No tragedy is too great not to be exploited by U.S. open borders advocates and those who insist on using immigration to force massive U.S. population growth. The media are filled with drumbeats to use the Haitian disaster as an excuse to greatly increase immigration even further past its already record-setting pace. Here are a handful of their most illogical arguments . . .
OPEN BORDERS ARGUMENT NO. 1: TENS OF THOUSANDS OF HAITIANS HAVE ALREADY BEEN APPROVED BUT ARE BLOCKED BY A PAPERWORK BACKLOG
This is what the president of a major refugee re-settlement group wrote in USA Today:
We can help the approximately 50,000 Haitians who've already gotten U.S. government approval to come to this country because they have a close relative (spouse, child, parent or sibling) who's a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident.
-- Lavinia Limon, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants
The open-borders people talk like this all the time. As soon as a foreign citizen applies for immigration and has the application accepted, they claim the citizen is "approved" and the only reason he/she isn't here already is because of paperwork backlogs or bureaucratic red tape.
In fact, though, the United States has had numerical yearly limits on most categories of immigration since 1921. Those limits have been very high since 1965, but they are the reason that once annual immigration hit the 1 million mark in the 1990s, it has barely edged above that.
There are millions of extended family who have applied and are in line to come to the U.S. some day. If we allowed in immediately everybody who is qualified to submit an application, our peak immigration of today would quickly double and quadruple.
OPEN BORDERS ARGUMENT NO. 2: BRING MORE HAITIANS IN TO TAKE U.S. JOBS SO THEY CAN SEND MONEY BACK TO HAITI
The New York Times and most of the rest of the national media elite can't imagine why this doesn't make sense.
The editorial writers apparently don't read their own papers which carry daily stories about what 10% unemployment is doing to desperate demographic communities across the country. Just which jobs do the editorial writers want the new Haitian immigrants to take?
In fact in this economy, every new Haitian immigrant (just like the 75,000 working-age immigrants we have been adding monthly all during the recession) who finds a job will be causing a U.S. worker to not have a job.
This is typical elitist humanitarianism in which the well-placed get to puff out their chests in righteousness about giving aid that is paid by the most vulnerable members of society.
Allowing higher immigration so more remittances can be sent to Haiti is like a seriously regressive tax on America's poor. If the elites want more money sent to Haiti than the massive amounts already being given by Americans, then the elites should shell out their own money -- not pick the pockets of America's unemployed workers.
OPEN BORDERS ARGUMENT NO. 3: MORE IMMIGRATION WILL RELIEVE THE PRESSURE IN HAITI AND PREVENT CHAOS
I have doubted that any editorial writers in America are more clueless about immigration than those at the New York Times, but those at the Washington Post proved me wrong this weekend:
(Taking more immigrants from Haiti) would reduce the overwhelming numbers of destitute Haitians who will need to be housed, fed and cared for . . . it would provide an orderly procedure to relieve the pressure building in a country where almost no one currently has a means of exit. Keeping people bottled up in a place as wrecked as Haiti is a sure-fire way to make desperate people more desperate; it raises the risk of violence, instability and chaotic exodus.
-- Washington Post editorial
I can only conclude that the Post editorialists are numerically illiterate or that they are such zealots for immigration at all costs they don't have any interest in logic.
Even these editorialists aren't calling for more than perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 extra immigrants. While that level would mean more than 50,000 more Americans would be left unemployed, 50,000 is an awfully small number in a Haiti with some 8 million people. Do the editorialists really believe that removing only about 1% of Haiti's population would have any measurable effect on the pressures for violence and chaotic departures?
But the Post is on a crusade. Before that editorial ran, the paper ran two days of op-eds calling for more Haitian immigration as a solution to the tragedy, and then a front-page article about the so-called momentum building to create an expanded Haitian immigration category.
Hooray for the editorial writers at USA Today!
To stop us from thinking that only the most blinded of thinkers are hired to write newspaper editorials, USA Today (the nation's largest newspaper) came out against increasing Haitian immigration.
For starters, inviting thousands to flee Haiti is no way to help Haiti rebuild. To the contrary, Haiti's survival depends on encouraging its best and brightest to remain and work on its revival.
-- USA Today editorial
Unbelievable to find that level of sophisticated thinking in an editorial board. But there it is (and to be fair, we often see thoughtful consideration of immigration at USA Today). The last thing the U.S. should be doing is luring away their citizens who might be most likely to be what I call "change agents." My colleague Jim Robb did a study in the 1990s that showed a high percentage of all Haitian doctors were in the U.S. Is that really a moral immigration policy?
USA Today also noted that the people standing in the line that the other editorial boards want to bring here may not necessarily even live where the earthquake hit. It brings up a number of other questions of fairness and practicality.
The more one weighs the consequences, the less appealing the immigration option seems. So far, the Obama administration has gotten the policy about right: It's not throwing open the doors, but it is doing a great deal to ease Haiti's burden.
America will do the most good by doing what it's capable of doing more efficiently. Finding ways to make Haiti more livable, more quickly, will encourage citizens to stay. Helping to finance reconstruction will create thousands of jobs for Haitians, in Haiti.
That might not feel as good as saying "ya'll come," but in the long run, it will be far more beneficial.
-- USA Today editorial
I hope you have used the NumbersUSA free faxing system to encourage the Obama Administration and Sec. of State Hilary Clinton to continue their very wise policies thus far of telling Haitians that their future is not in the United States but in working to rebuild their own country.
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ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA
