by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
T<\/span>housands of aliens crossing our 2,000-mile border from an impoverished Mexico reflect a much larger global one-way traffic problem.<\/p>\n In Germany, Turkish workers \u2014 both legal and illegal \u2014 are desperate to find either permanent residence or citizenship.<\/p>\n “Londonstan” is slang for a new London of thousands of unassimilated Pakistani nationals.<\/p>\n In France, there were riots in 2005 because many children of North African immigrants are unemployed \u2014 and unhappy.<\/p>\n Albanians flock to Greece to do farm work, and then are regularly deported for doing so illegally.<\/p>\n The list could go on.<\/p>\n So why do millions of these border-crossers head to Europe, the United States or elsewhere in the West?<\/p>\n Easy. Stable democracies and free markets ensure economic growth, rising standards of living and, thus, lots of jobs, while these countries’ birth rates and native populations fall. In contrast, immigrants usually flee mostly failed states that cannot offer their people any real hope of prosperity and security.<\/p>\n As people in the West live longer and enjoy longer retirements, service and health care industries strive to meet their ever-increasing needs. Meanwhile, younger adults often rely on others to clean their homes, change their infants’ diapers and take care of their elderly parents.<\/p>\n As a rule in the West, the more calluses on your hand, the less money you make. So Americans and Europeans do their best to get a desk job. But an immigrant may feel that washing clothes or busing tables is still better than doing the same thing back in Oaxaca or Ankara. A few immigrants do flee persecution or prosecution, but the vast majority just seek jobs \u2014 but for low wages that Americans or Europeans won’t accept.<\/p>\n S<\/span>till, given the social costs of illegal immigration, this is not a “win-win” situation of hooking up our available jobs with their available workers. Instead, it too often turns into a sort of cultural apartheid, where both unassimilated foreign workers and Western citizens are resentful of each other.<\/p>\n Employers may console themselves that they pay better than what the immigrants earned back at home. This might be true, but the wages are never enough to allow such newcomers to achieve parity with their hosts.<\/p>\n Naturally, immigrants soon get angry. And rather than showing thanks for a ticket out of the slums of Mexico City or Tunis, blatant hypocrisy can follow: the once thankful, but now exhausted, alien may wave the flag of the country he would never return to while shunning the culture of the host county he would never leave.<\/p>\n In the second generation \u2014 as we see from riots in France or gangs in Los Angeles \u2014 things can get even worse.<\/p>\n The moment illegal immigrants arrive, a sort of race begins: can these newcomers become legal, speak the host language and get educated before they age, get hurt or lose their job? If so, then they assimilate and their children are held up as models of diversity. If not, the end of the story can be welfare or jail.<\/p>\n Hypocrisy abounds on all sides. Free-marketers claim they must have cheap workers to stay competitive. Yet they also count on public subsidies to take care of their former employees when old, sick or in trouble.<\/p>\n Governments in countries such as Mexico and Morocco usually care far more about their emigrants once they are long gone. Then these poor are no longer volatile proof of their own failures, but victims of some wealthy foreign government’s indifference. And these pawns usually send cash home.<\/p>\n The lower middle classes complain most about massive immigration, but then they have to compete with aliens for jobs, often live among them and don’t use their services. The wealthier, who hire immigrants for low wages and see them only at work, often think mass immigration, even if illegal, is wonderful.<\/p>\n The lasting solution is not the status quo \u2014 or even walls, fines, deportation, amnesty or guest-worker programs. Instead, failed societies in Latin America, Africa and much of the Middle East must encourage family planning and get smarter about using their plentiful natural wealth to keep more of their own people home.<\/p>\n The remedy for the richer West?<\/p>\n It is past time to remember that paying our own poorer laborers more, doing some occasional physical work and obeying the laws \u2014 the immigration ones especially \u2014 are not icky or a bummer. Rather, this is the more ethical and, in the long run, cheaper approach.<\/p>\n There is a final irony. The more Western elites ignore their own laws, allow unassimilated ethnic ghettos and profit from an exploitive labor market, the more their own nations will begin to resemble the very places immigrants fled from.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a92007 Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Thousands of aliens crossing our 2,000-mile border from an impoverished Mexico reflect a much larger global one-way traffic problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[757],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Wn","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1507,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-fails-to-square-the-illegal-immigration-circle\/","url_meta":{"origin":3619,"position":0},"title":"Obama Fails to Square the Illegal-Immigration Circle","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 11, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner There was very little new in the president\u2019s speech \u2014 certainly not his tired hope-and-change trope of blending legal and illegal immigration (\u201cThe scientific breakthroughs of Albert Einstein, the inventions of Nikola Tesla, the great ventures of Andrew Carnegie\u2019s U.S. Steel and Sergey Brin\u2019s\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2010"","block_context":{"text":"July 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/july-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11045,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-rapid-progress-of-progressivism\/","url_meta":{"origin":3619,"position":1},"title":"The Rapid \u2018Progress\u2019 of Progressivism","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 8, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review It leads to an endless race for equality and erodes prior rules.Not long ago I waited for a flight to board. The plane took off 45 minutes late. There were only two attendants to accommodate eleven passengers who had requested wheelchair assistance. Such growing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Liberals"","block_context":{"text":"Liberals","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/liberals\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7648,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-moral-crisis-on-our-southern-border\/","url_meta":{"origin":3619,"position":2},"title":"The Moral Crisis on Our Southern Border","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 10, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"A perfect storm of special interests have hijacked U.S. immigration law. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online No one knows just how many tens of thousands of Central American nationals \u2014 most of them desperate, unescorted children and teens \u2014 are streaming across America\u2019s southern border. Yet this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mexico"","block_context":{"text":"Mexico","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/mexico\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11235,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/border-politics-and-the-use-and-abuse-of-history\/","url_meta":{"origin":3619,"position":3},"title":"Border Politics and the Use and Abuse of History","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 20, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Much has been written \u2014 some of it either inaccurate or designed to obfuscate the issue ahead of the midterms for political purposes \u2014 about the border fiasco and the unfortunate separation of children from parents.\u00a0Rich Lowry\u2019s brief analysis\u00a0is the most insightful. The media\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1406,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/illogical-immigration\/","url_meta":{"origin":3619,"position":4},"title":"Illogical Immigration","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 9, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Some 11 million to 15 million illegal aliens are now residing in America, most after crossing into America unlawfully. Once a federal law is arbitrarily not enforced, all sorts of bizarre paradoxes arise from that original contradiction. As proof, examine the following illogical\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "August 2010"","block_context":{"text":"August 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/august-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11874,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-china-iran-border-matrix\/","url_meta":{"origin":3619,"position":5},"title":"The China-Iran-Border Matrix","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 20, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Nationals Review President Trump and Secretary Pompeo have worked the U.S. into an advantageous position with a consistent policy toward bad actors. We are now at a point that even left and right agree that China\u2019s rogue trajectory had to be altered. And while progressive critics\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3619"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3619"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3620,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3619\/revisions\/3620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}