Conservative immigration restrictionists all too often tell business owners to simply raise wages, but raising wages isn’t the only solution. Who wants to pick lettuce at any price? The federal government is well aware of which industries employ the most illegal aliens. We should use the stick of federal enforcement but also the carrots of research and tax credits to empower employers to automate whatever illegal immigrant jobs they can. Illegal aliens can’t take jobs that robots are already doing. We might even learn from our Japanese and Australian friends, who provide businesses with incentives to do just that.
There are, of course, some jobs that do require seasonal immigrant workers. There, we can follow our friends in South Korea and hold back a portion of their wages, giving them back once they’ve left the country.
ICE spent $3.2 billion to identify, arrest, detain, and remove illegal immigrants in 2016—the latest figures available before the mad rush on the border—while the cost of illegal immigration to our country is more than $100 billion annually, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)—more than $6 billion just for the two million illegal aliens in Florida! Californians pay $23 billion for the more than six million illegal immigrants there and their children, while Texans pay more than $11 billion for the four million in the Lone Star State.
It also costs the taxpayers more than $15,000 to deport each illegal alien. The Democrats want to “abolish ICE.” The corporatist Republicans want to ignore ICE. I want to enhance ICE and give it the latest tech—while singing, “ICE, ICE, baby”!
I kid, but I am never more serious than when I am joking. After all, as the Left tries to smear those of us with America First immigration views as grievance racists, we should be joyous about protecting our countrymen. It is a worthy and noble cause. Don’t let anyone tell you different in America.
Reagan wanted to tear down the Berlin Wall, while George H. W. Bush wanted “a thousand points of light,” whatever that means. Bill Clinton wanted to build a bridge to the future, and Barack Obama told us which direction the moral arc of the universe bent (really). Donald Trump wants to build a wall to protect and secure our southern border, and over 200 miles are already complete. And once we have built that wall, I want to man the gates.
There will be times when those gates can swing open, but they must always be closed to those who do not wish to be a part of our experiment in self-government, rooted in self-reliance. Those who do not want to partake of the American spirit ought not to settle in America, and we should never let them set foot here. Give us only those yearning to be free—and willing to fight for that freedom, as hard as those who built the country they have found worthy of joining.
There is no alternative, no country to run to, should America fail.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Big Tech Hates America
January 2018
Capitol Hill Club.
America’s youngest self-made boy billionaire sat across from me wearing flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt—in January. As we sipped diet sodas, I sensed my congressional colleagues were reporting my plus-one to the Capitol Hill Club dress code committee.
I considered myself lucky, though. Time with the strange and brilliant is something I relish. In the world of Big Tech, you don’t fit in if you are not ready to surrender everything you believe to the Woketopia, the paradise of those purportedly more politically aware than the rest of us.
But Woketopia has its dissidents—the real resistance—who seek to warn America before it is too late, even as they build the stuff of miracles. Palmer Luckey is like a free-internet Paul Revere. He was there to tell me the British are coming!
Palmer spoke in headlines—animated, excited about matters great and technical. The community college dropout founded his virtual reality company Oculus in his trailer and sold it to Facebook for a “couple billion dollars” in what was then the fastest acquisition in Silicon Valley history. Palmer dedicates 1 percent of his net worth annually to acquiring some astoundingly nerdy toys: Missile silos? Check. Submarines? Check. Buying ships from the navy? Check. Black Hawk helicopters? Check, check, check. If it’s weird and cool and colorably legal, Palmer’s got it. He’s a legend in Japan—because of course he is.
Palmer had an urgent message: Big Tech seeks to dominate what we say and think and therefore how we act. They must be stopped. Palmer and I both know people who Big Tech has disappeared because of their heretical politics. I’ve seen the tech companies conduct elaborate opposition research projects against their critics. Six eBay executives and employees were even indicted for allegedly sending threats, including a bloody pig mask and books about how to survive the loss of a spouse, to a married couple who criticized them in an e-newsletter. Vicious! The innovators should know that disruption always wins in the end, though. America needs the nerds to keep its edge. What happens when Big Tech deletes its own conservatives? How many of them have been deleted already? Could a reboot to our technical-political thinking bring them back?
The Capitol Hill Club is the sort of stodgy place where lobbyists and politicians, dressed in their best, did their worst, often at America’s expense. The “Club” is where you imagine conversations in smoke-filled rooms that determine America’s fate take place—just without the smoking because, as you know, Washington kicked the smoking habit once Speaker John Boehner got run out of town. They’re addicted to something far more dangerous now—power and money.
Neither Palmer nor I, the third-youngest elected congressman, belonged here among the dad ties and old man cologne. I avoid the place as much as I can.
Palmer positively bounced with the energy of his middle
