printLeft-liberals and utopian libertarians cannot hear about any barrier intended to prevent undesired or undesirable human acts without launching into maudlin impersonations of the sainted Ronald Reagan, RIP. Mention a security fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, or one that separates Israeli from Palestinian territories and, on cue, these characters invoke the portentous metaphor of the Berlin Wall, deafening their opposition with shouts of, “Tear down this wall!”
The Israeli barrier has already cut by 80 percent the deaths by suicide bombers in Israel proper. To some, that’s a bad thing. The proposed 700 mile security fence along the U.S.-Mexico border has the potential to considerably reduce rampant crime against border communities—rape, murder, and property transgressions. According to researcher Edwin S. Rubenstein, “Approximately 27 percent of all prisoners in Federal custody are criminal aliens. The majority (63 percent) are citizens of Mexico.” (More on the REAL effects of this influx on crime, culture, the environment, health, labor, and national security, courtesy of Congressman Tom Tancredo.)
It will also stem the tsunami of illegals that has flooded—and devastated—schools, hospitals, and other services in these crumbling outposts, and beyond. Most illegal aliens do not come to the U.S. to wage war, but the reality is that, once in the country, almost all wage welfare. Because these are unskilled, low-wage workers, the taxpayer is compelled to supplement and subsidize every aspect of their existence.
As George Borjas, professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, has documented, since the 1965 Amendments “the United States has been granting entry visas to persons who have relatives in the United States, with no regard to their skills or economic potential.” “Immigrants today,” writes Borjas, “are less skilled than their predecessors, more likely to require public assistance, and far more likely to have children who remain in poor, segregated communities.”
Why do left-liberals and open-border libertarians ignore—or lie about—this unconscionable burden?
Neither does George Bush care much about reality—not the reality created by mass immigration or the one he engineered in Iraq. He has instructed that “No one should claim that immigrants are a burden on our economy because the work and enterprise of immigrants helps sustain our economy.”
Sorry, bubbles; facts tell a different tale.
For example, it’s been estimated that “California immigrants now receive about $9.3 billion more in state expenditures than they pay in state taxes.” And “native-born Californian households paid $1,174 annually in federal, state and local taxes in a net subsidy to the immigrant presence in their state.”
The problem is not unique to “The Golden State.”
A security fence is an infinitely civilized—and passive—form of self-defense. Emperor Hadrian built a wall in 122 A.D. to keep barbarians out of Roman Britain, thus ensuring three centuries of peace. And the Chin Emperor sought the same goal when he erected the Great Wall in the third century B.C. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Kumbaya Crowd that unlike the Roman, Chinese, Israeli, and yet-to-be-constructed American-Mexican barrier, the Iron Curtain was constructed to keep people in.
(A few hysterics have prophesied that a fence along the Mexican border will morph into a pen for Americans. They claim the totalitarian state won’t let its citizens exit. Such hyperbole usually emanates from individuals who’ve never experienced totalitarianism.
America is in trouble. Times are not good, but the United States is still the freest place I’ve lived in, and that includes the socialist Canada. Take it from someone who has lived under a dictatorship—and who left South Africa with her property (the proceeds from the sale of my apartment) stuffed in her shoes, because the state prohibits one from taking all one’s money out. )