Victor Davis Hanson on Immigration

going back to that poll of the zogby poll said that 50% of the 100 million plus in Mexico said if given the chance they would come across the border immediately that would be 50 million people who would come right away and given all of South America you could Envision that we very easily could quite short order reach the size of China and whatever you think about the American experience part of it is predicated on very different protocols than having a m a billion people in the North American continent the reason that you're here is really not about immigration it's about illegal immigration that is this new phenomenon we always had illegal immigration but not in the numbers that we've had in the last 30 years and that seems to be what the current controversy especially in the Congress is all about we'll talk about immigration but we're really talking about illegal immigration and it's been deliberately blurred by a lot of people on both sides of the issue but there is a distin between favoring immigration and having it controlled and allowing open borders that encourages or tolerates illegal immigration I'd like to make that distinction the second thing is it's not specifically an economic issue a social issue a political issue it's all of them ethical issue let me just give you an example the ambiguity um University of California is trying to appeal to minority students in the San Walkin Valley so they've opened a new new University of California Campus Kent Campus it has a budget of $20 million it's underfunded and it's nearing disaster to be quite Frank because of budgetary constraints but presently we have 15,000 I'm not saying there's a direct correlation but to give you some idea of the cost and the expenses and the consequences of that cost we have 15,000 people from Mexico here illegally in the California penal system that cost 500 million which is roughly 20 times the budget of that campus and if you count County jails and city jails that number may be up to 30 to 40,000 and have an aggregate cost of a billion a half dollars per year one of the things you quickly learn about the debate especially in the sphere of illegal immigration is that when you do have this many people living in the United States there is no data both sides try to produce data I noticed that uh I just read recently that the amount of taxes that are paid on the books by illegal workers uh is a shortfall of about 10 billion dollars Nationwide versus the entitlements they draw State of California advocates for closed border argue instead it's $10 billion just in California but when you have a amorphous group where nobody can agree on how many people are coming across the border we have a general idea that 3 million people per year try to come to the United States illegally and perhaps a million to a million and a half do I've heard a low end of 8 million are residing illegally and up I think Baron suggested 18 million on the top end when you don't have that data then there's all sorts of models and speculation that's allowed to happen so we really don't know the size of the problem and we don't know the exact economic effects of it because nobody knows the size of the pool who's here and especially the size of the pool who's in the system some people may have false names and have social security and pain some people are just paying in cash we some suggest that 55% of all the wages paid the illegal aliens are not run through the Social Security System they're just cash empirically from my experience growing up in rural California I think it's higher about 60 to 70% of the people who are working in construction or agriculture or hotels or are here illegally from Mexico are just being paid in cash so it's very hard to uh get a specific number okay my question is to both The Debaters uh what should the American government do about the current illegal immigrants that are residing in the United States uh should we Deport them and possibly permanently damage our economy or should we allow them to be legal residents and ignore the fact that they came here illegally whichever one you want to take Dr Hansen I I kind of found myself at odds with people who want to close so-called Clos the borders on that question because as someone who lives in a community that has about 6 to 7,000 residents here illegally from Mexico and some of them have been here 40 and 50 years I think it would be a public I mean I know that conservatives think we're going to deport people here illegally but they do not have the political Capital to put up with CBS News every night going into somebody's house and taking a 70-year old woman and putting her on a bus to Wako it's just not going to happen I think the more wise problem the more wise solution excuse me would to have some minimum criteria of 2 or three years residency that allows you to go through a process of citizenship with the qualifier that we've had seven rolling amnesties and each one has not been enforced and each one was said to be the last one and each one encourag more illegal immigration but if we could have an amnesty that would be tied with border enforcement employer sanctions and a legal quote of I just picked that 250,000 because that's one that we've historically used I think that'd be the answer one of the problems I have about the guest worker program is I grew up with the brero program and the idea that everybody's to join the guest worker program and then say 350,000 people will come and the other million will say I didn't get into the program I'll stay back in Mexico is crazy the people who are not in the guest worker will still want to come you'll still have to have enforcement but you now you'll suffer the additional hypocracy of bringing a little bit of legality to a whole lot of illegality and then you'll have a permanent pool of exploited uh workers finally I don't want to dominate Dr pow will have comments but remember there was a whole literature whether it's CBS News Harvest of Shame documentaries or um AR uh Woody guth's Dort a whole popular culture grou in the 50s and 60s about the baso program that was in fact from 1947 to 65 and the idea was that when that thing ended in October if you could go to places like deleno in California and I did people did not want to go home the way that we got the BOS to go home was we paid them 75 cents an hour we being the californ agricultural industry and we gave 50 cents to them and we sent the other 25 cents to the Mexican Government we know now that the other 25 cents was stolen and they never received it but that was the only bribe that we could get to leave make people go back because even though they were working and in compounds they found the conditions so attractive that they wanted to break the law and not go back to Mexico and I think that anybody who thinks that those same conditions will not reoccur is very naive one of the things I think is ironic about it is we use political labels a lot often people on the left will call people worried about illegal immigration racist people on the right suggest that they're nativist or protectionist but what strikes me about the issue is the illiberal nature of it in a variety of ways that is the illegal nature of allowing unchecked illegal immigration and let me just give you two or three examples of what I mean by that the first is that we have literally tens of thousands of people who like to enter the United States legally especially from places such as India the Philippines Korea it takes anywhere from 2 to 7 years to do it legally and yet because perhaps our historical relationship with Mexico the proximity of Mexico our constituencies that are pro- Mexican government within the United States uh we allow as I said a million people three million people try to come but at least a million people cut in the line so to speak that's not fair to the people who tried to come legally the second is is that we talk about alien labor or immigrant labor in a static sense and we forget the aging process that goes on a person who comes to the United States at 18 or 19 from wwk is one of the hardest workers in the world no doubt about anybody who's gone to Central California and seen people work in construction and uh agriculture will see that this country as a whole benefits from that worker because he takes s to 8 or $9 in cash the employer saves with the deductions in a lot of cases and even if he doesn't uh pay off the books it's it's a low wage labor the person's young usually not married and healthy but as the aging process proceeds and a person is alone here and he has three strikes against him or her I.E he's here illegally he usually does not know English and the average a the average level of education is usually the 8th grade um what happens is that that entry Lev job whether it's landscape or construction becomes a dead- end job and if a person makes one mistake falls off a ladder hurts a knee gains weight becomes ill then that employer is not obligated to take care of him and that becomes a w of the state that person so whether that worker who is here illegal is a boon or bust to the economy depends on the age cycle in which he's participating and the studies that I've read that suggest that perhaps from 18 to 40 that's a plus for the US economy but from 40 on it's not and one of the Striking things again from empirical experience that I've seen is this phenomenon of people who worked very very hard from Mexico as first generation workers and then their children who have never been to Mexico and do not speak Spanish well and yet have not been given the tools to compete in a very competitive American side become very bitter about the fate of their parents and as I I talked to a contract a contractor not long ago and as he said to me I asked him how many people were on his crew were legal and be paid through the so-called books he said none had eight workers he said they're the best workers in the world I only insist on three things they can't speak English they can't have any tattoos and they can't have a shaved head and what he meant by that is he did not want a second generation what he called Gang type he wanted people from Waka who were hardworking but had not been acculturated to the American system so and I think I don't think that's an isolated example so there's a cynicism involved about recycling human capital almost and then uh great controversy about the effect of illegal uh aliens on the labor scale Department of Commerce suggested it was a fine factor in keeping wages static we don't know whether it helps or hurts unemployment I I will give you another example last summer the chairman of the simple California Farm Bureau said that if the raisin industry of which I was a part did not have 30,000 workers from Central Mexico the industry would go broke guest workers at the time he said that the unemployment rate in Fresno County was 12% so there's something going on there and you can argue well we can't get Workers because they won't do that job that's fine but at least you should ask yourself why is that happening when we have counties that need workers from Mexico that have unemployment rates Per County of 8 to 10% there's something going on ethically psychologically morally or socially that says to Americans you don't have to do that type of work somebody else will do that for you at a cheaper rate uh as a classicist we always use this um Latin phrase qu Bono why do we have this system of 10 to 12 million illegal aliens who does it benefit that Latin phrase to who's good the answer is everybody seems to benefit Mexican government in three ways Mexican uh illegal immigrants contribute about $50 billion to Mexico and Central America and remittances that prop up the America the Mexican Government now we think that's good for Mexico and it is but it's often comes at the expense of immigrant labors if you go to a community like Mendota or san waen California you will see very quickly that they're bankrupt their WS of Fresno County and the state because anybody who's making1 or12 and sends four to five back will not have disposable income to be taxed upon or to invest in the local community so often in communities that are are becoming a partide in California we have pyramidal societies an elite on top that employs them and a lower hell out class on the bottom who's sending much of their wages down to Mexico Mexican government also finds that the larger The Expatriate Community is in California or the American southwest the stronger the advocacy they have for Mexican relations be be the United States and why do they want that strong advocacy because this is sort of a safety uh valve in Reverse for them they will never they will never Embrace structural reform uh as long as they can export people uh that might be potential dissidents now it is true that the Mexican population rate is slowing we have things like Walmart but if you look at the Mexican energy sector Mexican banking sector the Mexican Judicial System the Mexican political system system a lot of these structural reforms have not taken place because they count on at any given time a large pool of many millions of Mexicans who did not find that system Equitable to come to the United States one of the great ironies of course was there was an a poll not long ago by uh the Pew foundation and the zogby as well and it suggested that 58% 58% of Mexican citizens felt that the American southwest still belong to Mexico and that they had a right to go through an open border but even more interesting was almost 50% said they would migrate themselves this shows you the Deep psychological confusion about the issue because it essentially says our system does not work and we want to leave it but the place that we leave should belong to Mexico and that is mutually contradictory why would anybody want to maintain a Mexican sovereignty over a system that they want to it doesn't make any sense but it shows you this deep deep sense of Pride and frustration that people have when they come here uh so Mexico benefits so do employers who get cheap labor and they find that they cannot uh organize for unionization they're subject to exploitation I know that's sort of a Canard but I find it true especially when the state will step in and provide a subsidy of entitlement Section 8 housing support for uh education for children again this is a deeply uh ambivalent ethical issue as a person who taught 20 years in the California state system I had literally dozens of students who were here illegally whose parents were paid off the books but because they were residents of California they had instate tuition rates and paid a fraction a third I should say of my other students who were also Hispanic who were legal from Arizona and New Mexico who paid three times the amount to go to the California State University system because they had done it legally even though the the argument that the people in state paid taxes was not really a cogent one when they were not paying state income taxes because their parents were not in the books I know sales tax helps a little bit but it wasn't quite enough to justify that discrepancy and finally there's us all the middle class there there's been a radical change in the American view toward work whether we like it or not um as getting back to the anecdote I said about the California Farm Bureau he was asked when he made that statement how many teenagers in fral County are at the mall on any given day and people suggested 5 to 10,000 there's been a difference in the attitude and respect for hard work one of the things about this whole guest worker issue I think is very important is that assumes that all of our Lawns were cut by people illegally from Mexico before that none of us ever grew up cutting Lawns that all of our dishes all were washed all of our beds were made by people who were here illegally from Mexico because if you think that that were to cease that we could not go on but all you have to do is leave the amount American southwest and go to other states in the union including your your own and you will see that in fact a lot of these jobs are done by people who are illegal immigrants are natives and that part of it is a psychological issue that we have given the Privileges of the aristocratic class to have servants for your parents and the rest home your babysitters Cooks maids and and landscapers to the middle class that's been a great entitlement to the middle class but it comes at as I said social ethical moral and political cost thank you very much now we shift gears a little bit to the question phase and so we give Dr Hansen a chance to ask a question or propound a theory or an idea to Dr pal and then get his response and then that will be reversed um I think we agree on a lot of things Dr would you respond and again I'm not trying to quote polls but most of the polls I've seen said that currently 81% 80% of the American people uh are opposed to the status quo which I guess we could call what they consider open borders and want to have the present immigration policies in force so whatever you and I disagree there's going to be whatever we agree or disagree on there's this other gigantic animal in the room which is public opinion which seems to be that four out of five people do not favor your point of view yeah I don't think that's the case though it's not that four out of five don't favor my point of view it's four out of five don't favor the results of our current chaotic policy which is not what I'm pushing for and part of the the benefit of doing these forms is educating that there's a difference between open immigration policy and de facto open immigration while we remain making it illegal because that's what gives us all of these negative consequences that that you rightly point out but in all in all sincerity if I could follow um in all sincerity if you were to make this case and say the present system is broken you can make it for people in the room and say I've got a better solution we will simply with some checks on legality we'll just open the borders let anybody who wants to come in I think that you'll find that even more than 80% propose that uh I don't know if you'll find more than 80% propos but whether you do or not whether you find 90% to oppose it because that this popular opinion on any number of issues doesn't make it right or wrong and really doesn't sway me articulating what I think is the correct economic and just position the the game for an intellectual is not to say what's politically actually this is a famous quote of Hayek right the job of an intellectual is not to do what's politically practical but to do the policies that are right with the intention of making them politically practical in the long run that's that's our job we're not just intellectuals in some sense we're policy makers too and we have to deal with what's within the realm of reality let me ask you another question since citizenship is essential to a Democratic Society How would would you if you were mistaken and you might be mistaken the numbers that actually came let's say that 10 million came the first year how would you inculcate them any common sense of Commonwealth language knowledge of their host country how would you do that yeah sure I mean that number of people we have programs already that we do this with immigrants who come here before they can apply for citizenships those programs will have to be re-evaluated and restructured but it's not fundamentally something we can't do but if we're basically failing to do it now and we increase the magnitude of income incoming by 10 million people what makes you think it's not the legal ones that we're failing to do it now with it's the illegals who aren't ever part of the process that we're failing to do it with so my system would actually fix that by not making them illegals anymore but by bringing them into the legal realm where the system does work reasonably well well you're but who are the people who are good let's say to take an example of Mexico if we let in 10 million people from Mexico you think that by doing that we would be able to reverse bilingualism Lage chauvinism just by simply making them legal and sort of interrupt the last 20 years of no just making them legal doesn't do that by itself but just making them legal doesn't abolish the welfare state either that gives them these transfers these are all problems that have to be addressed but they're not problems of immigration per se but remember your position and this is one of the ironies of this debate would be accepted wholeheartedly by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal but it would also be accepted wholeheartedly by the National Council of lza for quite different reasons so why you see this is something that's logical and works for uh the economic benefit of the United States other people would agree with you because they would see entirely different results from it in other words they would see a massive influx of people from Mexico a constituency that would have historical grievances against the United States might not assimilate would have claims of a separate language and would demand Collective and group representation IE they would want a uh a different type of state but laazer isn't the average Mexican who comes here they don't represent their views very well at all the vast majority of them want to come here to get ahead and make their families better they do but if you look at the political leadership for example in the California state legislature that ises not the people who are making policy in California as we saw in the the recent Governor ship with candate Bustamante they do not reflect that view for some reason they reflect a laraza point of view that's what's I think a lot of problems with the California legislature that's why uh the a was such a sorry Congressman but as a general Point quite often politics doesn't reflect the views of society I think this is one case where it's it's failing in C in California uh Freedom there is a freedom and I agree from law but there's also a different type of Freedom that's freedom from chaos the present system is chaotic and it's partly uh chaotic because there's no freedom from it let me give you an example if somebody hits you in California and has no no driver's license which is common and has no insurance which is common and has no legality which is common you're not allowed the policeman in most municipalities is not even allowed to arrest that person and detain him as an illegal alien and the system that we're starting to see today with duplicate IDs uh fraudulent identification and simply no law is chaotic and it's not Freedom at all it's it's Anarchy I think that uh in theory there might be economic Arguments for open borders there's economic Arguments for legalization complete legalization of all drugs as well it would cut down on enforcement cost it would allow drugs to be produced in the United States without importation fees from the uh gross domestic product but I think the social ethical and moral cost which can't be calibrated in a strict economic sense without W those we got to remember that same logic applies here there's more moral issues when somebody pays three times the tuition of somebody else who's IL legal there's moral issues when once you break the law you decide which laws are going to be enforced whether you're breaking them or whether you're enforcing them which are going to be enforced and which are not uh 25% of all immigrant househ illegal immigrant households in California are on public assistance so while I say I agree with Dr P in the utopian world we could get rid of these things we're not going to get rid of them the and the reality we face is that we have 25% on public assistance four out of 10 Hispanic students are not graduating from high school in a very competitive environment in California and that's partly because we have a persistent pool of three million people who come without education English and legality 7% of all Hispanics have a bachelor's degree given this terrible Legacy of illegal immigration so u i I think that we have to deal with the reality that we're faced with we're not going to eliminate the entitlement system and finally the reason that we have these problems with separate language separate culture a laraza shavinism is not just because of therapeutic Society of the 1960s it's also because of the size of the illegal immigrant pool when you have 10 or 12 million people that are constituting an apartheid Community there will be protocols that arise to service that Community toward assimilation thank you

Channel: Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Views: 23,432

Keywords: conservatism, conservative, us history, politics, #immigration

Id: Fc8o7gV9upY

Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2024