The other day Brenda Walker had a blogpost titled Forty Percent of Americans Blame Illegal Immigration for Job Loss. That's based on a Byron York story, and a Rutgers Poll:“Diminished Lives and Futures: A Portrait of America in the Great Recession Era”.

But that's not actually the right view. I mean, I know it's "racist" and "prejudiced" to say that illegals take jobs, and of course, it's also true.

But they're not the real problem—the real problem is legal immigration which is not only larger numerically, but displaces a better class of American.

Illegals take jobs from poor Americans (drywalling, carpentry, farm labor) but middle-class job displacement in corporations is due to legal immigration, H1B visas, and visas of all kinds. But no one even thinks about legal immigration, or an immigration moratorium. In effect, border security and deportation efforts, if they happened, would be an attempt to declare a moratorium on illegal immigration. There should be no need to declare a moratorium on that, since it's already illegal.

But the idea of legal immigration being a problem isn't even on people's radar. In 2007, I noted the frothing-at-the-mouth fit John Podhoretz took when Mark Krikorian pointed out that immigration is incompatible with a modern society:

The Corner on National Review Online
Thursday, October 18, 2007

“Immigration Is Incompatible With a Modern Society”

So sayeth Mark Krikorian. Thank you, Mark. You have written honest words. And this is where I came in. Nearly four years ago, speaking out in modest support for the original Bush proposal on immigration, I was hammered by John Derbyshire and others for not understanding the profound difference between LEGAL IMMIGRATION (good) and ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION (bad). Now it seems we are to view immigration — all immigration — as incompatible with a modern society. So why didn’t you immigration restrictionists just say so in the first place, instead of hiding behind the word “illegal”? Why didn’t you then acknowledge your problem wasn’t with law-breaking at all but rather with the fact that any people are coming in? Could it be that you knew then it was an extremist view that only had support on the fringe, but that there would be real strength behind using the illegality of illegal immigration to rally people to your cause? And that now, with real movement in your direction ideologically, you now feel freer to advocate openly what you have always hinted at but have never quite said so blatantly?

Again, I thank you for your honesty. America is no longer to admit immigrants. Period. I hope you will now drop the weasel adjective “illegal” from the rhetoric from here on in, because otherwise, you will just be trying to snow people.

10/18 10:19 PM

Of course, this is not only evil, it's stupid. Mark Krikorian pointed out that he'd been talking about legal immigration for years, JPod just hadn't been listening. (He's not a good listener.)

But it's also self-refuting.Every country, has after all, the right to control its own immigration and decide what immigrants it wants.

I mean,Peter Brimelow didn't write Illegal Alien Nation, he wrote Alien Nation, Krikorian isn't head of the Center For Illegal Immigration Studies, but the Center For Immigration Studies. Legal immigration is the part of immigration that can be controlled.