Immigration

Amnesty and our Future.

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I came across an excellent long post at Bookworm this morning. I have been very aware of the growing presence of illegal aliens in California for the past 40 years. Not far from my home you can see some of it as Hispanic men gather at street corners looking for day labor.

j and l

Two such corners are at Jeronimo and Los Alisos in Mission Viejo. Another is a half mile away at a U-Haul yard where people rent trucks and trailers. Every morning you will see 50 to 60 men standing on the corner and running over to any car that seems to be slowing down or stopping.

Anyway, here are a few reflections on what is happening.

The communists’ big moment came in 1995 when no one was looking. That was the year that the Democratic Socialists of America, a communist group, put one of their own — John Sweeney — in as head of the AFL-CIO. Overnight, the AFL-CIO, an organization that was once ferociously anti-communist and that opposed amnesty because it would hurt working Americans, turned into a pro-communist, pro-amnesty group.

More than that, through the AFL-CIO, communists suddenly owned Congress. After all, unions (headed by the SEIU, which outspends the next two donor organizations which are also Leftist) are the largest contributors to Democrat politicians.

Ok, Ok I know that communists are an old story. Still, what we see in this country is Socialism gaining adherents among the young and poorly educated and among the rich who consider themselves immune to its ill effects.

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Immigration Policy

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The airspace over coastal South Florida is buzzing with police/ICE/USCG helicopters. A buddy of mine pointed out a Coast Guard cutter in the Atlantic off Miami and a highway-patrol Cessna flying along the beach. Apparently the federal govt fears a new wave of Cuban migrants due to rumors that we will soon cancel our “wet foot/dry foot” immigration policy, making it more difficult for Cubans to enter the country legally. Thus the feds are mobilizing all resources to keep Cubans out. Here, at last, is a restrictive immigration policy that the Obama administration can support.

My advice to prospective Cuban migrants is to try to get to Mexico first. And learn Arabic if possible.

My Saudi Essay Contest Entry

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(I am informed that the DoD is soliciting memorial essays for the recently-departed monarch of the House of Saud. My entry, somewhat inspired by a Facebook post by Robert Zubrin, is below. Other ChicagoBoyz contributors are encouraged to compose entries as well.)

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A Random Upper-Middle-Class White Guy Writes About MLK

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So, OK, my employer made me burn off some vacation days before the end of the fiscal year, in the form of a cap on the number of PTO hours that can be carried over from FY14 into FY15, which boundary has shifted by 3 months due to our recent change of ownership. Much lower down, my management intimated that due to certain software-release and testing milestone dates, no significant block of time off in February or March would be approved. But thanks to an unrelated M&A a few years back (a spectacularly problematic one, destined to be a business-school case study for decades to come), we now get the MLK holiday off. I decided to take the whole week and head southwest in search of sunlight. After a swing through New Mexico, I am spending a few days at Crow’s Nest, a 10-minute hike from the 6+ acres I own near Bloys Camp. It’s my first visit in four years.

Mitre Peak (1887m/6190') as seen from my lot
Mitre Peak (1887m/6190′) as seen from my lot

This is what I would write if somebody made me enter one of those hoary MLK essay contests that middle- or high-school students get sucked into. The entries that I’ve read over the years have seemed pretty unimaginative, but it’s hardly realistic to expect much historical perspective from a teenager. The tone I’m aiming for here is, of course, originality combined with some mildly discomfiting assertions, while avoiding stereotypical politics. The structure is a simple three-parter: past, present, and (near) future.

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A Few Cautious Predictions About Our “Crisis Era”

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The world weighs on my shoulders, but what am I to do?
You sometimes drive me crazy, but I worry about you
I know it makes no difference to what you’re going through
But I see the tip of the iceberg, and I worry about you …

Neil Peart, Distant Early Warning

 

But wouldn’t it be luxury to fight in a war some time where, when you were surrounded, you could surrender?

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

 

Reading through background material on the UN’s recent request for $16.4 billion in humanitarian aid in 2015, I find that the number of displaced people was already at its highest since World War II at the end of 2013, and has risen by several million since then. Nearly all are somewhere inside or on the perimeter of the Muslim world, with Ukraine the only sizeable exception. My sense, in which I am hardly alone, is that we are reliving the mid-1930s, with aggression unchecked and chaos unmitigated by morally exhausted Western institutions. That “low dishonest decade” ended in global war with a per capita death toll around 1 in 40. A proportional event a few years from now would kill 200 million people.

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