Freedom Folks

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Fisking a Yackson

"You've managed to change the entire conversation from the subject at hand to me thereby avoiding getting embarrassed by the exposure of your ignorance."

Awwww. A Fisking we will go! If I'd had more time, I'd have made haggis out of Yackson's bile. While I normally eschew heavy linking in my responses, this uncouth antagonist calls for digging into the archives. To set the record straight, I didn't change the subject. I did some educating. Yackson lacked the knowledge to discern the difference between an ad hominem and a reasoned point of view. Obviously he needed schooling. So I schooled him.

"First you didn't even read the report before you entered the debate. You didn't even read Jake's brief comment closely enough to notice the link to the report."

Yackson didn't read the report before his first thought droppings in the original comments thread either. Yup. I didn't catch the link at first. Yackson insists this makes me an ignoramus...an ignoramus that schooled him about ad hominems and the connection between his quickness to take overblown offense and his race-hustling. What's that say about his intellect?

"Then you lied about the content of the executive summary. You probably didn't even read that."


The misquote was my bad. I copied text the from the three web pages into NoteTabPro to print them for reading and for easy copying and formatting. Somehow parts of the Washington Times article got placed at the end of the Heritage Executive Summary, probably by hot-key goof. At least I'll admit when I'm off track.

But so what about it? Despite my attribution being to the wrong web page, the point still stands that there is a forthcoming additional study from Heritage that will cover the immigrant component of costs, which by definition will include illegal aliens.

But the use of this report by anti-immigration fanatics has taken a turn beyond what I predicted.

Um...I guess Yackson doesn't know or understand that the Heritage Foundation is quasi-Conservative. While many of those at a think tank called "The Heritage Foundation" ironically practice "economism" over "heritage" when it comes to immigration reform, by and large, the foundation still demands tough sanctions first and believes that illegal aliens are harmful, not beneficial. Us "anti-immigration fanatics," are unimpressed by people who lack the critical thinking skills to understand that the "nation of immigrants" fallacy is not prescriptive, it was a silly catch-phrase in a poem that won a contest. For ascertaining prescriptive ideals, traditionalists turn to the founding fathers' writings.

Yacksonians worship Emma Lazarus and bestow Founding Father status upon her.

"It is well known that most immigrants are not eligible for most programs like social security, Medicaid, food stamps, section 8, and most other programs so therefore the study cannot be applied to immigrants especially illegal immigrants (the fact that less than a percent of immigrants have been accused of fraud to obtain said benefits does not negate this fact)."

Let's dispense with the absurdity of the "noble illegal alien" posturing inherent in Yackson's writing. It has been well-known for quite some time that a large percentage of illegal aliens do, in fact, receive benefits(PDF) for which they are not eligible. Often they gain benefits by "fraud." We call it "stealing." Why is it so hard for mass-immigration and illegal alien cheerleaders to figure out that people who have no qualms about breaking our immigration law in order to get stuff from our economy are naturally less averse than citizens to breaking other laws?

Also, immigrant households are not identical to native households. Many immigrants are young, single men although some bring their families and others start families here, but many immigrants are young and single, rent a room and pose a negligible cost to society.

This is no more than a weak and disingenuous misdirect. Yackson is asking us to focus solely on the people within a cohort that he thinks cost us less and to ignore the people that he thinks cost us more. Reality doesn't work that way.

Most people who grew up in the US have already cost the government thousands due to their 12 years of education so when an adult immigrant arrives, he's already $50 - $100,000 ahead because we didn't have to pay for an education.

I'll set aside the absurd and convoluted contention that current schoolchidren don't pay for their grade school education, even though their parents' property taxes fund schools. Instead, I'll get to the heart of the matter: Most of us who grew up in the US have at least some ancestors who sacrificed blood, toil, sweat and often their very lives for the sake of Americans' liberty. Along the way our forebears paid for the all of the infrastructure that allows legal US citizens the privilege of partaking in the benefits of America's legacy. For legal citizens, this means that even if someone's ancestors' contributions were more latter-day or comparatively insignificant to the norm, they rightfully share. And they should. What did Yackson's coveted illegal aliens' ancestors do to mitigate or amortize the infrastructure and ongoing costs they present to us now and in the future? Nothing! Zip! Nada! Zilch! But they did make a mockery of our sovereignty while breaking our laws, and Yacksonians contend that we all should feel lucky to be taken advantage of by these interlopers.

My God. I feel as though I'm a counselor in some bizarre intellectual Special Olympics! "Run like the wind, Yackson! No, wait, first base is the other way!"

Also immigrants are naturally selected. Healthy people of working age are more likely to come to the US.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ad infinitum.

Yep, Yackson is my bestest schooled Special Olympian!

Raised on rice and beans and hard work (not HoHos, Popeyes chicken and Oprah), these people are on average healthier and use less health care. Another difference is that immigrants that are low-skilled are low-skilled because their countries did not provide them a no-cost-to-them K-12 education.

This riff is so absurd, I don't know where to begin.

As a long-time medical lobbyist, health system marketer and hospital consultant, I know factually that illegal aliens are not "healthier," especially from a cost perspective. They seek care later, too often after normally manageable conditions have become acute emergencies. They use our ERs as primary care centers. They are responsible for such painful cost-shifting in rural areas that hospitals are often rendered unable to afford to pay for advances in technologies or specialist salaries that are vital to saving American citizen's lives. Every day at least one American citizen dies or is left with an unnecessary permanent disability because he or she arrives for critical care at a hospital in which its accounting department was cost-shift-forced to red-line out the very medical innovation that would save their life or save the quality of their life. I doubt this will get this through Yackson's thick skull, but thousands of American men, women and children who would have lived are likely dead and thousand of others likely crippled today thanks to the burden illegal aliens have placed upon our healthcare system and infrastructure for the last 35 years.

Most of our illegal aliens are low-skilled not because their home nations lacked educational systems, but because their cultures fail to place priority upon education. This carries forward through the generations. Some argue this problem may be related to innate intelligence averages for the cultural cohorts; I have yet to find a single convincing counter argument. There is no pretty way to phrase this: The intellectual characteristics of most of our current illegal alien residents portend a future in which their descendants will remain poorly educated because they will be less smart - about one standard deviation less - than average American kids, and because they will reside within Diasporas that place little value on education.

Meanwhile most high school drop outs in the US are people who were unable to drag themselves out of bed in the morning to attend class at the local high school and therefore are not the prime candidates for employment. People like that also have trouble keeping a steady job and are therefore more likely to use welfare programs.

Yackson really, really doesn't like Americans, particularly those who are unskilled. No wonder he wants them replaced. Drawing out his latent hate for Americans I sensed in his early comments has been a fascinating and enlightening exercise.

In fact it has been reported that the Heritage Foundation plans to release a separate analysis focused solely on low-skilled immigrant households in the next few weeks.

http://tinyurl.com/ytcack

Even the Heritage Foundation knows that the study is not applicable to immigrants.

Whoo. Another doozy! Yackson insists that a representative of the National Council for LaRaza's comments about the Heritage study are informative of the intent of its contents. I've never shot this many fish in the same barrel. Yee ha! Is there a catch limit?

The Heritage Foundation estimated that each low-skilled household results in a lifetime cost of $1.1 million (assuming a 50 year adult lifespan for heads of household). I predicted that anti-immigrant fanatics would cite this figure despite [sic] the above. I was right.

Yackson hangs his hat on there being some sort of bizarre superhuman trait within our low-skilled illegal alien population that renders them exempt from being counted as a part of the cost we all bear related to all of America's low-skilled residents. Further, he has unmasked his loathing and contempt for Americans who aren't educated; he strongly prefers criminal interlopers to citizens who did not finish high school, whatever the reason. Predictably, Yackson writes as if the Heritage Foundation study exists in a vacuum and that there are no other sources of data available. For instance, the National Academy of Sciences reported that the net lifetime cost to the American taxpayer of an adult Mexican immigrant is $55,200. Multiply that by the RAND Corp estimate of 20 million illegal aliens in the US and you get 1.4 Trillion dollars.

Nope. No major impact on society here. Move along. Don't worry about your kids. War is peace. Freedom is slavery.

Yackson, through his own exposition, is beginning to present himself as a perfect-storm example of the sort of person: 1)whose mis-indoctrination about history, tradition and sovereignty poses myriad onerous threats to our children and our children's children; and, 2)while he has yet to express it specifically, whose loathing for the comparatively few historical "evils" perpetrated by Americans throughout history completely negates the incalculable and phenomenal benefits the founding and existence of America has meant to the causes of liberty, innovation, and goodwill throughout the world.

I'm glad these moonbat gnats are so attracted by Jake's fine work. It serves us all well to know the various ugly shades, malformed dispositions and laughable ignorance of our enemies. It will be interesting to see how the newest little troll here responds.

Jake here, we welcome KD to the blog and extend an invitation to Jackson to respond. You can find my email address in my profile.

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