Washington Post Edit Page Echo Chamber Booming Bogus Claims On AZ Illegals

Talk about April Fool's pranks! On April 1^st, our feckless federal government announced that the U.S. added 216,000 jobs in March, bringing estimate of the unemployment rate to 8.8%. [VDARE.com note: For Ed Rubenstein's analysis, click here]

Anyone who can read knows that with some eight million illegal aliens and 13 million legal immigrants taking jobs from our citizens, we are in for a long run of bad news. But with the real unemployment rate, counting underemployed and those who stopped looking, twice as high as the official rate, you still hear major Main Stream Media outlets like the Washington Post arguing these are jobs American citizens won't do.

WAPO's March 31st editorial, The madness of mass deportation: Can business bring Arizona to its senses? certainly belied its Editorial Page masthead claim "An Independent Newspaper" —unless this paper means independent of American citizens' interests. Sinking circulation and ad revenues leave newspapers dependent on advertising from businesses who favor open borders. 

This editorial suggests that the Arizona law will be a "wake up call to the Nation's business community". It claims the law would trigger a mass deportation effort and cost the state "millions of dollars in lost revenue for hotels, restaurants and other businesses that rely on visitors"—the very same businesses that could hire Americans, but don't want to pay decent wages! Ugh.

WAPO's claim is based on a new report, A Rising Tide or a Shrinking Pie, by the Center for American Progress (which has done this before) and the Immigration Policy Center, [email it]—both groups which the Post admits are "sympathetic to illegal immigrants, but intellectually serious", whatever that means. Apparently, taking jobs from Americans is dandy if you are "intellectually serious"!

WAPO says the report argues that "full scale deportation of illegal immigrants in Arizona would be tantamount to a major recession, quite possibly more severe than that of 2008-9".

How, if one is being "intellectually serious" could one argue that opening up more jobs for American citizens would cause a recession amidst the job recession we are now in? Go figure!

 WAPO says the report claims that "undocumented workers, [oops, we again misname these illegal aliens] who make up 7% of Arizona's population and 9.4 percent of its workforce, are critical to the state's economic health; not only do they do vital jobs that others [you know, those out of work American citizens] will not, they also shop, pay rent, pay taxes, and sustain the jobs of many other legal workers [really hard to understand how they sustain etc.....]." 

Even the Post admits

"The report is not definitive. For instance it makes no attempt to calculate the costs of providing services that state and local government would incur from mass legalization. Nor does it try to estimate the fiscal benefits of mass deportation, including savings for school systems that are constitutionally obligated to educate the children of illegal immigrants."

But other agencies, including the Center for Immigration Studies, a truly intellectually serious research organization, have done such estimates. And they are substantial. Why no WAPO editorials about them?

Conversely, VDARE.com's Ed Rubenstein has shown that the net economic contribution of illegals is nugatory. How could it be anything else? They are overwhelmingly unskilled.

As anyone who has read the law knows, Arizona's SB 1070 merely assists Federal efforts to enforce our existing immigration laws in securing our porous borders. But apparently, neither the Post nor the report issuers care about the costs of giving up our national sovereignty by permitting limitless illegal arrivees for as far as the eye can see.

Incidentally, these claimants admit their main arguments about the economic impact stem from "A worst-case scenario, in which all of Arizona s 445,000 illegal immigrants are deported," which they admit "is highly unlikely".  

So why are they spouting such Orwellian disinformation? I guess it's to please their advertisers. Sad.

Donald A. Collins [email him], is a freelance writer living in Washington DC and a former long time member of the board of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. His views are his own.