Hell, Oakminster, I post things that make people angry, and I’m not a troll. An important consideration is whether a poster does it only to provide a cover for abusive behavior (or prompt it on the part of others), or if there’s some honestly-held, if repulsive and ignorant, conviction about a real issue.
I think it’s probable that magellan01 sincerely believes many of the things he says about illegal immigration (some, I’m not so sure about). The greatest pretense lies in his contention that he wants anything resembling a productive discussion of the matter, a pretense he seems to be in the process of dropping. As I said before, I think he uses these threads to hang out a shingle, just to assert that his is the name to trust for all your foreigner-fearing needs. That’s why they show up so regularly, and why he has so little regard for their content. The point isn’t to convince anybody, and in fact magellan01 has no use for anyone susceptible to the facts and logic some posters manage to sneak into the conversation. The point is to attract the one or two lost souls encountering the thread who don’t need convincing because they already hate all the right people and ideas, and who will recognize in him a kindred spirit, perhaps even (because of the courage with which he pseudonymously withstands the typed derision of others) someone to look up to. They may not post in the thread, but they might e-mail him or catch up with him elsewhere, and then he’s got another friend.
Think of these threads as a kind of personals ad: “SDMB poster, male, nativist, seeks same for moonlit patrols along ill-defended border. Interest in sports a plus, interest in protecting the nation’s vital bodily fluids a must.” That kind of thing.
As for the latest desultory attempt to saddle illegal immigrants with all the ills of the age, I’ll just go with this, from here(Edited for length and clarity):
[QUOTE=Me]
…Let’s say, as the Center for Immigration Studies(1) (hardly an “open borders” crowd) does, that illegal immigrants impose a net cost of $10 billion/year at the federal level, and about twice that or a little more overall. That’s about where the rabidly anti-immigration City Journal(2) pegs it , also, so we’ll call the mostly non-partisan NRC(3) guess of $22 billion about right. This is approximately two-tenths of a percent of U.S. GDP(4) or, to put it in agricultural terms (many illegal immigrants become agricultural workers here), about what we give away in subsidies for corn alone(5). Or, bombastically, four percent of our military budget(6) , two years’ worth of Missile Defense research(7), or a fourteen week run for the Iraq war extravaganza(8). Or a third of a $70 billion tax cut. Money to pay for things we really care about is just everywhere.
So the cost of illegal immigration is not high at all in terms of what we can actually afford, and you know what? We’re not even counting such ancillary benefits as the lower cost of goods and services, and the economic impact of immigrants’ own consumerism. Nor are we counting the benefits gained from the descendants of illegal immigrants who were either properly educated (or managed to learn anyway) and improved their lot, by inches at a time or by leaps and bounds, and are now paying the kind of taxes you expect your neighbors to pay, and wouldn’t be here if …. but let’s continue to ignore that for now. Let’s assume that illegal immigration will cost us $22 billion/year, fifty bucks per, just so we can look at the Statue of Liberty without thinking about how much we could get for it if we sold it for scrap. Maybe I’m too sentimental about the history and civics classes I took, but my God what a bargain, to be the country that takes those the rest of the world doesn’t want and through freedom and tolerance and sheer brass forges them into the greatest nation (yes, in spite of recent missteps) in the history of the planet, for an expenditure equaling two one-thousandths of our wealth.
Here’s the problem: people lie about the problem. If the problem were really that school budgets were overextended, people would increase funding for the schools. If the problem were really that hospitals couldn’t provide care profitably, we’d fund universal health care. If the problem were really a lack of jobs, we’d actually compete for them (the thesis that there are a host of uneducated, non-English-speaking, disease-ridden people against whom we native-borns just cannot compete for jobs is not a fact, it’s an expression of self-loathing). But we go to the polls and vote against taxes to fund schools, we don’t support universal health care, we don’t apply for jobs picking grapes and mowing lawns, and we certainly don’t learn Spanish just because it might help us get a better job…
I get the strong impression that our childrens’ education, or public health, or tax burdens, are being cited as problems only because the proffered solution is to “seal the borders” and “send every illegal home.” Easier solutions (it wouldn’t be cheaper and easier to find another 20 billion dollars than to scour the country for 12 million illegal immigrants and their children and secure and patrol a five-thousand mile border forever?) do not interest FAIR and company. Health and education and crime are not, for them, problems worth solving except insofar as the solution involves punishing and preventing and deporting people from the wrong side of the border. And there’s no conceivable solution otherwise. If I ask, “If you can’t blame illegal immigrants, what do you do?” the answer comes, “I blame illegal immigrants.” This makes it hard to believe that their concern is social services, as opposed to getting rid of certain people they don’t like…
(1) http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscaltranscript.html
(2) http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_2_do_we_want.html
(3) http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/kouri/051007
(4) http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications...r/2001rank.html
(5) Agricultural subsidy - Wikipedia
(6) Defense budget 101.
(7) Defense budget 101.
(8) http://www.usatoday.com/news/politi...war-clock_x.htm
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