Questing for Atlantis

Roy Beck, founder and CEO of anti-immigration group NumbersUSA certainly has an interesting take on the idea of big government.

Discussing his talk at the Nashville Tea Party Convention, he explains:

I went to observe and make my case that for those who want to shrink government it isn’t possible without reducing overall immigration (especially LEGAL) immigration

In the actual discussion of his talk he says he emphasized that:

If not for our system of mass immigration over the last decade, there would have been virtually no growth in the uninsured…Just one more example of how current immigration policies create huge pressures for larger and larger government programs and expenditures.

Now, nevermind that it’s grossly inaccurate to describe our current immigration policies as allowing mass immigration and that economists like Keith Hennessy have pegged non-citizens as about only 9.3 of the 45.7 million uninsured. Let’s get to the real fun part of Beck’s claim.

I would love to know what world he lives in where you can have a more restrictive immigration system without:

• Hiring thousands, if not tens of thousands of additional border guards
• Mandating a Kafka-esque verification system
• Requiring everyone to carry a national ID card
• Empowering (if not outright forcing) local law enforcement officers to demand to see “Your papers, please!”

If this isn’t big, intrusive government, I don’t know what is.

As insane as I think it is, I can accept that some people think these are good policies. What I won’t tolerate is the outright false claim that anti-immigration policies are not big government.