NY Times Supports Stealing From Illegal Aliens

One of the many perplexities of "progressive" thought is that it contains so many internal contradictions that it defies consistent application, and yet this doesn't seem to bother adherents. That kind of who-do-you-think-you're-kidding logic was on display yesterday in the NY Times editorial, which championed a decidedly unprogressive course of action:

Illegal immigration, it turns out, is even better than legal immigration. In the fine print of the 2008 annual report on Social Security, released last week, the program’s trustees noted that growing numbers of “other than legal” workers are expected to bolster the program over the coming decades.

One reason is that many undocumented workers pay taxes during their work lives but don’t collect benefits later. Another is that undocumented workers are entering the United States at ever younger ages and are expected to have more children while they’re here than if they arrived at later ages. The result is a substantial increase in the number of working-age people paying taxes, but a relatively smaller increase in the number of retirees who receive benefits — a double boon to Social Security’s bottom line.

The most obvious problem with this line of argument is that we are expected to agree that the exploitation of an already-marginalized group of people is a good thing. Somehow, in the liberal mind, if we take money from illegal aliens and give nothing back, it's not robbery. More than that, we are expected to agree that perhaps illegal immigration should be allowed to continue...so we can use illegal labor to shore up our crumbling social insurance programs.

This is quite simply an outrageous suggestion. Look, I'm not saying that businesses shouldn't withhold payroll taxes from workers who use fake or stolen Social Security numbers. The illegal worker signed up for that deal, he has no grounds to complain. But I am saying that it is patently immoral to advocate for the status quo and downright disgusting to argue that the status quo is good because it lets us steal from people who already live on the margins of society.

The "progressive" faces an irreconcilable dilemma. They believe that illegal immigrants are deserving of all the rights and protections of legal immigrants, or at least of temporary workers. But they also believe that Social Security is an integral and inviolate part of our government's obligations to U.S. citizens. In this case, Social Security trumps human rights. But the really inexplicable thing is that it doesn't have to. Why is the Times arguing for the status quo?

The Progressive Order:

posted by Gabriel Malor at 12:38 PM

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