House of Eratosthenes

And then we’ve developed this unfortunate mode of thinking in which we say the issue is “complicated” when it isn’t. And we know the issue isn’t complicated at all. We just use the c-word to try to shake things up a little, to produce a different outcome for selected individuals and groups of people. Almost always, to help those individuals and groups of people.

The subject under discussion, specifically, was illegal immigration. I think the subject that was generally under discussion, is far more important though: our national confusion between simple things and complicated things. We call complicated things simple, and simple things complicated.

We’re laboring under this national delusion that Osama bin Laden caused 9/11, therefore we should kick Osama’s ass and nobody else’s. See? Simple. Simple, simple, simple. Well, it isn’t so simple. Anybody who ponders it for a little while will realize it isn’t so simple…but the democrat party thinks it’ll win some elections if it can be made to be simple, so they do exactly that, and everybody else clambers on board the stupid-wagon.

Illegal immigration, on the other hand, is against the law. And you know what? That is simple. But noooooo…we continue to hear about what a complicated issue this is. How so? Nobody will say. Because there are twelve to fourteen million of them here already?

That is a crock. I jaywalk all day every day, and aver a year and a half finally get busted for it — the judge isn’t going to care one bit how long I’ve been doing it. He won’t care that everybody does it. He won’t care that jaywalking is a “victimless” crime and he really won’t give a rip that I was doing it to feed my family. You break “stupid” laws and you get away with it if you don’t get caught. When you get caught, you stop getting away with it.

And that, my friends, is simple. It is no more complicated than that. What makes it faux-complicated, is that there are unscrupulous businesses that have a vested financial interest in keeping up the status quo. Those businesses buy politicians. Those politicians then do a lot of talking that confuses people.

But I get to break laws until I get caught. And then I don’t. Because I don’t have a license to break laws. That means I don’t want anybody else to have one either. The situation is really no more complicated than that.

Buck, love ya to death and everything, but Phil’s right. A one-stage “Night of the Long Knives” type of round-up is decidedly off topic. We aren’t discussing a one-night sweep or a one-week sweep, the subject under discussion is whether a designated class of people should be given a license for breaking a law. And to address your frightening hypotheticals, to the extent this designated class has been granted such a license, when it is revoked it turns out beautiful things happen.

Congress’ failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform, immigration crackdowns, Arizona’s new employer-sanctions law and a sluggish economy have combined to create a climate families…no longer find hospitable.

The number returning to Mexico is difficult to calculate, but there is no question that many families are leaving, according to Mexican government officials, local community leaders and immigrants themselves. “The situation in Arizona has become very tough,” [an illegal alien] said minutes after driving into a Mexican immigration and customs checkpoint south of the border on Mexico 15.

Dozens of immigrants are leaving the U.S. daily, and even more are expected to leave once the sanctions law takes effect in January, provided the law survives a last-minute legal challenge, said Rosendo Hernandez, president of the advocacy group Immigrants Without Borders. “If people can’t find work, they won’t be able to pay their bills, so they will leave,” Hernandez said.

H/T: Malkin.

Does this cause pain? I’m sure it does. I’m sure the families feel pain going back to their place of origin, which the law says they must…and I’m sure an infrastructure of shady, nefarious private enterprises has grown around them like ugly despicable dark spots of mold on wet warm bread.

But long term, this has to be a good thing. America is a place where we are all, regardless of group-identity, equally accountable to the law. That doesn’t necessarily mean all classes of people get equally harassed by the law, or equally incarcerated, or equally fined, or are hired on to jobs in equal proportion. It doesn’t mean all classes of people get busted for committing crimes, or can commit crimes in equal numbers and get away with it in equal proportion.

It just means all classes are equally accountable. Just that…and nothing more. The minute you can’t say that anymore, we’re no longer living in America.

And why is that? Well the people who defend illegal immigration, and illegal other-types-of-things on the basis that the laws are “stupid” should take especially careful note. This is from where the stupid laws come. Laws that are enforced selectively…tend to be stupid. You see, when you have that going on, it’s all okay. The law can afford to be stupid. It’s only enforced when the agent in charge of enforcement, decides that is what is going to happen.

This illegal-immigration thing has brought America perilously close to that cliff of lunacy. If this is really a retreat from that brink of disaster, it is cause for celebration.

If not, it is cause for a revolt.

When you get busted for something in this country, even for breaking a law EVERYBODY thinks is stupid…we do not check to see what groups you are part of, before making the decision to bust you or let you off with a warning. We make that decision blindly. Or, at the very least…for God’s sake, we pretend to do that. If we lose that, that is the final indignity. We might as well just tear down every flag, every statue, every emblem in our nation’s capitol if we’re at that point.

Illegal aliens. They don’t belong here, there are legitimate ways for them to get in if they think they should be in. And they can be sent home. If you want to argue with that, fine, I would ask you simply withdraw your name from the race for United States President. POTUS is the highest office in the Executive Branch, and the Executive Branch exists to enforce laws. Show a willingness to do the job, American-style, or don’t run.

I think I take a different tack on this one.

First, I often hear the statement “they are doing jobs that Americans won’t do.” I don’t buy that. Based on the unemployment stats there are just not enough citizens to fill all the jobs that illegals do. Without even considering the type of work or the pay. Just warm bodies. So we need more people. After all, jobs aren’t created because there are people to fill them.

Second, going after businesses that hire illegal immigrants tends to circumscribe those businesses, which might have negative economic effects. So, the laws/regulations will have consequences at the local level.

Finally, for now, the Constitution does say that children born in this country by illegal immigrants are American citizens. I’m not so keen on throwing out Constitutionally endowed citizens. That is what it entails.

So yeah, it’s simple on one level, but I think some of the ramifications aren’t so simple.
- Allen L | 12/21/2007 @ 01:06
All right, those are some good arguments, and well stated. The third point is the strrongest, since it’s a constitutional requirement that is intentional, legally unavoidable, and it does indeed complicate things.

However, could the first two not be rightfully categorized as self-fulfilling prophecies? In other words, by applying this unequal treatment aren’t we making the situation needlessly complicated? Let’s explore the supply and demand. I manage a nice hotel. It has twenty rooms, for which I could be charging maybe $250 a night but instead I charge about $115. To make this profitable I hire illegal aliens to clean the rooms. Of course, I don’t know they’re illegal aliens, the same way Inspector Renault didn’t know about gambling.

Of course, thanks to PriceLine and HotWire, I have to charge the $115 in order to compete. With other nice hotels. That also hire illegal labor so they can compete with me.

Which is great for the traveler, and the couple seeking a romantic getaway. But it’s also inherently unfair, and it’s not a victimless crime. The victim is the hotel maid that happens to be legal, and can’t get work because now the going rate for hotel labor is drastically reduced from what it should be. Is this a case of the illegal alien then coming over and earning our business, finding more efficient ways to provide the same services as someone else, succeeding, and then living according to the American dream…”doing the jobs Americans won’t do”? Maybe. Perhaps. If that illegal alien is performing everything legally once she is finished breaking the law by coming here.

And this is something I’ve gradually come to doubt. Too many stories about large families living in one room, in violation of fire codes and other ordinances the rest of us are expected to follow. And traffic violations. Sometimes the car stuff gets talked-about when an innocent is killed by a drunk-driving illegal alien, but more central to my immediate concern is the just plain driving without registration, license, insurance…the day to day costs you’re supposed to meet when you work and live and pay bills.

So my point is when we tolerate this we’re putting legal citizens in the position of competing on an uneven playing field, and that’s the point I’m trying to make. The illegal aliens get to “break the laws Americans can’t break,” you might say. Competing on that basis, of course they win, if you call that winning. America’s laws, lately, are passed for the purpose of making everyday life expensive, and this is what is patently unfair about passing out virtual licenses for certain groups of people to break those laws. Through this unequal treatment, America gradually becomes a country crammed full of citizens that don’t actually “do” anything — we all have jobs that involve polling each other or auditing things or producing reports to comply with government requirements, leaving the manual labor to people we don’t know whom we’d be shocked! to find out were illegal aliens. Because it’s cheaper. And if we wanted to go ahead and do it ourselves, we’d never be able to afford to do it, because the market has been distorted.

So the “doing the jobs that Americans won’t do” ends up being true, but not in the way people think — the job now demands that various laws be broken. And so does the “it’s complicated” thing…it, too, is true, but not in the way people think. We’re making it complicated by defining some laws as “gotta follow ’em no matter what” laws, and other laws as “we don’t really mean it” laws.

Notice, I’m pretty much agreeing with everything you’re saying. My perspective is just different. I think we’re treating the market as something that has to be handled with kid gloves, when in actuality, it has ways to address everything. If the law were enforced, hotels would become more expensive. But who is to say they shouldn’t be? On a whim, you can log on to a web page, get a four star hotel room for pennies on the dollar, and people who work in the hotel labor industry end up getting shafted, unless they have that license to break numerous laws I’ve been talking about.

The market has become a mutilated distortion of what it is supposed to be, because we’ve made it that way.
- mkfreeberg | 12/21/2007 @ 06:34
One of our very best blogger friends objected, predictably, when I said…

Hmmm. Should I take offense at the characterization of my objection? Have I become predictable in my dotage? Aiii-eee! Please, not that! 😉

You misinterpret me, Morgan. I have no issues with the law… other than the bungling, bureaucratic way it’s currently being semi-enforced and the byzantine complexity of our immigration laws, but Hey! those are nits, right? I think I made that perfectly clear in my three-point second comment in the linked post. I have issues with the proposed solutions to this problem emanating from some quarters, and most specifically with the mass-deportation aspects of SOME of those solutions. Or, if you prefer, I’ll use Allen L’s term: it’s the ramifications. And they are NOT simple. At all.

Regarding the “good news”… I’ll wager many, many more illegals are finding their way to California, Utah and New Mexico (or points further east and north) than are heading south from Arizona. No empirical evidence, just a gut-feeling.
- Buck | 12/21/2007 @ 15:06
Yeah Buck, I think you and I are more or less in agreement about it, as you pointed out, and I agree with your thinking about those other states. I’m probably a little bit more worried about the lyin’ sacks o’ …used food…politicians double-talking about this. I really don’t think we should be tolerating it. At ALL.

I was thinking last night as I drifted off to sleep after writing the above — you know what describes this perfectly? The Mafia. The whole splitting a tradition into two pieces, one of which is “above board” but phony, the other one of which is deep underground, illegal as all holy hell, but which people “in the know” understand is how the stuff is really getting done.

The Mafia, 2,000 years ago, did that to The Law. Illegal immigration is now doing it with manual labor.

But that topic is probably more appropriately addressed in a post of its own.
- mkfreeberg | 12/21/2007 @ 15:16
I see from over at Bookworm’s Blog you got Ron Paul on that little online quiz. Sorry, that’s just too funny, sputter, guffaw, and here I was feeling wierd about getting Huckabee.

As to your points on the market solution, if you will, on illegal immigration. Regardless of what is done i think costs will go up. Deport them all, or legalize them all, I think reuslts in the same thing to the economy. So in effect yes I guess it is much simpler than I first thought.
- Allen L | 12/21/2007 @ 16:28
I’ve quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2007/12/re-how-to-handle-illegal-aliens.html
- Consul-At-Arms | 12/24/2007 @ 03:48

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How to Handle Illegal AliensThursday, December 20th, 2007

How to Handle Illegal Aliens
Thursday, December 20th, 2007