What's Wrong With Illegal Immigration? by John Eberhard

What's Wrong With Illegal Immigration?

By John Eberhard

Part I of III

http://www.commentaryusa.com/commentary/illegal-immigration/whats-wrong-with-illegal-immigration.html

There has been a great deal of controversy recently about illegal immigration, which was initiated by Congress's considering several bills attempting to reform the area.

Latinos in the Los Angeles area have been protesting, waving Mexican flags, students have been cutting school, and various politicians have been weighing in on the issue. Teddy Kennedy made a speech recently, which compared the issue of illegal immigration to earlier civil rights struggles by blacks and women. In other words, he was saying that illegal immigrants have a right to come here illegally and efforts to limit their illegal immigration are an infringement on those rights. Other immigration supporters have chimed in with this line.

I've decided to weigh in on this issue. There are a couple of things wrong with illegal immigration.

The Problems of Non-Assimilation

Since the United States is the most prosperous country on Earth, it is a privilege to move here. It is not a right. Trying to compare illegal immigration to earlier civil rights struggles is ridiculous.

The United States has, as does every country in the world, a right to limit immigration and control immigration. There are a variety of reasons why the US and every country has this right and should have this right.

One reason we have the right to limit the number of people who immigrate here, is because we want to make sure they assimilate to our culture and way of life. There is, naturally, a limit to how many people could assimilate into a country at any one time.

Why do we want them to assimilate or why do we have the right to demand that they assimilate?

First of all, we have a tradition in America where people moving here from other countries have assimilated; they have learned the language, learned our laws, become citizens, paid taxes, and so on. We have never required them to leave their own customs behind, but we do require that in general they become part of the group here. And you'll notice that despite many different peoples here with many customs and backgrounds, most Americans get along pretty well. The last major civil strife occurred 141 years ago.

There is a phenomenon that has been observed in some countries, which some smart person has named "Balkanization." "Balkanize" is defined by the Miriam Webster Online Dictionary as "to break up (as a region or group) into smaller and often hostile units." The term comes, of course, from the Balkans, the countries occupying the Balkan Peninsula; Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, & Turkey. You may have heard of a lot of fighting and unrest in that region over the past 15 years, based largely on differing customs, languages, ethnic hatreds and so on.

We have also seen a Balkanization effect in Canada, where the French-speaking people of Quebec have tried several times to secede.

We are seeing a definite Balkanization in France, caused by large-scale Arabic immigration in recent years, and by the French government foolishly permitting the Arab immigrants to set up isolated enclaves where police aren't even allowed in. This recently erupted in full-scale riots in Paris.

Now in America, with massive amounts of illegal immigrants, most from Mexico, we are seeing a true Balkanization effect. The bilingual educational program has allowed the youth of this group to continue to speak Spanish and not to learn English. And how many times have you called some company you deal with and heard "for English, press 1..."? Many companies have worked hard to court the non-assimilating Hispanic population, and in so doing have made it easier for them to be here. Some banks are now even giving home loans to illegal immigrants.

Many of these people have no intentions of assimilating to America. They aren't learning the language, learning the laws, or becoming legal so they can pay taxes or get a driver's license. Some are even staying here only temporarily so they can send money home to family in Mexico (no wonder Vincente Fox wants things to stay as they are).

If you look at past generations of immigrants to America (mine from Germany in the early 1900s), and the way those generations adapted to life here, it is totally different from what the current illegal immigrants are doing. The current illegal immigrants, most of them from Mexico, have no respect for our laws, our customs, our way of life. Note that recent demonstrators have been waving the Mexican, not the American flag.

Several authors have written books recently on this Balkanization of America and how this alone could potentially destroy the country.

Many illegal immigration advocates say that any hostility towards illegal aliens is a symptom of racism. I saw a column in the paper recently that made that claim. What they are not willing to confront is that Americans have played by the assimilation rules for hundreds of years, and that it is actually natural to feel hostility towards someone who comes in, breaks the law, doesn't play by the rules, doesn't learn the language, and has no respect for the country or the system, and collects $5-6 billion in free services per year in California, paid for by his taxes.

(See the next section very soon – Part II).