Immigration as Punishment

Should Harvard be required to accept the wretched refuse of its applicant pool even though they are likely to flunk out?

Should the Golden State Warriors be forced to draft the huddled masses of short and slow college basketball players who are likely to get torched in the NBA?

And should the United States government be mandated to let in immigrants likely to go on welfare?

Well, obviously, the answer to the first two questions is “No.” Americans care intensely about sports drafts and college recruiting, rightly sensing that who your team acquires is more important than how they are coached. So colleges and sports franchises work intensely to acquire the best talent.

Americans used to be more innocent about this. In the 1960s, a sportswriter asked UCLA basketball coach John Wooden why he’d gone all the way to New York to recruit 7′ 2″ Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) instead of just finding some local boys and coaching them to the national title. Wooden replied, “You can’t coach quickness.” Amazon.com Gift Card i... Buy New $10.00 (as of 08:25 UTC - Details)

Kareem won three NCAA titles for Wooden and then six NBA titles.

This exchange sounds archaic today, but Wooden’s predecessor as the top college coach, University of Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp, imposed a rule on himself that he’d have only three out-of-state recruits per team. Those were different times…

Harvard has shown a striking ability over the last 383 years to burnish the Harvard brand name. Harvard alumni don’t want the prestige of their résumés degraded by their alma mater letting in a lot of dummies or grinds, so the college administration devotes much brainpower to optimizing its freshman class to maximize donations in a generation. It seems to be working: Harvard’s endowment is $39.2 billion.

But the Trump administration’s announcement on Monday of its update to the “1999 Interim Field Guidance on Deportability and Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds” to better avoid letting in legal immigrants likely to wind up on welfare was widely greeted with shocked sputtering. Our elected government choosing immigrants who would be better neighbors for us current Americans makes the Statue of Liberty cry.

A reporter triumphantly asked Trump administration official Ken Cuccinelli:

“Is that sentiment, give us ‘your tired, your poor,’ still operative in the United States, or…should the plaque come down from the Statue of Liberty?”

Similarly, New York attorney general Letitia James tweeted:

Denying people a path to citizenship simply because they depend on public benefits is patently un-American.

Actually, “public charge” laws to keep the rest of the world from foisting their unwanted layabouts on us have been part of the American tradition going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1645. It’s been a federal law since the 19th century.

But American history has been retconned over recent decades by the descendants of Ellis Island immigrants to promote their ancestors as the true founding fathers of the country. It’s hilariously blatant when you stop and think about it, although nobody ever does.

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