Tying immigration to abortion

November 14, 2006

Way back in March, I noted that Georgia State Sen. Nancy Schaefer (R) crafted a bizarre connection between abortion and immigration when she argued, “I am convinced it is a consequence [of] the almost 50 million children we have put to death in their mother’s womb through abortion. The large, unfilled job market in Georgia would not be a problem if the almost 50 million Americans were here, filling many of those jobs.”

Alas, it wasn’t just an obscure far-right state lawmaker who takes this notion seriously — the abortion-immigration nexus seems to have truly caught on among conservatives. Convicted Watergate felon and Prison Fellowship Ministries founder Chuck Colson has joined the bandwagon, as have Republican state lawmakers in Missouri.

A report from a Republican-led Missouri House committee argues that illegal immigration is partly the result of abortion and a “welfare culture,” findings that Democrats called ridiculous. […]

“The lack of a traditional work ethic, combined with the effects of 30 years of abortion and expanding liberal social welfare policies have produced a shortage of workers and a lack of incentive for those who can work,” the report said. “Today’s growing affinity for government dependency has created a class of potential employees who are not eager to work.”

Other sections of the report supporting this argument said that “the entitlement and government welfare culture that has emerged over the last 50 years” had caused a shortage of workers, and “many Americans prefer a subsistence income from the public treasury rather than earning a similar or better income as a reward for hard work.”

Really, is there something in the water?

I suppose it’s worth noting, of course, that the Missouri House’s bizarre conclusions did not go by without refutation.

The six Democrats on the House Special Committee on Immigration Reform refused to sign the panel’s final report, which was signed by the 10 Republican members. In a letter to Rep. Ed Emery, the Lamar Republican who heads the committee, the Democrats said the report included things the panel never discussed and other comments that were “inappropriate.” […]

Rep. Trent Skaggs, a North Kansas City Democrat, said the sections on abortion and “liberal social welfare policies” sucked all credibility out of the report.

“It’s delusional and not really owning up to what the problems are,” Skaggs said of the report.

Rep. Ed Wildberger, a St. Joseph Democrat on the committee, agreed and called Emery’s arguments “ridiculous.”

In terms of substance, national immigration expert Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in New York, noted that rising education and more skilled American workers have a great deal to do with the demand for immigrant labor, and the welfare argument doesn’t make any sense in light of work requirements imposed in 10 years.

Reality aside, did some kind of memo go out from Phyllis Schlafly to blame immigration issues on liberal social policy? I knew I shouldn’t have let my subscription to Right-Wing Talking Points Weekly lapse….

Ahhh, but if there is supposed to be strict abstinence outside of marriage, then a) the abortion rate would tumble, certainly, but b) there wouldn’t be enough new babies to make slave laborers out of!

Can’t the Republicans make up their minds which way they want it?

  • I didn’t realize that very aborted fetus was predestined to be a janitor, nanny, landscaper, manual laborer, migrant farmworker or restaurant dishwasher. There’s some incentive to have an unwanted child … a chance to give them a life of low-wage labor that would otherwise go to immigrants. What a rallying cry: “Save the unborn – we need them to clean our toilets.”

  • “I am convinced …[t]he large, unfilled job market in Georgia would not be a problem if the almost 50 million Americans were here, filling many of those jobs.”

    And I am convinced that little green mice from Pluto have eaten Shafer’s brain and are working her body. Does this mean that immigrants are coming here because we allow abortion? Hey, let’s go to America and take jobs from honest fetuses!

    A report from a Republican-led Missouri House committee argues that illegal immigration is partly the result of abortion and a “welfare culture,”

    Cute. I wondered how long it would be before someone dragged the Welfare Queen out of the mothballs. This of course completly ignores the fact that people who are poor enough to get on welfare can’t afford abortions. Women able to afford an abortion may be doing so because they know they can’t afford to have a child/wage loss caused by pregnancy. (I utterly reject the Abortion as Birth control theory btw.) I guess what he wants to do is kill off all of the people on welfare, force the working women to have children and then their kids can take those jobs. And will we hear any discussion of real sex ed, birth control, education for single mothers etc etc, from these fuck wits? Yeah, right after we hear Shub admit he is a total failure as a human.

  • Shorter Republican Talking Point:The United States doesn’t have enough poor people willing to do any job for a pittance. I guess they could also argue that any policy which is aimed at lessening income inequality would would also force push up the demand for illegal immigrants. I guess Phyllis is having trouble finding a house keeper to keep the domicile running while she tours the country insisting the women stay at home.

  • What? No mention of all the meth addicts who are unemployable in MO?

    We just need to get some breeding going on in the US! We should be creating our own low wage workforce instead of encouraging all those Mexicans to cross the border. What a disgrace! Just think about how many more Walmarts could have been built to support those 30 million low income consumers. Damn, we got to get this country on a growth path.

  • You know, every time I think maybe this state is becoming less nutty, something like this comes up. And I apologize on behalf of every sane resident of the Show-Me state for the stupidity of this committee.

    Just … um … damn. I don’t even know what to say.

  • Um, if there is a nexus between abortion, population, and illegal immigration to the United States, wouldn’t it also somehow involve the restrictive abortion policies of Mexico and Central America??

    More matter of factly, is there any way of demonstrating that every abortion since Roe equals one American who was never born? I mean, suppose Mom only wants one baby. Maybe she aborts the first and tries again later; maybe she never aborts but avoids any further pregnancies. No net change. How often does this happen?

  • I knew I shouldn’t have let me subscription to Right-Wing Talking Points Weekly lapse….

    🙂 And we should all read RW-TPM in the bizarro blogosphere. Right-wing Talking Points Memo.RWTPMMuckraker and RWTPMCafe.

    Let’s do the geometry. 50,000,000 abortions. If they had been born there would be that many more unwanted babies. Now taking into account elevated levels of childhood disease, abuse and murder, we’d lose a few low-paid workers (and without a higher minimum wage we’re talking really low-paid.

    But the babies would have been busy making more babies so let’s just misestimate the population rise to 75 million (one fifth of our current population. And then those would keep making more unwanted babies who only have half a chance in this life.

    There are worse things than being unborn.

  • I heard a similar argument for Social Security (in 1998). If people didn’t abort all those millions of babies, then we’d have more workers and more people paying into the Social Security system. Easy solution, right? The poor speaker we went to see was completely hijacked by these nuts and he couldn’t come up with a logical response to such an illogical argument.

  • And what about the stem cells? All of those proto-lives wrecklessly destroyed by fertility mills. We need a forced implantation program. Any woman over the age of 20 who does not already have a child will have the honor of carrying one of God’s Pre-Humans to term. Whether she likes it or not. Or better yet, stick the little buggers in immigrant women, so real Americans can continue to work.

    Sorry, I can’t even take this shit seriously.

  • Unholy MOses:
    Your state legislators got to do something to show they ain’t just gitten drunk and chasin pussy all the time. I mean John Ashcroft it still lookin over some shoulders. Uh, how about a tune here Johnny boy?

  • To answer my own question from #9, the MO report cites 80,000 lost Missourians, which is far less than the state’s fraction of the estimated 47 Million abortions. They may be saying that 9 out of 10 of abortions were somehow replaced.

  • “Today’s growing affinity for government dependency has created a class of potential employees who are not eager to work.”

    And the Conservatives affinity to criminalizing every form of economic endevour they don’t approve of (prostitution, recreational drugs) means that the prisions of this country of full of potential employees who will not ever get to work.

    “We need a forced implantation program. Any woman over the age of 20 who does not already have a child will have the honor of carrying one of God’s Pre-Humans to term. Whether she likes it or not.” – TAIO

    Whimp! A good fundementalist mormon polygamist would be inpregenating those girls at the age of 14. Else they will all go to Hell.

  • Heeeeey … what if all these unborn were born and were sent to Iraq … we’d be winning right now and Bill Kristol would be happy. Fifty million more troops over there would have meant more of our troops than Iraqis in Iraq! Yet another reason to halt abortions brought to you by the right wing spin machine.

  • Even if the MO report counts only a fraction of total abortions as being lost workers, that still didn’t stop committee chair Edgar Emery from citing the full national figure: “If you kill 44 million of your potential workers, it’s not too surprising we would be desperate for workers.”

    So maybe the MO report does acknowledge that not all abortions are irreplaceable citizens, but the chairman just wants people to think otherwise.

  • I think petorado @ #2 and rege @ #5 have it right. Poor people with access birth control, abortion, and the grudging “assistance” from the government means an entire class of workers that can’t be easily exploitable.

    But I think there’s a racial aspect to this, too. Given Conservative Republican’s newfound interest in abortion rates among African-Americans (Bill Bennett, Pat Rooney) and their untrue, eternal stereotype of the typican “welfare queen” … and I get the feeling they’re lamenting the fact that there isn’t a more easily exploitable class of minority workers.

    What? No mention of all the meth addicts who are unemployable in MO?

    To be fair, Missouir meth addicts are employed in stripping public monuments and cemeteries of bronze fixtures and building sites of copper wiring and pipe to sell for scrap. They’re rather industrious that way.

  • Well….. In defense of our state enough residents were sane enough last week to vote for Claire McCaskill and help win the U.S. Senate. As for the other 49% there’s nothing I can say in their defense, no apologies, just embarassment.

  • And factor in also that one big job creator — prison construction and staffing. As I recall from reading the book ‘Freakonomics’, the big drop in crime we experienced back in the 90s was positively correlated with the numbers of abortions about 20 years earlier.

    So dammit. Instead of cousin Leroy having to hunt down a job as a state legislator in Jeff City, he could have got one of them good payin prison jobs closer to home and kept his bass boat in the water. Damn I missed out on a lot a good fishin w/ cousin Leroy.

  • One can only hope that if Missouri Republicans continue to sound like the nutty Kansas Republicans of recent ilk the new Kansas trend of embarassed Republicans bailing on their party will start moving east. Soon. And maybe that “work ethic” problem they noted has to do with drinkin all that moonshine down in the southern reaches of the state?

  • Actually, you can blame illegal immigration on two things: NAFTA and corporate social welfare masquerading as “farm supports” for family farmers.

    The overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants from the interior of Mexico – which is the majority of immigrants over the past 10+ years – are farmers who were forced off their land because they couldn’t compete with subsidized American corporate agriculture being allowed into the country at illegally-low prices, under NAFTA.

    One thing that has to be done is to destroy the myth of the American Family Farm. 80% of agriculture is now corporate, and the families left on those farms are employees, not independent yeomen – they don’t see a dime of all that government welfare. The agriculture subsidies go to line the pockets of the pinstriped pimps running companies like Archer-Daniels-Midland, while the “free” trade agreements allow them to use their subsidized product to destroy the agriculture of any country we are in a “free” trade agreement with.

    It’s time to destroy “Free trade” and its race to the bottom.

  • But I think there’s a racial aspect to this, too. Given Conservative Republican’s newfound interest in abortion rates among African-Americans (Bill Bennett, Pat Rooney)

    This “interest” comes up every election cycle that I can remember. The fact that it never works doesn’t stop the GOP from developing a deeply creepy African-American fetus fetish.

    and their untrue, eternal stereotype of the typican “welfare queen” … and I get the feeling they’re lamenting the fact that there isn’t a more easily exploitable class of minority workers.

    Yep. Things were sooo much better in the “good old days” when “those people” knew “their place.” Now there are all these uppity black folks running around, running companies, running for office and more brownish folks from other countries. I feel faint, someone bring me my smelling salts.

  • The best part about having 50,0000,000 extra workers is that with so much surplus labor potential we could lower the minimum wage to $1.00 per hour! Rupert, Paris, and others of their ilk would be thrilled.

  • Tom, rather than destroy the myth of the family farm, some of us here in the heartland would rather restore the reality of the family farm. You’re assessment of the current situation is correct: most are just employees of the giant producers (and in Iowa and North Carolina, increasing amounts of land are becoming giant cesspools for corporate hog and poultry operations). I agree that giving subsidies to ADM and Tyson doesn’t make a lot of sense, but lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater — support the few remaining family farms, and work to promote localism in production and consumption to allow smaller scale farming to be economically viable.

    Of course the biggest “problem” in terms of illegal immigration is that the American public is addicted to cheap produce and meat products. If the farms around Salinas were picked using solely legal workers at minimum wage the price of a head of lettuce would likely double (or more). It would be interesting to see how much Americans would pay for their alleged convictions on immigration.

  • World estimations of the number of terminations carried out each year is somewhere between 20 and 88 million.

    3,500 per day / 1.3 million per year in America alone.

    50% of that 1.3 million claimed failed birth control was to blame.

    A further 48% had failed to use any birth control at all.

    And 2% had medical reasons.

    That means a stagering 98% may have been avoided had an effective birth control been used.

    People have to stop using abortion as birth control.

    I’d like to see effective birth control made available to all who can’t afford it.

  • As long as we have *any* unemployment, nobody will ever convince me we’re missing 50mil working citizens. What does she want? Americans trying to emigrate too Mexico and India, looking for jobs?

  • Zeitgeist:

    I’d love to do what you suggest, but I sadly fear that train left the station a good 20 years ago. The whole corporatization of agriculture, which results in good union jobs lost in food plants and the loss of connection between human and the farm product, be it corn or cows, results in food that is dangerous to eat. I challenge any carnivore to look at a film of how the animals are now treated nowadays (some are still alive as they are being flayed) and still want that next burger. And the corporatization has resulted in such things as the e coli outbreak with spinach back in September.

    God I wish we could pass a constitutional amendment that the only “persons” the Constitution protects are the 2-legged living breathing variety, so corporations could be roped back to where they belong!

  • Libra,
    With 50 million more consumers, more jobs would be generated.

    I’d suggest to neither abort nor birth.
    I’d suggest to prevent them from comming to be in the first place.
    98% could have been prevented……..

    World estimations of the number of terminations carried out each year is somewhere between 20 and 88 million.

    3,500 per day / 1.3 million per year in America alone.

    50% of that 1.3 million claimed failed birth control was to blame.

    A further 48% had failed to use any birth control at all.

    And 2% had medical reasons.

    That means a stagering 98% may have been avoided had an effective birth control been used.

    People have to stop using abortion as birth control.

    I’d like to see effective birth control made available to all who can’t afford it.

  • If conception is NOT when life begins,and a clump of cells is just that and not a living human being.
    Then at least concider this-

    Soon after you were conceived you were no more than a clump of cells.
    This clump of cells was you at your earliest stage, you had plenty of growing to do but this clump of cells was you none the less. Think about it.
    Aren’t you glad you were left unhindered to develope further.
    Safe inside your mother until you were born.

  • “Aren’t you glad you were left unhindered to develope further.”

    Nah. Knowing what I know now, I’d have aborted myself. Or had those cells transferred into chicken egg and become a cock. Or better yet, had those cells propagated in a petri dish and cloned myself a million times. Or had a gene jockey give me kaleidoscope eyes and have my brain manufacture its own THC.

  • “Aren’t you glad you were left unhindered to develope further.
    Safe inside your mother until you were born.” – ausblog

    Considering that I was conceived soon after (within the potential term of) one of my “siblings” my mother miscarried of, frankly no, that is not the standard I’d like to apply.

  • Hey Carpetbaggers!

    Put down your joints and hash pipes….give your brains? some time to recoup and do some second grade math…duh!

    Here is a word problem: Oops! You were on LSD during that class.

    Let’s start over.

    A negative 50,000,000 (natural born citizens) plus a negative 25,000,000 (natural born citizens under working age) equals a negative 25,000,000 (natural born citizens in every profession and class).

    Now class…….How many bodies do we need to fill the employment gap?

    Do the math….and look! No religion, no politics, no moralizing and no defamation to the “gap fillers”!

    Say NO to drugs and you will see clearly!

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