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TUCKER CARLSON: Why no one in Martha’s Vineyard – including the Obamas – celebrated the migrants
Tucker reacts to Ron DeSantis sending illegal migrants to Martha’s Vineyard
Finally, a happy story for once. Outbursts of irrepressible joy erupted throughout the exclusive island community of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, last night. For hundreds of years, Martha’s Vineyard has suffered from the soul crushing effects of its own Whiteness. Island residents understood there was only one cure. They badly needed diversity. In fact, they often said so, but despite their very best efforts over many years, diversity never came to Martha’s Vineyard. It was tragic.
Imagine an 18th century British frigate adrift on the high seas with no lines, sailors slowly going mad, convulsing, dying, excruciating deaths from scurvy. That was Martha’s Vineyard, except it wasn’t lime juice they lacked. They had plenty of that because you can’t make a gin and tonic without it. What Martha’s Vineyard lacked was diversity, which is to say strength. Martha’s Vineyard was a very weak place. As of yesterday morning, that island was 89% White, monochromatic and utterly homogenous. Nearly everybody there was a rich Democrat. 80% voted for Joe Biden. The median home price was over $1,000,000. And then in a single blessed moment, everything changed. Relief arrived for an unlikely source.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, having made his own state a paradise, decided to help other states desperately in need. So yesterday, the center sent 50 illegal aliens, most of them from Venezuela, to the Martha’s Vineyard Airport. They traveled from San Antonio to the Florida Panhandle and filing to their new home on Martha’s Vineyard. CBS Boston reports that after landing, the group wandered about three and a half miles from the airport into town, thereby instantly improving it. You can imagine the unrestrained jubilation on Martha’s Vineyard tonight, long-suffering islanders finally rescued from their own oppressive Whiteness. In fact, let’s go there now to check in on the celebrations.
Well, that’s not expected. Obviously, there has been a mistake. No, our producers are telling us there are no technical problems. That is, in fact, a live shot from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, right now, but where were the weeping, joyful crowds? Where was the champagne and the ticker tape? We expected Times Square and V-J Day. What we got was a cemetery at midnight. What? But maybe it’s not so confusing. Maybe things aren’t as they seem. Our first clue is Barack Obama. Barack Obama is a part-time resident of Martha’s Vineyard. Obama is also, of course, as you know, the country’s greatest proponent of diversity. For years, Obama earnestly told us that immigrants were better than Americans. They were holy. They make our country strong.
Barack Obama speaks during the premiere of Netflix’s Descendant during the Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival at MV Performing Arts Center on August 05, 2022 in Edgartown, Massachusetts. (Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for Netflix)
BARACK OBAMA: America is—and always has been—a nation of immigrants. Throughout our history, immigrants have come to our shores in wave after wave from every corner of the globe. Every one of us, unless we’re Native American, has an ancestor who was born somewhere else. That’s what makes America special. That’s what makes a strong. The basic idea of welcoming immigrants to our shores is central to our way of life. It is in our DNA.
So, that was basically the whole presidency right there for eight years. Obama hectoring us about diversity, but he didn’t just talk about it. He spent his two years in office making certain that places like Des Moines, Iowa and Portland, Maine became much less White than they previously had been because, as he so often told us, Whiteness is bad. It’s a disease. So, we recall being a little confused when we read that Barack Obama had spent $12 million to buy an eight-bathroom oceanfront property on Martha’s Vineyard, which is one of the Whitest places on Earth. Really, Martha’s Vineyard? Why not Baltimore or Gary, Indiana? Is there really no real estate left in Detroit for the Obama family compound? There’s got to be. What’s going on here? We didn’t know.
And then in 2019, Michelle Obama explained it to us. Listen to this.
MICHELLE OBAMA: We grew up in the period, as I write, called “White flight.” That is families like ours, upstanding families like ours, you know, who were doing everything we were supposed to do and better, as we moved in, White folks moved out because they were afraid of what our families represented, and I always stop there when I talk about this out in the world, because, you know, I want to remind White folks that y’all were running from us. And you’re still running because we’re no different than the immigrant families that are moving in, the families in Pilsen, the families that are coming from other places to try to do better and so, yeah, I feel a sense of injustice.
So, there she was, reminding White folks who badly needed reminding that the Obamas are “no different from the immigrant families moving in” because White people hate them, too. They’re still running, as she just said. So that explained it to us. The Obamas were, in fact, despised immigrants. So, when they moved to a $12 million seaside compound on Martha’s Vineyard, the point is not to live in luxury with other rich people. No, obviously. The point is to diversify Martha’s Vineyard, to strike a blow for justice. That makes sense to us and we felt better.
But then last night happened and we started to rethink our assumptions about the Obamas, about a lot of things, because a planeload of highly diverse immigrants arrived on Martha’s Vineyard to join the Obamas, but the Obamas didn’t welcome them. There was not a word from Barack or Michelle Obama. Barack wasn’t waiting at the airport to greet the diversifiers with flowers. He didn’t issue a statement of congratulations. He didn’t invite a single Venezuelan to his home. How come?
Could it be that Barack Obama isn’t really actually in real life in favor of diversity at all? Could it be that Barack Obama strongly prefers blond SoulCycle moms and Lululemon to sweaty Third World campesinos and dirty work pants? Could it be? We can’t say. But we can tell you that if you want to find out what people really think, go ahead and ignore what they say and watch how they live and by that measure, the one that matters, Barack and Michelle Obama are every bit as bigoted as any board member in any restricted country club in the Deep South, assuming those still exist. “Those people? They’re not dating my daughter. I could tell you that.”
So, the words we learned this week that Barack Obama really is a racist and not in the way you’ve always assumed. Obama may hate White people. He certainly seems to, but he also demands to live around them and only them. But the Obamas, to be fair, are not alone in this. His friends at the news networks in Washington, New York and Los Angeles feel exactly the same way because they’re exactly the same sort of people. CNN, for example, spent the day interviewing people connected in some way to Martha’s Vineyard. Turns out that precisely none of them were excited about the planeload of Venezuelans. One of them, the state rep for the island, even blamed this show for the sudden blessed surge in diversity. Watch this.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announces that he wants to raise the minimum starting salary for teachers during a press conference held at Bayview Elementary School on October 07, 2019 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
DYLAN FERNANDES: Ron DeSantis and Republicans might want to play political games with people’s lives. I believe that’s incredibly inhumane to be using women and children and families as a political pawn that you’re going to talk about on “Tucker Carlson” and pretend to be tough on immigration.
Wow. So, see if you can follow the argument here. When penniless illegal aliens show up in Brownsville, Texas, one of the poorest cities in the United States, they are noble strivers. They’re looking for a better life in this country, and we applaud them. “Good luck in Brownsville, newly arrived immigrants,” but when these very same people jump the moat and get a free flight to Martha’s Vineyard, it’s something else entirely. It is, as the state rep just told you, “playing political games with people’s lives” because it’s dangerous. These immigrants could wander into a clambake by accident or worse, much worse.
Earlier today, CNN anchor John Berman (who just got fired, by the way, this morning. This morning!) John Berman interviewed noted filmmaker Ken Burns. Burns is famous, but sad, exactly the kind of middle-aged prestige hound who spends an awful lot of time looming around Martha’s Vineyard looking for other famous people. Burns has a new film out that blames the United States, of all countries on Earth, for the Holocaust.
Now that the World War II generation has passed, Ken Burns can do that. There’s no chance angry veterans will show up at his house and beat him with their canes for besmirching the memory of their closest friends who died in the early twenties fighting the Nazis. So, Ken Burns can say whatever he wants, and he will believe him. So, this morning, Burns played the role of Holocaust expert on CNN and you know what Ken Burns has discovered? Ken Burns has discovered that Ron DeSantis sending illegal aliens to Martha’s Vineyard is pretty much exactly what Hitler did, pretty much exactly. Watch this.
DEMOCRATS’ HYPOCRISY OVER MIGRANT FLIGHTS CALLED OUT BY GOP LAWMAKER: IT’S OK IF THEY DO IT
JOHN BERMAN: All of your documentaries are about history, but all of them also make you think about where we are now and we woke up to the news this morning that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida sent two plane loads of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts and kids and whatnot and I’m not saying this is not a one-for-one. This is not a parallel here in any way, but it does address some of the same themes.
KEN BURNS: This is coming straight out of the authoritarian playbook. This is what’s so disturbing about DeSantis is to use human beings, to weaponize human beings for a political purpose.
Do you hear that, ladies and gentlemen? It’s literally – literally – just like the Holocaust. Edgartown is Dachau. Oak Bluffs is Treblinka. The horrors! This is genocide and it may be, but of course, everything is relative. Martha’s Vineyard may be a modern-day death camp, but compared to where illegal aliens usually go, it doesn’t look that bad. Let’s compare just for fun. On your screen, you will see images recently shot in America’s border towns, which are now completely overrun under Joe Biden’s immigration policy. You will know this if you look carefully chaos, violence and filth.
Now we will take you to Martha’s Vineyard. It’s hellish, perhaps, but in a very different way—families eating together on balconies overlooking the water, women doing their shopping in a quaint little town on bicycles, couples strolling along the boardwalk, sailboats. It doesn’t look that bad. Oh, but that’s exactly the problem the media told us today. Martha’s Vineyard may seem like one of the richest places on the planet, but somehow – somehow – there aren’t enough social services there. It’s bereft of social services, unlike Brownsville.
‘CBS MORNINGS’ ANCHORS FRET OVER FLORIDA MIGRANTS BEING RELOCATED TO MARTHA’S VINEYARD: ‘INHUMANE’
CBS News put it “Martha’s Vineyard is not an urban metropolitan area with a robust social services infrastructure. There’s no Justice Department immigration court where the migrants can attend asylum hearings. There’s no ICE field office for migrants can check in” now, but you see, Martha’s Vineyard is in “an urban area” with a “robust social services infrastructure” that other people get to deal with and honestly, that’s true and it’s kind of the whole idea.
That’s why DeSantis sent the illegal aliens to Martha’s Vineyard. People who make and advocate for certain policies should at some point have to live with those policies, but until now, they haven’t had to. Bill Gates goes to Martha’s Vineyard. So does Oprah, James Taylor, Spike Lee, Amy Schumer, and many more and all of them. Every one is a much better person than you are because they support diversity and now for the first time, they’re going to have some diversity.
But it’s just the beginning. Martha’s Vineyard will need many, many more illegal aliens, tens of housands more, until the island is no longer majority White. Only then can it be a good place. Yet, at the same time, the people who currently go to Martha’s Vineyard are going to have to keep going there. They can’t run away to somewhere else. That would be immoral. It would be, as Michelle Obama has told us, “White flight.” Now massive demographic change will obviously make Martha’s Vineyard a very different sort of place, but that’s okay. Change is good. Anyone who fears change is racist. We know that for sure because they told us that for years.
“Where,” you may ask, “will all these new people live on such a small island?” Simple. First, they can occupy Barack Obama’s compound. There is no reason Obama needs that much space. Nobody needs that much space. You could probably fit a dozen immigrant families in Barack Obama’s pool house and another five or six in the pantry. Keep going. Build a soccer field on the lawn, an outdoor goat barbecue by the back door and bingo, you’ve got affordable housing, but it won’t be enough.
The vineyard is going to need to construct shantytowns for all these new people, but we can’t call them shantytowns. Obviously, that’s demeaning. So, we’re going to call them townships after Obama’s favorite country and they’re going to give them dignified names that suggest some kind of victory over adversity: Mandela, Cesar Chavezville, Kamala-apolis.
Now, inside each one we will put a plaque with that famous Emma Lazarus poem, just so that everybody knows that these are not ordinary favelas. These are moral victories. As the signs say in Martha’s Vineyard to this day, “No human is illegal. Love is love.” That’s just science.
But speaking of science, what will the environmental impact of all this new development be? That’s a massive concern of Martha’s Vineyard and for good reason, but in this case, it’s not a concern. None of these new townships will have running water or electricity. So, by definition, they will be carbon-neutral. It’ll be part of the Green Revolution.
Local law enforcement services won’t be strained either because they won’t be needed. None of these new arrivals will be bound by local laws. Why would they be? They ignored federal law to get here. There’s no reason that they should have to observe the vineyard’s ordinances against, say, drunk driving or defecating in public and just in case, there are still vineyarders who think they have the right to protect what they own, think again, people. We refer you to the case of the fascist McCloskey family in St. Louis who once tried that, tried to defend what’s theirs, and they got indicted for it, so that’s not allowed. But we can’t fully trust you. Somebody’s going to have to go door to door to make sure that not one person on Martha’s Vineyard keeps a gun at home because self-defense can be tempting even for Democratic voters.
There’s a lot of change for the Vineyard and they’re going to start work soon. The summer season begins on Memorial Day. So, when Amy Schumer shows up to her place in June, she better be ready to find an illegal alien family using her bath towels. Yes, she will and let’s hope she doesn’t complain about it, because as Joe Biden often reminds us, illegal immigration is a gift.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during an event to celebrate passage of the “Safer Communities Act,” on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, U.S., July 11, 2022. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo)
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Guess what? They’re the reason why, the legal as well as undocumented, they’re the reason why our society is functioning, the reason why our economy is growing. We don’t talk about that. We stand up and act like it’s a burden. It is not a burden. It’s a gift.
Hear that? Hear that? Illegal immigration is not a burden. It’s a gift, dumbo. So, Martha’s Vineyard received an enormous gift last night. Think of it like a perpetual Christmas, but noisier. And you can’t beat the timing. As Karine Jean-Pierre just reminded us today at the White House, it’s Hispanic Heritage Month. Perfect, so roll with it, Martha’s Vineyard. Things are about to change a lot for you, but that’s OK.
Radical, destructive change is the essence of anti-racism, and as you’ve told us so many times, you support anti-racism, lest we need to remind you and, in any case, pretty soon you’ll have no memory of the way things were before. Martha’s Vineyard will feel and look just like El Paso and that will all seem normal to you. “What’s El Paso like?” you wonder. Haven’t been there lately? OK. Well, here’s some recent pictures.
REPORTER LIANNA GOLDEN: I want to show you an exact look of what we’re seeing out here. We’re right next to the Greyhound bus station where, as we’ve been telling you for days now, migrants, mostly a large group of Venezuelans, have been using this area as a temporary camp and a home. Now, take a look at this video from earlier this morning and overnight where you can see migrants have set up sleeping arrangements on cardboard and mattresses in this same spot here outside the bus station. Dagostino and other city leaders, said their number one priority is to avoid people on the streets, but since CBP has been so overwhelmed with the large numbers coming in, they have been forced to release as such. As more and more people have been on the streets in recent days, sanitation and cleanliness have become a concern out here. We’re not seeing any porta potties or temporary toilet showers or sinks and as you can imagine, the smell is beginning to add up.
Oh, wow. Look, El Paso has Venezuelans, too, and that’s why tonight it’s redolent of diversity, brimming with the gift of illegal immigration. That’ll be Edgartown, Massachusetts soon but we can’t stop there. Why would we? If we’re really going to make Martha’s Vineyard look like the world, the people who vacation on Martha’s Vineyard have created for the rest of us, we’re going to need to import graffiti artists, armed robbers and subway rapists and the drug addicted homeless community, many, many of those and their tents.
Why should they be living outside your house when they could be camped on Barack Obama’s $12 million lawn? That seems fair. Why isn’t it fair? Well, unfortunately, don’t expect Obama to see it the same way. He is a racist as we’ve established, and so apparently are his fellow liberals. They are outraged by the idea of illegal aliens near their island vacation homes. Before long, they’ll be tweeting in solidarity with the Vineyard’s White community. “Hashtag, I stand with Martha’s Vineyard.” Little Island emojis in their bios. Hilarious. That could actually happen, by the way, because in the end, liberals really do stand with Martha’s Vineyard against everyone else and honestly, on some level, we can kind of understand why.
If we’re being honest, we don’t want to see Martha’s Vineyard trashed. We’re Americans and Martha’s Vineyard is a beautiful place. It’s a sin to destroy beautiful things always. Unfortunately, and this really is the point, Martha’s Vineyard is one of a dwindling number of beautiful places left in our country. Martha’s Vineyard is what most of America once was not all that long ago—small, socially cohesive, orderly, safe with traditional human-centered architecture and big stretches of nature, unspoiled by industrial wind farms and dollar stores.
The people who live in Martha’s Vineyard now didn’t build any of that. The people who did build it are long gone, along with the attitudes and values that made it possible. The people who live there now just came for the nostalgia and all that’s left really are the buildings and the beaches, but still you’d hate to see them wrecked.
On the other hand, at this point, we may have no choice. No sane country would allow millions of foreign nationals to walk across its borders illegally and then immediately give them government benefits in exchange for mocking our rule of law. No one would ever do that. It is suicide. Over time, it will destroy the United States. Everyone can see that, no matter what they say, but the people who vacation on Martha’s Vineyard don’t care. They are making this possible. They support it. They vote for it. They fund it, and they can do all of that because they are so insulated from the effects of Joe Biden’s lunatic immigration policies that none of it matters to them. The country collapses? Big deal. They live on an island. but to the rest of us, it is a big deal. This is our country. We were born here. We planned to die here. We have nowhere else to go, and we don’t want to live in a slum. Maybe Martha’s Vineyard will finally understand.
Tucker Carlson currently serves as the host of FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Tucker Carlson Tonight (weekdays 8PM/ET). He joined the network in 2009 as a contributor.
Power of the Market – Immigration
The ‘Secure Border’ of Kamala Harris
Terence Jeffrey / @TerryJeffrey / September 14, 2022
“The border is secure,” Vice President Kamala Harris told NBC’s Chuck Todd last weekend. Pictured: Harris speaks Aug. 12 during a visit to a science center in Oakland, California. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
COMMENTARY BY
Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSNews.com.
When Donald Trump was president, the Border Patrol in fiscal year 2019 did not encounter a single individual on the terrorist watchlist trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border between legal ports of entry.
In the first 10 months of this fiscal year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol encountered 66 of them.
These include individuals, as Customs and Border Protection explains on its website, who are “known or suspected terrorists” or “individuals who represent a potential threat to the United States, including known affiliates of watchlisted individuals.”
Did CBP fail to encounter any individuals on the watchlist in 2019 because the Trump administration was less aggressive about securing that border?
Or have 66 been caught this year because the Biden administration has sent a signal to the world that the border is not as secure now as it was three years ago and, thus, has inspired watchlisted individuals to try to sneak in?
Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that the U.S.-Mexico border has indeed been secured and argued that illegal aliens already inside the United States should be rewarded with U.S. citizenship.
“Would you call the border secure?” host Chuck Todd asked Harris.
“I think that there is no question that we have to do what the president and I asked Congress to do—the first request we made, pass a bill to create a pathway to citizenship,” Harris responded.
“The border is secure,” she continued.
“But we also have a broken immigration system, in particular over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed,” Harris added.
“We’re going to have 2 million people cross this border for the first time ever,” Todd said. “You’re confident this border is secure?”
“We have a secure border,” Harris repeated, “in that that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration. But there are still a lot of problems that we are trying to fix, given the deterioration that happened over the last four years.”
“We also have to put in place a law and a plan for a pathway to citizenship for the millions of people who are here and are prepared to do what is legally required to gain citizenship,” she said.
This is nonsense.
People who were “prepared to do what is legally required to gain citizenship” legally applied for immigrant visas before they came to the United States, came here legally, and now are living here legally on a legal path to citizenship.
Harris is talking about people who have violated the law, either by overstaying a visa or by illegally sneaking across our southern border.
America has the most generous legal immigration policies of any nation on Earth.
In 2019, the same year that the Border Patrol did not encounter a single person on the terrorist watchlist at the U.S.-Mexico border, the United States naturalized 843,593 foreign-born citizens.
These new Americans came from all across the globe, according to data published by the Department of Homeland Security.
The total included 5% from Central America, 8.1% from South America, 9.6% from Europe, 10.1% from Africa, 12% from the Caribbean, 15.8% from other regions in North America, and 38.8% from Asia.
In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic started, the number of naturalized U.S. citizens dropped to 628,254. In 2021, however, it climbed back up to 813,861.
The 813,861 people who became naturalized U.S. citizens in 2021 almost equaled the entire population of San Francisco, which the Census Bureau says was 815,201 that year.
Indeed, the number of people who became naturalized U.S. citizens in 2021 exceeded the populations of many major U.S. cities, including Seattle (733,919), Denver (711,463), Washington, D.C. (670,050), Boston (654,776), Detroit (632,464), and Baltimore (576,498).
Clearly, the United States has not closed its doors to law-abiding people who immigrate here in keeping with our laws.
What has happened along our border in the past three years? In fiscal 2020, Trump’s last full year in office, Customs and Border Protection reported that it encountered 458,088 people trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border into the United States.
In fiscal 2021, the year Joe Biden succeeded Trump, the number of people CBP encountered trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border jumped to 1,734,686.
“Migrants were encountered 1.7 million times in the last 12 months, the highest number of illegal crossings recorded since at least 1960,” The New York Times said Oct. 22, 2021.
“It was the highest number of illegal crossings recorded since at least 1960, when the government first began tracking such entries,” the Times said.
The Washington Post reported on April 2, 2021—more than two months after Biden took office—that the number of illegal border crossers who successfully evaded the Border Patrol was surging. The Post reported:
Nearly 1,000 people per day are sneaking into the United States without being identified or taken into custody because U.S. border agents are busy attending to migrant families and unaccompanied children while also trying to stop soaring numbers of male adults, according to three U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials familiar with the data.
While CBP has never claimed to interdict every border-crosser, the number of ‘gotaways’ recorded in recent weeks is the highest in recent memory, said two of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the data.
In just the first 10 months of this fiscal year (October 2021 through July 2022), CBP has encountered 1,946,780 illegal border crossers.
The Biden administration is setting another record for the number of illegal border crossers encountered by Customs and Border Protection.
This is what Harris calls a “secure border.”
COPYRIGHT 2022 CREATORS.COM
Immigration, Part II: Turning America into a Welfare Magnet
In Part I of this series, I explained why it’s absurd to think illegal immigration can be stopped by sending foreign aid to less-developed countries, such as many of those in Central America.
Simply stated, government-to-government handouts have never been a successful strategy for turning poor nations into rich nations. Indeed, aid actually discourages countries from following the recipe that does deliver prosperity.
In today’s column, let’s address Milton Friedman’s famous dilemma about the incompatibility of open borders and welfare.
Like most libertarians, I want to solve the problem by getting rid of the welfare state.
Immigrants are a big net plus so long as they are coming to work and be productive.
Indeed, because of their entrepreneurial skills and work ethic, immigrants from many nations wind up earning more than native-born Americans.
That’s something to celebrate. The American Dream in action!
But will that story of success continue if the welfare state is expanded?
Two advocates of increased immigration are worried. First, Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal recently explained that Biden’s agenda is a recipe for immigrant dependency.
…it is a growing belief on the political left that people should be allowed to enter the U.S. on their terms rather than ours, and that it is our collective responsibility to take care of them if they can’t take care of themselves. Milton Friedman said that open immigration and large welfare states are incompatible, and today’s progressives in Congress and the White House are eager to test that proposition.…Another concern is the left’s determination to sever any connection between work and benefits, something all the more worrisome since it is occurring while destitute foreign nationals with little education are being lured here en masse. …Earlier this month, the Biden administration quietly announced that it would no longer enforce a policy that limited the admission of immigrants who were deemed likely to become overly dependent on government benefits. What could go wrong? …In countries like Italy and France, generous aid programs have attracted poor migrants who are more likely than natives to be heavy users of welfare and less likely to be working. It’s a mistake to think it can’t happen here.
In a column last year for Reason, Shikha Dalmia warned that welfare programs undermine support for immigration.
…economists Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva…administered online questionnaires to 24,000 respondents in six countries: U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden. The explicit aim was to study attitudes toward legal, not illegal, immigration. …restrictionists have succeeded most spectacularly is in depicting immigrants as welfare queens. …In America, over 25 percent of respondents said the person with the ..immigrant-sounding name would pay less in taxes than he collected in welfare… The study’s findings pose a particular dilemma for Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who wants to combine grandiose welfare schemes like free health care, pre-K, and college for everyone with generous immigration policies, because the mere mention of immigration reduces support for such schemes. Respondents who were asked about immigration became less concerned about inequality and less supportive of soak-the-rich schemes. …as long as immigrants are seen as succeeding through their own grit, natives may have no real objection to them. What is most likely to sour the public on immigration are the grandiose universal freebies… Immigrants should be wary of Democrats bearing gifts.
Both Riley and Dalmia raise good points.
My modest contribution to this discussion is to provide a practical example.
In his so-called American Rescue Plan, Joe Biden included a huge giveaway program that will shower $3,000-$3,600 to non-rich households for every kid they have.
This is a one-year, one-time handout, but many Democrats (and some Republicans!) want to make these enormous per-child payments a permanent part of America’s welfare state.
If that happens, the incentive to move to the United States almost surely will skyrocket.
Here’s a map I made, showing the annual handout for two children in the United States and the average per-capita incomein some nearby nations.
At the risk of stating the obvious, there will be a huge incentive to migrate to America – but not for the right reasons. And my little example doesn’t include the value of any of the dozens of other redistribution programs in Washington.
The bottom line is that we shouldn’t have a welfare system that rewards dependency, whether for people in the country legally or illegally.
And if you like immigration in theory, you should be especially opposed to handouts that will undermine public support for newcomers in practice.
P.S. It’s much better to have immigration policies such as the ones proposed by former Congressman Jared Polis and current George Mason University Professor Tyler Cowen.
Milton Friedman in 2004
Power of the Market – Immigration
MILTON FRIEDMAN ON IMMIGRATION
MILTON FRIEDMAN ON IMMIGRATION PART 2
March 18, 2021
Office of Barack and Michelle Obama
P.O. Box 91000
Washington, DC 20066
Dear President Obama,
I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters.
There are several issues raised in your book that I would like to discuss with you such as the minimum wage law, the liberal press, the cause of 2007 financial meltdown, and especially your pro-choice (what I call pro-abortion) view which I strongly object to on both religious and scientific grounds, Two of the most impressive things in your book were your dedication to both the National Prayer Breakfast (which spoke at 8 times and your many visits to the sides of wounded warriors!!
I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it.
Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:
WHEN IT CAME to immigration, everyone agreed that the system was broken. The process of immigrating legally to the United States could take a decade or longer, often depending on what country you were coming from and how much money you had.Meanwhile, the economic gulf between us and our southern neighbors drove hundreds of thousands of people to illegally cross the 1,933-mile U.S.-Mexico border each year, searching for work and a better life. Congress had spent billions to harden the border, with fencing, cameras, drones, and an expanded and increasingly militarized border patrol. But rather than stop the flow of immigrants, these steps had spurred an industry of smugglers—coyotes—who made big money transporting human cargo in barbaric and sometimes deadly fashion. And although border crossings by poor Mexican and Central American migrants received most of the attention from politicians and the press, about 40 percent of America’s unauthorized immigrants arrived through airports or other legal ports of entry and then overstayed their visas.
By 2010, an estimated eleven million undocumented persons were living in the United States, in large part thoroughly woven into the fabric of American life.Many were longtime residents, with children who either were U.S. citizens by virtue of having been born on American soil or had been brought to the United States at such an early age that they were American in every respect except for a piece of paper. Entire sectors of the U.S. economy relied on their labor, as undocumented immigrants were often willing to do the toughest, dirtiest work for meager pay—picking the fruits and vegetables that stocked our grocery stores, mopping the floors of offices, washing dishes at restaurants, and providing care to the elderly. But although American consumers benefited from this invisible workforce, many feared that immigrants were taking jobs from citizens, burdening social services programs, and changing the nation’s racial and cultural makeup, which led to demands for the government to crack down on illegal immigration. This sentiment was strongest among Republican constituencies, egged on by an increasingly nativist right-wing press. However, the politics didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines: The traditionally Democratic trade union rank and file, for example, saw the growing presence of undocumented workers on co
nstruction sites as threatening their livelihoods, while Republican-leaning business groups interested in maintaining a steady supply of cheap labor (or, in the case of Silicon Valley, foreign-born computer programmers and engineers) often took pro-immigration positions.
Back in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes, indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I’d pledged during the campaign to resurrect similar legislation once elected, and I’d appointed former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security—the agency that oversaw U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection—partly because of her knowledge of border issues and her reputation for having previously managed immigration in a way that was both compassionate and tough.
My hopes for a bill had thus far been dashed. With the economy in crisis and Americans losing jobs,few in Congress had any appetite to take on a hot-button issue like immigration. Kennedy was gone. McCain, having been criticized by the right flank for his relatively moderate immigration stance, showed little interest in taking up the banner again. Worse yet, my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate. This wasn’t a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE’s budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records. My team and I had made a strategic choice not to immediately try to reverse the policies we’d inherited in large part because we didn’t want to provide ammunition to critics who claimed that Democrats weren’t willing to enforce existing immigration laws—a perception that we thought could torpedo our chances of passing a future reform bill. But by 2010, immigrant-rights and Latino advocacy groups were criticizing our lack of progress..And although I continued to urge Congress to pass immigration reform, I had no realistic path for delivering a new comprehensive law before the midterms.
Milton Friedman wisely noted, “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,”
Is it prudent to allow illegal immigrants (60 percent of whom are high-school dropouts) access to Social Security, Medicare, and, over time, to 60 federal means-tested welfare programs? I don’t think so either!
FREE TO CHOOSE “Who protects the worker?” Video and Transcript Part
In 1980 I read the book FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman and it really enlightened me a tremendous amount. I suggest checking out these episodes and transcripts of Milton Friedman’s film series FREE TO CHOOSE: “The Failure of Socialism” and “What is wrong with our schools?” and “Created Equal” and From Cradle to Grave, and – Power of the Market. Milton Friedman shows in this episode how the worker is best protected and it is not by the government!!!!!!!
The essence of what Milton Friedman is saying in this episode is found in this statement:
“The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.”
L. WILLIAMS: Dr. Friedman and Walter Williams go back in history and they take a look at a situation where America was empty, where we didn’t have anything like the sophisticated industrial economy we have today, but had a much more agricultural and rural kind of economy and of course when the __ when the impoverished peasants of Europe, my ancestors and most of our ancestors, except for the slaves, which is another situation, but when these people came from Europe and came to a wide open continent with the most fertile soil then available to anyone in the world, naturally there was progress; and I or any of us would be mad to deny progress. But as that developed and as population increased and as we moved into a much more sophisticated industrial economy, we moved then into the situation in the 1930s, or earlier than that , at the end of the century. As some of the more skilled jobs came along, the labor movement didn’t happen by accident. Didn’t happen because there wasn’t a need there. The results of this development, even with all the wealth available in America, the results of this development was that many working people were not having anything like, by standards of civilization or whatever, anything like their fair share in this progress.
MCKENZIE: Now you’re arguing that in a free market, for labor, everyone benefits. Does that mean that you would favor abolition of all immigration restrictions?
FRIEDMAN: The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.
MCKENZIE: But this is true of every western industrialized country.
FRIEDMAN: That’s right and that’s why today __
MCKENZIE: Yeah.
FRIEDMAN: __ under current circumstances you cannot, unfortunately have free immigration. Not because there’s anything wrong with free immigration, but because we have other policies which make it impossible to adopt free immigration.
MCKENZIE: Well I’d like other reactions. Is it at all feasible to open the door of the labor market internationally now? Bill Brady?
BRADY: I would __ I would say yes providing they open the door to us. I think that the door to not only the labor market, the door to all markets should be __ should be open. That is the product markets.
W. WILLIAMS: My feelings about the undocumented workers of Mexican-Americans are inscribed at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. I think that the people should have the right to come to this country. Now, those who would say, you know, I hear a number of people saying that, well the immigrants are contributing to our unemployment problem. And I point this out to some people, I said, “look, you know, this is the same rhetoric that the Irish used when the blacks were coming up from the north, ” you know, they’re using blacks as scapegoats. They’re saying, “get those people back where they came from so that our members can get jobs, ” you know. Unions were as well doing this, you know, they called them scabs, strikebreakers, etcetera, etcetera. So I do not wish for Mexican-Americans to become the new scapegoats of our particular national problems. They are not the problem, and our nation benefits to the extent that these people come here and work. And to that extent __ to that extent__ so it’s kind of good for them to remain illegal aliens as opposed to being legal aliens where they’re subject to our welfare programs, so that we don’t want them to come here to __
(Several people talking at once.)
GREEN: I think that this country cannot have a group of workers to remain outside the framework of our laws and our protection. And as long as we have workers who are attracted to the United States because of the standards of living; and I think minimum wages play a part in that as part of that attraction. But it seems to me to have undocumented workers without providing either a means of protection for them and it seems to me that we’ve got to go to the question of providing the amnesty for those generations of workers who have come here over a period of time, now two, three, maybe four generations. We have to see that they have the same rights and protection of all other workers. And as it stands now, large numbers of them live outside the framework of the laws and statutes that we have on the __ on our books.
MCKENZIE: Comment Milton.
FRIEDMAN: They do and the tragedy of the situation, as what Walter Williams point out, that as long as they are undocumented and illegal they are a clear net gain, the nation benefits and they benefit. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t. The tragedy is that we’ve adopted all these other policies so that if we convert them into legal residents it’s no longer clear that we benefit. They may benefit, but it’s no longer clear that we do. What Lynn Williams said before is again a travesty on what was actually going on. The real boost to the trade union movement came after the Great Depression of the 1930s; that Great Depression was not a failure of capitalism; it was not a failure of the private market system as we pointed out in another one of the programs in this series; it was a failure of government. It was not the case that somehow or other there was a decline in the conditions of the working class that produced a great surge of unionism. On the contrary __ unions have never accounted for more than one out of four or one out of five of American workers. The American worker benefited not out of unions, he benefited in spite of unions. He benefited because there was greater opportunity because there were people who were willing to invest their money because there was an opportunity for people to work, to save, to invest. That’s still the case today. You say, we have to provide them with something or other Ernest. Who are the “we”?
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com
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The Daily Hatch 