Julia Hahn of Breitbart has been writing some great articles lately, see here and here. Her August 5th contribution is about green cards. In other words, she's talking about legal immigration, which is for many, a taboo subject to call into question.

Green cards, by the way, are no longer green, except for the strip on the back reading "Permanent Resident Card", with some green lettering above that ("United States of America" and "Department of Homeland Security") and below it "The person identified by this card is authorized to work and reside in the U.S.". Plus there is some green lettering and an arrow at the bottom of that side. But, by custom, it is still called a green card.

Just about every Republican gives lip service to border security, as long as we don't get too specific about it. (Note what happened when Trump got specific about it).

Many who oppose illegal immigration defend legal immigration, saying something like "Illegal immigration is bad, legal immigration is good."

The fact is, though, if we are to save the historical American nation, legal immigration must be shut down, and the way to do that is shut down the issuance of green cards.

Here are some excerpts from the Julia Hahn article

It's Official: Green Cards Now Part of 2016 Debate Breitbart, August 5th, 2015

In one of the stranger quirks in the long arc of Western civilization, a green-tinted sheet of laminated paper— no larger than a drivers license— has done more to change the course of American history than many of the most intense debates and political upheavals that have occurred since 1776. This document, rarely discussed by the media, is the source of some of the most dramatic social, cultural, political, linguistic, educational and economic transformations that have occurred in our history.

The document is known as a green card. It is handed out to foreign nationals who apply for permanent admission into the United States. A green card grants foreign nationals lifelong legal residence within the United States as well as: authorization to occupy any U.S. job, freedom to collect welfare, and a guaranteed track to U.S. citizenship and voting.

For all of the extravagant, yet half-hearted and failed efforts to secure the border, a simple one-sentence change to federal law— decreeing a pause on all green cards— would have had an infinitely more substantial impact on immigration to the United States. That is because the vast bulk of all immigration to the United States occurs through the green card and has absolutely nothing to do with our nation’s border.

Even if all of the politicians’ supposed efforts to secure the border had proven successful— and the border were completely sealed— long-term immigration levels would be little affected.

Even if not a single illegal immigrant were able to cross the border in the next ten years, the United States would still add 10 million new permanent immigrants and smash all immigration records— exclusively through the process of allowing foreigners to apply for green cards.

It now appears increasingly likely these transformative sheets of green paper will be a major issue in the 2016 presidential race.

I sure hope that's right, it needs to become a major issue in the race.

In recent months, a series of facts and circumstances have brought the green card into national focus: reports documenting the sustained compression of the middle class during the forty-year green card wave; the discovery that all net job creation among working-age people went to foreign workers from 2000-2014; evidence documenting the overcrowding of schools where a growing number of students qualify for free meals and require language instruction; the breakdown of social cohesion; and the blue-ward shift in the electoral landscape of formerly red states. All of these facts combined to direct the public’s attention to the most impactful, yet so rarely discussed, little slip of tinted paper.

And here's how it got into the presidential race. in the New Hampshire GOP candidate forum on August 3rd, moderator Jack Heath asked

So much is made of illegal immigration. Until we get a handle on that, should we reduce the number of green cards granted legally each year to folks who want to get into this country through the legal process? Should we cut down that number? What should that number be each year?

That question, by the way, was directed to Rick Perry, who evaded it by changing the subject,see here. When asked the second time, he evaded some more and finally said that if we find out who's in the country illegally, "then we can make a smart decision about whether we do or we don’t need to have more visas being handed out.”

Julia Hahn continues

.... conservative thought leaders have sounded off in recent days urging a halt to all green cards until the record 42 million immigrants residing in the United States have been assimilated and the battalions of unemployed Americans— including a shocking share of the black population— have been absorbed into the workforce by corporate CEOs who would prefer to import foreign substitutes.

Talk show host Mark Levin has said this:

 

Legal immigration in this country… over one million a year— over ten years, that’s ten million— it’s an enormous number and then you have chain migration behind it. The country can’t assimilate and Americanize this many people—it just can’t… Why can’t you reduce the number of legal immigrants coming into this country by 25 percent? I would even argue by fifty percent. As a matter of fact, I would go even further, we need a respite of several years.

Talks show host Rush LImbaugh said

The United States gives legal residency status, green cards, to over a million legal immigrants, each and every year. Do you know that that is more than the rest of the world does combined? That’s a revealing statistic. Over a million — 1.05 million green cards a year… [Do] you realize, from, I forget the exact years, but through 1924 through 1965, there was no immigration? Not legal, anyway. Zilch. And you know why? Because we stopped everything in order to assimilate the masses of immigrants from Europe… Decades and decades of no immigration. And look at the arguments we are having now. I mean, the numbers were nothing like what we have today.

Julia Hahn isn't afraid to take on the cultural issue.

Indeed, each year the United States issues more than one million green cards to many of the poorest and least-developed nations in the world. Unlike the prior wave, these are from non-western countries. Many Americans would be surprised to learn that most of the low-wage workers competing with them for jobs are invited into the country not in defiance of U.S. law, but as a consequence of U.S law— the one lobbied for Ted Kennedy in 1965. In addition to these green cards are nearly one million handpicked foreign workers imported on work visas, dependents of foreign workers imported on work visas, and refugees.

She's not afraid to specifically discuss Mexican immigration.

For example, in the past decade, we have issued more than 1.5 million green cards to Mexican foreign nationals. Overall, about half of all Mexican immigrants have green cards or are naturalized after getting green cards. That means that for every one Mexican who crosses the border illegally (or overstays a temporary visa), another Mexican is mailed a green card and is allowed to reside permanently with all the benefits of legal residency. To put it another way, the presence of green cards has roughly doubled all Mexican immigration into the United States.

And she brings in the political angle.

Last year, of the one million new immigrants selected for permanent residence in the United States on a green card, 800,000 of them were from either Asia or Latin America; 100,000 of them were from Africa. Less than 10% were from Western countries with similar political systems. Hispanics and Asians vote 2-to-1 for Democrats and big government policy, creating ironically similar economic conditions to the ones they left behind. For this reason, large amounts of brand new non-western immigration make life more difficult— not better— for the immigrants themselves, by allowing them to replicate failed political conditions and denying opportunities for positive assimilation.

In recent years, about one out of every seven new legal immigrants is from Mexico, and about 9 out of every 10 new immigrants brought into the country on green cards is from Latin America, Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. The vast majority of future immigration from these non-Western regions will all be through the legal dispensation of green cards, including almost all Muslim immigration.

She discusses what Scott Walker said

Thus far, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is the only top-polling Republican presidential contender to articulate an openness to potentially slowing the green card express. If the express is not slowed, in less than ten years, all known immigration records in terms of immigrant to population ratio will be exceeded forever.

In contrast, Candidate Marco Rubio

...has introduced legislation—known as the I-Squared bill— which would remove the green card cap placed on foreign youths sought by college administrators, a major new pipeline for Islamic immigration. Rubio was also the co-architect of the Gang of Eight plan to make 30 million green cards available in the span of one decade.

How has mass immigration affected the minorities already in the country?

The green card tsunami has been a disaster for communities of color.

As Harvard Professor George Borjas has analyzed: “A 10% immigration-induced increase in the supply of workers in a particular skill group reduced the black wage of that group by 2.5%, lowered the employment rate by 5.9 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate by 1.3 percentage points.” When Borjas studied the period of record immigration from 1960-2000 he found, “This immigrant influx lowered the wages of native-born blacks by 4.5 percent, and of native-born Hispanics by 5 percent.”

U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow has similarly discovered that, “Competition from immigration accounts for approximately 40 percent of the 18 percentage point decline in black employment in recent years. That’s nearly a million jobs lost by blacks to immigrants.”

And crime?

As for the impact on crime, the Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald demonstrated that: “Between the foreign-born generation and their American children, the incarceration rate of Mexican-Americans jumps more than eightfold, resulting in an incarceration rate that is 3.45 times higher than that of whites.”

Of course, the Democrats benefit, by expanding the welfare state and gaining new voters.

Yet despite the economic and cultural impact of mass immigration, Democrats have benefited electorally from this green card tsunami in two ways: first, they have been able to build campaign strategies centered upon preserving social welfare programs disproportionately used by communities of color trapped impoverished by an endless stream of low-wage competitors. For the first time ever, the majority of public school students are minorities, and a majority of students now qualify for programs like subsidized school lunches. According to a 2010 report from the U.S. Department of Education, in 2009 Hispanic 4th-grade students were eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches at rates approaching 80 percent.

The second electoral benefit is that it has enabled Democrats to engage in electoral identity politics— stitching together communities along color lines to establish permanent majority voting blocs.

On the other hand, polling shows that minorities think jobs should go to people already here. That gives us something to work with.

Polls show that Hispanics, by nearly a 7 to 1 ratio, want employers to hire workers already in the country rather than importing foreign workers to fill jobs. Black voters support this measure by a ratio of almost 30 to 1. Yet, thus far, Republicans have failed to capitalize on this opportunity to capture both voters of color, as well as white working class voters in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, by urging an immigration pause after the four-decade tsunami.

 

Julia Hahn presents four questions the GOP may need to answer. I suggest you ask your own senators and representatives these same questions.

–Should the United States continue to issue green cards at a time when we have record high immigration and an over-saturated labor market?

–Should immigration be reduced until it returns to historic norms?

–Should green cards only be given to a small number of immigrants who will be able to swear-off all welfare, speak fluent English, and assimilate into American society?

–Should green cards be issued at all to terror regions that have sent numerous Islamic radicals to our shores in the past?

 

Paul Ryan, who was Romney's V-P candidate last time around, was asked by David Webb, a talk show host, if Ryan thought “immigrants from the third world are more likely or less likely to support conservative policies,” Here was Ryan's clueless answer

Some of the best Americans are the newest Americans. People who left former Communist countries, people who left scandalous nations that are crony capitalism that deny them their rights. So people who come from those kinds of systems and those kinds of governments can make the best patriots because they finally see and taste what freedom is like, and they want to fight for it. So that kind of a person can make the best American. And the way I look at it, from our Party’s perspective, is we have to do a better job of going into these communities and exposing people to a different mindset– to these principles that they may not even have ever heard or seen before. This is a challenge that conservatives have to answer.

But as Julia Hahn points out

Ryan’s suggestion is peculiar because, if these new immigrants were to arrive in large numbers in his Congressional district in Wisconsin, Ryan’s platform of cutting Medicare and corporate taxes would suddenly put his seat in great jeopardy. If Paul Ryan believed that his message of cutting Medicare and corporate taxes was a winner with immigrant voters, presumably Ryan would have encouraged the Romney campaign to devote it’s time, money, and resources to winning California and its treasure trove 55 electoral votes.

In fact,

Polls highlighted in [Phyllis] Schlalfy’s 2013 report on mass legal immigration suggest that, as a matter of specific policies, new immigrants may not be overwhelmingly receptive to Paul Ryan’s “Right to Rise” platform:

- A 2011 Pew survey found that Hispanics have a more negative view of capitalism (55%) than do supporters of Occupy Wall Street (47%). In addition, 44% of Hispanics had a positive view of socialism (compared to 24% of whites and 31% of all Americans)

- A 2012 Pew Hispanic Center survey found that 75% of Hispanics and 55% of Asians prefer bigger governments that provide more services as opposed to smaller government that provide fewer services

- A 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study found that immigrants similarly supported Obama’s Stimulus package at a higher rate than native-born Americans (66% vs. 57%)

- A 2012 Fox News survey found that 62% of Hispanics support Obamacare. The 2012 National Asian American Survey found that three times more Asian Americans had a favorable opinion of Obamacare than had an unfavorable opinion.

Contrary to Ryan’s assertions, the data suggests that Republicans will struggle to court Hispanic voters unless they drop their platform of limited government policies. As political scientists R. Michael Alvarez and Lisa Garcia Bedolla argue: “The fact that this partisan identification is based on policy issue preferences suggests that, unless the parties fundamentally change their issue positions, these Latinos’ identifications with those parties should remain fairly stable.”

Ryan’s position, however, is supported by the entire Republican Congressional leadership team, all of whom are apparently unwilling to support any immigration limitations, or would like to see even more than we are scheduled to take in.

There's more in the article. Congrats again to Julia Hahn, keep up the good work!