Mexican Immigrants and the "Objectivist" Center
by Adam Reed
A few days ago, I was discussing academic credentials and their impact on pay scales with a production director of a company that makes clinical-trial quantities of newly discovered drugs, while its customers are just beginning to try to invent a way to make those new drugs reliably and safely. It is demanding work that requires the highest levels of inventiveness, intelligence, and technical competence in abstruse branches of organic chemistry. Two of the most productive people under her direction are self-educated Mexican immigrant technicians whose formal schooling ended somewhere around seventh grade. One of the least productive is a highly credentialed chemist whose salary is exactly twice that of one of the Mexican immigrant technicians.
That reminded me of something that I noticed in the "Soundings" section of the November 2004 issue of the "Objectivist Center" Navigator magazine. It quoted, without much comment, the following statistics:
* Eighty percent of non-Mexican immigrants are fluent in English. Among Mexicans, the number is 49 percent.
* Non-Mexican (working) immigrants have an average wage income of $21,000 a year. Mexican immigrants have an average wage income of $12,000 a year.
* The typical non-Mexican immigrant has a high school diploma. The typical Mexican immigrant has less than an eighth-grade education.
* Compared to other Hispanics, only 49 percent of Mexican immigrants are fluent in English, compared with 62 percent of non-Mexican Hispanics.
* Mexican average incomes are about 75 percent that of other Hispanic immigrants, and Mexican immigrants have about two and a half fewer years of schooling.
"Two other facts are worth noting: First, Mexican immigrants live in communities where 15 percent of the residents were also born in Mexico. Non-Mexican immigrants live in communities where fewer than 3 percent of the residents are from their native land. Second, Mexican immigrants account for a much higher proportion of the immigrant population than does any other group—29 percent in the 2000 Census." This "sounding" stinks to hell of collectivist racism, symptomatic of an organization that welcomes people who call themselves "Objectivists" without being willing to give up their previous attachments to anti-objective ideologies that range from supernatural beliefs, to endorsement of forcibly keeping brown people out of the United States. It illustrates the difference between reality as understood by an individualist, in terms of the productivity and achievement of individuals—and the collectivist's comparison among collective statistics. Only this time, the collectivist's collective statistics were being disseminated, in semi-transparent propaganda for racist limits on Mexican immigration into the United States, by an "Objectivist" publication.
To an individualist, immigration is an issue of individual rights. In a civilized legal order, governments would be limited to protecting the rights of individuals, such as my right to engage in non-coercive cooperation and trade with other individuals of my choice. Laws that forcibly prevent individual Mexicans from working for and trading with Americans, in either of our countries, are an unacceptable violation of my individual rights. It is reasonable to screen out terrorists, foreign government agents, convicted criminals and fugitives from civilized justice at the border. It is anti-human, and uncivilized, for governments to classify otherwise innocent people into government-approved and non-government-approved categories, and impose penalties on Americans—the very people whose rights our government is supposed to protect—for trading with productive people whose only "crime" is that they lack the approval of our politicians and bureaucrats.
Laws that prevent productive, innocent persons from coming here to trade with and work for Americans are also a threat to our national security. The imposition of an "illegal" status on millions of productive workers in the American economy has resulted in giant underground industries that smuggle people across our borders and manufacture expertly forged documents for anyone willing to pay. Terrorists are willing to pay, and are able to infiltrate the United States with much less effort than they would need without the immigration restrictions and the people-smuggling and document-forging industries spawned by those restrictions.
That racist propaganda is widely tolerated among America's "Conservatives" and "Liberals" is scandal enough. That it is spread by the magazine of an "Objectivist" organization is beyond scandal. It is treason.
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