2010-12-18

Immigration policy turns the corner

Requiem for a DREAM
As Katrina notes below, the DREAM Act has finally been put out of our misery (here’s how everyone voted). But it’s bigger than that. The vote was the capstone of 10 straight years of successful defense against amnesties, following the passage of seven amnesties from 1986 to 2000. Only twice in the past decade did amnesties even get the approval of one chamber — the overall amnesty passed by the Senate in 2006 and the DREAM amnesty by the House earlier this month — but neither time did the amnesty reach the president’s desk.

This decade-long perfect record of stopping amnesty came despite the fact that the pro-amnesty side has held all the commanding heights of the economy and society: Big Business, Big Labor, Big Religion, Big Academia, Big Media, Big Philanthropy, and of course, Big Government. The open-borders side is backed by billionaires like George Soros, Rupert Murdoch, and Michael Bloomberg, plus scores of millions from mammoth foundations like Ford, Carnegie, and MacArthur, plus 98 percent of groups lobbying Congress on the issue.

But we had the public.

Now, the next phase of the immigration struggle begins. Next month, the new Congress will be a very different animal. Fifty-three members of the House of Representatives who voted for the DREAM amnesty will not be returning in January. And it will finally be time to go on the offense.
That's Mark Kirkorian writing at The Corner, the group blog of the National Review. While he's not using a socionomic perspective, socionomics confirms his expectation that politics will now shift from blocking the most extreme pro-immigration policies (stasis) to pushing immigration policy in the direction of greater restriction. See this chart of the Dow/Gold ratio below:
Robert Prechter predicted immigration restrictions during this decline in social mood. Bush the Younger pushed hard for amnesty and he had the chance with a Democrat Congress after 2006, but they could not overcome the decline in social mood and the shift in the public's priorities. Illegal immigration was never popular, with two-thirds or more of the public against it, but during rising social mood, the public felt more inclusive and had other concerns. I believe immigration also fits into Prechter's opinion that the peak in 2000 was of a much greater degree. On the scale of all immigration policies, from completely closed borders to completely open borders, amnesty for tens of millions of illegal immigrants is very close to an open border policy, an extremely pro-immigration policy. It took a full decade of declining social mood just to stop this policy, let alone achieve any reversal in policy...but consider that this mirrors the credit markets quite well.

Just as the United States is starting to with the buildup of excess credit during the period of rising social mood, it will also begin to deal with excess immigration. Peak social mood saw both open credit and open borders. Want a loan? Come and get one! Want to live in America? Come on in! This week, the Federal Reserve moved to limit debit card fees charged by banks, possibly costing them $13 billion in revenue, and Congress killed amnesty.

For a look at excess immigration, see Victor Davis Hanson's Two Californias:
In fact, trash piles are commonplace out here — composed of everything from half-empty paint cans and children’s plastic toys to diapers and moldy food. I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands. So I would suggest to Bay Area scientists that the environment is taking a much harder beating down here in central California than it is in the Delta. Perhaps before we cut off more irrigation water to the west side of the valley, we might invest some green dollars into cleaning up the unsightly and sometimes dangerous garbage that now litters the outskirts of our rural communities.

We hear about the tough small-business regulations that have driven residents out of the state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week. But from my unscientific observations these past weeks, it seems rather easy to open a small business in California without any oversight at all, or at least what I might call a “counter business.” I counted eleven mobile hot-kitchen trucks that simply park by the side of the road, spread about some plastic chairs, pull down a tarp canopy, and, presto, become mini-restaurants. There are no “facilities” such as toilets or washrooms. But I do frequently see lard trails on the isolated roads I bike on, where trucks apparently have simply opened their draining tanks and sped on, leaving a slick of cooking fats and oils. Crows and ground squirrels love them; they can be seen from a distance mysteriously occupied in the middle of the road.

At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.
This is literally Third World, it is what takes place in countries where the government is not strong enough to enforce basic laws.
Do diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a hundred-mile stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or drove through Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market in southwestern Selma, my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic — there were no Asians, no blacks, no other whites. We may speak of the richness of “diversity,” but those who cherish that ideal simply have no idea that there are now countless inland communities that have become near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers or at least the chief sources of income — whether through emergency rooms, rural health clinics, public schools, or social-service offices. An observer from Mars might conclude that our elites and masses have given up on the ideal of integration and assimilation, perhaps in the wake of the arrival of 11 to 15 million illegal aliens.

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