It was a busy week for Invite the World / Invade the World / In Hock to the World news:
700 Million Worldwide Desire to Migrate Permanently
U.S. tops desired destination countries"… Gallup finds about 16% of the world's adults would like to move to another country permanently if they had the chance. This translates to roughly 700 million worldwide — more than the entire adult population of North and South America combined."
President Barack Hussein Obama rushed to warn that there must be no rush to stereotype Major Nidal Malik Hasan. The New York Times played along, running a five-part red herring discussion on Combat Stress and the Fort Hood Gunman. Presumably, Major Hasan, who had never seen combat, was suffering from PTSD: Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
But discussion of the role of immigration in boosting unemployment was simply nonexistent in the Main Stream Media.
When things go very wrong, as they have, the most likely causes are ones that nobody who is Anybody was expecting.
Their conceptual framework leaves them unable to cope with unthinkable reality.
In contrast, my alternative Invite / Invade / In Hock analysis of the Bush-Obama Era's dominant approach helps point out linkages behind events that baffle those brainwashed by the conventional wisdom.
For example, if you stop and think about it, you'll notice that Hasan, whose mother was born in Jerusalem, was following in the tradition of Palestinian terrorist Sirhan Sirhan, who shot Sen. Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968.
Few conceive of Sirhan as a Palestinian terrorist because nobody in American thought much about Palestine or terrorism before George Habash masterminded the skyjacking of four jetliners in 1970. Hence, most Americans mentally lump Sirhan in with the 1960s domestic assassins Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray.
Yet, Sirhan certainly saw himself as a Palestinian terrorist. Sirhan murdered Bobby Kennedy on the first anniversary of Israel's June 5, 1967 attack on its Arab neighbors because RFK promised to send 50 fighter jets to Israel.
That there's an inevitable conflict between "Invade" and "Invite" in terms of domestic terrorism is something that the Kennedy brothers never figured out. Teddy Kennedy sponsored the 1965 immigration expansion act three years before his brother was assassinated by an immigrant. (Sirhan arrived in the United States in 1957 and had gone through the assimilation process, enrolling in the same junior high school and junior college that my father, now 92, attended a generation before. Fat lot of good assimilation did us.)
The Kennedys grew up in an era of restricted immigration, so it's understandable that they didn't grasp the inverse relationship between "Invite" and "Invade".
But the current neocons have less excuse.
The Invite / Invade tradeoff is simple. If you want to run an ambitious foreign policy, such as Britain did in the 19th Century, then it's prudent to keep out the foreigners you have aggrieved, as Victorian England sensibly did. In contrast, if you let in millions of immigrants, as 19th Century America did, it's wisest to run an isolationist foreign policy, so that immigrants aren't angry at you. America mostly did this in the century after George Washington advised it.
Or, most prudently of all, our country could refrain from pestering foreigners while not letting them pester us.
Of course, the one alternative out of four that's self-evidently self-defeating—Invite / Invade— is considered the only respectable one. In the eyes of, say, the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, all the alternatives to Invite / Invade are simply unthinkable. Thus, our country's grand strategies are, literally, thoughtless. We must bomb foreigners overseas until they start liking us more. Meanwhile, at home we aren't allowed to notice that some of their co-religionists in the United States are liking us less. Discerning is discriminating. Discriminating is bad. Our thoughts must be utterly indiscriminate!
Similarly, the long-run implications of Invite the World are staggering, but nobody thinks about them.
Note that Gallup's 700 million figure is just for adults. It doesn't count their current or future children. Sixteen percent of the world's total population is 1,073,000,000 people.
So, over a billion people would be immigrants if they could. That shouldn't be surprising—I've been pointing out since 2005 that five billion people live in countries where the mean per capita income is lower than Mexico's.
Gallup reports:
"The United States is the top desired destination country for the 700 million adults who would like to relocate permanently to another country. Nearly one-quarter (24%) of these respondents, which translates to more than 165 million adults worldwide, name the United States as their desired future residence."
Gallup says that would boost America's population by 60 percent—but that's leaving out children. Therefore, for about a quarter of a billion adults and children, moving to America is their first choice (and the second choice of many millions more).
But nobody ever thinks about that. Gallup's report was covered in the U.S. only by Fox News and a few trade press magazines, mostly aimed at the immigration industry, such as GlobalVisas.
What would we do with 250,000,000 newcomers, most of them with little education?
Well, we now have over 20 percent of the Mexican nation's population here, so we'd no doubt do in the future what we did in this decade: put them to work doing the jobs Americans just won't do: building the houses nobody can afford.
And how did that work out for us last time?
Shhhh—we're not supposed to talk about it!
Following the mortgage meltdown in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, the unemployment rate is 10.2 percent among job-seekers.Yet, a broader measure that includes those who are too discouraged to look for work and those underemployed in part-time jobs, the actual rate is 17.5 percent.
The government doesn't track jobs by citizenship, so VDARE.COM's Ed Rubenstein has long used ethnicity as a proxy. He blogs:
"From January 2001 through October 2009:
Hispanic employment increased by 3,437,000 positions (+ 21.3 percent)
Non-Hispanic employment fell by 2,938,000 positions (-2.4 percent)"
What can we do about unemployment?
Tom Friedman recently wrote a column in the New York Times arguing that the only lawyers (!) who aren't in danger of losing their jobs are those "who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work".
Reasons Friedman: "So our schools have a doubly hard task now—not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity. Bottom line: We're not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools…" [The New Untouchables, October 20, 2009]
Super.
On the other hand, feasible reforms that would actually lower the unemployment rate over, say, the next few years mostly involve immigration.
Teddy's random drawing for foreigners is why Egyptian immigrant Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who killed two Jews at the Israeli El Al Airline counter of Los Angeles International Airport on July 4, 2002, was in the U.S.
These policies would actually do American citizens some good.
And they could do Republican candidates some good—by giving them something to run on.
That's probably why these ideas are unmentionable in the MSM.
But why are they also unmentionable among Republicans?
[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA'S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA'S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here.]
