The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 5 of 14)

Living in Florida for the past several years, I followed a white slavery trial two years ago. The main perpetrators were Mexican nationals, who recruited the young girls by promising they would be placed as domestics inside the U.S. Once they got them into Florida, they kept them imprisoned, using them to service young, illegal men who were working primarily in the fruit and construction industries in Florida.

Recently, a nephew of mine who lives in West Virginia, very near Washington, D.C., was singled out and threatened by avowed MS-13 gang members who have recently enrolled in his high school. The reason for the threat: he objected to one of them making lewd and suggestive remarks to his girlfriend. While you might say this is an isolated incident, I suggest you check with local police in the D.C. area.

p>The border needs to be closed, now, in the interests of national security! If the administration in Washington is serious, they should use the military if necessary.... br> -- R. Goodson br> Vero Beach, Florida /p>

Mr. Tyrrell's notion of a legitimate demand -- of a "market for immigrants" -- makes me wish there was some standardized, internationally accepted credential for journalists and editorialists. Such credentials exist for engineers, physicians, nurses, and other American professionals whose wages are being depressed because of the sudden application of ivory-tower free trade and free-immigration ideas to America's real-world, flesh-and-blood, labor force. Carrying these credentials, foreign-trained immigrants compete for jobs in America, and, predictably, wages and benefits are diminished downward from the American scale toward the world scale.

If such a journalistic credential existed, and if the immigration of journalists were encouraged to the same degree as other professions, then journalists likewise would experience depression of their wages and benefits toward the world-journalist average. Not to mention that aspirants would then have to compete with five- or tenfold as many individuals for a job.

As it is, the peculiarities of the American media labor market virtually guarantee that only the home-grown citizen is able to earn a living in such an occupation. As a result of this homogeneity in the journalist population, immigration and free-trade practices are, to many opinion writers, mere abstractions. The journalist is more inclined to embrace the ideas of the free-immigration policy theorist than the unemployed American engineer whose job was given to an Indian immigrant willing to work for much less than he.

p>On the other end of the salary scale, many unskilled American citizen laborers' jobs are now filled by illegal immigrant Mexicans. "American citizens just don't want those jobs...," is the usual cant we hear. But is this not a tautology? Without the huge illegal Mexican labor force long present in the United States, would not Americans have already taken many of these jobs? And is it not conceivable that the wages and benefits of these jobs, held by Americans instead of illegal immigrants, would be much better than what they are now?... br> -- Francis Dillon br> Indianapolis, Indiana /p>

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