Immigration Can Determine Where You Sleep
By Adam C. Kolasinski
The Virginia State Senate
has just passed a bill
that will allow Fairfax County to outlaw
sleeping in any room of a house except the
bedroom.
On the surface, such a
measure seems rather odd.
What do I care if my neighbor falls
asleep in front of the TV?
What harm have I done by allowing a
friend with exceptionally poor apartment-hunting
skills to crash on my couch for the past six
months? (To
be fair to my friend,
I live in New York).
What possible interest would the county
have in regulating what room people sleep in,
for heaven’s sake?
Well, apparently some
people in Fairfax County have turned their homes
into boarding houses,
jamming scores of people into
single-family residences.
But why has this become a problem now,
all of a sudden? Well, the laws of political
correctness prevent anyone from coming right out
and saying it, but there are clues in the AP
report as to the “root cause.”
A Republican opponent of the bill had
this to say:
“What this bill does
is make no distinction between 27 illegal aliens
and a family of four trying to care for an
ailing parent.”
Another
clue is the fact that one of the most vocal
groups lobbying against the bill happens to be
the League of United Latin American Citizens.
Starting
to get the picture?
Because
of current immigration law, the vast majority of
immigrants coming in to this country are poor
Third-Worlders who just happen to have relatives
here. Most
come from countries where squalor and
over-crowed living conditions are the norm. They
have little money or skills with which to earn
money. They naturally crash with their
relatives.
Since the relatives that sponsor them are
not usually too well off themselves, they
don’t have the extra bedrooms to accommodate
all the cousins, aunts, uncles, adult siblings,
and other extended family members that current
law allows them to import.
The
result: Scores
of aliens crowding into small apartments or
houses. The
Republican cited above got only one thing wrong:
the aliens are not always, or even usually,
illegal.
Naturally,
this sort of residential crowding has all kinds
of negative externalities: poorer sanitation,
scarcer parking, crowding in public places, and
the like. So it is perfectly legitimate for
Fairfax County to attempt to remedy the problem.
Unfortunately, such a remedy will
inevitably result in an abridgement of
Americans’ liberties - illustrating yet again
the stupidity of open-borders libertarians.
Adam
C. Kolasinski
Republicans
and the Minority Vote, by Adam C. Kolasinski
[Adam is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New
York. The
views expressed herein are entirely his own and
do not necessarily represent those of the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York or any entity
within the Federal Reserve System.
Adam can be reached at
akolasinski@hotmail.com]
February 01,
2001