To almost no national notice that I can see, Representative Tom Tancredo scored a great victory on Friday morning:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. House of Representatives this morning voted to withhold federal emergency services funding for “sanctuary cities” that protect illegal immigrants.
Anti-illegal immigration champion Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., sponsored the measure, which he says would apply to cities such as Denver and Boulder. He was elated by its passage, which stunned critics and supporters alike….Tancredo said he thinks his amendment is an indicator that the House would crush the reform plan if it passes in the Senate.

Tancredo wins surprise immigration vote, By Chris Barge, Rocky Mountain News,
June 15, 2007

Bad news for the Axis of Amnesty.

Kerry Howley at Reason.com [Send her mail] has a post called The United States Is Full, Chapter MCXVII, saying “The war on cucumbers continues“

[Farmer's whining about not having cheap labor omitted. ]

To recap: Government criminalizes mutually beneficial exchange through protectionist labor policies; innocent cucumbers rot. (Some will never even have the chance to be born.) Tobacco, sweet potatos, and Christmas trees are also in jeopardy.

Actually, we don’t have a war on cucumbers. Cucumbistan isn’t being threatened with invasion. America is. And while an immigrant invasion might be mutually beneficial to growers and illegals, it harms everybody in America who pays taxes.

It harms victims of farmworker crime. It harms taxpayers. It harms American workers. It harms American schoolchildren.

Here’s something John Derbyshire had to say recently about the jobs Americans won’t do.

There probably are some jobs Americans won’t do at any wage level anyone is actually willing to offer.

I would still say: Well, then, let those jobs go hang. If you can’t, for love or money, find any citizens or legal residents to pick your apples, at wage levels not so high that consumers refuse to buy the apples, well, let the apples rot. That’s hard on you, I understand. You’ll have to find some other way to make a living. That happens to people, though—it’s happened to me a couple of times. And the U.S.A. won’t fold for want of apples.

Or for unborn cucumbers.

Alex Nicholson writes at Associated Press:

Speaking at an economic forum in Russia’s second-largest city of St. Petersburg, Putin lamented that today’s international economic organizations “look archaic, undemocratic and awkward” by protecting the interests mainly of developed economies.

“Today protectionism which the WTO is intended to fight oftentimes comes from developed economies that set up this structure,” Putin told the conference.

……

Putin also said that, currently, global financial markets evolved around “one or two” currencies — an apparent reference to the euro and the dollar
……..
“There can be only one answer to this challenge — the creation of several world currencies, several financial centers,” [Russia's Putin Calls for WTO Alternative, June 10, 2007]

The countries with WTO trade advantages tend to be heavy net recipients of immigration. Putin’s Russia is a relatively low net-immigration country-and along with Japan and China, one of the larger lower net-immigration economies. WTO managed trade may be creating a situation in which the only practical hope for a better life the more ambitious individuals in many poor countries have is to emigrate to a more highly developed, counties with more favorable WTO trade terms.

I doubt Putin’s claim WTO managed trade really a “benefit” to countries like the US. Hes not looking a the cost of immigration or the long term impact of trade empires as part of the equation. The “benefits” of WTO managed trade are often focused on specific elites that tend to manage trade and finance. Under protectionism, the makeup of US elites was different than it is today. You simply don’t see folks like Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison or George Westinghouse in prominent positions in the US any more. The old elites were also more likely to call for careful management of immigration than their successors.

Economists often teach that “free trade” maximizes the potential for development. Unfortunately, externalities-like the movement of diseases that accompany trade and migration, are given little attention-as are the negative distributional patterns that can accompany the combination of free trade and open borders.
I suspect the losers in the broader move away from protectionism and the lower immigration rates we saw from 1910-1970 and towards Open Borders and WTO managed trade are the same.

We desperately need better economic analysis of this topic. Even without that analysis, I expect Putin’s message will have significant populist appeal to the poorest of countries affected by the current world order. The rise of countries with less immigration may inspire management of US immigration.

In response to my article on talent based visas, one reader wrote:

One guarantee of “diversity” is Balkanization and then in the right circumstances formal separation. Bringing nonwhites into America who have high IQs will do what, as America formally separates into separate countries?

And if we bring in high IQ people from countries extremely lacking in highly bright people, ie India. Do we really want to say, we know you have an extreme shortage of doctors and nurses for your people, but we need to maintain our First World life style.
Sincerely,

Harold Levin

My proposal wasn’t endorsing simply granting citizenship to high IQ folks, so much as calling Bill Gates’ bluff and showing how such a program that does what he says he wants might be rationally structured. As I pointed out in the article, there are a lot of other costs to be considered. Is it really worth importing the “really smart” people Bill Gates wants if it means a repeat of 9/11? We don’t have hard-nosed mechanisms in place that assess these kinds of risks. Some of the politicians that have tended to promote mass immigration have been the strongest opponents to imposing discipline in that area.

Balkanization is one of the “costs” that I mentioned in the article. It isn’t as immediate or dramatic as a repeat of 911-but a real long term risk.

Acceptance of importation of talent was pushed early on by Francis Galton–and has persisted despite the discrediting of many other aspects of his ideas. If importation of talent is a political reality for the US in the immediate future, the question to ask is what kind of minimal discipline makes sense-and what really might reflect a popular consensus in this area. As the Kennedy/McCain/Bush proposals show, all too often we get tiny cabals attempting to remake America against the wishes of its current residents. The ‘low hanging fruit’ in immigration reform is the clearly unpopular excesses.

The ‘brain drain’ issue is a real one. It is sad that in today’s world, many talented people would rather accept menial employment in a highly developed country than skilled employment in their own countries. Part of the issue there is the corrupt nature of many poorer countries. Such countries often don’t create attractive social and economic niches for many types of talented people. Now, I don’t think most nurses and doctors as dedicated as they often are, qualify as “world class” or “exceptional” talent mechanisms like the “O” class of visas were targeted at. America has sadly created mechanisms that tend to “mine” human capital and the more broadly held forms of wealth. The mass importation of doctors and nurses isn’t about maintaining the US lifestyle, but avoiding addressing the fundamental failures of US economic and social policy. One interesting initiative in area of medical education aimed specifically at the brain drain you mentioned is IVIMEDS-which would specifically train doctors and nurses in the third world without requiring them to settle in developed countries for training(a similar idea was tried quite successfully here in Washington). The US and UN could with relatively minor effort do quite a bit to make talented folks throughout the world more productive and comfortable in their home countries–and better able to create a world better for all its citizens.

There are a number of ways of computing the cash value of American citizenship, which patriots may consider above price, but which the American government is more or less willing to sell to rich foreigners, via the Immigrant Investor Visa program, which Michelle Malkin wrote about in 2001, and which is still running.

Randall Burns has pointed out that a Green Card is worth six figures on the Indian dowry market, and citizenship is worth more.

If I had to pick a number, I’d say citizenship is worth a round million dollars, because I recall that, years ago, a poll was taken in which American citizens were asked if they’d give up their citizenship for a million dollars. Almost all said no, and that was only because there wasn’t a space in the form for “Hell, no!”

So that’s what the Axis of Amnesty is proposing to give a away to every illegal immigrant–a check for a million dollars, payable to them, drawn on you. The price tag? Maybe $5,000, paid in installment.