The Crossed Pond

…to the problem of the immigration bill (article from Saturday).

Mysteriously, it looks almost entirely like what the anti-bill people were asking for before the immigration bill went down: a big fence, and enforcement on employers. This piece could an exemplar entitled “how to write an anti-conservative putatively conservative article”:

It has bad maths:

It’s estimated that about 750,000 illegal immigrants enter the United States every year. If so, that implies that more than 10% of the illegal population arrived within the last 24 months, and about one-third arrived since George W. Bush’s inauguration. These people are not deeply rooted in the U.S.

I can believe the conclusion, but the implication requires more data (like, how many go home, how many are re-entering, etc).

The article also has something that looks suspiciously like a national ID requirement (or, at least, for those people that want to work or get any of the other goodies for which you need an SSN):

Our first priority should be to create a system that allows employers to instantly and reliably check whether a job applicant is legally entitled to work here. Social Security cards should include photographs. Employers should be able to feed the card into a scanner and confirm that a prospective employee is eligible to work here.

That sounds really cheap. No, really. What could be more affordable than re-issueing every Social Security card in the US with a certified tamper-proof photo and some fake-proof digital information that can be read with a scanner that you’re going to force every employer to buy or, otherwise, rent access to.

But you’re going to need that ID card to show you’re an American if the police every stop you for any reason (unless, you know, you want to be deported from your own country):

Beyond that, police should check the residency status of everybody they have legal cause to stop or question. All arrested illegals should be swiftly deported. States and localities should stop accommodating illegality with hiring halls and driver’s licenses issued with no regard for residency status. If we emphasized such enforcement, we probably would not need a border fence.

What could be more conservative than using the Clean Water Act as an inspiration:

And if an employer hires an illegal immigrant, he or she should be held accountable. Violators of the Clean Water Act can be fined up to $25,000 a day for a first offense; comparable liability would go far in enforcing immigration laws.

And finally, disparage quoted figures that show (very) small net gain from immigration by citing unquantified disadvantages:

The current U.S. legal immigration system does not serve the needs of the country much better than its tolerance of illegality. A decade ago, the National Academy of Sciences studied the aggregate social costs and benefits of current immigration policy. It estimated that U.S. immigration policy adds about $10 billion a year to the national income — that is, less than one-tenth of 1%, virtually nothing.

Yet for particular states and towns, mass migration is a cause of trauma and upheaval.

Oh wait, there is quantification; quantification of a cost that is presumably already factored into the original quoted NAS report (admittedly a decade old, but Frum picked it, not me):

We all know that the population of those without healthcare insurance is rising — with all manner of attendant woes. But did you know that three-quarters of the increase is driven by immigration? And all of this for virtually zero net economic benefit.

Jesus wept.

It’s not like the case against the bill is so difficult to make from a conservative viewpoint, nor the case for alternatives to the bill, that Frum has to serve up this bilge.