Sunday, August 27, 2006

Buchanan right on immigration

No pun intended. I haven't read Patrick J. Buchanan's new book, "State of Emergency," but if it is anything like his previous books "The Great Betrayal," "The Death of the West," or "A Republic, Not an Empire," he won't have any trouble convincing me of his theory that illegal immigration has reached the emergency point in this nation.
This may upset my more liberal friends and readers, but the simple fact is that Pat Buchanan, no matter what we may think about him, is correct on many issues, like international trade, the invasion of Iraq, gun ownership, and immigration.
In the past, Buchanan has talked about the issue of illegal immigration from the standpoint of depressed wages and culture.
Frankly, I don't get into the concept that illegals are lazy and collecting welfare and crap like that, some of the ideals espoused by Howie Carr and others. Sure, that might be true in some cases. But, in most cases, it is a rarity. Many illegals are breaking their backs to build our country. The problem is that they are often working for less than the minimum or prevailing wage which then depresses wages for everyone else, especially those folks who were born here, pay taxes here, and have no other choice but to live here.
What they should be doing is breaking their backs to build their country. And, if we didn't have a corrupt foreign policy, our nation would be trying to bring their standard up - and not dragging it down via NAFTA and other policies - which only encourages them to come the United States to work. But, that wouldn't make cheap goods for consumer markets here, now would it?
Illegals are also sending their money back to Mexico by the billions and billions - essentially taking huge swathes of cash out of our economy and putting it into their home economy. This money, had it been earned by native born and legals, would be spent here, boosting our economy, and not that of Mexico and other countries, whether from the south, north, east or west of the border.
Just as an aside, here in the state of New Hampshire, prison costs for illegals costs millions of dollars, with more than 15 percent of prisoners being illegal immigrants; money that is otherwise not being spent on other things, like roads, bridges, and health care for poor kids; cells which would otherwise be filled by other criminals who should probably be in jail too.
This doesn't even get to the issue of future potential terrorism issues and the fact that while our borders are not secure, we are more in danger of attack than anything going on with Iran or North Korea.

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