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The Democrats’ Trump Card
President Obama seems on the verge of the most abject diplomatic capitulation in American history – to Iran, our bitterest enemy – and Republicans are arguing about Donald Trump? The prospect of a deal with Iran is dumbfounding and infuriating, as the U.S. held all the cards in the protracted negotiations and yet executed serial surrenders to the Iranians, rather like a courtier bowing his way backwards from a monarch.
While the Obama Administration is paving the way for a possible mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv or New York in the near term, we’re all tying ourselves in knots about what Donald Trump said about Mexicans. The Democrats seem to have a Trump card.
Immigration arouses tremendous rage among both left and right. The left, always panting to push grievance buttons, transforms illegal immigrants into yet another clientele – as if those who enter the country illegally are entitled to legal status, benefits, and even citizenship. They establish “sanctuary cities” as if enforcing immigration laws amounts to persecution.
This drives the right crazy. You don’t break into my house and then demand the keys, they fume. While I like a good brawl as much as the next person, it seems that Trump is the answer only if the question is: Why can’t we get more oafish egomaniacs into politics? Just when the Republican Party needs finesse and sensitivity when discussing immigration; just when it needs to focus on issues that unite all sectors of the electorate including Hispanic and Asian voters; it gets a blowhard with all the nuance of a grenade.
Trump’s smear about Mexican immigrants was about as far away as you can get from Ronald Reagan’s “Hispanics are Republicans, they just don’t know it.” He tarred most Mexican immigrants as drug-dealers, criminals, and rapists, allowing only as an afterthought that some may be good people. He claimed to have discussed the matter with border guards. (Would those officers please step forward?) In any case, crude and vulgar people always preen that they are brave truth tellers.
Trump has achieved his objective – making himself the center of attention — but he has subtracted from our sum total of knowledge about the immigration issue. According to an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Immigration Policy Center, only 1.6 percent of immigrant males between the ages of 18-39 are incarcerated, compared with 3.3 percent of the native-born. There are terrible stories of immigrants committing crimes, and it’s certainly fair to demand that criminal aliens be deported with dispatch. Sanctuary cities are a disgrace. But just as Dylann Roof doesn’t represent white people, Mexican rapists don’t represent anyone other than themselves either.
Oddly, the entire brouhaha over immigration may be misplaced. If demographers are correct, the great wave of immigration from Latin America is over. As Jonathan V. Last noted in the Los Angeles Times, birth rates are plunging throughout our hemisphere. Between 1970 and 2005, Mexico was the source for roughly two-thirds of the million or so immigrants who entered the United States yearly. When this huge migration began, Mexico’s birthrate was 6.72 children per woman. It has since fallen to 2.1, and it continues to decline. Last writes: “Countries with fertility rates below the replacement level tend to attract immigrants, not send them.” And voilà, since 2005 net migration from Mexico has been zero.
The Census Bureau reports that starting in 2013, the country that sent the most immigrants to the U.S. was China with 147,000, followed by India with 129,000, and Mexico with 125,000 (an equal number of Mexicans living here went home). Other Latin American nations whose fertility rates have already dropped below replacement – Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica – send virtually no immigrants north.
Some immigrants will doubtless continue to arrive. As Tamar Jacoby of ImmigrationWorks USA put it, “Once they see that you don’t have to bribe the police here, they’re satisfied.” There remains much to recommend the U.S. as a destination, and we’ve been lucky that our neighbors to the south roughly share our religion and civilization (unlike the Muslim immigrants who’ve flooded Europe during the same period). But with world fertility rates declining, the U.S. may face an unexpected problem – too few immigrants. In 1960, half of the U.S. workforce consisted of high school dropouts. Today, it’s only 6 percent. Yet the jobs for low skilled workers – busboys, chambermaids, food processing – remain. If employers cannot find workers for those jobs, there will be fewer managerial and executive positions for native-born Americans.
It’s a complex subject that deserves grown-up discussion – exactly what Trump and his claque preclude.
Published in Foreign Policy
Dylann Roof does not represent white people because, statistically, he does not represent white people. We have a media eager to report any real or imagined racial crime by whites. Is Roof a once-a year thing or a once-a-decade thing or longer?
If there was a R00f-type massacre occurring every day, Roof would be a lot more representative of white people than he actually is.
One of my favorite bits: If ISIS is not Islam, then the Inquisition was not Catholic.
That’s not racist, and I happen to agree with you. But building an electorate requires breaking down to components.
Actually, this is the heart of why you are wrong. I was a Californian at the time, and I remember that argument being made by moderates during the referendum campaign. When the votes were tallied, the proposition passed with 60% of the vote. That’s a landslide. Independents supported it at a rate of 62%.
What changed in California is that the law was challenged in court, never enforced, and eventually overturned; meanwhile, local Democrats actively encouraged mass immigration with local sanctuary city policies and the like. The result over the last 20 years was that all population growth in California has been due to immigration, as there has been net outflow to other states.
The California Republican establishment was in a state of civil war over the legal challenge exactly akin to the discussion ongoing now at the national level, but the anti-anti-immigration stance quickly won out as the smart political move (just like we see from Mona and friends now). But no matter, the immigrants proved reliable Democrat voters.
The notion of limited government is not common throughout the history of the world, and is likewise uncommon in the world today. That is why most immigrants will reflexively vote for the Big Government party. They think the guys they vote for will protect them. Trying to outbid them is futile. And a surrender in and of itself.