A gentle way of getting unwanted foreigners to leave

Speaking of practical methods of reducing the problem of Islamic and other Third-World immigration, Spain has just passed a law under which unemployed migrants will be paid to return to their native country.

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Sage McLaughlin writes:

It seems obvious that Spain is creating a perverse incentive for people to show up on its shores as “unemployed migrants,” since they’ll be sent home free of charge with a nice check from Madrid. I wonder what safeguards are in place—if any—to prevent this kind of abuse? My guess is, very few. This seems like a very bad idea, for all kinds of reasons, but the principle of the thing is repellant. An unpleasant visit from the Interior Ministry is probably a much more effective way to go, but that’s just my opinion.

LA replies:

Good—I hadn’t thought of that.

However, I don’t think your argument takes away from the general idea, first proposed by Steve Sailer, of paying Muslims and other unwanted immigrants to leave, since that idea would apply not to illegals but to legal immigrants who are already here and have been here for some time.

Sage McLaughlin replies:

I also believe Sailer is on to something there, especially in the current economic situation, in which the personal financial benefits of staying in America are going to be increasingly scant.

By the way, I’ve been wondering about this point. If the financial meltdown really rips the guts out of the U.S. economy, I’ll be very interested to see what sort of arguments the pro-immigration fantasists put forward in favor of continued immigration of the world’s poor. In my county, which is Fairfax, VA, the local latte liberals (as I like to call those middle-to-upper-middle-class whites with politically correct notions about race and culture) made national news by making a massive volte face on the subject in recent elections and referenda. Apparently, having mobs of unemployable Mexicans and Arabs moving in to their pristine housing developments on subprime mortgages hasn’t been sitting quite so well with them. How much worse will it be when, following what is sure to be a cratering in the defense contracting sector over the next ten years, all these people suddenly find themselves and their children actually competing with illegals, to say nothing of the H1-B set, for jobs and education?

I find it hard to believe that average Americans, already basically ill-disposed to mass Third World immigration at least in principle, are going to continue to watch their neighborhoods and cities overrun by the wretched of the earth, in conditions creeping up to an actual economic depression. Wall Street has taken kindly to the dispossession of the native population while the ponze scheme lasted, but with construction grinding to a standstill and the tech sector hemorrhaging native whites into the ranks of the unemployed, something tells me their Ellis Island pleas and appeals to a supposed shortage of labor aren’t going to cut the mustard much longer. If that much is true about the current crisis—and I’m no expert on economics, so I have no idea how bad the situation is likely to get—then it would be one positive outgrowth of this whole mess. Multiculturalism thrives on a certain minimum level of prosperity, and most especially on the assumption that things will always be as good or better than they are today. When that’s no longer true, I have the feeling things could get ugly, and fast.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 22, 2008 07:00 AM | Send