Bordering On Insanity

If you don't catch the PJ Media Trifecta segments, you're missing out big-time. They range from good to brilliant, from topical to sublime, and far surpass most anything you'll find on cable or broadcast TV in terms of both honest analysis or common sense. The guests are good, and the three regulars are generally fantastic. Bill Whittle is brilliant, and anyone who wants to run for any GOP national office should have to go to speechwriting bootcamp under his tutelage before being allowed to open their mouths. Steve Green is P.J. O'Rourke's spiritual younger brother. And Scott Ott is an Everyman cross between Jimmy Stewart and George Will. They're different enough to keep things interesting, and intelligent enough to keep things worthwhile and informative.

Until, as in the hot-linked segment above, posted yesterday, when they try looking at Opposite Day ideas, like "just opening the borders and supporting free movement and free markets." And then the rant center in my head goes a little bit explodey.

I like Scott Ott, and I don't doubt he's a good and decent guy, but the only thing he said I can agree with on this topic is that he hasn't thought about this idea enough to know which way to jump. His answers after that admission make his confession self-evident.

Contrary to his video suggestion, we can't place a 20-year moratorium on entitlements to new immigrants, because there's this terrible thing in the Constitution called the 14th Amendment, which helped end slavery, and contains this minor provision about "equal protection" to all citizens.

So if Scott wants to elucidate how we can just cleverly repeal one of the amendments that ended slavery, the open-border utopia is one step closer. (I jest.)

As Bill Whittle noted, the answer is to export America there, not import the Third World here, and as Steve Green said, you can't go back to 18th century immigration paradigms unless you're willing to repeal the entire welfare state. No healthcare, no income tax, no public education, no social security, no welfare EBTs or AFDC or food stamps, not any little shred of it.
While anyone works on that, the wave of immigrants looking in from outside can wait.
I wouldn't recommend holding their breath.

And if you did miraculously get that, what are you then left with?

Competing with the entire Third World by the millions who'll make it here, to drive all wages to the bottom. While concurrently making it as fun to live in America as it is currently to live in Bangladesh, and at the same pennies-a-day wage rate they enjoy there.

Not quite the First World Paradise the jet-fuel genius who burped this retarded idea out had in mind when he was shilling for it.

But it's great for the Chamber of Commerce members who can pay even less than what wages are now, while the prices for everything go up, due to demand for everything, even basic commodities, skyrocketing, and all those new immigrants decide they can vote themselves an ever-larger share of other people's money. This idea is why the Third World looks like the Third World.

Just for two examples, Iraq is a top oil producer, yet the people there only have power an hour or two a day because everyone just taps a line into the power grid whenever they feel like it, and browns out a whole city, and everyone suffers in 140-degree days with no air conditioning.
And the African Sahara marches southward year after year, because everyone there cuts everything for firewood, because they need it, and once-fertile soil turns into a burgeoning dustbowl across an entire continent, killing farming in once fertile land, and bringing famine right behind the blowing sands.

America became America because people here came with an ethic of hard work, a foundation of fair play based on (then) 700 years of English common law, and a respect for freedom and rights that understands life demands responsibilities along with rights, to mitigate a ceaseless quest to grab everything you can, and devil take the hindmost. And when you get a critical mass of people who think and act like that, everything works.

When you never had them to start with, you get the religious freedom of Iran, the political freedom of Venezuela, the driving habits of Mexico City, the respect for law and rights of North Korea (and Mexico), the economic wisdom of Zimbabwe (and Mexico), and the burgeoning grasping grifting government bureaucracy of China (and Mexico). (Clever readers will note a trend there.)

And until 1965 (thanks, Teddy Kennedy!), we had an immigration process that selected for people who had skills, the ability to function in the dominant language, and a grounding in the philosophy which underpinned the America to which everyone wanted to come. Now, having trashed that system (at the exact time the social welfare bandwagon had a supercharged big-block engine dropped into it), we select entrants randomly - unless you've already plopped out an anchor baby, in which case your entire extended under-educated ESL non-skilled dysfunctional family can come on down and sign up for the full boat of government gravy, paid for by people born here who aren't eligible for most of it, because they work too hard - and we wonder why our culture and civilization built over centuries is eroding by the day. And as a direct result, give us a growing population underclass that looks and acts like Bangladesh, or Ciudad Juarez.

The problem, Mr. Ott, isn't that we can't sell the idea of America to the Third World. One look at the border along the Rio Grande shows it's selling like hot cakes. The problem is that we're preaching it from a lifeboat of sanity, and like countless videos of Third World ferry disasters, they're all in water over their heads, and all they can think of is how nice it would be to get into our boat. So they're all swimming like mad and trying to climb inside, heedless of the fact that when they overload it, they'll be right back in the water again.
Which was the reason their ferry overturned in the first place.

And they'll happily drag the rich, prosperous, pinche Americans down to a watery grave with them, out of stupidity, desperation, and a sense of hateful envy for us that would fuel a nuclear reactor and light up Las Vegas.

If you want to buy the world a Coke, good for you. Go over there and do that. And when they smash it over your head, and steal your watch and wallet, only you suffer.
But when you bring them all by the millions to the neighborhood block party, now they're everyone's problem.

Bryan Kaplan should move to any of those places, and Scott Ott needs to vacation in one of those garden spots for a couple of days - not in a resort, but down among the locals, in the cardboard slums at the dump - and then we should see if either can better answer the question "Why is moving all these people into our neighborhood an utterly idiotic idea?"

"Could open borders be worse than this?"
The root question is, look at San Diego and Tijuana, or El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.
And then tell us exactly how much crap is the right amount of crap for us to put in your crap and tunafish sandwich.
Open borders means we should pile in all the crap we can find.
Enjoy that lunch.
But please, stop trying to share yours with us.