VDH, always a must-read-----The Civic Cost of Illegal Immigration | Hoover Institution

The Civic Cost of Illegal Immigration | Hoover Institution
The Civic Cost of Illegal Immigration

by Victor Davis Hanson-Tuesday, March 28, 2017

"The arguments for ignoring illegal immigration are as well-known as the self-interested motives that drive it.
In the abstract, open-borders advocates argue that in a globalized culture, borders are becoming reactionary and artificial constructs. 

They should not interrupt more natural ebbs and flows of migrant populations.
More concretely, an array of vested interests sees advantage in dismantling the border: 

• employers in hospitality, construction, food processing, and agriculture prefer hard-working low-wage immigrants, whose social needs are often subsidized by the government and who are reluctant to organize for higher wages.
• The Democratic Party welcomes in impoverished immigrants from Latin America and Mexico. It hopes to provide generous social welfare assistance and thereby shepherd new arrivals and their offspring into the salad bowl of victimization and identity politics—and thereby change the electoral map of key states from red to blue.
• La Raza activists see unchecked illegal immigration as useful in maintaining a large pool of unassimilated and poor foreign nationals who look to group leaders, thereby ensuring the continuance of what has become an industry of ethnic activism and careerism.
• Mexico—which is now offering advice to illegal immigrants on how best to avoid U.S. federal immigration authorities—has the most to gain by porous borders. It envisions the United States as a relief valve destination to export its own poor and desperate rather than to have them agitate and demand costly social services from Mexico City.

Yet lost in this conundrum are the pernicious effects of illegal immigration on the idea of citizenship in a consensual society. 

...The first pillar of citizenship is the idea that the nation-state has the sole right to create and control its own borders.
...When borders are fluid and unenforced, it inevitably follows that assimilation and integration also become lax, as society loses a sense of who, or even where, their residents are. 

And the idea that the Bill of Rights should apply to those beyond U.S. borders may be a noble sentiment, but the practical effect of such utopianism is to open a Pandora’s box of impossible enforcement, affronts to foreign governments, endless litigation, and a diversion of resources away from protecting the rights of citizens at home.
Residency is also confused with citizenship, but they are no more the same than are guests at a dinner party and the party’s hosts, who own the home..."

Lots more, read on!