Creating the Third World in America : The GOP “contract” would gut civil liberties, education and health care to stop immigration.

As a liberal Democrat, feminist and human-rights advocate, let me be the first to congratulate the new Republican majority on its sophisticated plan to address the immigration crisis by turning the United States into a Third World country. This subtle strategy will turn back the rising tide of immigration by transforming our golden shores into a destination not unlike those the “huddled masses” are fleeing.

It’s somewhat puzzling that the new regime of radical marketeers favors free trade in goods, services and finance, but not labor. However, their program should allow immigrant-bashers to have their cake and eat it, too. And judging from his State of the Union address, the President now also agrees that the tax-paying, church-going people who scrub our toilets constitute a grave threat to national security.

This new “contract on America” deserves wider publicity. The core of the program follows the example of our Latin American neighbors in reducing the size and scope of government. We, too, will soon enjoy the benefits of a weak state and unregulated market competition: unsafe workplaces, tainted products, privatized patchworks of public services and life-threatening pollution.

Immigrants will no longer be attracted to jobs in the United States, since poorly regulated wage levels will fail to meet the competition in Mexico. As health-care reform fails and public clinics are cut, measures like Proposition 187 will become unnecessary--there will be no health services that immigrants (or even poor citizens) can afford. After all, lack of access to affordable prenatal care has already produced infant mortality rates in America’s inner cities that approach Africa’s, and we already host epidemics of preventable Third World diseases such as measles and tuberculosis.

Similarly, the immigrant’s dream of education will succumb to underfunded and overcrowded public schools, further weakened by voucher-based “intellectual capital flight.” The Southern Hemisphere’s best and brightest will have no reason to attend our collapsing public universities and community colleges, with their deteriorating facilities, moonlighting professors and inadequate libraries.

The conservative social agenda will discourage immigrants who seek liberty

and opportunity, as the United States will come to mirror the most socially regressive aspects of the Third World.

Advocates of school prayer will be heartened to learn that Ecuador has passed a law mandating up to two hours a day of religious education in public schools (engendering weeks of student protest).

Conservatives who seek to impose “family values” may create in the United States a society just as intolerant as the ones immigrants flee, where, typically, homosexuality is illegal, unwed mothers are stigmatized and parents retain the authority to control, beat or even sell their children with a minimum of government interference. Anti-abortion activists should consider the model offered by Latin America: Abortion is legally restricted in every country except Cuba--and illegal abortion is estimated to be the leading cause of death among women of childbearing age in many countries.

Finally, the combination of growing inequality, urban crisis and punitive crime policy will create a level of violence and conflict that will discourage refugees from seeking succor in the new America. Republicans’ refusal to regulate weapons or fund preventive drug programs seems to aspire to replicate the conditions in Colombia, whose streets Detroit and Washington already resemble. The get-tough attitude on crime could easily be extended to Brazil’s approach of bringing the military in to police the slums of Rio, although some critics claim that this “no strikes” versus “three strikes” policy leads to human-rights violations. Contemplated changes in immigration policy itself will increase police power and curtail civil liberties in a manner all too familiar to Guatemalan refugees in Mexico or Bolivians in Argentina.

There are many positive features of non-Western societies, but underdevelopment, inequality, intolerance and conflict are the factors that drive good people out. Immigration is an ironic testament to America’s strength and attractiveness, not a cause of its weakness. The Republican reformers’ rejection of our own history and the experience of our advanced industrialized peers defies logic as well as principle; underdeveloping our own is no solution.