Tying immigration to abortion

March 27, 2006

The award for the most bizarre policy connection of the day goes to Georgia State Sen. Nancy Schaefer (R), who connected immigration and abortion in a way I hadn’t thought possible. (thanks to Carpetbagger regular J.C. for the tip)

“Guest-worker amnesty must be defeated in Washington, too. If it is not defeated, millions of illegal aliens who violated our laws will remain in American and bring their families here.

“Big employers may get the benefit of cheap labor, but the U.S. taxpayer will pay for their health care, food stamps, schooling for children, and income tax credits.

“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.”

I’m trying to wrap my head around the logic, but it’s too early on a Monday for such absurdity.

There are lots of perfectly honest reasons to be opposed to abortion, but this has got to be one of the worst I have ever heard. So the less abortion, the lower corporations can drive down wages? Hmmm…. I’ve always wondered what was behind the political alliance of business and the religious right.

  • I’ve got no numbers on this, but wouldn’t most immigrants from south of the border be Catholic and innately predisposed against having abortions?

  • …but it’s too early on a Monday…

    So true! At first I read that wrong. I see now he’s saying if we didn’t abort babies, we’d have plenty of domestic cheap labor and we wouldn’t have to import it.

    D’oh.

  • I’ve heard of something like this before. You can explain every precept of the NeoCons in terms of “low wages.” For example, say abortion is banned. A single woman now has to feed an extra mouth or two, so she is willing to work for lower wages. Meanwhile, 18 years later, she can’t afford to send her kid(s) to college, so they are also low-wage workers. It’s a fun game. You can do it with anything. Not that it’s always necessarily their honest motivation, but it’s an interesting frame of reference.

  • ‘…I’m trying to wrap my head around the logic…’

    CB, if you truly get your head around this, we may have to hook your head up to a car battery to get you right…

  • Here’s is the logic of the extreme right:

    “We are having too many white offspring being aborted”
    “We are having too many non-whites coming into this country, producing too many non-white babies.”
    “Because they aren’t white, they aren’t intelligent enough to replace the whte offspring being aborted.”
    “America will turn into a Third World countryif this is left to continue. ”

    This is a very crude explanation, but all you have to do is read a book by Pat Buchanan, and you get the gist of this kind of mentality

  • “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.” – Georgia State Sen. Nancy Schaefer (R)

    Yes! Then American Citizens could live like South American Immigrants, three families stuffed in a house built for one. And of course all these Citizens would be eligable for the social welfare programs that Schaefer’s allies claim the illegal immigrants are overburdening now. And of course we would have 38-40 million more poor people in the country.

    You know, I’ve met immigrant janitorial staff. They are nice, hardworking folk. Frankly, I don’t think native-born Americans would do the work as well or as happily. But maybe the poor in Georgia are lining up for these jobs. I suppose in Virginia we just teach our citizens to expect a little better life.

  • Yup, and there’d be plenty to spare for other tasks,
    too. A few million could have been put to work
    building a huge wall across the Mexican border,
    while others acted as sentries.

    Still more could have been sent to Iraq to bolster
    our presence there.

    Let your imaginations run wild, folks. Just think
    what we could do with fifty million unwanted kids
    standing around desperate for something to do.

    Damn those pro choicers! The opportunity of
    a lifetime down the drain, so to speak.

  • I love a bit of mental gymnastics in the morning. Let’s see how this goes:

    1. The state of Georgia needs a fixed amount of workers, regardless of population size.

    2. The workplaces of Georgia are now beginning to empty, as the people who were never born have called in absent.

    3. Because Nature abhors a vacuum, people are sucked in from other countries.

    It just couldn’t be clearer!

  • Without taking a position on whether abortion is right or wrong, I have been wondering how our economy would have absorbed the 40+ million extra citizens that we would have without abortion. Job creation in the Bush economy can’t even keep with present population growth.

    As for Schaefer’s comments I’m sure in her mind there also exists other kinds of illogic such as, we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.

  • “Let your imaginations run wild, folks. Just think what we could do with fifty million unwanted kids standing around desperate for something to do.” – hark

    Like watch them burn cars the way the kids in France do when they are unhappy?

    Or have them committing suicide at increditable rates like they do in Japan?

    Or maybe have them rot in orphanages like the kids did in Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena, who also thought their country should abolish abortion to produce more workers. The unwanted kids ended up in institutions without even enough human interaction to turn on their brains. It was just horrible.

    And any Republicanite politician who wants to follow in their footsteps might note that they were executed by their own army on Christmas Day 1989.

  • “I’m trying to wrap my head around the logic, but it’s too early on a Monday for such absurdity.”

    hehe, best quote i’ve read in a long time.

  • Lance — The Republicanite thing is starting to sink in. It sounds subtly derogatory, I like it.

  • Lance,

    I know its off topic, but I can’t let this stereotype go unchallenged.

    Or have them committing suicide at increditable rates like they do in Japan?

    According to reports from the World Health Organization for 2002 the following are the suicide rates for teens (per 10,000):

    Country……Boys 15-24……Girls 15-24…..Total
    ———…….—————…….—————…..——
    Japan………14.7…………..6.3…………….10.7

    USA………..16.6…………..2.9…………….9.9

    I trust we can agree that while teen girls in Japan have a higher incidence of suicide, the total numbers for both genders in both countires is pretty close.

  • Lance,

    Having said that about the suicide rates, I think your Romania example is outstanding. I truly wish that the rightwing nut jobs cared as much about current living children as they do about the unborn fetus. If only…

  • D’oh! Not that anyone beside me is likely to care, but I have a few details wrong on the country suicide rate info.

    Both countries rates are per 100,000, not 10,000.

    Japan data are for 2002, but the USA is for 2001.

    I believe however, that my point remains.

  • “Having said that about the suicide rates, I think your Romania example is outstanding. I truly wish that the rightwing nut jobs cared as much about current living children as they do about the unborn fetus. If only…” – Edo

    They (theocratic reactionaries) would just point out the number of parents waiting and hoping to adopt children in this country, or who go overseas to find children to adopt (my daughter’s best friend has three adopted sisters from Russia, scarily cute when they were younger).

    I in turn would point out all the children in foster care in this country that these same ‘would be parents’ refuse to adopt. Not to mention all the children left in the ‘care’ of their biological parents because the social services are so overwhelmed that they can’t be saved from abuse.

    No, our country is just not ready for more unwanted children. We’ve got millions already.

    Thanks for the statistics on Japanese teen suicides. Sad to see them so high for girls. I suspect that if we could determine motivations, we would find a higher rate in Japan due to bullying.

    Ceauşescu and Romania illuminates one of the three examples of what happens when the State claims an overreaching interest in women’s reproductive rights. The other two are Communist China, where they ‘abort’ children one minute before birth, and Nazi Germany, where they were selective, sterlizing unwanted population (Afro-Germans from German South-West Africa (Nambia today) ) while instituting programs and policies to encourage birth by native German women. Upon inspection, all three examples prove to be pretty horrible.

  • “America will turn into a Third World countryif this is left to continue. ”

    So what? The people who are scared of that are people like me, and I’m less and less convinced of the rightness of my manifest destiny…

  • I didn’t know that every single woman who’s had an abortion since 1973 lived in Georgia!

  • 16 Edo, I was reading them. upsetting statistics /

    and uh..’large unfilled job market in georgia, inDeed.’ i cracked up reading 9 llari – “2. The workplaces of Georgia are now beginning to empty, as the people who were never born have called in absent.”

    here’s the thing: abortion should not be on the table labeled “Politics”. i am disinclined to debate anyone as to when they think life begins. we all hold different beliefs, and if that isn’t enough for you, i STILL say this:

    if our country were trying to make some sort of law, interfering with a male’s reproductive organs…..it’d never reach the floor.

    and well is shouldn’t.

  • Hmmmm….

    57% of women who seek an abortion have incomes that are below twice the federal poverty level. However, the portrait that it paints of them as poor could be misleading. 52% of women who have an abortion are under the age of 25. Young people simply earn less than older people and single people earn far less than married people. For example, a 2003 census bureau study found that those under 25 with a bachelor’s degree earned on average $22,000 while those between 25 and 29 with the same degree earned $39,000.x Thus, these women could have low incomes, but they could also have wealthy or middle class parents.

    • Only one in four women who sought an abortion had income levels above 300%of poverty ($42,000).
    • Only 21% of women said inadequate finances was the main reason for choosing an abortion.

    So 40 – 50 million more people in the workforce who probably have advantages such that they don’t NEED to do scut work will affect the jobs “suitable” for illegal immigrants how????????????

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