In the L.A. Times:
Companies operating 'maternity hotels' cater to pregnant women from Chinese-speaking nations who want an American-citizen newborn.
A couple of years ago, I had a Chinese birth tourism fraud website translated into English so I could analyze the cash value of the eight benefits the fraudsters proposed for having Chinese babies in the U.S. Obviously, being an American citizen has scarcity value, which Chinese con-moms want to deplete for the benefit of their offspring. The cash value can add up to a huge number.
The fundamental problem is that we are never supposed to notice that America exists, as the Founders explained in the Preamble to the Constitution, "for ourselves and our posterity."
I concluded:
Yet the reigning dogmas promulgated today is the more, the merrier! We Americans should be proud and happy that tens of millions of foreigners are conniving their way in. The more immigrants that jostle us, the more awesome we know we must be.
U-S-A! U-S-A!
Tellingly, this kind of silly thinking is never even brought up when sit comes to protecting the scarcity value ofmunicipal residence. The liberals of Beverly Hills, for example, carefully police the scarcity value of living in Beverly Hills. Why would they want more people piling into Beverly Hills? They like it the way it is. And why would they want to let the children of non-Beverly Hillsians attend Beverly Hills public schools?
Actually, Beverly Hills does let some non-residents send their children to Beverly Hills High. But are these lucky exceptions "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"?
Don't be ridiculous. The outsiders who are allowed into Beverly Hills schools are the grandchildren of long-time Beverly Hills residents—the children of Beverly Hills public school alumni who now can't afford to live in Beverly Hills.
The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District has adopted a similar system of "legacy admissions."
You might also think that the people who run the entertainment industry don't seem to think the messages of their movies apply to them? [Legacy enrollments offered in two top L.A.-area schools districts, by Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times, May 16, 2009]
Seriously, the voters of Beverly Hills understand the part about "for ourselves and our posterity" just as well as the Founding Fathers did and the Chinese do.
And good for them. They built excellent schools in Beverly Hills. So why shouldn't they take measures to help their descendants' benefit from their scarcity value?
But (ahem!) why shouldn't Americans be allowed to think of America the way that Beverly Hillsians think of Beverly Hills?
