Attrition Strategy: Phased Redeployment

Jeff Jacoby, ersatz "Conservative" for the Boston Globe, writes another wee bit of tripe today about illegal aliens. He relies on the old canard "we can't deport them all! there are too many!" Which is really getting tiresome to read considering there are 237 THOUSAND references to the attrition strategy on Google.

I don't know if Jeffy took a shrill pill before writing this drivel, but I'd like to set him straight.

What if we deport them all? - The Boston Globe

"Some 1.2 million illegals are believed to work in construction," Holman Jenkins wrote in the Wall Street Journal last June. "If the cost of home building goes up, demand goes down: Less wood is sold, fewer nails, fewer power tools, fewer pickup trucks. Contractors would make less profit; ergo, Harley-Davidson would sell fewer Road Kings with all the chrome and finery."

Lord know's we've tried to explain the idea of getting most illegal aliens to leave by choice via enforcement-compelled attrition: Start enforcing the law and the jobs will disappear; if the jobs disappear, millions will leave as they did in the 1950s when Eisenhower succeeded in ending the problem of illegal immigration then. Perhaps because the word "attrition" is often used as a military term that connotes we're winning, the Leftists just can't get it and the Neo-Conservatives have no stomach for it because it suggests we aren't winning fast enough.

Let me try to put this in the language that both a Leftist (or one posing as a conservative like Jacoby) and a Neo-Conservative will understand. We need to implement a strategy of "phased redeployment" of our valiant illegal immigrant criminals. Over a five-year period, I propose we shift the majority to Mexico, some to other South and Central American Nations, some to Ireland and still other smaller groups to various nations around the globe. Their redeployment destinations will be dependent on their knowledge of the language and customs of the nation to which they go. For the Leftist, this is a benefit because it creates a wedge within the populations of poorer nations who can later be recruited to assist Leftist American youth who arrive to do their Peace Corp stints. For the Neo-Conservative, it creates a core bloc of potential insurgents who can be recruited by the CIA when the next Wilsonian President with "we can democratize the world" delusions is elected.

On the home front, the five-year-plan goes as follows: A blue ribbon panel investigates which types of businesses are employing illegal aliens, which should take all of about 15 minutes using the data already collected both by government agencies and by private foundations. From this list, they create a schedule working backwards from the five-year deadline that allocates Border Patrol and ICE business enforcement resources in an ever-increasing web of pressure on companies that are skirting our laws. The final list will start with the business types with the fewest illegal aliens in their work forces and provides for enforcement resources to be ratcheted up over four and a half years, finally getting to the business types with the most illegal aliens in their work forces in year five.

Why four and a half years of enforcement activity, not five? Simple. The first six months is the publicity phase; we advertise and promote the schedule the panel creates so that the businesses are all given fair warning and roughly know when their "deadline" is for getting illegal aliens off of their under-the-table payrolls. This should make the transition as orderly as possible. These businesses relied on American labor at some time in the recent past, and they will have to get used to a less slave-like work force again. And their prevailing wages will have to go up.

I know it will be tough for construction companies to again see themselves as pathways to the middle class for young and less skilled Americans, but I know that we can do this. It will take some time for our hospitals to get used to not having an overflow of non-paying patients in their emergency rooms, but I have faith they'll get through it. I don't know what they'll do in California when they stop having to build one new school a day and gang members are as easy to spot as a red wine spill on a white carpet, but the Americans there have always been a hearty lot. Maybe they'll have to call Dr. Phil to console all of those state legislators who lost their power bases and probably won't be re-elected. But I never said this would be painless.

Setting things right after letting them be wrong for so long is never painless.

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