EinSteyn
Sunday, May 28th, 2006 11:11 pm by NealHere’s the Mark Steyn article we promised to locate for your reading pleasure.
From the Washington Times: “The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment.”
Well, I think that’s the kind of moderate compromise “comprehensive immigration reform” package all Americans can support, don’t you?
Some mean-spirited extremist House Republicans had proposed that illegal aliens should only receive 75 percent of the benefits to which they’re illegally entitled for having broken the law.
On the other hand, President Bush had proposed that illegal aliens should also be able to collect Social Security benefits for any work they’d done in Mexico (assuming, for the purposes of argument, there is any work to be done in Mexico).
On the other other hand, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) had added earmarks to the bill proposing that the family of Mohamed Atta should be entitled to receive survivor benefits plus an American Airlines pilot’s pension based on past illegal employment flying jets over the northeast corridor on Tuesday mornings in late 2001.
Fortunately, the world’s greatest deliberative body was able to agree on this sensible moderate compromise.
Meanwhile, from the Associated Press:
“Mexico warned Tuesday it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops detain migrants on the border.”
On what basis? Posse Comitatus? It’s unconstitutional to use the U.S. military against foreign nationals before they’ve had a chance to break into the country and become fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community?
Or is Mexico taking legal action on the broader grounds that in America it’s now illegal to enforce the law? Which, given that Senate bill, is a not unreasonable supposition.
Whatever. Under the new “comprehensive immigration reform” bill (Posse Como Estas?), a posse of National Guardsmen will be stationed in the Arizona desert but only as Wal-Mart greeters to escort members of the Illegal-American community to the nearest Social Security office to register for benefits backdated to 1973.
Mark Steyn isn’t finished by a long shot.
This is not an “immigration” issue. “Immigration” is when you go into a U.S. government office and there’s a hundred people filling in paperwork to live in America, and there are a couple of Slovaks, couple of Bangladeshis, couple of New Zealanders, couple of Botswanans, couple of this, couple of that. Assimilation is not in doubt because, if you’re a lonely Slovak in Des Moines, it’s extremely difficult to stay unassimilated.
This is not an “illegal immigration” issue. That’s when one of the Slovaks or Botswanans gets tired of waiting in line for 12 years and comes in anyway, and lives and works here and doesn’t pay any taxes, so the money he earns gets sluiced around the neighborhood supermarket and gas station and topless bar and the rest of the local economy, instead of being given to Trent and Arlen and Co. to toss into the great sucking maw of the federal budget.
But a “worker class” drawn overwhelmingly from a neighboring jurisdiction with another language and ancient claims on your territory and whose people now send so much money back home in the form of “remittances” that it’s Mexico’s largest source of foreign income (bigger than oil or tourism) is not “immigration” at all, but a vast experiment in societal transformation. Indeed, given the international track record of bilingual societies and neighboring jurisdictions with territorial claims, it’s not much of an experiment so much as a safe bet on political instability.
Whoa! Read on as Steyn compares, contrasts, and extrapolates our situation with illegal aliens to other countries who have experienced similar invasions. It’s not encouraging, but it IS important.