As part of the intensifying barrage to soften up Congress and the electorate for a new amnesty offensive this fall (which has even included suggesting that favoring more immigration is a religious duty), the Wall Street Journal has at last gotten round to discussing the new business-funded lobbying effort, vividly reported in the Los Angeles Times over three weeks ago. ["White House to Push For Revised Immigration Plan - The Wall Street Journal, August 16 2005 - John D. McKinnon]

Being a partisan log-roller in this debate, the WSJ piece is much more discreet and less informative than the LA Times version. No mention is made of the massive fees the lobbyists are siphoning out of their corporate allies ($50,000 - $250,000, according to the LA Times, which emphasizes the unusually lavish funding involved). Tom Tancredo was allowed a forceful quotation in the LA Times piece - not in The WSJ. Indeed there is no clear statement of why Congressional opponents object, except the misrepresentation that

some Republican Party conservatives …have made a top priority of clamping down on illegal immigration in the name of national security.

with no reference to their concerns about wage depression and the deleterious social impact of mass unskilled immigration. (Voters are said, sniffily in half a sentence, to be

unsettled …by the increased competition for jobs and higher demands for taxpayer-funded public services that result from illegal immigration)

Business representatives are given ample space to assert, quite wrongly, that the economy needs more workers (as opposed to the true reason: their wish to benefit from the regressive redistribution of wealth immigration causes):

the U.S. will face a total shortage of 3.5 million workers by 2010, said Bruce Josten, an official with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been lobbying for change in immigration policy for years.
Complain to Josten.

But the WSJ is going to have to keep working those guns. In an encouraging OpinionJournal essay the day before,[ Run for the Border. Democrats try to outflank the GOP on immigration August 15 2005], veteran political correspondent John Fund quietly but candidly considers the political cost of the White House intentions:

President Bush is vulnerable on immigration…. “All my constituent town meetings want to talk about is immigration and why Washington is still spending so much money,” Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas told me. Indeed, 17 of the 37 GOP House and Senate members who responded to a National Journal survey last month identified immigration as the issue “most on the minds” of their constituents. One Republican identified immigration as the issue on which “the mismatch between the federal government’s inaction and the realities at home is the greatest.”

Fund masks his piece by warning (probably correctly) that Democrats who purport to be willing to restrict immigration are likely to renege, quoting Dick Morris on Hilary Clinton:

She thinks she can outbid the Republicans for Hispanic votes in 2008 while bringing Reagan Democrats home with vague rhetoric about getting tough and employer sanctions she has no intention of implementing.”

and reporting that the much more plausible Governor Bill Richardson

vetoed a “No Fear” bill, which would have prohibited state and local law enforcement agencies from cooperating with federal authorities to detect or apprehend people based solely on immigration status. But then he quietly issued an executive order that had much the same effect. Earlier this year, he also signed legislation giving some illegal aliens the right to in-state tuition rates at public universities.

But the substance of Fund’s article is some remarkably blunt advice to President Bush:

President Bush’s guest-worker program is politically stalled because of fears it will turn into another ill-fated amnesty program like the 1986 reform…Mr. Bush can win support for a guest-worker program only after he proves his bona fides in areas of legitimate concern on immigration…Mr. Bush has to recognize that post-9/11 border security is now inextricably tied up in the public’s mind with homeland security. Mr. Bush also needs to crack down on scofflaw officials who are thumbing their noses at federal immigration policy, including …Mayor Michael Bloomberg….Mr. Bush …must also pull off the delicate balancing act of convincing Americans that the federal government hasn’t lost complete control of the border.

Careful John! The neocons take no prisoners on this issue! Pickings are slim for paleocon journalists - essentially zero in the MSM.

(PS: The correspondence thread on John Fund’s article is even more heartening.)

— Nothing drives me crazier than people who claim to be free market fans ignoring Econ 101’s main lesson — the Law of Supply and Demand – and saying “Immigrants just do jobs Americans won’t do.” It drives Sowell crazy too (via Mickey Kaus at Slate):

Immigration has joined the long list of subjects on which it is taboo to talk sense in plain English. At the heart of much confusion about immigration is the notion that we “need” immigrants — legal or illegal — to do work that Americans won’t do.

What we “need” depends on what it costs and what we are willing to pay. If I were a billionaire, I might “need” my own private jet. But I can remember a time when my family didn’t even “need” electricity.

Leaving prices out of the picture is probably the source of more fallacies in economics than any other single misconception. At current wages for low-level jobs and current levels of welfare, there are indeed many jobs that Americans will not take.

The fact that immigrants — and especially illegal immigrants — will take those jobs is the very reason the wage levels will not rise enough to attract Americans.

This is not rocket science. It is elementary supply and demand. Yet we continue to hear about the “need” for immigrants to do jobs that Americans will not do — even though these are all jobs that Americans have done for generations before mass illegal immigration became a way of life.

There is more to this issue than economics. The same mindless substitution of rhetoric for thinking that prevails on economic issues also prevails on other aspects of immigration.

Bombings in London, Madrid and the 9/11 terrorist attacks here are all part of the high price being paid today for decades of importing human time bombs from the Arab world. That in turn has been the fruit of an unwillingness to filter out people according to the countries they come from. [More]

Jay Leno has been doing a lot of jokes about the immigration issue, indicating some kind of cultural trend.

Of course, Leno actually lives in California, one of the hardest hit states.

You’ve probably heard this one:

You read about all these terrorists - most of them came here legally, but they hung around on these expired visas, some for as long as 10-15 years.

Now, compare that to Blockbuster: you’re two days late with a video and those people are all over you. Let’s put Blockbuster in charge of immigration.

Jay Leno on Homeland Security

On Friday he did this one:

President Bush has indicated that the President of Iran will receive a visa to come to the United States. I’m as shocked as you. You still need a visa to come to the U.S.? I thought they did away with that stuff years ago.
Newsmax One Liners, August 12, 2005

TWO JOKES (Quoted in a deeply stupid piece in the LA Times: (One More Embrace, Then Slam the Door , May 1, 2005)

Hundreds of private citizens will begin patrolling the Mexican border starting this weekend to try and stem the tide of illegal immigration into this country….Unfortunately, the pay is so low, the only people signing up are illegal immigrants who are already here.

–Jay Leno, March 31

I was reading some interesting facts about the new pope, Pope Benedict XVI. According to the New York Post, the new pope has never had a driver’s license. Hey, he should come to California. He’s an immigrant. We’ll give him one for free.

– Jay Leno, April 22

For your edification, I’ve collected some more. Enjoy!

President Vicente Fox visited Arizona and demanded that we make immigration easier. As Jay Leno says, “How? By installing moving walkways?”

Marian Jennings |Bush’s illegal-alien plan insults our intelligence

“A Washington think tank has concluded that the job of finding and removing all the illegal immigrants
from the United States would cost $200 billion and take over five years. Unless we hired illegal immigrants. That
would cost us a tenth of the price.”

sandiego.indymedia.org | Jay Leno makes a joke about “illegal” immigration

Hurricane Emily is hitting Mexico pretty hard. Luckily everyone down there is already up here.

NewsMax.com: Liners Archive, July 19, 2005