“It May Seem Ridiculous To Talk About Mexican Terrorists – But…”
Just when I think I’m out, ODE columnists keep pulling me back in. What subject is almost guaranteed to trigger an angry blog post from your humble correspondent? That’s right, immigrant-bashing. Kirsten Brock’s focus, as I’m sure she would point out, is illegal immigration, but count me as one non-citizen who isn’t terribly reassured by what she does here: take a crucial national security problem and treat it as if it applied only to one particularly vulnerable segment of the population.
And then there is this spectacular money quote:
While increasing security is a step, we must remove the incentives for crossing the border.
This is, to say the least, a novel approach to the issue: removing the incentives for crossing the border. Yes, if only the US economy (not to mention US salaries) were on a par with Mexico’s, if only people didn’t want to come to the US to build a better life for themselves and their families – in short, if only the United States could somehow be made to suck more, we wouldn’t be drowning in all these goddamned foreigners.
Brock deploys every related fallacy in the book – immigration as antisocial behavior, immigrants as drain on public resources rather than as the engine driving a substantial part of the economy, etc – with enough space left over to call ’em all terrorists. After all, she points out, they’ve already broken one law, simply by being here! Why, these fiends will stop at nothing! The moral distinction drawn here between good-guy legal immigrants and nefarious illegals is, to put it politely, nonsense: to pick one obvious example, Mohammed Atta actually received the student visa he’d applied for, six months after September 11. This points to a massive systemic problem, to be sure, but it’s one that can be conveniently disregarded the moment an easier populist target comes along, such as the work visa scheme Brock is busy decrying.
Bite me, Kirsten Brock. And when you’re done biting me, read this.
