(What’s Left of) Our Economy: George Will’s Breathtaking Ignorance on Immigration and Trade

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Border Crisis, CAFTA, Central America, immigrant children, Immigration, NAFTA, Trade, trade agreements, {What's Left of) Our Economy

However craven, at least the ministers and subjects whose emperor had no clothes in the Hans Christian Anderson story were smart enough to recognize their monarch’s unjustified pomposity. If only the same could be said for George Will’s fellow talking heads on Fox News Sunday.

Will, whose punditizing success owes largely to the popular equation of haughtiness with intellectuality, was at his condescending but specious best on the show’s July 27 edition, and his colleagues’ utter inability to hold him remotely accountable was at its most embarrassingly obvious.

Is there a “right way” to deal with the tens of thousands of Central American children and their parents flooding the U.S. border, anchor Chris Wallace asked Will. After briefly alluding to the refugee policy aspects of the problem, Will seized an opportunity to dazzle both viewers and the show’s other panelists with his reputation for historical expertise and general erudition.

“Long term,” he explained pedantically, “the most effective legislation passed concerning immigration wasn’t an immigration bill at all. It was Bill Clinton’s greatest act, passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement that put North Americans on the path to prosperity. We need to do something similar for the countries in which these children are fleeing, including the fact of trying to get Americans consuming so much of the drugs that are imported from these countries.”

The ignorance is as jaw-dropping as the arrogance. The United States, of course, has already “done something similar” to NAFTA for the countries of Central America. It was the Central America Free Trade Agreement, which has been in force since 2006. Eight years later, signatory countries El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala have turned into the home countries for most of the newest illegal immigrant wave.

Further, NAFTA itself was so effective at limiting the illegal immigrant flow that more than half of the illegal population in the United States nowadays comes from Mexico. This, of course, despite repeated promises from the treaty’s supporters that its passage would spur the export of “goods, not people.”

To his credit, Will knew his Fox News Sunday colleagues all too well. Neither Wallace nor Fox’s Brit Hume and Juan Williams, nor Kirsten Powers of USAToday, uttered a syllable of objection.

At least in the process, he made plain as day a leading reason for America’s deepening political dysfunction. How can any democratic political system perform adequately if so many of its designated watchdogs are such unmistakable know-nothings?

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(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Post’s Tradition of Immigration Inanity Continues

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Border Crisis, Central America, drugs, immigrant children, Immigration, immigration reform, violence, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s now at the point where I cringe each morning when I open the Washington Post, dreading what transparently tendentious pro-Open Borders/amnesty immigration inanity will greet me not only on the editorial pages, but on the news pages. This morning’s edition certainly didn’t disappoint.

Just below the fold, on page one, appeared a report from correspondent Pamela Constable titled “Deportation policies may have fueled rise of gangs.” The implication couldn’t be more obvious: Many, at least, of the Central American children streaming toward the United States have been fleeing violence increasingly threatening them from drug criminals. So the longstanding U.S. practice of deporting immigrant drug gang members responsible for further immiserating many American inner cities was portrayed by Constable as a possible policy blunder, or at least a classic example of unintended consequences deserving the spotlight.

Predictably, Constable had no trouble finding supposed experts critical of what they viewed as the shortsightedness – at best – of the deportations. Since this view is widespread among the influential supporters of immigration reform, that was reasonable enough. What wasn’t reasonable was Constable’s neglect of the screamingly obvious rejoinder: Just what were U.S. officials supposed to do? Keep the gang members in the United States where they either would add to prison overcrowding even if they were convicted, or would quickly return to the streets after wrist-slapping plea bargain deals?

Of course, the policy critics quoted by Constable believe they have the answer: More U.S. foreign aid that can turn Central American countries into the kinds of places where drug trafficking and gangs won’t breed in the first place. But such initiatives – also requested by the Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran presidents at their meeting with President Obama yesterday – have a long record of failure, mainly because Central America was so ruined by centuries of Spanish colonial rule that it’s been stripped of the social and cultural prerequisites of successful economic development.

Therefore, as is so often the case, Washington is faced with an enduring condition that’s mistaken as a problem — which by definition has a feasible solution. It’s bad enough that American leaders can’t keep the distinction clear. Neither can an American chattering class whose only valid raison d’etre is realistically monitoring the government’s performance, but that keeps pretending that the intrinsic limits of human knowledge, wisdom, and good will are “news.”

Equally moronic – but more excusable, given its appearance on the op-ed page – was Colman McCarthy’s effort to compare what he depicts as the despicably un-American cruelty of today’s immigration restrictionists (the “send’-‘em-all-back crowd and the build-bigger-walls cabal”) with the vastly more welcoming attitude that he implies prevailed in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. Singled out for special praise today and back in the day are “justice-seeking” immigration lawyers – like his late father.

McCarthy’s article was of special interest to me because his family lived on the north shore of Long Island, close to where I grew up. And I’m sure his father was a fine man. But what McCarthy somehow forgot to emphasize is that the newcomers for whom his father did so much pro bono or largely free work, both in the courtroom and in terms of job placement, came to the United States legally. McCarthy did mention that his father “met and befriended them at Ellis Island” – meaning that they were admitted only after passing through that official inspection station. Yet the author apparently regards immigrants who ignored the law and jumped the line as meriting the exact same status as immigrants who played by the rules.

Something else of supreme relevance overlooked by McCarthy – last year, the United States allowed more than 990,000 immigrants to become permanent, legal U.S. residents. Maybe in his next column, he’ll explain the apparent paradox of today’s allegedly inhumane restrictionists overwhelmingly supporting this influx.

A final note: McCarthy quite accurately describes how the immigrants to the Long Island of his childhood often found decent-paying jobs from the Gatsby-esque one percenters who were building palatial estates all along what would become known as the Gold Coast. Nowadays, as I documented in a recent Fortune Magazine column, America’s wealthiest employ more than their fair share of the current generation of immigrants, especially illegals. But the wages paid are generally so low that these newcomers still need plenty of social services – which are paid disproportionately by taxes from the lower 99 percent.

McCarthy has long been a pillar of the social justice community. To be genuinely true to his avowed principles, he should wholeheartedly back my proposal to boost taxes on the rich to pay most of the costs of the greater immigrant presence that he – and they – so strongly favor.

Im-Politic: Border Crisis Undermines Even McCain’s Support for Key Offshoring Trade Deal

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Border Crisis, Central America, conservatives, Im-Politic, immigrant children, Immigration, McCain, Mexico, middle class, NAFTA, Republicans, Trade, working class

Arizona Republican Senator John McCain has long been one of his party’s staunchest supporters of trade deals and broader trade policies that have supercharged U.S. deficits and debts, and slowed the current recovery. He’s been an especially ardent defender of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which set U.S. trade policy off on its offshoring-friendly course.

So it’s got to be big news that McCain last night agreed with Fox talker Bill O’Reilly’s proposal that if Mexico doesn’t do more to stem the flow of Central American immigrant children moving through its territory to the swamped U.S. border, Washington should tell America’s southern neighbor, “[Y]ou can forget about NAFTA.” O’Reilly added that Americans should boycott Mexican-made goods (so many of course manufactured by U.S-owned or affiliated companies and their subcontractors) and cross Mexico off their travel list.

To be sure, McCain started to look queasy as these words were uttered. But asked explicitly by O’Reilly, “What’s wrong with that?” McCain stated, “Nothing is wrong with that….” For good measure, McCain endorsed telling “these Central American countries that we give a lot of assistance to, that they are going to not get another dime until they stop” allegedly abetting their citizens’ exodus. In that vein, it’s worth noting that McCain also strongly championed the 2005 U.S. free trade deal with Central America that was supposed to bring prosperity and democracy to this long impoverished and misruled region.

There’s no reason to think that this McCain about face on NAFTA will be much more lasting than his 2008-10 about face on amnesty-friendly immigration policies once they became taboo among so many conservatives he needed to court during his presidential run, and among the Arizonans whose backing he needed to stay in the Senate. In fact, expect him to issue some kind of mealy-mouthed clarification if need be during the next few days.

But this feckless immigration record underscores how even conservative stalwarts who are handsomely rewarded by offshoring-, cheap labor-happy multinational corporations can change their globalizing spots when facing enough grassroots pressure. So far, these results have been achieved almost entirely on the immigration front. Motivating conservatives on the equally important trade front, against its at least equally damaging effects, remains a woefully unmet challenge. Which is tragic since backing fundamentally new trade policies that benefit the domestic economy for a change could be exactly what conservatives and Republicans need to win back the economically stressed middle class and working class voters they’ve lost recently.