Steve Sailer had a good post the other day on the economists at Marginal Revolution:

Exhibit A right now is Marginal Revolution, where NYT columnist and GMU economist Tyler Cowen’s desire to Hispanicize America in furtherance of Tyler’s own exotic aesthetic tastes has led him to claim that he’ll look for “useful” data on Mexican assimilation rates, then today ignore the enormous amount of useful data displayed in his own comments section, apparently on the grounds that it is not “useful” for furthering his policy desires.

Now, Tyler’s co-blogger Alex Tabarrok is pushing “an open letter on immigration reflecting the consensus opinion of economists on the major issues,” which is a compendium of sentimental clichés worthy of Oprah.

The bad news is that Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are are among the best of the bunch: smart guys, sensible and open-minded about most things, whom I read them every day. But, clearly, on immigration, as this impressive comment thread demonstrates, they’ve gone out of their way not to learn the facts and are allowing their emotions, tastes, and self-interests to drive their policy recommendations.

And Tyler and Alex are among the best of the bunch.

Steve Sailer: The Debacle of the Economists:

The funny thing is that I’ve quoted their stuff a couple of times, when they were talking about research that proved stereotypes: here, about research that shows that cab drivers are statistically correct when they claim that African-Americans don’t tip well, and here, about massive corruption in the Mexican Judiciary.

But what I was totally not impressed by was this: in a Volokh Conspiracy post on the “Immigration reduces crime” myth, he wrote this:

Yes comments are open, but purely anecdotal accounts of how you were once mugged by a Mexican, or how your neighborhood just isn’t “the same anymore” are discouraged.

That’s the attitude of someone who just doesn’t want to know.

Some in the blogosphere are apparently dismayed at the speed with which the Bush Amnesty/Immigration Acceleration Bill is being rushed through the Senate. They shouldn’t be. After all, the other side said at the outset that they were willing to pay top dollar to get it into law.

Not that there are not some compensations. For instance, this afternoon we learn President Bush does not care about the position of English in this country: Bush opposes English as national language: Gonzales – Reuters May 19 2006. (That should not be a surprise either. He has long made it clear he is indifferent to the United States being American.)

But experienced observers can see the signs that the Treason forces are experiencing difficulties, and expecting more. They have wheeled out their ultimate weapon: the accusation of Racism. Time magazine has obediently carried a long essay telling Americans that if they refuse to allow their homeland to become a Spanish speaking Third world slum, they are guilty of this Mortal Sin. [Is Racism Fueling the Immigration Debate? – by Massimo Calabres May 19, 2006]. And Senator Harry Reid of Nevada actually accused other Senators of it yesterday, another example of Reid’s statesmanship on this question. [Reid calls language proposal racist –by Charles Hurt The Washington Times May 19 2006.]

That eerie sound you can hear from the East is Adolf Hitler laughing. As Peter Brimelow said in Alien Nation

There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America. The U.S. political elite emerged from the war passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism or xenophobia. Eventually, it enacted the epochal Immigration Act…of 1965. And this, quite accidentally, triggered a renewed mass immigration, so huge and so systematically different from anything that had gone before as to transform – and ultimately, perhaps, even to destroy – the one unquestioned victor of World War II: the American nation, as it had evolved by the middle of the twentieth century.

Today, the U.S. government is literally dissolving the American people and electing a new one…

Being unable to discuss dangerous facts about public policy because of this moronic chant of racism is a prohibition which simply has to be rejected. But by using it to ram through a policy that many normally apolitical people resent and detest, the Treason Lobby brings closer the day when it will be rejected, and become ineffectual. That will be a true victory for America.

Actually, it was yesterday. But I wrote about it on Cinco De Mayo:

As an example, one of the other public holidays this month is May 18, the Dia de la Expropriacion Petrolera—the anniversary of the Nationalization of the Petroleum Industry  in 1938.

This was the biggest armed robbery of the twentieth century. It left all the oil in Mexico in the hands of corrupt Mexican governments, who couldn’t even get most of it out of the ground; a lot of it is just sitting there, because they won’t allow foreigners to touch it. And this is a public holiday?

Of course, a little farther south, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales are doing the same thing. [ Chavez's oil 'revolution' spreads to Bolivia By Roland Gribben, Telegraph, May 3, 2006)]

A Certain Slant Of Light has an Open Letter To the House Of Representatives. I like this part, but Read The Whole Thing:

Ironic, isn’t it, that the United States Senate, which only begrudgingly passed an amendment to S-2611 to build just 370 miles of security fencing along our 2,000+ miles’ porous southern border with Mexico, has shown no reluctance whatsoever in building an impenetrable wall between itself and the American people? And isn’t it altogether indicative of a president whose plummeting job performance poll numbers underscore a sharp decline in credibility, that he plans to send National Guardsmen to the border for just a year and only to do road building, maintenance, and innocuous desk-jockey paper-pushing, for fear of upsetting the government of Mexico, all the while playing a shell game with $1.9 million billion in funding for hard assets for the U.S. Border Patrol and Coast Guard?

Early in the week, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation dropped a bombshell into the immigration debate by estimating that the Senate bill under current consideration would allow 103 million new legal immigrants over the next 20 years, compared to 19 million under current law.

In response, the Senate voted to cap the guest worker program at 200,000 visas per year (plus spouses and children).

Rector has now redone the math to take the amendment into account. Heritage reports:

“How many people would the Senate’s immigration plan allow into the U.S.? Robert Rector adds up the provisions and finds the Senate plan would admit 66 million over the next 20 years, following a recent amendment.”

Thanks a million, Senate!

(Or, perhaps, thanks 66 million!)

Bill Clinton’s chief-of-staff, now a Washington insider, has just proposed a Marshall Plan of subsidies for Mexico:

“Thomas McLarty said the United States should partner with Mexico, and to a lesser degree with Canada, in a ‘Marshall Plan’ effort — named for the U.S. aid offensive for a ravaged Europe after World War Two — that could inspire Mexico’s work force to remain at home.
“‘In Mexico, we need to consider some type of Marshall Plan,’ McLarty told a Latin American energy conference in a San Diego suburb. McLarty said the three countries could provide $20 billion in development aid over a 10-year period.
“‘That sounds like a lot of money, and it is,’ said McLarty, who served as White House chief of staff from 1993 to 1994 and is now a consultant. ‘Consider that the United States spent $100 billion in Iraq in just this past year. Unless we help out our neighbors to the south, and especially Mexico, we will continue to have this issue of immigration which will hurt our relations.’”

A week before 9/11, I kicked the same idea around in VDARE.COM in my article “A Marshall Plan for Mexico.”

The obvious problems, of course, is that so much of the money would likely end up in the Swiss bank accounts of the Mexican ruling class that it would have no effect on the immigration rate.

So, I proposed a mechanism to make the subsidy dependent upon Mexico cutting the number of border crossers:

“Mexico needs help if it’s ever to be a good neighbor to the U.S. Our political establishment’s plan for helping Mexico is to take even more unemployed Mexicans off Fox’s hands. The moral problem with this plan, among others, is that most of the burden of helping Mexico this way falls on those Americans least able to afford it.

“A better solution would be to put more of the burden of helping Mexico on American taxpayers. The progressive income tax means that the costs would fall more on the right half of the American bell curve, who can afford it, rather than on the left half.

“We should demand that Fox use his military to police his northern border regions against Mexicans trying to illegally enter America as vigorously as he’s doing on his southern border. In return for quantified cuts in illegal immigration from Mexico, we would offer a Marshall Plan-type arrangement to help Mexicans stay in Mexico. For example, we could offer Fox $4 for every $1 that private remittances from Mexicans resident in the US decline. So, if Fox helped cut the number of Mexican illegals in the US by enough that the amount of money wired home fell from $7 billion to $4 billion per year, we’d give him $12 billion. To us, that’s a pittance to pay annually to help solve a pressing social problem.”