Noonan graduates to kindergarten in the immigration debate

Peggy Noonan has certainly been breaking barriers on the immigration front in recent months. Back in December she criticized … illegal immigration. After never having addressed immigration before, except as part of her song of America, she wrote in the Wall Street Journal that it was not a good thing for America to allow hundreds of thousands of people to sneak illegally into this country every year. Talk about being on the cutting edge of societal evolution.

Now Noonan, ever the pioneer, is turning to the issue of legal immigration, where she has made an equally groundbreaking discovery: We’re not assimilating the immigrants. And the reason for this, she writes, is that we don’t believe in America ourselves anymore. This is the very argument that neocons began making in the early 1990s (discussed by me in National Review here and here), when they discovered that immigration was being seen as the force driving multiculturalism. Their evasive response was to say that immigration was not the cause of multiculturalism; the cause was our own lack of will to assimilate the immigrants, resulting from our cultural anomie, from leftism, from black demands and from other domestic factors having nothing to do with the immigrants themselves. Of course, if the neocons had been serious about this analysis, they would have called for a moratorium on immigration until America returned to cultural health and confidence and was able once again to assimilate immigrants. But they were not serious; they were simply using any argument they could find to protect immigration. Their message, which they have continued to promote until this very moment, is that we easily have it in our power, if we can only summon the desire and will, to assimilate one million or more non-Westerners, including Muslims, into this country every year. But they never say what we should actually do to make this assimilation happen. It’s just a cheap slogan, a cliché, designed to deflect any critical thoughts about America’s open borders policies.

And now Noonan, opening her dreaming eyes and taking cognizance of the immigration problem for the first time in her writing career, leaps into the fray with the same evasive argument that her fellow neocons have been using for the last 15 years. Maybe by 2020 she’ll notice that some groups are less assimilable into America than others.

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Howard Sutherland writes:

I like your comment, but Noonan’s latest is actually worse than you paint it: she chastises Americans for failing to assimilate illegal aliens as well as the immigrants we foolishly admit: “Because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special…” Note the presumption that illegal aliens have “joined” our special America. I don’t believe that of most legal immigrants, and I categorically reject that idea with respect to any illegal alien. Noonan does not, and for her the distinction between legal and illegal is merely technical. For her, anyone here is an assimilation challenge who, presumably by virtue of his mere presence on our land, has the right to remain and has already—by breaking in—become a part of her special America. For Noonan our duty is to assimilate the illegal alien, when our real duty as Americans is to apprehend and remove him, numbers be damned. For Noonan the illegal alien (now presumptively part of America) only has some vague duty to assimilate, whatever that means. Certainly not to leave or surrender for deportation. Noonan once wrote that the fact that illegal aliens’ first encounters with America consist of breaking our laws might argue against their eagerness to assimilate. I guess her editors brought her back to earth. She has returned to WSJ orthodoxy: America at any given time is simply the sum total of human units of production/consumption who happen to be present within her open borders.

Noonan is worse than an enemy in this fight. Like President Bush, conservatives mistake her for an ally, when in truth she has no objection to the utter transformation of America and Western society generally. Even in saying that America is not just a big box store, she cannot call her a real country or a nation. For Noonan, America is a “great enterprise,” presumably an economic work-in-progress with a thin veneer of “Judeo-Christian” ethics. This is the proposition nation/nation of immigrants fallacy at its worst. Noonan will never be able to believe that America has a blood and soil core. So identified as she is with her Irish Catholic immigrant heritage, I’m sure the very notion is wormwood and gall to her. Perhaps when her ancestral Ireland looks even more like Senegal or Ghana, she may wake up about what is happening to the West. About America, though, the scales will never fall from her eyes. This latest article of hers is just another example of an establishment Republican pretending to be concerned about runaway immigration, which actually looking for excuses to increase it. She is really no different from Bush, McCain, Specter, Frist (yes, him too).

Even her Catholicism, as far as I can tell, is of the John Paul II, post-Vatican II, “We Are the World, So Please Send Us Your Migrants” variety.

LA replies:

Thanks for catching the fact I missed, that she was speaking of our failure to assimilate illegals as well as legals. Terrible. This cancels out her column last December where she was saying that illegal immigration is inherently subversive of any affection and respect for nation. Now she’s turning around and suggesting that illegal immigration can also be made to “work.”

I think I said in December that she might abandon the little progress she had made in criticizing illegal immigration. She has. Truly, as you have so well stated, she remains incorrigible.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 30, 2006 10:18 AM | Send