Shikha Dalmia,[Email] an immigrant from India who writes for Reason Magazine, writes about the Chertoff crackdown, in which she seems to be following Mickey Kaus’s theory that the Administration is trying to promote amnesty by making crops rot in the fields:

Curiously, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who joined Chertoff in announcing the crackdown, doesn’t deny any of this. “We do not have the workers our economy needs to keep growing,” he readily admits.

So why drive out the workers we have? Employer sanctions have been on the books for years. Why enforce them if there are no upsides for national security—only downsides for the economy?

One explanation is that the administration is hoping that this campaign will prove to Congress how much the economy depends on undocumented workers and force it to once again tackle comprehensive immigration reform. Reason Magazine - All Politics, No PrincipleAugust 28, 2007

However, she thinks there’s an even worse motive–the Republicans are pandering to the wishes of…the American people! Yes, they’re doing this because voters like it!

The only plausible reason is that the administration has not just abandoned rational immigration reform, which would be understandable under the circumstances. It has actually made a conscious decision to embrace its opposite to win back its lost base before next year’s elections. In short, its immigration policy now is driven neither by conviction, nor the needs of the economy—but naked political calculation, even if that involves targeting “willing employers” and “willing foreign workers,” the very victims of that policy.

That is a new low.

Comment on the article here.

Robert Samuelson, noted previously in these pages as getting it, has a column today on MSN about importing poverty.

Samuelson: We’re Missing the Real Story on Poverty - Newsweek Robert Samuelson - MSNBC.com
Importing Poverty
We can’t ignore the facts. Only an act of willful denial can separate immigration and poverty

Web exclusive
By Robert J. Samuelson
Newsweek
Updated: 2 hours, 35 minutes ago

Sept. 5, 2007 - The government last week released its annual statistical report on poverty and household income. As usual, we—meaning the public, the media and politicians—missed a big part of the story. It is this: The stubborn persistence of poverty, at least as measured by the government, is increasingly a problem associated with immigration. As more poor Hispanics enter the country, poverty goes up. This is not complicated, but it is widely ignored

If you want to see who’s practicing “willful denial” you should read Ed Rubenstein’s column today, More Hispanic Happy Talk From The WSJ Edit Page.

More from Samuelson:

By default, our present policy is to import poor people. This imposes strains on local schools, public services and health care. From 2000 to 2006, 41 percent of the increase in people without health insurance occurred among Hispanics. Paradoxically, many Hispanics are advancing quite rapidly. But assimilation—which should be our goal—will be frustrated if we keep adding to the pool of poor. Newcomers will compete with earlier arrivals. In my view, though some economists disagree, competition from low-skilled Hispanics also hurts low-skilled blacks.

It’s official. Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa has revealed that she has asked the U.S. government to let Elvira Arellano back into the country.

What’s not clear though, is that she will be designated “peace and justice” ambassador, as Elvira has requested.

According to diplomatic protocol, the credentials of an ambassador must be approved by the receiving country. Any self-respecting U.S. government would reject those of Elvira. (However, we are talking about the Bush administration).
Anyway, Elvira is getting a little displeased with the Mexican government:

“Arellano said she would not back down from her request and was angered that Mexico was seeking a U.S. visa, adding that the Mexican government should not have to ask permission to send her north of the border.” Mexico Trying To Help Arellano Return To U.S.CBS2Chicago.com, September 4, 2007

Well, that’s the attitude that got Elvira into trouble before. She never thought she needed a visa to get into the United States.
Elvira declares adamantly ,

“I’m not asking for any visa. I want a diplomatic post as ambassador of peace and justice, and I won’t accept anything less.”

There’s a real silver lining here. The more aggressive and obnoxious Elvira and her supporters are, the more it wakes up ordinary Americans and helps the restrictionist cause!

Linda Thom writes, re my blog SPLC Vs. PJB On The Color Of Crime:

A pdf file entitled, Deaths: Leading Causes for 2003, that is available on the Internet from the Centers for Disease Control contains vital statistics on deaths and causes. Data show that blacks have the highest death rate by homicide of any race or ethnicity. Whites have the lowest.

Does this mean that whites are good shots and blacks are not? Nope, generally folks murder their own. (See a discussion: Immigration Policy: Importing Murder, Mayhem, and a New Underclass on VDare.com)

As the death statistics are on a federal government website, should the SPLC conclude that the Center for Disease Control is a white nationalist hate site for distributing this data?

In an unusually fine piece of incisive reporting, Noelle Phillips of South Carolina’s The State newspaper got right to the point:

Study links Hispanics, pay drop Posted on Fri, Aug. 31, 2007

As South Carolina’s Hispanic population has grown, wages for all workers have dropped, a USC study released Thursday found.
While study authors were careful not to pin all the blame on immigrants, their findings were similar to other research done elsewhere, including Harvard University.
S.C. median annual wages, adjusted for inflation, dropped 3.1 percent to $28,039 between 2000 and 2005 when the state experienced rapid growth in its Hispanic population.
Pay in construction, the dominant field for Hispanics, slipped 5 percent for all S.C. workers during what was a record housing boom. Hispanic construction wages fell by more than twice that.
“When an industry is booming like this, you expect to see wages increase, not decline like this,” said Doug Woodward, a research economist at the USC Moore School of Business

One has to say the study’s Doug Woodward gets the point too:

“What we’re doing here in South Carolina is importing cheap labor to our economy,” Woodward said.

The study in question has now appeared on the website of the University of South Carolina’s Consortium for Latino Immigration Studies: The Economic and Social Implications of the Growing Latino Population in South Carolina (PDF file).

It is a devastating document which patriots could fruitfully study. Of course the authors twist themselves in knots to avoid being politically incorrect. For instance, speaking of South Carolina’s schools English reinforcement program on Page 5

English Language Learners (ELL) represent only 2 percent of the total public school population, and 62 percent of the total Latino student population, indicating that almost 40 percent of Latino students are fluent in English and fully integrated in “mainstream” classrooms

The fact that a Latino child is not in the English booster program does not prove he is “fully integrated” of course, but more importantly, the key fact is 60% of the children of this new population need expensive remediation courses. These inevitably take resources which could otherwise have helped American children.

But the poor human capital constituted by the influx is lucidly documented:

Over half of the USC survey respondents (age 16 and over) reported that they spoke no English or only a few words of English, and another 25 percent described their English skills as poor. That means that over three-quarters of those surveyed (age 16 and over) do not speak English well

(P4)

according to the USC survey, only 16 percent of Latinos had completed high school, and a large part of the male working population has little formal education: 39 percent of Latino males age 25 and older had attended school less than nine years. Just 16 percent of Latino males had some college.

(P6)

And their impact at ground zero of their economic effect–landscaping–vividly spelled out:

Many Hispanics found full-time jobs between 2000 and 2005 in Landscaping Services (with a 67 percent increase in the number working in that sector), although, again, real median earnings fell by 14 percent. For Blacks, Landscaping Service employment grew over the period…but real earnings fell approximately 10 percent. For Whites working in landscaping, employment and earnings declined by 1.5 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively.

(P7)

(Of course, this was wonderful for Senator Lindsey Graham’s rich garden-maintaining friends.)

The reward for doing this important study and for the excellent reporting of it has been–needless to say–to be ignored by the MSM. The State’s story was run in an abridged form by the Charlotte Observer, but otherwise, silence. This is exactly what happened with a broader study on mass immigration’s impact on Canadian and US wages last May.

There was one exception, which I hereby nominate for Joe Guzzardi’s Worst Immigration Reporting of the Year prize.

Study: Hispanics Not Taking Jobs Away
By KATRINA A. GOGGINS Associated Press 08.30.07

manages to completely omit the wage effect and confine itself to immigration-enthusiast misrepresentations:

“There’s a myth that Hispanics drain our system,” said Lee McElveen, Hispanic/Latino coordinator for the South Carolina Commission on Minority Affairs. “This report reveals something different.”

Correct Lee McElveen. Complain to AP about Katrina Goggins. Applaud Noelle Phillips.