Displacing Americans

In making their case for a free-for-all immigration policy, open-border libertarians usually confine themselves to insipid sentimental arguments. This manipulative fare is easy to dismiss. After all, saying that immigrants are only seeking “a better way of life” in our country or that immigration is an American tradition hardly constitutes a valid justification for laws that are manifestly antithetical to the welfare and rights of Americans.

Considering the immigration policy currently in place, libertarians who preach open borders are aligned with the State. Listen to any politician, bar Representative Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., and all you’ll hear is that immigration is a gift that just keeps giving. The exact same slop is repeated almost verbatim by these statist libertarians.

Immigration lawyer Gregory Siskind is a good example. Siskind, who claims his work is inspired by his libertarian beliefs and Jewish faith, to boot, traffics in H-1B visas. These are temporary work permits, which are also the route to acquiring legal permanent resident status. The H-1B visa program is an example of crony capitalism in action – it’s tantamount to a subsidy for hi-tech corporations.

Libertarians who oppose the happy-clappy, open-border worship should have no difficulty seeing these visas as the grants of government privilege that they are, or seeing immigration policy for the exercise in the dispossession of Americans that it has become.

Siskind claims his work benefits the economy. As his immigration muse, Siskind touts the man who monkeys with our money, Alan Greenspan. Predictably, Greenspan is as hip about immigration as he is about inflating the money supply. That Siskind credits the Fed chairman with “ensuring that America thrives” ought to cast doubts on any judgment he makes about the value to the economy of his H-1B work, much less on his libertarian bona fides.

Far worse is Jim Rogers’ paean to open borders published by the Future of Freedom Foundation, an organization that generally doesn’t countenance falsehoods. The author and private investor’s inspiration for wanting to drop immigration restrictions comes from the highly centralized, totalitarian European Union, which has moved to abolish passports. Under the false pretense of creating a “common market,” the unelected E.U. bureaucrats have achieved a massive consolidation of power, in the process moving to obliterate many of the ancient European communities. How gracious then of Brussels to allow Continentals, who are losing liberties by the day, to move about the Continent freely. I guess it makes the cage seem bigger.

In support for his open-border position, Rogers claims falsely that the United States has huge shortages of computer specialists, software and other engineers. Our Mr. Siskind, for his part, has it that advocates of limited immigration or a moratorium on work visas wish to shut “down the country’s borders to protect the economic well-being of the few.”

Putting paid to these patent falsehoods is the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the U.S. Department of Labor. Unemployment among electrical and electronics engineers reached 7.0 percent in the first quarter of 2003! 172,000 high-tech professionals are out of work! Computer software engineers lead the way with 62,000!

Quite a sizable number of spoilsports, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Siskind? Yet the current cap of H-1B visas stands at 195,000, and immigration lawyers like Siskind are lobbying Congress to keep the new arrivals coming.

In 1992, the allowable number of H-1B visas was 65,000, but due to pressure, Congress increased the number of incomers first to 115,000 and then to its current level. “Since the H-1B cap was raised to 195,000 visas a year in 2000,” reports the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-United States of America, unemployment among American engineers and computer scientists has jumped from 65,000 to 114,000 in 2001 to 166,000 in 2002 to its current unequalled high.

During the same time span, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, cheered on by the likes of Siskind and the congressional cockroaches, had approved “529,000 new and renewal H-1B visa petitions from U.S. employers.”

Talk about treason. American governments are unique in their efforts to displace their own population, while at the same time training it in the art of silent suffering. The locals will go quietly into the night, mouthing mad mantras about immigration’s blessings.

The sheer volume of unemployed highly skilled people in the fields of science and engineering must give pause. This “may not be a short-term cyclical phenomenon,” ventures Dr. Ronil Hira of the IEEE-USA, but a result of much more fundamental changes in the U.S. economy. Even theoreticians who refuse to adapt abstracted models to reality must concede that it’s not likely that America’s best and brightest young people will be pursuing careers in science and engineering anytime soon, not if they want to eat.

Professionals like electrical engineers and computer scientists have an added problem. Most of these fellows make their living via the economic means. The political class and its sycophants – immigration lawyers and activists – deploy the political means to advance their aims. As libertarian economist Murray N. Rothbard reminded, these “are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth” – the economic means is honest and productive, the political means is dishonest and predatory.

These visas are an extension of the political means. The small yet sensible group of libertarians who care about the communities in which they live should vigorously oppose them.