Napolitano’s State of the Borderless State

You’re all familiar with Janet “I am Governor, Hear Me Roar” Napolitano’s State of the State Address earlier this week. I’m not going to rehash it. The address was largely a campaign speech on immigration.

I missed the stupid electronic fence idea, but otherwise I called it here: a crackdown on the secondary effects of illegal immigration, and an attack on business is exactly the J.Nap gameplan.

Nothing she said will make any difference.

Setting aside the small fraction of the population who oppose immigration for racist or xenophobic reasons, and the small fraction of the population who don’t believe in borders, the primary objection to illegal immigration, or immigration in general, in the mind of the average citizen is this.

We’ve voted ourselves all these safety nets and government benefits as citizens of this country, and we’ll be damned if we’re going to start giving these benefits away to someone new. It costs too much. We don’t want to pay for it. Besides, we have a “right” to American jobs ourselves, even if we don’t want them.

That is the immigration debate in a nutshell. Our lips are locked on the government teats, feeding on the milk of privilege, and we don’t want competition.

There will be no solution to illegal immigration until the taxpayers stop rewarding themselves unearned benefits. Eliminating the welfare state removes many of the incentives to illegally immigrate. If you’ve got to pay for your kids to go to school and pay for your own healthcare, only the truly motivated are going to immigrate, and those who do will be valuable additons to our country. But if we’re going to deny these incentives to immigrants, then we must also deny them to ourselves. The alternatives are either the current situation, or a slave state, with a second class of immigrant persons laboring to ensure a fat government teat upon which citizens suckle.