And another another thing...

Would the spokespeople for the party of Tom Delay, Duke Cunningham, Alphonso Jackson, Elliot Abrams, Ollie North, Scooter Libby, Dan Safavian, James Tobin, and Jack Abramoff please, please, please stop complaining about how people who support immigrants' rights are supporting criminals and amnesty for their crimes (and that was just a list of the current gang).

Please? Please.

And what he said:

Of course, the greatest irony is that the only halfway decent excuse for keeping immigrant laborers segregated from the rest of the working class is the faux-righteous outrage that the immigrants in question are “breaking the law”. One wonders where these defenders of civic virtue have been over the past few years as the Bush Justice Department has made a deliberate effort to cut down on the enforcement of laws that make it a crime to hire undocumented workers. Apparently the only crimes worth shedding crocodile tears over are the ones committed by poor Mexicans. Perhaps we should take a cue from the Republican response to the President’s own lawbreaking by working to bring immigrants’ residency status back “within the scope of the law”.

And what he said:

NEW RULE. To follow up on Matt's spat with David Frum, I think a rule needs to be adopted: If you don't care about income inequality normally, you're not allowed to make it your central argument against immigration. Frum is a guy who, throughout his career, has argued that income inequality has simply been a surge of salaries at the top. And he's been similarly unconcerned about mobility (which has decreased across the board, not just for Mexicans). The rich get richer, but the poor don't get poorer, so why worry? And to show how attentive he's been to the issue, searches on his blog for "inequality" or "mobility" turn up, literally, nothing. But when the subject turns to immigration, both become issues of paramount importance.

Last night, over drinks at the Rooster, we were talking about what separated intellectual dishonesty from simple dishonesty. And this is an excellent example. Frum's arguments on intergenerational wage convergence among Latinos aren't lies. So far as I can tell, and my read was admittedly quick, they're perfectly true. But Frum isn't a guy who cares about intergenerational wage convergence, or equality of incomes -- he's dishonest in his concern. He may worry about what low incomes or poor educational attainment are correlated with, but he's curiously unwilling to make that connection explicit. To be fair, though, Frum isn't the only, or even the worst, offender. That comes in the right's widespread adoption of George Borjas's work, which I say more on here.

Yep. I'm done with this.