A Simple Government (17 page)

But this improved technique for capturing gas has significant strategic implications, starting with bad news for the likes of Russia and Iran. Prior to the discovery of the potential of our beds of shale nationwide, those two countries were believed to control more than half of the world’s natural gas. Now there won’t be the expected demand for access to their supplies, meaning less wealth and power for them from this particular resource.

It’s not likely that natural gas will turn out to be the “forever” solution, but it will be useful as a transition or bridge fuel. That is recognized and admitted even by those who are almost single-mindedly pushing for renewables. In other words, if we’re sensible, we can use natural gas to buy us the time we need to achieve the long-term goal of making alternative energy both cheaper and more practical.

During that time, we can work to make clean coal a reality by perfecting carbon capture and storage in an economically feasible way. Nature has given us 30 percent of the world’s coal, so we would be foolish to ignore the potential of this resource. While we’ve been leading in the race to produce clean coal, our victory is by no means assured.

Finally, we have to continue developing more effective storage systems for wind power. Who can catch the wind? America can. Because wind is intermittent, sometimes producing more power than is needed right away, it becomes unreliable when that power is wasted or not strong enough. Promising projects include creating storage batteries that adjust the flow of the power, with computers keeping the batteries half charged as the wind picks up or dies down. Also, there is research on other possible storage systems, such as those using flywheels or compressed air.

Throughout this chapter, always mindful of Teddy as that thoughtful and creative student of nature and its relationship to humankind, I’ve been working with the underlying theme that we Americans must do three things to preserve our freedoms: feed ourselves, fuel ourselves, and fight for ourselves (that is, we have to manufacture our own weapons of defense). Whenever we have to depend on foreign sources for any of the three, we have in effect outsourced our freedoms, because other countries might not always be friendly to us and our goals.

Never should we trade away our independence—no matter what form it comes in. Not ever.

 

 

 

 

T
he notion of America as a great “melting pot” goes all the way back to at least the 1780s, when it was used to describe a young country in which various cultures and ethnicities could “melt together” into a more homogeneous whole. Somewhere along about the 1970s, proponents of multiculturalism started chafing at the idea that cultural identities might be lost in a melting pot and began favoring the “salad bowl” concept, where disparate elements mix but still remain unique. Quibbling over metaphors, perhaps, but whether you prefer the melting pot or the salad bowl vision of America, one thing is certain: Ours is a nation of immigrants. If you don’t believe me, ask a Native American sometime. Most of our family trees (mine, for instance) felt the spray of saltwater at some point, as our forefathers crossed oceans to seek out a better life in a new land called America.

But the important thing to remember, whether you prefer one metaphor over another, is that in both cases we’re talking about working from measured ingredients—coordinated, controlled, legal immigration, which has literally helped make America the country it is today. And immigrants continue to make important contributions. For instance, almost half of Silicon Valley’s venture capital-funded start-ups were cofounded by immigrants. If you’d seen a six-year-old Russian boy entering the United States in 1979, could you have imagined he would one day grow up to cofound Google and become one of the wealthiest men in the world, creating twenty thousand high-tech jobs in the process? No one did, but that’s exactly what happened in the case of Sergey Brin. Immigrants often bring a unique perspective and are motivated to match with hard work the many opportunities America has to offer—and that in itself is the very nature of the American dream. We’re all the better for it.

But most of today’s illegal immigrants bear little resemblance to their predecessors from previous generations. We can no more fault a man or woman for wanting to live in the United States than we can fault our own forefathers who sought a better future here. However, when our forefathers came to America, it was to be Americans—to live here and become a part of the fabric of this great country. In too many cases, illegal border crossers have no intention or desire to spend their lives in America but are coming simply for economic gain, to make money to send back to their families in Mexico or Central America. This creates a shadow culture living “off the grid,” never truly putting down roots in this country.

It’s all too easy to view illegal immigration as a battle between “us and them.” The toll this issue is taking on our people can be seen in the faces of those protesting both sides of the issue. The debate has become a powder keg nearing a flash point in some areas of the Southwest. Images on television of Anglos and Latinos screaming in each other’s faces bear too close a resemblance to ugly scenes from the American civil rights movement for my comfort. As president, George W. Bush said something I will always remember: “We cannot build a unified country by inciting the people to anger, or playing on anyone’s fears, or exploiting the issue of immigration for political gain. We must always remember that real lives will be affected by our debates and decisions, and that every human being has dignity and value, no matter what their citizenship papers say.”

When they live their lives in fear of being discovered, illegals neither fully benefit from nor contribute to society. One example would be an alien afraid to report a crime for fear of being arrested himself. Or the case Tom Brokaw documented of a family of illegal aliens who, when struck by the stomach flu, bought penicillin without a prescription from a local meat market, afraid to visit a clinic or hospital. The uncle nervously guessed at an appropriate injection amount for his two-year-old niece. This is not the American dream; America is not a third-world country, but this shadow America might as well be one.

It’s time to stop accepting illegal immigration as a necessary evil. One attorney who defended a large food processor in an immigration case commented, “If we didn’t have immigrant labor in this country we’d all die of scurvy, because no one would pick an orange.” I refuse to lean on this crutch. If we have jobs in this country that only the most desperate souls will take, for less than a living wage, that’s a wage problem, not an immigration problem, and we need to deal with it as such. Other employers will tell you we’ve bred a generation of entitled kids who think they’re “too good” to work summers digging a ditch on a construction site or washing dishes at a restaurant. Here again, that’s a parenting problem, not an illegal immigration problem.

If we successfully stem the tide of illegal workers in America and then come to the conclusion that there are workforce needs we cannot fulfill domestically, then we can address those needs by upping the quota of low-skilled workers we allow to immigrate legally or by increasing the number of temporary work visas to accommodate seasonal labor or whatever the specific workforce need may be. But turning a blind eye to entire industries built on illegal immigrant labor is no answer. It may seem cheap in the picking, but that’s a bushel of fruit that comes with a heavy cost in the larger scheme of things.

We need to get our own house in order and stop accepting that we can build an economy on the backs of illegal immigrants living in a shadow society. That’s not an economy; it’s a delusion. So let’s be clear: Wanting to secure our border with Mexico isn’t about xenophobia or racism or a belief that America is an exclusive club for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or anything of the sort—it’s about enforcing the law. And the law has a purpose: to make our country stronger and safer for everyone. Legal immigration makes our country stronger, while illegal immigration could prove to be our undoing.

In his major speech on immigration at American University on July 1, 2010, President Obama once again, just as he did with ObamaCare, tried to cram something down our throats that we don’t want and that is wrong for our country—amnesty for illegal immigrants.

In his speech, he blamed Arizona for passing a controversial anti- illegal immigration law, and he blamed Republicans for supporting it. “Unfortunately, reform has been held hostage to political posturing and special interest wrangling,” he said. No, he had it backward—securing the border has been held hostage to ideas like amnesty; it has been held hostage to political posturing.

“States like Arizona have decided to take matters into their own hands,” Obama said. But why did they take matters into their own hands? The job of the federal government is to
define
and
defend
our borders. We can’t be free if we aren’t safe, and we aren’t safe if our boundaries are ignored routinely by those without respect for our laws. Wasn’t it only because the federal government threw up its hands and refused to do its job that Arizona decided to take matters into its own hands? President Obama called the Arizona law “ill conceived” when his own amnesty plans were ill conceived and contrary to the will of the people.

The American people have been burned by the failed immigration “reforms” of 1965 and 1986, which didn’t seal our border and only made the problem worse. Amnesty doesn’t just reward those who have broken our laws; it encourages more people to come. If we don’t take our own laws seriously, why should those who want to come here? Having been duped before, the American people loudly and angrily rejected yet another amnesty bill when it was on the table in 2007—Congress got an earful and quickly backed off.

But it pushed the same poison again in 2010. Typically, when someone from Washington talks about “immigration reform,” they’re talking about amnesty. The “blueprint” presented by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York in April 2010 was just the same old Democrat call. He wanted illegals currently here to pay a fine and back taxes and then have a “provisional status” for eight years. Amnesty was and is always a terrible idea. Think about it—if you let it be known that there is a program whereby once you’re in the country you’ll be allowed to stay, what message does that send to someone contemplating an illegal border crossing? Get in at all costs! Once you’re here, you’ll be set. That’s been the case not just in America, where the 1986 amnesty law gave us triple the number of illegals over the course of the following twenty years, but also in Europe, where amnesty programs have produced similar unintended consequences. It’s just human nature—amnesty incentivizes illegal border crossing. It’s a carrot, not a stick. And amnesty would be especially disastrous when millions of Americans are looking for jobs.

President Obama’s immigration speech and Senator Schumer’s blueprint were both consistent with the message Obama allegedly gave to Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona in a one-on-one meeting at the White House. According to Kyl, Obama told him the Democrats didn’t want his administration to secure the border because then Republicans wouldn’t negotiate on comprehensive immigration reform. What the president doesn’t seem to understand is that securing the border is not a political bargaining chip; it is a federal obligation and duty.

Securing the border is also a national-security issue and an important part of the war on terror. There are Syrians, Sudanese, Iranians, Afghans, Iraqis, Lebanese, Nigerians, Pakistanis, Saudis, Somalis, and Yemenis being caught trying to sneak across our border with Mexico—and I don’t think all these Muslims are coming to pick fruit or mow our lawns.

What’s known in Arizona as Senate Bill 1070 (formally known as the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act) has become a lightning rod in the national debate over illegal immigration. And Governor Jan Brewer, who stepped into the job when Janet Napolitano (who had previously vetoed similar measures) left Arizona to become secretary of homeland security, is bravely holding that light-ning rod despite the storm surrounding her. The fact of the matter is, Arizonans can’t afford the luxury of debating illegal immigration as an esoteric policy discussion—for them, it’s a matter of frontline border security. As the state with the highest incidence of illegal border crossings, Arizona has an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants, and in the words of Governor Brewer, Arizonans “have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act. But decades of federal inaction and misguided policy have created a dangerous and unacceptable situation.” Even Arizona’s Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords defended the law, saying her constituents are sick and tired of the federal government failing to protect the border and calling the current situation “completely unacceptable.”

Let’s be clear on what Arizona’s controversial law actually does—it tasks Arizona law enforcement officers with . . . well, enforcing the law. Controversial, huh? Federal law requires certain aliens to register with the federal government and carry their registration documents at all times. What the Arizona law does (at least the part that’s drawing so much attention) is obligate a law enforcement officer, when making a lawful stop, detention, or arrest, to make an attempt to determine a person’s immigration status if there is probable cause to suspect the person is an alien not in possession of the required legal documents. Basically, it tasks state and local law enforcement with helping enforce federal immigration law. This is Arizona trying to step in and get the job done where the feds are not. It’s a strategy called “attrition through enforcement,” and to me it sounds an awful lot like plain old law enforcement.