Andrew Friedman

Hypocrisy and a Red Herring

Tonight, President Bush will officially jump into the fray of the national debate about immigration reform.

Yesterday's New York Times, though, had an interesting article about New York Congressman Peter King, a leader of the legislative assault on immigrant rights and a co-sponsor of H.R. 4437, the notorious Sensenbrenner-King bill. The bill, which passed the House in December, would criminalize any support of undocumented immigrants. For example, a church soup kitchen that served food to an undocumented child could be prosecuted for their generosity.

It turns out, though, that King's lawn is maintained by immigrants, some documented and some undocumented. King's hypocrisy is striking. He seeks to criminalize charity for immigrants, and pontificates about reigning in lawless employers, but himself hires undocumented workers. He seeks to hide behind the technicality that he hired a friend's company to do his lawn, and his friend is the one who hired the workers. Let's see if King seeks to prosecute his friend now that the Times has broken this story.

The Times article also includes a great example of King using faulty logic and a red herring to support his anti-immigrant position. King is quoted as saying that, "After 9/11, we don't have the luxury of allowing unlimited illegal immigrants into the country."

First of all, nobody participating in the immigrant rights movement has called for unlimited illegal immigration. King is simply battling a straw man. He is also manipulatively trying to tie immigration to national security. The action in Washington, though, is not focused on border security, but, rather, what to do about the 12 million or so undocumented workers who are already in the U.S. All of the proposals that include a path to citizenship, as opposed to deportation or temporary guest worker programs, include extensive backround checks as part of the process. King is fear-mongering and being disingenuous, and he is doing so because his argument loses on the merits.

The anti-immigrant crowd aserts that immigrants are shredding America's safety net by accessing government services, like Food Stamps and Medicaid, that they don't pay for. The problem for them, though, is that undocumented immigrants are not eligible for these benefits, and legal immigrants use them significantly less than native-born Americans.

For example, nearly 33 percent of low-income native citizens used Medicaid in 2001, compared to only 13.2 percent of low-income non-citizens. Also, a study on immigrants and taxes that was done by the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 and 1998 concluded that the average immigrant and their immediate descendents pay $80,000 more in tax contributions over the course of their lives than they receive in benefits.

Let's keep these facts in mind as we watch President Bush's speech tonight.

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Posted at 12:55 PM, May 15, 2006 in Immigration
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