At a table on the patio of a downtown bistro last week, some
friends were discussing economics and foreign policy — ordinary
late-night small talk among political folk in Washington.
When the conversation turned to U.S. policy in Iraq, I became
bored. The discussion was heated and earnest, but utterly
pointless. The Bush administration doesn’t listen to outsiders, and
I’ve long since lost interest in endless arguments among friends
about a policy over which none of us has any influence.
Much more interesting to me was our waitress, whose cheerful
efficiency suggested ambitions beyond a generous tip for the
service.
A college student? Yes, she said. Her major? International
business and marketing. And where was she from? Mongolia, she
answered.
Had she misunderstood my question? I was asking about her
hometown, not her ethnicity. Her English was flawless and without
any detectable accent — if she had said she’d grown up in
Gaithersburg or Fairfax, I would not have been surprised.
She assured me she was indeed a native of Mongolia. And then
came the real shocker: she had only been in the United States for
five years.
She explained that she had attended school in Japan before
coming to America at age 17 for her senior year of high school —
in Kansas, of all places. Schools in Kansas don’t offer bilingual
education (at least, not in Mongolian) and thus her one year in an
American high school was a total-immersion experience. Though she
struggled with English at first, in subjects like math and science
she found herself far advanced in comparison to most of her
classmates.
So here she was in Washington at age 22, waiting tables to earn
her way through college, undoubtedly destined for success, both
more interesting and more relevant than my tablemates’ discussion
of Iraq.
Earlier that same day, the Wall Street Journal made an
editorial attack on Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. Mr.
Rector dares to cite facts that contradict the rosy scenarios
beloved by supporters of “comprehensive” immigration legislation.
This eminent scholar was therefore stigmatized as a
“restrictionist.”
Mr. Rector has stubbornly argued that the Bush-backed bill now
contemplated by the Senate would grant legal residency to millions
of illegal aliens whose levels of education, income and job skills
are so low that each of them represents a net annual cost to U.S.
taxpayers of nearly $20,000.
Perhaps Mr. Rector’s analysis is too pessimistic, though I’m no
more qualified to question his scholarship than I am to
second-guess the Pentagon. Still, the Heritage researcher’s
arguments have the merit of resembling common sense.
If the nation’s economy is so deficient of human capital as to
require augmentation from abroad, wouldn’t it be better to take in
well-educated people who are likely to become taxpayers, rather
than poorly educated people who are likely to become clients of the
welfare state?
Common-sense questions like that ought not be answered with
accusations of harboring “anti-immigrant sentiments,” a charge
recently leveled by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson.
The category “immigrant” encompasses too great a diversity for
the term “anti-immigrant” to have any useful meaning in the present
debate. Surely Mr. Rector has no “sentiments” against the cheerful
student/waitress, who didn’t break the law to come here, and one
suspects Mr. Rector would welcome many more such bright, ambitious
young immigrants.
Nor is there any need to insult the citizenry, as President Bush
has repeatedly done, by telling us that illegal aliens are “doing
jobs Americans won’t do.” My own daughter waits tables at Pizza Hut
to earn her college tuition, my wife works part-time as a provider
of janitorial services, and both of my brothers are truck drivers.
Are my kindred not American, Mr. President?
The bistro waitress didn’t volunteer any opinion of U.S.
immigration policy, and I didn’t raise the issue. Politics has
confused the debate so much that it’s become nearly as boring as
talking about Iraq and, in much the same way, nobody in the Bush
administration is listening to outsiders like us.
