and English perfectionism would not fit in with modern immigration policy!

**************

Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

$6.3 Trillion: The Cost Of The GOF8’s Amnesty Plot

Debt, Economy, IMMIGRATION, Labor

Trust Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation to do the job the open-border “Treason Lobby” won’t do: crunch the numbers to come up with the price of the bipartisan (for some strange reason), Gang of Eight amnesty plot to reel-in “undocumented Democrats.” (It is supported by pillars of the Gof8, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio.)

Bullet points:

* These targeted ‘undocumented Democrats’ are ‘net tax consumers’: “The benefits they receive exceed the taxes they pay. These households generate a ‘fiscal deficit’ that must be financed by taxes from other households or by government borrowing.”

* “the typical unlawful immigrant has only a 10th-grade education. Half of unlawful immigrant households are headed by an individual with less than a high school degree, and another 25 percent of household heads have only a high school degree.”

* “unlawful immigrants at present do not have access to means-tested welfare, Social Security, or Medicare. This does not mean, however, that they do not receive government benefits and services. Children in unlawful immigrant households receive heavily subsidized public education. Many unlawful immigrants have U.S.-born children; these children are currently eligible for the full range of government welfare and medical benefits. And, of course, when unlawful immigrants live in a community, they use roads, parks, sewers, police, and fire protection; these services must expand to cover the added population or there will be “congestion” effects that lead to a decline in service quality.”

* “In 2010, the average unlawful immigrant household received around $24,721 in government benefits and services while paying some $10,334 in taxes. This generated an average annual fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of around $14,387 per household. This cost had to be borne by U.S. taxpayers. Amnesty would provide unlawful households with access to over 80 means-tested welfare programs, Obamacare, Social Security, and Medicare. The fiscal deficit for each household would soar.”

* “As noted, at the current time (before amnesty), the average unlawful immigrant household has a net deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $14,387 per household.”
* ” During the interim phase immediately after amnesty, tax payments would increase more than government benefits, and the average fiscal deficit for former unlawful immigrant households would fall to $11,455.”
* “At the end of the interim period, unlawful immigrants would become eligible for means-tested welfare and medical subsidies under Obamacare. Average benefits would rise to $43,900 per household; tax payments would remain around $16,000; the average fiscal deficit (benefits minus taxes) would be about $28,000 per household.”
* “Amnesty would also raise retirement costs by making unlawful immigrants eligible for Social Security and Medicare, resulting in a net fiscal deficit of around $22,700 per retired amnesty recipient per year.”

* “Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.”
* “In the interim phase (roughly the first 13 years after amnesty), the aggregate annual deficit would fall to $43.4 billion.”
* “At the end of the interim phase, former unlawful immigrant households would become fully eligible for means-tested welfare and health care benefits under the Affordable Care Act. The aggregate annual deficit would soar to around $106 billion.”
* “In the retirement phase, the annual aggregate deficit would be around $160 billion. It would slowly decline as former unlawful immigrants gradually expire.”
* “If amnesty is enacted, the average adult unlawful immigrant would receive $592,000 more in government benefits over the course of his remaining lifetime than he would pay in taxes.”

Over a lifetime, the former unlawful immigrants together would receive $9.4 trillion in government benefits and services and pay $3.1 trillion in taxes. They would generate a lifetime fiscal deficit (total benefits minus total taxes) of $6.3 trillion.

“These costs would have to be borne by an already overburdened U.S. taxpayer. (All figures are in 2010 dollars.)”

ONE QUESTION: What’s with the “unlawful immigrant” bit of finessing?