Scott Spiegel

As the immigration debate reignites and Congressmen stake out their positions on Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s comprehensive immigration reform bill, a remarkable number of supposedly free-market conservatives are taking a rather hidebound, protectionist stance against the expansion of trade that such reform would bring.  Consider:

• Fury recently erupted when a Rubio aide privately told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, “There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it.  There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer.  There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it.”  Before the immigration issue resurfaced, you’ll note, this is what we used to refer to as “the Republican Party platform.”

• Victor Davis Hanson accused the nation’s corporate “elites” of wanting amnesty so they can ensure an endless supply of “cheap laborers.”  Hanson seems to have forgotten that there are two parties to any employment contract—those who receive the wages and those who pay them—and fails to explain to us why employers should prefer pricy laborers.

• National Review lamented that “The fine for legalization is small—just $500 up front and $500 paid in installments, in return for lifetime legal access to the U.S. labor market.”  Apparently NR has no problem forcing those entering the workforce to pay a tribute of $1,000 to the government for the privilege of working a minimum-wage job.

• Peter Kirsanow complained that most low-skilled workers are “unwilling to work at the cut-rate wages (and often substandard conditions) offered to illegal immigrants—a cohort highly unlikely to complain to the EEOC, OSHA or the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor.”  Now immigration has turned conservatives into rabid Department of Labor acolytes?

• Ann Coulter asserted that Mexicans will grab jobs from African Americans—contradicting her previous claim that “innumerable studies” on Mexicans have shown that “the second, third and fourth generations plunge headlong into the underclass.”  If subsequent generations of Mexicans aren’t hard workers, how exactly is it that they’re going to be taking all those jobs away from African Americans?

• Victor Davis Hanson similarly argued that African-American unemployment is being kept high by competition from illegal workers—despite his admission that “second-generation immigrants are deemed less industrious” than their parents.  Well, are second-generation Mexicans unstoppable workhorses poised to decimate the black race or lazy siesta-indulgers?  Hanson and Coulter can’t seem to make up their minds.  (For the record, Census Bureau data show that African-American unemployment is no greater in areas with higher concentrations of recent immigrants.)

• In a piece titled “Rubio’s Folly,” National Review editors declared, “By more than doubling the number of so-called guest workers admitted each year, the bill would help create a permanent underclass of foreign workers…  That is a lot of taxation without representation.”  Wait—I thought illegal immigrants didn’t pay taxes and were just here to collect benefits.  Now we’re supposed to be distraught because they’re forking over too much to the IRS?

• Hanson warns that although illegals can often “find jobs that pay over five times more per hour than anything they could find in Mexico,” those jobs “often become a permanent dead end.”  But aren’t those illegal workers here voluntarily?  Can’t they return home anytime they like if they believe they’re about to hit a permanent dead end?

Are there any other immigrant employment protections these recent conservative converts to the Working Families Party would like to enact?

For some reason the economic implications of immigration have to be spelled out for most conservatives, who otherwise seem to understand how the economy works in every other area of life, so here goes:

• Importing low-skilled workers does not take jobs away from Americans, any more than technological innovations such as the automobile or ATM take jobs away from horse-and-buggy drivers or bank tellers.  Immigration makes it easier to get cheap labor and frees up the rest of us to adopt more skilled professions.  There are transition costs, and some older folks who can’t or won’t learn new skills may find themselves out of work, but the net benefit to society more than compensates for the loss.

• Competition from foreign workers may drive wages down slightly for some low-skilled workers and those directly competing with immigrants.  But that happens when any growing field starts attracting more workers, immigrant or non-immigrant.  And the resulting efficiency frees up capital for business owners to expand and invest in high-tech equipment and services that require skilled employees, which lets those who are willing to learn new roles advance in their fields.

• Welcoming new residents brings more demand for goods and services, which means that more jobs are created to fulfill these demands.  Immigrants take jobs, but they also afford more job creation to meet their needs.  The nanny, lawnmower, and construction business owner all require groceries, clothes, fuel, and shelter.

It’s a strange world when conservatives find themselves on the same side as left-wing, protectionist unions like the AFL-CIO, which recently won a concession in Rubio’s bill to force employers to pay foreign workers higher wages; or the Building and Construction Trades union, which won a battle to limit the quantity of visas given to foreign construction workers.  Are we going to have to fight NAFTA all over again, too?

Conservatives’ neurotic insistence on strict border enforcement, mandatory E-Verify usage, and other protectionist measures is about one step up from nationalized affirmative action for American workers.

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Last Wednesday, reporter Glenn Greenwald revealed in the UK Guardian that the FBI and National Security Agency were implementing a top-secret, court-ordered program requiring Verizon Business Network Services to turn over daily “telephony metadata” logs on hundreds of millions of calls it processes for its subscribers.

This “transactional data” excludes the content of the calls, but includes the numbers from which they originate and to which they are made, as well as subscriber IDs, calling card numbers, and the time and length of the calls.

The order authorizing the program was issued by District Court and former U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Justice Roger Vinson, who also happens to be the first federal judge to have ruled that Obamacare’s insurance mandate is unconstitutional.  (Clearly Vinson knows a thing or two about what’s constitutional and what’s not.)  Vinson agreed with the administration’s argument that the NSA’s phone surveillance is justified under the Business Records section of the Patriot Act.

On Thursday, The Guardian revealed that the NSA’s surveillance activities also included tapping into the servers of Internet and social networking companies such as Google, Microsoft, AOL, Apple, Facebook, and YouTube.  Project PRISM, as it is known, allows the government to access users’ search histories, file transfers, e-mail, chats, login information, and social network profiles.

As it happens, in 2006 reporters revealed that the Bush administration had also been accessing metadata on millions of phone records from major telephone carriers, including Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth.  Democrats including Senator Barack Obama railed against the Bush administration’s “spying” on Americans, but until Greenwald’s report, it was not known that President Obama had continued and expanded Bush’s efforts.

Ironically, most on the left, including The New York Times, the American Civil Liberties Union, and numerous Democratic congressmen, have decried Obama’s program—no doubt because they fear the surveillance program might be effective in helping catch Islamic terrorists.  (Recall how they similarly opposed Obama’s continuation of 95% of his predecessor’s successful counterterrorism policies.  Liberals adore Obama, but even they can’t tolerate his taking actions that are in the country’s national security interest.)

The Obama administration has defended the NSA surveillance program, arguing that it helped thwart a major terrorist attack in New York in 2009.  Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein maintains that the court order is merely a three-month renewal of a program that has been running since 2006.  Defenders of the program remind the public that NSA officials must still go to court to get approval to access content they flag as suspicious based on metadata.

The problem with the NSA program isn’t its surveillance activities, for which a reasonable case can be made.  Radical anti-interventionist libertarian Rand Paul exemplifies the superficial stance against the program when he argues that it involves collecting “hundreds of millions”—gasp!—of records from a country with, um, hundreds of millions of residents.

The problem with the NSA program isn’t its ability to function after former NSA employee Edward Snowden leaked its existence to journalists, an act some have called treasonous.  The Bush administration was able to continue its program in altered form even after The New York Times reported on a leak about it in 2006.

The problem with the Obama administration’s NSA program is the Obama administration, which poisons everything it touches, from gun control (see Fast and Furious) to implementation of its own stimulus act (see Obama’s firing of numerous Inspectors General).

The problem with Obama’s NSA program is that Obama cannot be trusted with sensitive information.  Consider:

When evidence suggested that al-Qaeda affiliates were behind a murderous attack on our Benghazi consulate, the administration altered its official report to remove such references, sent out its Ambassador to the United Nations to lie about the cause of the attack until the Presidential election was over, and threw an innocent filmmaker in jail for a year on trumped-up probation-violation charges.

High-level administration officials were likely aware of and probably approved a comprehensive IRS effort to delay for years the tax-exempt status of hundreds of conservative and Tea Party organizations, and to target major Republican donors for harassment, schemes whose sordid details journalists are still uncovering.

The administration’s Justice Department was caught subpoenaing AP reporters’ phone and e-mail records, and spuriously identifying Fox News reporter James Rosen as a co-conspirator in a national security leak, scandals we learned about only because of the efforts of intrepid reporters.

Under a responsible administration, the NSA’s surveillance program would provoke debate, but perhaps not grave concern.  Under this administration, the agency’s intelligence-gathering capabilities—like most other executive powers Obama has been granted, and many he has not—should send chills down our spines.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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The College Republican National Committee recently released a report claiming that the GOP is losing young voters and must change its overall tone and better explain how its positions match theirs.

The report criticized the GOP’s focus on reducing the size of government and cutting taxes as stuffy relics that don’t address Millennials’ concerns (“We’ve become the party that will pat you on your back when you make it, but won’t offer you a hand to help you get there”), and claimed that young people are turned off by strong rhetoric against gay marriage, immigration, and abortion.

While I’m all for removing social issues from the table, CRNC’s suggestion to compromise on economic issues worries me.  In addition, the impetus for their report may be based on a false premise.

CRNC claims, “The issue of the Republican Party’s challenges with the youth vote and the party’s challenges with non-white voters are inseparable.”  Similarly, many analysts have been trying to make sense of the GOP’s recent Presidential electoral loss by claiming that Republicans face (1) an age problem, whereby they’re getting older people’s votes but losing young people’s; (2) a gender problem, whereby they’re getting men’s votes but losing women’s; and (3) a race problem, whereby they’re getting whites’ votes but losing other races’.

But an analysis of 2008 and 2012 exit polls reveals that only the last of these three claims has any truth to it.

First, contrary to popular opinion, the GOP does not have a gender deficit or a youth deficit.  It has a race deficit.  Mitt Romney won both the white female vote and the white under-30 vote in 2012.  He lost the overall female vote and overall under-30 vote only because he lost to Obama with all other female and under-30 racial groups.

Second, from 2008 to 2012, the GOP did not lose young people, women, or even non-whites.  For the most part, it gained all three.

In 2008, men voted for Obama over John McCain 49% to 48%, and women chose Obama 56% to 43%—a gender difference of 12%.  In 2012, men voted for Romney over Obama 52%-45%, and women chose Obama 55%-44%—an 18% gender difference.

But this apparently growing gender gap is illusory: It is explained entirely by black males voting more Republican, and Latinas voting more Democratic, in 2012.

Consider: In 2008, white males chose McCain over Obama 57%-41% and white females chose him 53%-46%, a gender difference of 9%.  In 2012, white males chose Romney over Obama 62%-35% and white females chose him 56%-42%, a gender difference of 4%.

So white women actually voted Republican in greater numbers relative to men in 2012 than in 2008.

But the gender story is completely different when we consider non-white voters.  Black males chose Obama over McCain 95%-5% and black females chose him 96%-3.  But in 2012, black males chose Obama over Romney only 87% to 11%, whereas black female party vote was identical to 2008.  Thus, the black male vote swung 14% in Republicans’ direction from 2008 to 2012, while for black females it was unchanged.

The GOP didn’t lose white women in 2012, and it didn’t even lose black women.  It gained black men.

Similarly, in 2008 Latinos chose Obama over McCain 64%-33%, and Latinas chose him 68% to 30%.  But in 2012, Latinas swung 15% in Obama’s direction, whereas Latinos swung only 1%.

To sum up these race-gender differences: The GOP didn’t lose female voters from 2008 to 2012—it gained white male voters, white female voters, and black male voters; held its ground among black female voters and Latinos; and lost only Latinas.

The race-age intersection tells a similar story.  Obama won whites under 30 by 10% in 2008 and lost all other white age groups by 14% to 18%.  In contrast, he won all black age groups by 88% to 91% and all Hispanic age groups by 18% to 57%.

In 2012, however, Romney won whites under 30 by 7%—a 17% shift in under-30 white voters from 2008.  He made much smaller gains among all other white age groups, from 4% to 9%.  So Romney didn’t drive away young white voters—he attracted them in droves.

In contrast, the GOP’s gains among black voters were smaller and more homogenous across age groups—though, as with white voters, its largest gain (8%) was among blacks under 30.  And although Hispanic voters aged 30-44 and 45-64 swung further in Obama’s direction in 2012, both Hispanics under 30 and those 65 and older voted for Romney in greater numbers than they did for McCain (8% and 6% shifts).

So the GOP didn’t lose young voters in any racial groups: It made huge gains among white voters under 30; it made modest gains among black voters under 30 (and other black age groups) and among young and elderly Hispanic voters; and it suffered losses only among Hispanics aged 30 to 64.

The GOP is simply, factually not the party of old white men.  That claim is as ludicrous as stating that Democrats are the party of under-30 lesbian Jews, just because each of those demographic groups leans Democratic.  The GOP is the party of both genders and all age groups of white voters, and is making inroads among young voters, including black and Hispanic voters.  Of the three most populous racial groups, it has lost only Hispanics aged 30-64 since 2008.

Being the party that’s winning all white gender and age groups and is just beginning to recapture the non-white female and youth vote is not the ideal situation to be in.  But understanding where we stand as a party, rather than castigating ourselves as the party of cranky white geezers, will help us clarify our message.  Namely, our Mission #1 should be, not pandering to women or young people, but recapturing once and for all the non-white vote that Democrats stole from us half a century ago.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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Demonstrating their impeccable timing, liberals have been ramping up talk of global warming and carbon dioxide restrictions smack dab in the middle of a historic cold stretch that has obliterated spring across North America and threatened to engulf summer.

South Dakota is seeing its first May snowfall in half a century and Arkansas its first ever, interstates and schools are shutting down across the Upper Midwest, and cherry blossoms in D.C. are blooming a month late, but The New York Times proclaims in its piece “Climate Warnings, Growing Louder” that 2013 is the year we must finally get serious about the impending planetary meltdown.

As I sit here in Manhattan shivering this Memorial Day weekend because my high-rise shut off central heating a month ago, even though it plummeted to 40 degrees last night, I thought I’d ponder, for all those liberals who claim to care about science, the string of questions that must be answered before our nation even thinks of passing expensive, intrusive legislation to regulate CO₂ emissions:

Is global warming happening?

Contrary to the predictions of all widely publicized climate change models, there has been no increase in global surface temperature since 1998.  Global warming skeptics also note the absence of warming in satellite temperatures and ocean temperatures.  But that’s OK: According to liberals’ utterly specious, ad hoc, made-up explanation, global cooling is actually evidence of global warming, because global warming leads to extremes in temperature, which can include global cooling—although this differs from the actual global cooling that took place from 1940 to 1970, which was somehow evidence of global cooling.

Does CO₂ cause global warming?

Physicist and global warming “convert” Richard Muller writes, of his examination of factors correlated with global temperature over the past 250 years, “By far the best match [is] to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.”  Great—but how does Muller know that increases in atmospheric CO₂ cause increases in global temperature?  He doesn’t.  In fact, evidence from ice core records indicates that CO₂ levels lag behind global temperature changes, which implies that temperature alters CO₂ levels.  In layman’s terms: The Earth warms, ice melts, plants thrive, animals and humans multiply, and presto!—there’s more CO₂ in the air.

Is man contributing to global warming?

Perhaps not.  Skeptics point to the Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago, when the Earth was significantly warmer than it is now, yet industrial civilization was centuries away.  They also note that most 20^th-century warming happened before 1940, despite the explosive growth in industrialization that occurred after 1940.

Is man’s global warming contribution significant?

Even if man is contributing to global warming, there remains the question of how much.  Non-anthropogenic sources such as sunspot activity, cosmic rays, cloud cover, volcanic eruptions, natural cyclical variation, and even bovine methane emissions may be contributing much more.

Is global warming harmful?

Even if the Earth is warming and man is causing it, global warming may not be harmful to mankind and other animal species.  Looking on a scale of tens of thousands of years, plants and animals have typically thrived in warmer temperatures.  Ice ages, after all, aren’t known for their lush vegetation and tropical, carefree lifestyles.  So it’s not obvious that an increase of a degree or so every century would wipe mankind off the map.  Harrison Schmitt and William Happer recently argued in The Wall Street Journal for the beneficial effects of CO₂, the most misaligned and misunderstood compound on the planet.

Can man reverse global warming?

Even if global warming would harm mankind, we may not be able to do anything about it.  The indispensible Lord Christopher Monckton has demonstrated how, using global warming advocates’ own numbers and projections, proposed climate change legislation would have a miniscule effect on CO₂ emissions.

Is the cost of reversing global warming less than the cost of adapting to it?

Even if global warming is harmful and man can reverse it, it’s not clear that he should, rather than simply adapting to any changes it induces.  Until we can make trustworthy projections of which course of action is less costly, taking preventive action is premature.

Should the public bear, and the government oversee, the cost of reversing global warming?

Even if it’s cost-effective to change our way of life to hedge against global warming, it’s not obvious that our inefficient central government should make such decisions, and that taxpayers should succumb to their regulations.

Would CO₂ emission reductions be offset by developing nations?

Even if developed nations decided our governments should regulate CO₂, it would make little difference if our efforts were offset by the exponentially increasing emissions from developing nations such as China, India, and Brazil.

So to sum up: We should definitely destroy industrial civilization to mitigate the effects of global warming—if it’s actually happening, if it’s caused by CO₂, if it’s caused mostly by man, if it’s harmful and reversible, if doing so is cheaper than adapting to it, and if our efforts are matched by the efforts of developing nations.

As global warming alarmist-friendly journal The Economist recently admitted, the jig may finally be up on global warming hysteria, and not a moment too soon.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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According to liberals, it was “un-American” to protest the adoption of Obamacare.  Now apparently it’s unpatriotic not to go out of one’s way to help make it a roaring success.

The New York Times recently claimed that GOP congressmen and governors are spitefully refusing to fund or participate in Obamacare implementation solely to make the President look bad.  On Monday The Times argued that conservatives are harping on the Internal Revenue Agency scandal just so they can delegitimize the IRS and block its assigned role in determining citizens’ income eligibility for having to buy health insurance.

In the Times’ fantasy world, Republicans are going after former IRS tax-exempt division head Sarah Hall Ingram just so they can stall her installation as head of the IRS’s health care office.  The Times also claims that conservatives are spotlighting Department of Health and Human Services Head Kathleen Sebelius’s improper Obamacare lobbying efforts just so the law will fail.

Meanwhile, The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn complains that fast food restaurant owners, nursing home operators, and other low-wage employers are trying to “weasel out” of complying with Obamacare—as though it were every businessman’s patriotic duty to mindlessly accept intrusive, expensive regulations, or as though thousands of Democrat-connected organizations hadn’t already been granted waivers to evade the plan’s dictates.

Cohn explains that a loophole in the law may allow companies to offer employees only barebones coverage and pay a smaller fine than if they had offered no coverage.  But even Cohn admits to the role that free market forces properly play under such circumstances: “[T]hese companies would have to consider the competitive effects, which could push in either direction.  Do they provide less insurance, so they keep costs lower?  Or do they provide more, so they can attract better workers?  Different companies will undoubtedly respond in different ways…”  Yes, Jonathan, that’s exactly the way it’s supposed to work in a free market—minus, of course, the government’s forcing employers to provide any coverage in the first place.

Cohn’s tepid nod to capitalism is positively Hayekian compared to the stance of Ezekiel Emanuel, one-time White House health policy advisor and brother of former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm.  Ezekiel admits that Obamacare may be unsustainable, because it forces young, healthy people to pay disproportionately large premiums to subsidize sick, older people—an arrangement that the former won’t stand for and the latter can’t pick up the slack for.

Emanuel’s solution?  A massive public relations blitz that reminds the Millennium Generation just how much they love Obama, and that urges them to buy Obamacare health plans even if it makes no economic sense so that Dear Leader’s presidency won’t fail.

In a hilariously naïve and economically illiterate editorial, Emanuel preaches, “[Y]oung people believe in President Obama.  They overwhelmingly voted for him.  He won by a 23% margin among voters 18-29—just the people who need to enroll.  The president connects with young people, too, so he needs to use that bond and get out there to convince them to sign up for health insurance to help this central part of his legacy.  Every commencement address by an administration official should encourage young graduates to get health insurance.”  Every commencement address by an administration official should also explain to young graduates where exactly they’re going to find jobs in the Obama economy so they can purchase said insurance.

If I understand Emanuel’s appeal correctly, it’s that twentysomethings should subsidize Obama’s legacy, and in return they won’t look like fools for voting for him if his plan somehow miraculously succeeds.

Commenting on Emmanuel’s Don Draper approach to health care reform, Richard Epstein notes, “Emanuel’s expansive view of civic duty plays the game both ways when he accuses individuals who don’t purchase health insurance of ‘freeriding’ on the public.  But their purchase of insurance will allow the [older] preferred plan recipients to free ride on them.”  Emanuel assumes that young people are already in the bag for Democrats, whereas older folks’ votes need to be bought.

Emanuel also assumes that his proposed marketing campaign will cash in on the emotional nature of persuadable young voters.  Good luck with that.  Most young people who voted for Obama and supported Obamacare are nonetheless learning that the penalty for not having health insurance is lower than the actual cost of health insurance, and are acting according to their rational self-interest by declining to purchase it.  Would we expect young adults—who earn the least of all adult age groups—to do any less?

More broadly, would we expect other age groups, or small business owners, or large business owners, or private citizens, or unions, or—yes—Congressmen and their staffers not to try to find a way to get out of a plan they know costs more than it’s worth and unacceptably limits their options?  Are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi un-American for not signing up for health care exchanges that the poor schlubs in their districts will be forced to buy?

As Obamacare implementation stumbles on, more and more stakeholders are realizing that, not only is it not their duty to make the plan succeed, it is in their distinct interest to help it fail.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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Two recent events—the Benghazi coverup and the IRS scandal—provide an object lesson in how liberals and conservatives view “politicization.”

Conservatives’ definition of politicization is: liberals treating them unfairly for partisan reasons.  Liberals’ definition of politicization is: conservatives pointing out something they did wrong.

Consider: When conservatives highlighted the Obama administration’s incompetent, deceitful, disastrous handling of the terrorist attack on our Benghazi embassy, Democrats dismissed the affair as no big deal and accused Republicans of politicizing it.

Actually, politicizing Benghazi would have involved, say, a Presidential candidate who pressed the issue during his foreign policy debate with Obama, or who mentioned it in campaign commercials leading up to the election.  Instead, Mitt Romney decided it would be more Presidential to bring it up once and then never, ever mention it again.

When evidence of their malfeasance becomes too overwhelming, liberals simply switch tactics and claim that, OK, sometimes they politicize their faults by downplaying them, but the other side is just as bad.

Thus, The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd recently confessed, “The administration’s behavior before and during the attack in Benghazi was unworthy of the greatest power on earth…  The State Department’s minimum security requirements were not met, requests for more security were rejected…  Obama aides wanted to promote the mythology that the president who killed Osama was vanquishing terror.  So they deemed it problematic to mention any possible Qaeda involvement.”

Nonetheless, Dowd ludicrously titled her piece “When Myths Collide in the Capital” and claimed that both sides are politicizing Benghazi.  She wrote, “Welcome to a glorious spring weekend of accusation and obfuscation as Hillaryland goes up against Foxworld…  Truth is the first casualty here when competing fiefs protect their mythologies.”

Except that it’s not a mythology if it’s the truth.  Exactly which part of the Republicans’ Benghazi charges has proven unworthy of investigation?  Did ABC News recently join the feifdom of Fox News?

And The New Yorker’s Alex Koppelman had to admit, “It’s striking to see the twelve different iterations that the [administration’s] talking points went through…  The mere existence of the edits seriously undermines the White House’s credibility on this issue.”

Yet Koppelman felt compelled to add, “For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession.  But now there is something to it.”  No—there always was something to it; the left was just too blinded by partisanship to see it.  It isn’t bipartisan partisanship when liberals finally start admitting what conservatives have been saying all along.

Meanwhile, conservatives actually are the objects of politicization.  Witness the IRS’s recent admission that it targeted dozens of conservative and Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny during the 2012 Presidential election, solely on the basis of having words like “patriot” in their names instead of “progress,” action,” or “organizing.”  The IRS was warned about its improper filtering criteria back in 2010 and briefly stopped using them, then started using slightly different ones in 2012.  Congress learned about the IRS harassment last spring, but, as with Benghazi, didn’t address it until after the election.  Last Friday the IRS lied and said its actions were carried out by only a few low-level employees, a claim it has since retracted.

How has politicization affected free-speech rights as a result of the scandal?  Numerous conservative and Tea Party groups had their tax-exempt status delayed for months or even years, some until after the 2012 election.  Some are still waiting for approval.  Many eventually had their requests granted only because the American Center for Law and Justice stepped in and helped fight their case.  And how many conservative grass-roots activists will be intimidated into staying out of politics for fear of government harassment or bankrupting fines?

Naturally, liberals’ response to these charges has been to accuse Republicans of politicizing them.

The right is also the target of politicization in the form of persistent media bias.  At least since the 1960s, mainstream journalists have reliably voted for and donated to Democratic over Republican candidates by an order of magnitude.

Conservatives know what it’s like to have their actions politicized; they experience it in the form of a constant stream of harassment from supposedly neutral organizations like the mainstream media and the IRS.  Politicization for conservatives means an endless maelstrom of invective and staggering odds against getting their unfiltered message out to anyone outside their base.

If media-coddled liberals ever faced any actual politicization, it would crush them.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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The Heritage Foundation recently released a 92-page study titled “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer.”  The report, which has received much attention in the conservative media, purports to calculate the cost of granting amnesty to the country’s 11 million illegal aliens as $6.3 trillion.

How does Heritage derive this figure?  First they project the education levels and household composition of illegal immigrants, by taking all U.S. Census immigrant respondents and subtracting those that are legally here.  Then they take the average earnings and taxes paid by households by education level; weight these by the proportion of illegal immigrants with these education levels; and adjust for benefits denied to illegal immigrants.  Because illegals have lower education levels, and households with less education receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes, the authors conclude that amnesty would be a net cost to our economy.

Heritage notes that illegal immigrants are barred from receiving direct government benefits, including Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and workers’ compensation.  Illegals are also ineligible to collect means-tested benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, Section 8 housing, public housing, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Social Services Block Grant, and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Unlawful immigrant households receive only $44 a year on average in direct government benefits, compared to $9,398 for lawful immigrants and $11,617 for non-immigrants.  They collect only $4,497 in means-tested benefits, compared to $9,040 for lawful immigrants and $6,685 for non-immigrants.  In addition, illegals make less use of population-based services such as highways and police.

So how do illegal immigrants collect any benefits at all?  The answer is that their U.S.-born children, who are legal citizens, are eligible to receive them.  Heritage includes the cost of children born in the U.S. to illegals as part of the cost of illegal immigration.

U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants are eligible to receive food stamps, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program benefits, and—most expensively—public education.  The means-tested benefits illegal aliens receive, though lower than for other populations, flow largely to their children.

So how does Heritage’s analysis hold up?  As I’ve argued before, immigration-leery conservatives are not addressing the real problem plaguing the country’s economy, which is the growth of the welfare state.  All of the arguments Heritage makes constitute good arguments for why we should deport the poor, or why we shouldn’t have accepted uneducated immigrants during the great 19^th and early 20^th century immigration waves.

But the main problem with Heritage’s report is its failure to think dynamically.  The authors assume that illegal immigrants’ children will hobble along in perpetuity at the same education and career level as their parents.

But does Heritage really think that industrious, motivated parents fed up with our draconian immigration quotas, who skirted the law and possibly risked their lives to move here and make a better life for their families, are going to settle for their children drifting along on food stamps for the rest of their lives?  For as long as anyone can remember, successive generations of U.S. citizens have attained greater educational credentials and earnings than their parents.  Why should we expect immigrants’ children to be any different?

Heritage’s estimate of the costs illegal immigration places on our system via disproportionate benefits and lower taxes might be accurate—if illegal immigrants’ children never improved their station in life beyond that of their parents.  But evidence suggests that their children are likely to become better-educated, earn more, and pay more in taxes, thus offsetting the cost to our system.

As Jennifer Rubin notes, “[T]he flawed Heritage study has generated… a backlash from fiscal conservatives who cannot in good faith embrace the notion that fewer people make us richer or that every immigrant will be a poverty-stricken ward of the state (and hence a drain on the Treasury).”  Immigration bill author Senator Marco Rubio explains, “[Heritage’s] argument is based on a single premise, which I think is flawed.  That is, these people… will be poor for the rest of their lives in the U.S.  Quite frankly, that’s not the immigration experience in the U.S.  That’s certainly not my family’s experience in the U.S.  The folks described in that report are my family…  I would not say they were a burden on the United States.”

Heritage complains that Rubio’s immigration bill hides the long-term costs of granting amnesty.  But Heritage misses the long-term benefit of the bill hiding in plain sight: the future educational and earnings potential of generations of young American immigrants.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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• Heritage: Amnestied Illegals Will Get $9.4T in Benefits; Increase Debt $6.3T’ (ncrenegade.com)
• $6.3 Trillion to Fund Amnesty? (foxnews.com)
• Heritage’s Flawed Immigration Analysis (cato.org)
• READ FULL REPORT: The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer (americanfreedombybarbara.com)
• What the Heritage Study Does – And Doesn’t Do (nationalreview.com)

Which of the following countries would you prefer to live in?

(1) A bloated welfare state, with record numbers of Americans receiving disability payments and food stamps, but nice secure borders to keep Mexicans from pestering us with dirt-cheap labor;

(2) A country in which the entitlement state has shrunk to a speck, only the most destitute receive temporary federal assistance, government signs and voting ballots are in English only, and we have a policy of open immigration.

If conservatives are going to turn the 2016 presidential election into a one-issue referendum on immigration, they’d better define their terms first.

The biggest problem plaguing the country today isn’t rampant immigration—it’s rampant entitlement.  Immigration rates were far higher during many periods throughout American history—most notably during the mid-19^th and early 20^th centuries—with entering populations much more illiterate, poor, and low-skilled than today.  Yet somehow we survived and even thrived from their integration into our population and economy.

Between 1840 and 1930, 30 million Europeans immigrated to the U.S., including whole metropolises’ worth of Germans, Irish, Poles, Italians, Russians, and Scandinavians.  Most came for the same reason Mexicans and other Second and Third World residents do today—greater economic opportunity and political freedom.  Like Mexicans capitalizing on the long, porous border between Mexico and four Southwestern U.S. states, European immigrants scampered aboard crowded shipping vessels trekking to the U.S. via new trade routes and flooded immigration centers in Northeastern cities New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.

Immigration as a percentage of the general population was 11% during the 1850s and 10% during the 1900s, the two peak immigration decades in our history.  Yet immigration as a percentage of the population during the supposedly runaway 2000s was a paltry 3%.  Though immigration has slowly increased since the last great wave of the 1920s, as a percentage of population in the 2000s it was lower than during any decade between 1820 and 1930.

Even the sheer volume of immigrants from 1900-1909 was a full 80% what it was between 2000 and 2009.  The number of immigrants in the 1900s and 1910s were each greater than the number of immigrants during the alleged dark years under President Reagan’s amnesty program.

And even mass Mexican immigration is nothing new.  During the 1920s, when the U.S. was a third the size it is now, the number of Mexicans entering the country was about half the number that entered during the 1980s.  Since the late 2000s, when Mexican immigration dried up due to the economic downturn, there have been more immigrants per year from Asia than Mexico for the first time in over a century.

How did the U.S. previously accommodate so many immigrants without collapsing?

Easy.  Our welfare system used to give assistance only to the truly needy—with much more being given via charity; and most citizens, including and especially immigrants, took self-sufficiency as a point of pride.  Part of immigrants’ self-sufficiency included learning and using English and assimilating to American cultural practices, right down to changing the spelling of their last names.

In the early 20^th century, we didn’t have a federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, disability payments, or Obamacare.  The term “welfare state” wasn’t used with regularity until the Great Depression, and even then it referred mostly to job creation programs and not cash payments.  Do you think the above roster of federal behemoths might have a bit more to do with our country’s financial state than some lettuce pickers working off the books in San Jose?

Just like today, reactionary citizens a century ago wailed that immigrants were going to depress our economy, steal our jobs, and sap our international strength.  How’d that prediction work out?

If Marco Rubio’s immigration bill passes, then instead of carping endlessly about “illegals,” Congressional Republicans should make themselves useful and pass laws sharply restricting welfare benefits to legal citizens, not just those who are lawfully present.

The GOP should compromise on Rubio’s bill and leverage the immigration debate to shrink the welfare state—the underlying issue that truly matters and is fundamentally consistent with the Republican party philosophy.  Which political platform sounds like a winner: an ever-expanding welfare state in which we nonetheless put those cocky chulos in their place; or a tiny-government, pro-growth, capitalist magnet for the world’s hardest-working and entrepreneurial residents?

Let’s stop getting exercised over day laborers starting construction businesses and use immigration policy as a big fat opportunity to dismantle the welfare state.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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• PolitiFact: Immigrants would get free cell phones under new bill, bloggers falsely claim (miamiherald.com)
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• From the Bookshelves: Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal by Cybelle Fox (lawprofessors.typepad.com)
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Just in time for Earth Day 2013, we can safely conclude that fewer sea mammals were killed by the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in 2010 than Bostonians were murdered by Islamic terrorists just last week.  But don’t expect that to slow down the environmentalist jihad.

Several months after the BP oil rig explosion in April 2010, honest reporters were already discovering that environmentalists had wildly overstated the likely impact of the accident.

In July 2010, TIME magazine reported that the oil spill had killed fewer than 1% the number of birds as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989.  By November 2010, the fish and seafood population had rebounded explosively.  This regeneration of aquatic life was due to the simple fact that fishing had been restricted for several months, which allowed the stock to refresh.  Environmentalists’ prediction that oil and dispersants would stunt the fish population was dead wrong.

So fish recovered, but were they safe to eat?  Earlier this year, Robert Dickey of the FDA’s Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory reported, “[T]he seafood is as safe to consume now as it was before the spill.  We’re back to background levels.  We were in the fall (of 2010) shortly after the spill dissipated.”  Dickey noted that levels of toxic chemicals in the seafood were only 0.1% to 1% of the level at which one should be concerned about their harmful effects on humans.

How about turtles and sea mammals?  TIME reported that researchers had located hundreds of dead turtles in the Gulf, but that “only 17 were visibly oiled; otherwise, they have found only one other dead reptile in the entire Gulf.”  (Meanwhile, Al Gore’s chauffeur kills an average of five turtles a week backing up his Priuses into the garage.)

TIME similarly reported that wildlife response teams had collected the “visibly oiled carcasses” of three sea mammals.  Three.

So birds, fish, turtles, and mammals weren’t devastated.  Surely the fragile marshes and wetlands were decimated?

Nope.  The oil spill reached only 2% of the marshlands that Louisiana was losing due to erosion each year.  Not 2% of all of Louisiana’s marshlands—2% of the fraction it was already losing each year due to other causes.  Two percent of annual losses isn’t a tragedy; it’s a rounding error.

Even the marshes tainted by oil have bounced back.  Author Michael Grunwald noted, “Mother Nature can be incredibly resilient…  [N]ew shoots of Spartina grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes and new leaves were growing on the first black mangroves I’ve ever seen that were actually black.”

Area scientists were unanimous in downplaying the damage from the spill.  Geochemist Jacqueline Michel reported, “The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared.”  Audubon Society vice president Paul Kemp compared the spill’s effects on the marshes to “a sunburn on a cancer patient.”  (To put it in terms a northeastern big-city mayor might understand, the effects were comparable to those of “a Big Gulp sipped by Michael Moore.”)

Marine scientist Ivor van Heerden noted, “There’s a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it”—which, coincidentally, describes the entire environmentalist movement.

It’s also possible that the Obama administration is exaggerating the amount of oil BP spilled in order to wring more settlement money out of the beleaguered oil company.  In March 2012, BP alleged that the U.S. was using legal privilege to shield tens of thousands of documents proving it was overestimating the size of the spill.

So why review all of this evidence now?  Because greens aren’t just living on a commune in Minnesota eating soy and wearing hemp—they’re trying to impose their worldview on the rest of us.  And they use overblown incidents like Deepwater Horizon to scare responsible citizens into accepting their doomsday scenarios.

It’s important to evaluate now and then the predicted vs. actual outcomes of supposed environmentalist catastrophes.  It’s easy to spread hype and fear immediately after an oil spill or nuclear meltdown, but we must take the long view and see whether reality matches the hype.

(Speaking of nuclear meltdowns, there still have been zero deaths from radiation leaked from the Fukushima power plant.  The number of deaths from the Chernobyl incident numbered in the dozens, though environmentalists keep lying that it was a million, and three decades later the region’s flora and fauna are even more abundant than before.)

It’s important to put incidents like Deepwater Horizon in perspective and not allow them to discourage us from obtaining the energy we need to fuel our advanced way of life.

It’s an unfortunate fact that power production sometimes results in a few reptiles and scavenger birds meeting an untimely end.  But better them than industrial civilization.

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Do illegal immigrants commit more crimes than legal immigrants, residents, or U.S. citizens?  From the stream of anecdotal evidence conservatives have been circulating as the immigration debate heats up again, you’d sure think so.

As Congress prepares to consider a reportedly 1,500-page bill cosponsored by Republican Senator Marco Rubio that would enforce current immigration laws and provide a pathway to citizenship for 11 million aliens, one of the arguments against such a de facto amnesty policy is that illegal border crossers are a risk to the nation’s safety due to their higher criminality.  But is this true?

Let’s clarify what we’re talking about: when examining the crime rates of illegal immigrants, I don’t count the acts of crossing the border illegally, bribing border control agents, or helping other immigrants cross.  Whatever you think of illegal immigration, all of those actions would be unnecessary or legal if the U.S. had an open immigration policy.  An illegal immigrant who never commits another crime in his life is not what I would consider a dangerous felon.

Let’s focus on assault, battery, murder, theft, robbery, rape, kidnapping, breaking and entering, vandalism, arson, drunk driving, fraud, illegal gun possession, drug violations.  Do illegal immigrants commit these more often than legal residents?

High-profile incidents in the wake of Arizona’s tough immigration bill, including the murder of ranchers and border patrol agents by Mexico’s drug cartels, suggest chaos and mayhem under a policy of open immigration.  The Obama administration’s irresponsible act of releasing hundreds of illegal aliens with criminal records in anticipation of the recent sequester spending cuts didn’t help matters.

But  many conservatives have been focusing on the additional crimes—i.e. crimes at the margin—that accompany immigrants’ entry to the U.S., without considering the prevalence of those crimes among the population.  Of course any group of people who enter the country are going to bring both good and bad.  The extra crime wouldn’t have occurred in this country—but neither would we have gotten all the additional talent, hard work, and cultural exchange.  The question is, do immigrants bring more of the bad, per capita, than we already have here?

Though controlled studies are far from readily available (but see this excellent analysis), the FBI reported that violent crime has decreased 17% in border city San Diego over the past decade, 10% in border city Phoenix, and 10% overall in border state Arizona.  In El Paso, which sits directly across the border from crime-ridden Juarez, Mexico, and whose residents are three-quarters Hispanic and one-quarter foreign-born, it is down a whopping 36%.

New York police statistics show that communities with high numbers of first-generation immigrants—many of them illegal—have seen dramatic drops in crime rates over the past two decades, even larger than those experienced by the city as a whole.  One possible explanation is that poor immigrants willing to move into run-down areas reduce the number of vacant buildings and storefronts and help revitalize the neighborhood.  According to social science researcher Robert Sampson, “You don’t migrate to the United States from countries around the world on a whim.  It takes planning.  And for the most part, it is driven by economic motivations.  People want a better life.  They’re seeking to get ahead.  And those are the very factors that tend to be associated with lower crime.”

Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes increased immigration and supports greater border enforcement, admits, “There’s no evidence that immigrants—or even illegal immigrants—are necessarily any more or less likely to be committing crimes than the population at large.  It’s just that they tend to be associated with certain types of crimes—drug trafficking, for example.”

The National Bureau for Economic Research found that immigrants (legal and illegal) had one-fifth the incarceration rate of non-immigrants between 1980 and 2000, a difference that grew over time.  The latter trend was due, not to increased deportation, but to self-selection and deterrence effects.  Namely, immigrants who chose to come to the U.S. were less criminally inclined than native residents, and were especially sensitive to criminal charges that might tear asunder the lives they had come here to build or send them back home.

CBS News did report that illegal immigrants are twice as prevalent in the Arizona prison system nowadays as in the general population.  But that doesn’t mean illegals are committing more crimes, just that they’re getting caught more often.  The Arizona Legislature recently empowered—and coerced—tens of thousands of police and border patrol agents to be more vigilant in checking the papers of “suspicious” individuals, so it’s no surprise that they’re catching more Latino criminals.  And poorer segments of the population who lack resources to protect themselves, who don’t understand the law as well, or who can’t afford adequate legal representation are more likely to be thrown in the brig.  This isn’t a treatise on “social justice”—it’s just an explanation of why there are so many Hispanics in Arizona jails over the last few years.

Some have assumed that, because the percentage of deported immigrants with criminal records has increased over the past few years, illegals are committing more crime.  But this trend is due in large part to Obama’s instruction to border patrol agents to prioritize deporting immigrants with criminal histories or who pose national security threats.  Large numbers of deportees with criminal records have committed only nonviolent offenses, such as drug crimes or driving under the influence.  In 2010, only 0.28% of deportees had been convicted of homicide.

There are many arguments for a more restrictive immigration policy, most of which I don’t happen to find persuasive.  But until better evidence is in, the notion that immigrants who cross the border without inspection to make a better life for themselves are a disproportionately dangerous and felonious bunch is a slanderous charge that conservatives should not toss around lightly.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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