Recommended Reading

Montana MILE: Montanans for Immigration Law Enforcement

Mass immigration, both illegal and legal, affects most aspects of our national life: national security, the environment, national cohesion and governability, resource depletion, social conflict, economics, education, the rate of technological innovation – you name it!

Accordingly, the "literature" on immigration is vast. It ranges from the myriad news stories concerning immigration and immigrants that fill our newspapers today to scholarly tomes examining in depth the facts and policy implications of mass immigration.

Here we suggest some superb "beginner" resources to guide your way into the subject. And although our title above is "Recommended Reading," several of our recommendations involve, instead, viewing or listening.  (Note that if you go from one link to another, below, they will open, successively, in a common window.)

1. This six-minute video featuring Roy Beck and his -- literally! -- famous gumballs is a must-see: Roy will convince you, just as he convinces his live audience, that the U.S. can't possibly cure the woes of the world by running a super-generous immigration program.  (Beck is the co-founder and executive director of NumbersUSA, the leading organization working to re-focus America's immigration policies to serve the interests of us citizens.  See our "Links" page to become active through NumbersUSA.)

2. The set of "one-minute" essays called Common Sense On Mass Immigration will introduce you to many issues within the overall subject of mass immigration to the U.S.. We suggest that you start with Essay #8, "Mass Immigration and Basic Freedoms," by John Vinson.

3. Illegal immigration has mushroomed into a catastrophic problem partly because some cynical American citizens employ illegal aliens in order to save a buck (while dumping the social-welfare and quality-of-life burdens on the rest of us). In the process, they drive citizens who want to obey the law out of business. Two brief articles from 2007 illustrate this phenomenon.

A. "Immigration: When doing the right thing hurts" A brief video interview of the young businesswoman described in the article is available here.

4. Many American governmental institutions are either buckling under the load of mass immigration now or will be if illegal aliens receive amnesty (i.e. are allowed to stay in our country). Here are two examples.

A. "Immigration Crisis Tests Federal Courts on Southwest Border," has a self-explanatory title. This is an official government publication, which (in our politically-correct times) lends added weight to its message.

B. "Rx for breakdown," by law professor and former U.S. Department of Justice adviser Kris Kobach, appeared in the New York Post in May 2007, when the Senate was threatening to shove a 10-million-illegal-aliens amnesty down the throats of the American people. But Kobach's article is enduringly timely as long as we face any threat of a massive amnesty.

5. Many people consider illegal and legal immigration to be separate subjects. And MILE's focus is, indeed, on illegal immigration. But the subjects really aren't separate, as the following two brief opinion pieces and a two-minute video make clear.

C. "Cost of Low-Skilled Immigrants" is a video featuring Robert Rector, the formidable public policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who was the architect of the 1996 welfare reform.  (The full paper on this subject, by Rector and his colleague Christine Kim, is available here.)

6. What does a sustained surge of immigration from a Third World country do to a small city in the American heartland? In a longer article from The Atlantic Monthly ("The ordeal of immigration in Wausau," July, 1994), Roy Beck tells us how a large influx of Hmong (late refugees from the Vietnam War) has affected life in Wausau, Wisconsin.

7. In the current era, both legal and illegal immigration flows to the U.S. are dominated by Mexicans. Hence, many publications examine in detail the effects of immigration from Mexico. Here are two example 12-page articles from the Center for Immigration Studies, both by Marti Dinerstein.

A. Will illegal aliens be able to collect Social Security because of payroll taxes collected from them while they were working illegally in the U.S.? "Social Security ‘Totalization’: Examining a Lopsided Agreement with Mexico"

B. Have you heard about the Mexican government's concerted effort to gin up a de facto amnesty for Mexicans illegally present in the U.S. by persuading American banks and government agencies to accept fraud-prone IDs issued by Mexican consulates here? "IDs for Illegals: The ‘Matricula Consular’ Advances Mexico’s Immigration Agenda"

(Since a Mexican alien legally present in the U.S. will have U.S.-issued documentation, only illegal aliens need these matricula consulars. But the cards would be of no use even to illegal aliens if they weren't accepted as valid IDs by American institutions. For example, police officers of a city that accepts matriculas, when presented with such a card, will let the presenter go instead of turning the presenter -- obviously an illegal alien -- over to the federal immigration authorities for deportation!)

8. Hearing these MP3 sound clips will get your blood pressure up! And when someone calls you a "racist" for wanting our immigration laws enforced, you'll be well-qualified to respond if you've listened to clips #2 and #5 at this web page. The page also includes the transcripts of all the sound clips.

Note that Mario Obledo, the speaker highlighted in clip #5, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton in 1998, the same year this sound clip was recorded.

All 19 clips at that web page are worth listening to. Perhaps the most memorable -- besides #s 2 and 5 -- are #s 1, 3, and 14.

9. Now you'd like to read something about immigration that's more comprehensive? Two seminal but out-of-print books are available for free on the internet as PDF files.

A. Lawrence Auster's The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism [1990] is actually an extended essay rather than a full-fledged book.  It takes a couple of hours to read.

B. Roy Beck's The Case Against Immigration [1996]. The material in The Atlantic Monthly article cited above as item #6 was taken from this book.