Race Baiting for Open Borders

While I was over at No Treason I also spotted a post titled "The Real Reason Some People Want Closed Borders". by John Lopez. Based on the number of comments, I see this is an issue people aren't willing to discuss, lest they be called a racist. Which is a reasonable assumption given poor reasoning that went into this post.

One commenter got the gist of the post.

In my decade of libertarian discussions and debate, I have yet to hear an anti-immigrant position that at it's essence in principles did not boil down to "I just don't like those brown-skinned other people"

Although this commenter goes a little further than claiming it is only "some people".

John's post starts with a picture of some illegal immigrants who beat a team of MIT students for an engineering prize. He then writes:

Let that sink in for a minute.

I wasn't surprised so it left me wondering what I was suppose to let sink in. It's no surprise to me that a U.S. high school team might beat MIT. I've heard of this kind of thing before.

It certainly would have been more surprising had I believed that illegal immigrants were not are allowed to go to taxpayer funded schools. After all then they would have had to pay for their own education. That would be hard to do on an illegal off the books salary. So I don't think we are to be surprised that they got a good education because they were here illegally. Since most people know that doesn't preclude one from getting a free US education.

That leaves me with one thing. We were suppose to be surprised because they were "brown skinned". That leads me however to wonder exactly what racial makeup John expects us to assume on the part of the MIT team. Here I was assuming that team had perhaps a Chinese and East Indian or two. Is he some sort of racist that assumes MIT is all white?

I’ve given enough of the background so now on to my point. This post wasn't about me. Johns post was mainly a hack job on one Ira Mehlman. I found it hard to believe that a guy named Ira Mehlman would be concerned about immigration for solely racist reasons given historical facts about Jews, or for the fear of an inability of Jews to compete academically with Hispanics. I did look it up, and Ira is a Jew, or at least he is a co-founder of an organization titled "American Jewish Immigration Policy Institute".
So not finding this Johns post credible I decided to find out Mehlman's real reasons were. Was he against immigration for the same reasons as say a Chuck Pearson. Someone who, by the way, has a problem with Ira.

You can't read a news story like "Mexican Official Wants Border Eliminated" without running straight into a Jew. "'It is clear that their objective is to affect the domestic policies of the U.S.' said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform" -- thus proving once more Pearson's Law. "Any organization that is not explicitly anti-Semitic ends up being run by Jews." Surprise!

I doubt it. This guys so dumb he didn't even recognize that Ira was arguing against a fully open border with Mexico. Ira seems smarter than that.

One of the first things I wondered about is how Mehlman got pulled into this MIT article. He wasn't mentioned at either of the links provided by John. The way John made his post it seemed like Ira couldn't help but speak up about the winning of this award. Is Ira against private organizations awarding prizes to illegals? I don't think so. I found the original article at Wired here. They made the connection but with a lot of intervening text that John removed. Ira's quote wasn't about the prize. It really only pertained to taxpayer money going to illegals.

Next I wondered why John felt justified in saying this was Ira's "real" reason for wanting closed borders. In the colloquial the "real reason" is a sole hidden agenda. Was it true that Ira was hiding something and that it was the sole reason he was for closed borders? Well, firstly the reason isn't hidden. He states it plain and clear. Furthermore, he has lots of other reasons, it's just that John didn't feel the need to mention them, or perhaps even to look them up. Reasons like a quite justified fear of muslim immigration, a perhaps ill informed concern about unskilled labor, concerns with overpopulation, infrastructure and tax burden, also concerns about fairness on the issue of the educations grants from the state.

Well so far John has lead me astray on most of these facts, so I began to wonder if Mehlman was even wants closed borders as the title states. Again, I have been mislead. Turns out Ira is all for immigration as one would expect given his heritage. It's just that he wants it done legally. The opposite of an open borders position is not closed borders after all.

Of course, maybe I got John all wrong, and he was moralizing about some other point besides racism. If it truly was about education grants then why didn't he balance his article and complain about foreign countries not allowing US citizens access to their programs? Then an Ira Mehlman could win one of those lucrative oil revenue supported grants from say Saudi Arabia. That would be a laugh if Jews won all the grants from Saudi Arabia.