Cognitive Dissonance

Another blog had a post yesterday on the election results, which generated a vigorous and wide-ranging discussion in its comment thread. One of the commenters, a successful border state businessman, whom I know to be intelligent from his previous comments, lamented his high tax burden while essentially expressing support for unskilled immigration to deal with "scarce labor" in the U.S. Surprised that he hadn't connected the dots from the one issue to the other, I left him this comment in response:

If memory serves, elsewhere in this thread you were complaining about your tax burden. Here you seem fairly sanguine about the importation of unskilled immigrants, who, research shows, tend to consume more in government resources than they pay in taxes. Further, when they become amnestied (or when their American-born kids turn 18) they will vote to increase your tax burden -- you know most of them aren't going to be joining the Club for Growth, right? There seems to be some cognitive dissonance at work here.