Maggie's Farm

Immigration

Polipundit, a recent legal immigrant, wonders why Congress is considering guest-worker programs, when no-one is asking for them:

Even leaving aside issues of homeland security and respect for the rule of law, mass immigration on the scale the president is proposing is terrible policy. When white-collar workers get hurt because of a few hundred thousand temporary visas issued to high-tech workers, it gets a lot of attention. But what about low-income American workers who will face severely depressed wages because of the millions of low-skilled immigrants who will now be able to compete for their jobs? You can’t “outsource” a job at McDonalds to India or China. But now you’ll be able to hire an immigrant to do it at a low wage.

And isn’t there such a thing as an American culture that deserves to be protected by keeping immigration at reasonable-enough levels that immigrants will want to, be forced to, assimilate into the melting pot? Large “guest worker” programs have been miserable failures everywhere they’ve been tried, creating resentful racial underclasses and culturally-alienated urban ghettoes.

Read the whole post, here.