How pro-immigration conservatives have betrayed conservatism

In her major article on immigration at City Journal, Heather Mac Donald speaks of how pro-open borders conservative elites in their all-out support for Hispanic illegal and legal immigration are abandoning and betraying every conservative principle. Below are three excerpts I’ve organized under headings.

Conservative elites betray the conservative belief in the efficacy of law enforcement.

Elite wisdom for decades held that the police cannot affect crime…. New York’s Mayor Giuliani and his first police chief, William Bratton, rejected that fatalism. They empowered the New York Police Department to enforce aggressively laws that had long lain moribund… and brought crime down 70 percent in a decade. It turns out that the well-founded fear of getting caught changes behavior.

Conservative open-borders advocates do not explain why policing brings domestic crime down but can have no effect on border crime. Nor can they point to any evidence to support their claim, since immigration laws have never been enforced in the interior of the country.

Conservative elites betray the conservative support for middle-class behavior and opposition to dysfunctional behavior.

If someone proposed a program to boost the number of Americans who lack a high school diploma, have children out of wedlock, sell drugs, steal, or use welfare, he’d be deemed mad. Yet liberalized immigration rules would do just that….

Conservatives pride themselves on reality-based thinking that rejects utopian theories in favor of facts on the ground. Yet when it comes to immigration, they cling, against all contrary evidence, to the myth of the redeeming power of Hispanic family values, the Hispanic work ethic, and Hispanic virtue. Even more fanciful is the claim that it is immigrants’ children who constitute the real value to American society. The children of today’s Hispanic immigrants, in fact, are in considerable trouble….

Conservatives have never shrunk from pointing out that dysfunctional behavior creates long-term poverty among inner-city blacks. But when Hispanics engage in the same behavior, they fall silent. From 1990 to 2004, the number of Hispanics in poverty rose 52 percent, accounting for 92 percent of the increase in poor people….

Instead of backing the local decision makers who are facing the real problems of illegal immigration at the local level, conservative elites attack them as racists and side with the liberal judges who strip them of local autonomy.

Illegal immigration has prompted a powerful grassroots democratic reaction, as people in areas most affected by Hispanic immigration try to regain control of their communities….

After appeals from illegal-alien advocacy groups, judges have struck down many of these laws. Ordinarily, conservatives would deplore such thwarting of the people’s will. When it comes to illegal immigration, however, they side with the elites in robes and on Capitol Hill who dismiss the public as know-nothing rubes. Open-borders conservatives denounce California’s Proposition 187 as vehemently as any Hispanic activist….

Conservatives have historically trusted local decision making over distant Washington solutions. The tradition of federalism holds that people closest to a problem are best able to assess and resolve it. Yet the open-borders Right waves away the fervent local lawmaking around illegal immigration as merely an outbreak of xenophobia. Would such conservative legalizers argue that the 63 cities and counties that founded the Coalition of Mayors and County Executives for Immigration Reform, a movement trying to alert Washington to the burdens of illegal immigration, have been taken over by racists? Do they really think that they themselves see matters more clearly than angry local residents whose local hospital has gone bankrupt under the strain of serving immigrants with no insurance, or than parents who no longer feel welcome in their local schools, or than business owners harmed by the crowds of day laborers on the sidewalk who scare their customers away?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 18, 2006 08:40 AM | Send