Time to Take
Illegal Immigration Seriously
The newsweekly dramatically breaks
with elite orthodoxy.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
By Heather Mac Donald
City Journal
The cover says it all: two fists ripping a hole in the American flag. And with that striking image, Time magazine just may have started a revolution in the mainstream press’s attitude towards illegal immigration.
For decades, public outrage over illegal immigration met only scorn or indifference from the elite media. The New York Times recently dismissed opponents of border trespassing as the
“ ‘what part of illegal don’t you understand’ crowd.” But with its September 20 cover story, WHO LEFT THE DOOR OPEN?, Time magazine has crossed over to the other side. The 9,000-plus-word article meticulously documents the destruction wrought by illegal aliens. More important, it seethes with indignation at the Bush administration’s unwillingness to stop that destruction. The story’s tone—calling border trespassers “invaders,” who seek to “mask their unlawful presence”—was once confined to the ghetto of talk radio. No longer. And if Time—that venerable voice of the establishment—can fume that it is “outrageously easy to sneak in,” maybe politicians will start to pay attention when the public voices the same complaint.
WHO LEFT THE DOOR OPEN? explodes every myth that open-borders proponents churn out. The most crucial one is the “we can’t turn off the flow” myth. According to this lie, the border invasion is an unstoppable fact of nature that has nothing to do with government action or inaction. The only solution, say the apologists, is to legalize illegality.
Time is having none of it. “Who’s to blame for all the intruders?” the magazine asks. “The problem is one of the U.S.’s own making. The government doesn’t want to fix it.” The biggest cause of border trespassing, argues Time, is the government’s decades-long refusal to enforce the law against employing illegal aliens. Simple solutions—like a fraud-proof Social Security card—have never been tried.
Second biggest myth of the open-borders advocates: illegals take jobs Americans spurn. Wrong again, says Time. It’s bottom-of-the-barrel wage rates, not hard work, that American workers reject.
Third myth: illegal aliens are an economic plus for the country because they cheerfully provide inexpensive services that raise everyone’s standard of living. Give me a break! guffaws Time. WHO LEFT THE DOOR OPEN? catalogues the costs to the public: increased risk of terrorism; local hospitals driven out of business by border interlopers demanding free care; police forces and county jails reeling under the burden of illegal-alien rapists, murderers, bank robbers, and car thieves; Southwestern ranchers and homeowners who daily face “revolting mounds of personal refuse” on their property, not to mention broken fences and missing property; and a corrosive assault on the “U.S. tradition of encouraging legal immigration.”
Fourth myth: the demonization of Proposition 187. No lie is dearer to the elite press than the charge that only a nativist bigot would object to illegals’ exploitation of America’s public largesse. So California’s 1994 passage of Proposition 187—denying taxpayer-funded goods like free education and free hospital treatment to illegal aliens—has until now been characterized as one of the darkest moments in America’s long history of racism towards “people of color.” And along comes Time and actually sympathizes with public anger over the illegal capture of benefits. The government’s failure to enforce immigration laws “breeds anger and resentment among citizens who can’t understand why illegal aliens often receive government-funded health care, education benefits and subsidized housing,” says the magazine. Presumably, Time is not joining the assault on a current Arizona referendum to require proof of citizenship for voting and welfare receipt—a cheeky populist demand to obey existing law.
Time’s groundbreaking story shreds the Bush administration’s justification for its recent amnesty proposal: we’ve tried enforcement of entry laws, and it doesn’t work. No, responds Time: neither yours nor any previous administration has ever tried enforcement. And what is worse, notes the magazine, the recent amnesty proposal has served only to double the rate of illegal entry.
The lock on elite opinion has been broken. Let the debate begin.
Heather Mac Donald is a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. She also is a recipient of 2005 Bradley Prize for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement.
Heather’s work at City Journal has canvassed a range of topics including homeland security, immigration, policing and “racial” profiling, homelessness and homeless advocacy, educational policy, the New York courts, and business improvement districts. Ms. Mac Donald’s writings have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, The New Republic, Partisan Review, The New Criterion, Public Interest, and Academic Questions. Her book The Burden of Bad Ideas
—a collection of essays from the pages of City Journal—details the effects of the sixties’ counterculture’s destructive march through America’s institutions. Her second book, Are Cops Racist?
—another City Journal anthology—investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over so-called racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby's harmful effects on black Americans. Her newest book, The Immigration Solution:
A Better Plan Than Today’s, coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, chronicles the effects of broken immigration laws and proposes a practical solution to securing the country's porous borders.
“A non-practicing lawyer, Ms. Mac Donald has clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, has been an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York City. She has testified before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives; the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims; the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. In 1998, she was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's task force on the City University of New York, thanks in large part to her City Journal essays on education. The New Jersey State Law Enforcement Officers Association conferred its Civilian Valor Award on her in 2004. She was awarded the 2008 Integrity in Journalism award from the New York State Shields. She was also the recipient of the 2008 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration from the Center for Immigration Studies. She is also a frequent guest on Fox News, CNN, and other television and radio programs.
Ms. Mac Donald received her B.A. in English from Yale University, graduating Summa Cum Laude with a Mellon Fellowship to Cambridge University, where she earned her M.A. in English and studied in Italy through a Clare College study grant. Her J.D. is from Stanford University Law School.
Heather Mac Donald lives and works in New York City.
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