STANFORD -- With the publication of The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today’s (Ivan R. Dee, 2007), three astute observers of the situation argue that today’s pro-immigration advocates are simply apologists for the status quo—a situation in which we have lost control of our southern border, so that the vast majority of our immigrants are now illegal Mexicans.
Poor, uneducated, and unskilled, these newcomers, however hard many of them work at their mostly menial jobs, add much less to the national wealth than they cost the taxpayers for their health care, the education of their children, and (too often) their incarceration.
Coauthor Heather Mac Donald describes how an epidemic of crime, gangs, and illegitimacy is creating a new Hispanic underclass and how the Mexican government aids and abets illegal immigration to the United States and thwarts state and local attempts to resist it.
Steven Malanga shows how, despite much argument to the contrary, Hispanic immigrants produce a net cost to the American economy, not a net benefit, and goes on to outline the kind of immigration policy that would be both liberal and in America’s interest.
Victor Davis Hanson, the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, writes about his own experience growing up in California’s farm country and watching the Hispanic immigrant influx transform his home state.
The Immigration Solution, published under the auspices of the Manhattan Institute, proposes the same type of policy successfully employed by other advanced nations, one that admits skilled and educated people on the basis of what they can do for the country, not what the country can do for them.
Heather Mac Donald is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Burden of Bad Ideas and Are Cops Racist? Victor Davis Hanson is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other; his syndicatedcolumn appears in newspapers throughout the country. Steven Malanga’s most recent book is The New New Left; he is also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Myron Magnet is the former editor of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute.
