Letters

From the January 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Compare that price to the $25 or $50 one can pay on the streets right now for fraudulent documents. Don't you think raising the price to $5,000 would serve as a deterrent? It is probably true that no documents we make will ever be totally fraud-proof. But by making them as fraud resistant as possible, we can at least make them much more difficult and substantially more expensive to reproduce illegally.

If we are serious about curbing illegal immigration, then we must make it more difficult for those who are here illegally to obtain work. The very least we can do is make it possible for employers to follow the laws we make.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein
Washington, DC

It is important to set the record straight on some of the provisions contained in my immi gration reform legislation.

First, Mr. Garvin asserts that I want to "reduce" U.S. refugee admissions to 50,000. My bill, the Immigration in the National Interest Act of 1995, sets a flexible ceiling at 50,000 annual refugee admissions, but allows the level to be raised by Congress at any time or by the president in emergency situations. The current refugee process is broken and must be fixed.

Mr. Garvin also argues that my legislation would allow the government to seize the assets of employers suspected of hiring illegal aliens. However, H.R. 2202 contains no such provision. Neither does it contain a national worker registry linking the databases of the Social Security Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as proclaimed by Mr. Garvin.

Besides the misinformation on my legislation in this article, which makes one wonder whether the author has ever read the bill, the tone it projects adds nothing to the immigration debate. Your magazine should be ashamed at the blatant attempt to play on fear and emotion as represented by the picture of an arm tattooed with a bar code on the cover. America needs to have a calm, reasoned debate on its immigration policiesnot one that panders to baseless arguments and false emotion.
Rep. Lamar Smith
Chairman
Subcommittee of Immigration and Claims
Washington, DC

Your readers must be puzzled by your recent personal attacks on me, particularly consider ing that in 20 years in mainstream journalism I dare say I've done more for libertarianism than your writers John J. Miller and Glenn Garvin (whoever they are). Or indeed, given your sadly small circulation, than you.

Thus in "Bringing the Border War Home," Mr. Garvin tries to smear me as a "racial scien tist." But in fact in my book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disas ter, I explicitly eschew The Bell Curve's conclusion that the average IQ of the post-1965 immi grant inflow is significantly below that of native-born Americans. Instead, I rely entirely on the overwhelming economic and sociological evidence against the
current mass immigration policy. Mr. Garvin's smear is not merely a fabrication: It is a calcu lated effort, given contemporary standards, to drive me out of public discourse.

The reason for this extraordinary behavior is simple: The libertarian establishment simply has no answer to my dem-onstration, in Alien Nation , that the current mass immigration is not the result of open borders, but instead is determined
in minute detail, as to numbers, origins, and skill levels, by a complex, perverse, and highly discriminatory government policythe 1965 Immigration Act,
as subsequently amended; and Washington's betrayal of its constitutional
obligation to protect the states against invasion. Accordingly, establishment enforcers must either abuse me personally, as does Mr. Garvin, or suppress my book's central thesis altogether, as did Mr. Miller in his review ("Wretched Refuse," June).

Messrs. Garvin and Miller are in the same position as the boosters of dams and water projects who gulled an earlier generation of libertarians into thinking these projects were the result of market forces. In fact, they were the result of government intervention and subsidy. An entire school of free market environmentalism developed from this episode. It is time today's libertarians recognized the social engineering implications of Washington's current mass immi gration policy. To say nothing of the fact that markets require metamarketsinstitutional and cultural frameworksof which property rights are only the most obvious aspect.

At least the dam-boosters were after
a dishonest buck. What is Garvin and Miller's agenda, and yours? Peter Brimelow
Forbes
New York, NY

John J. Miller replies: Come on Peter. If I were involved in any kind of conspiracy to "suppress" your ideas about immigration, then please explain why the Center for Equal Opportu nitywhere I serve as vice presidentsponsored a debate on the subject between you and Ron K. Unz at the National Press Club last spring. I not only helped conceptualize that event, but also organize and promote it. You may have sold a few copies of your book as a result. Either you have a strange definition of suppression, or I'm just no good at it.

Glenn Garvin replies: If Sen. Feinstein would like to withdraw from the vanguard of the movement for a combination national ID card and work permit, I think that's great. But I don't see the slightest suggestion in her letter that she intends to do so. Nor do I see any indication that she comprehends the problems with such a card. She admits that all kinds of fraudulent docu ments can be purchased on the street right now for $25but it is precisely from those fraudulent documents that the federal government will create a database and issue the new national ID card.

And though she expresses dismay at the way current law plunges employers into bureau cratic hell on worker-eligibility verification, her solution is to plunge all of us into that same purgatory. Generally I oppose federal porkbarrel programs, but I think I speak for most Ameri cans when I say that I wish Sen. Feinstein would go back to lobbying for useless zillion-dollar Defense Department projects for California and leave the rest of us alone.

Rep. Smith says he seeks a calm,
reasoned debate on immigration policies. He would contribute to that debate if he would stop playing games. The article didn't refer to H.R. 2202 because that bill didn't exist when the story went to press. Instead the story specifically mention sections of H.R. 1915, which was Rep. Smith's bill at the time.

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