Amnesty miscellany

This blog entry will be for readers’ comments about the illegal immigration bill, the illegal aliens’ demonstrations, the elites’ betrayal, and related matters.

Robert C. writes:

The more I consider the collapse and betrayal by our national leadership, the more shocking and consequential it becomes. As a collapse of the sense of a right to have a separate national existence, its suddenness is like that of collapse of the Berlin Wall, or of the Soviet Union. More fearfully, I consider comparisons to what followed the consent of the Romans to the Goths to cross the Danube, and the very quick re-population and transformation of Asia Minor. A border collapse will bring more than just political change. Amnesty, guest-worker program, means the continued presence and invasion of a people largely younger and with higher birthrates than the white population. And once granted amnesty/guest worker status, they can bring over their families, and then, the families of those families.

But by that time, the matter of respect for national borders, or even of the recognition that Americans have a right to their nation, will be settled as far as the Hispanics are concerned—and also as far as the American universalist government is concerned. Can we conceive that in 10 or 15 more years, with 30 or 40 million more Hispanics, the government will assert such a moral and national right?

I agree that things will apparently have to get even worse before the populace might, just might, recognize the fraud of liberalism and universalism. I fear that by that time, any organized effort at collective resistance through the already rotten two party racket system, whose leaders consider the concept of a nation as something to be overcome, will be even less possible. That would leave only extra-constitutional means to resist a government that long since stopped representing its people.

LA replies:

You capture this present moment in a way that reflects my feelings too. I had a similar moment when I was reading some of the proposals being passed in the Judiciary Committee, a sense that this was moving to some new level of madness, a truly out of control reality was taking over.

David G. writes:

Regarding your comments on today’s column by George Will: In sports when a guy “shows up” it means that he came to play and that he did on the field what he was supposed to do. Larry, you really showed up today. I share your disgust and your outrage. I hope you don’t mind if I weigh in myself.

Will’s column is a “how-to-behave” guide for handing off our culture and its traditions to the Other. This ridiculous piece of detritus says that there is a way to behave while you watch your traditions and history being reduced to nostalgia; that there is a way to behave while fecund third worlders replace the native population; and that there is a way to behave (thoughtfully, gloomily) as we monitor our East-German style fence. This is conservatism for enablers. Messrs. Will and Bush are expecting us to hand over our culture in order to save our culture.

If you liked the America of the 1940s, ‘50s and early ‘60s your memories have been reduced to mere nostalgia—they no longer have anything to with a living American tradition. Better to laud a do-nothing president who stands correctly, according to Will, to the left of his politcal base. Too erudite for me, George.

Of course it worth noting that George Will and Michael Barone are best buddies. In his book The New Americans, a paean to the immigration of the early twentieth century, Barone insists that we (the U.S.) have been here before: Everybody is just like somebody else, and we will all be just fine if we just understand that simple, cogent assessment of modern immigration.

Here is a snippet from an interview at the Heritage Foundation with Michael Barone among others: http://www.uncommonknowledge.org/01-02/636.html

Peter Robinson: Okay. Well let me then tighten up the question a little bit. If you had known what it would lead to, would you have voted for the 1965 Immigration Act?

Peter Skerry: I would have been much more hesitant clearly.

Peter Robinson: You still would have voted yes?

Michael Barone: I would have voted for it, yeah.

LA replies:

Thanks. I would fully expect Barone, a true open-borders ideologue, to say of course he would have voted for the ‘65 Act. I find more interesting Skerry’s reply. He indicates criticism of the ‘65 Act, but still won’t say definitely that he would not have voted for it. He doesn’t like the liberalism, but he can’t break with it either. Sort of like Daniel Pipes and “Islamism.”

A reader writes with an amazing report about Chris Mathews:

I’ve seen some interesting stuff on TV the last few days.

You’ve posted about the increasing perceptiveness some pundits are showing recently about immigration. Michelle Malkin, Peggy Noonan.

Would you believe Chris Mathews?

Thursday night, he had a colloquy on illegal immigration with two talk-radio hosts, Amy Goodman (ultra-leftist) and Hugh Hewitt (standard neo-con). When Goodman started whining about the “cruelty” of the House bill and American oppression in the Third World, Mathews cut her to pieces. Then he demanded she answer—yes or no—the question: Does America have the right to secure its own borders? She whined some more and Mathews, looking utterly disgusted, cut her up some more and kicked what was left over a cliff, in a manner of speaking.

But the more interesting exchange was with Hewitt.

Hewitt favors a wall and sealing the border, but is otherwise a typical “invite the world” neocon. Then he went out of his way to emphasize that Republican/conservative opposition to illegal immigration was only because of terrorism concerns, that otherwise red-state folks had no problems w/immigrants, legal or otherwise. [LA: Unbelievable. We can understand that this is Hewitt’s own view of the matter; but how could he be so ignorant or dishonest as to claim that Republicans’ view generally?]

Mathews jumped all over this, saying several times he disagreed, and that the core of opposition to illegals was cultural, that regular people were upset about their neighborhoods “going brown” and they didn’t want the country to be overrun by Mexicans. He also made clear he thought this viewpoint, while not necessarily his own, was totally legitimate and had to be respected.

Hewitt was clearly not expecting to hear this argument from Chris Mathews, the liberal Philly Democrat. He sputtered how he and all his friends loved immigrants, especially Mexicans, and repeated his claim that most opposition was based on fears of terrorism, to which Mathews replied, “I think you’re wrong.”

Mathews also pointed out several times that the Republican elites were refusing to do what the Republican voters were telling them to, i.e., lock the border and forget about amnesty and guest-workers, at least for now.

I’ve been watching HARDBALL for five years and have never seen anything like this before. Mathews, like many white ethnics, is visibly uncomfortable talking about immigration and in the past has dismissed those concerned about it as “nativists,” “xenophobes,” etc.

I don’t know how to account for Mathews’ sudden willingness to state fairly, though not endorse, what amounts to the national identity position. Perhaps it’s the sweet ministrations of Pat Buchanan, a frequent guest on HARDBALL. Or maybe he watches Lou Dobbs.

But generally, I’d say this is an example of the “Tancredo effect,” the apparently real influence of Tom Tancredo’s (and, IMO, Lou Dobbs’) crusade against open borders. Another factor is Newt Gingrich’s newfound opposition to any kind of amnesty for illegals already here. He is still the enemy of course, supporting guest workers and all the rest, but this is a real change in his position, driven by polls, but still encouraging.

Finally, I’ve been at home all week with the flu, and I’ve watched a lot of immigration coverage on the cable news channels. The best, from our POV, is CNN, mainly because of Dobbs, but also because they seek out—when looking for people to present the anti-illegal immigration view—people who actually are opposed to illegal immigration.

Which Fox is not doing, for the most part. This supposedly red-state oriented network has been giving most of its air-time on immigration to supporters of the Senate’s judiciary committee bill, or those only tepidly opposed, like John “Corporation” Cornyn, the senator whose own guest-worker program is only slightly less horrible than Kennedy-McCain. I get the feeling the Fox people are so worried about Bush’s poll numbers, the war, and the November election outlook, that they decided he can’t afford to lose this one.

Whatever, the reason, on immigration for the past six days, FoxNews is worst, CNN best, and MSNBC is in between.

Thought you’d like to know.

Rick Darby of the Reflecting Light blog has a reaction to the amnesty bill similar to mine, a sense of reality veering madly off into some unknown territory. He writes:

Thanks for helping me to think coherently about the seemingly incomprehensible.

W.’s driven, almost maniacal determination on behalf of amnesty and open borders has seemed to emanate from some strange psychological disorder that should have a Latin scientific name. The Senate’s complicity—and the probable surrender of the House as well—do not strike one as any form of rational behavior. It’s like reading about the rites of a remote tribe whose speech and behavior come from a world view that has no assumptions in common with mine or those of any American before the past 40 years.

You can’t even put these acts down to political cynicism. Our supposed representatives may be self-serving, but anyone smart or at least shrewd enough to get elected to Congress can’t seriously believe that voting for amnesty in the wake of mass demonstrations by illegal immigrants and Mexican school kids hoisting the Mexican flag above an upside-down Stars and Stripes is going to win them popularity among the majority of voters. Nor can the expectation of winning, or keeping, the favor of big business fully account for this dementia, it seems to me.

Stuffing the immigration channels, mostly with uneducated, unskilled, non-English-speaking opportunists, goes beyond any imaginable political calculation (although that no doubt is part of the mix). A move this drastic has deeper, symbolic meaning.

A mentality was spawned in the 1960s—a rejection of the traditions, both civic and spiritual, of the Western world in favor of supposedly rationalistic, secularist, economics-based Utopianism. It was propagated by a mind-set with a simple premise: that all wickedness was bound up with white European-derived culture, and all virtue resided in non-white, “oppressed” people. That mentality has had its ups and downs. It reached a high-water mark in the ‘90s, but lately, it’s been slipping.

Ah, but here’s the chance to turn the tables big time. Immigration is the trump card. You can argue against Marxism and big government, but you can’t argue against immigration, because we’re, quote, a nation of immigrants. (I understand, of course, that you are perfectly right that for most of our history we have been no such thing, but the idea has been repeated so often that most people take it for gospel.)

The faction that has largely lost the battle of ideas, especially since 9/11, knows that ideas are disabled by undefended borders and fecund wombs. That is what lies behind the vote of the Senate committee and those to come: deploying the ultimate weapon that tradition, principle, and reason cannot stand up to. The ‘60s Liberal Establishment has found a way to speak Power to Truth.

An Indian living in the West writes:

Why has Bush pushed and why does he continue to push an open borders agenda that 82 percent of his own party is vehemently opposed to? Many people have speculated as to the reasons for this. But none of those seem to make much sense to me—it certainly doesn’t benefit him electorally (the majority if Americans want illegal immigration stopped), it doesn’t make sense economically, it doesn’t make sense ideologically (for a right of centre party), it doesn’t make sense from the point of view of law and order (this is a case of allowing people brazenly to violate the law), etc. So why does he keep pushing it? With Bush I have come to the conclusion that he has some set ideas about the world, and his open borders insanity is a mirror image of his foreign policy insanity. And he is surrounded by people who simply act as an echo chamber (such as Condi Rice). And this is why there seems to be no hope of ever changing his mind on things. He also seems incapable of absorbing any new ideas (even if they are sound) because his liberal prejudices are very strong and he never violates those. He is basically incapable of what you refer to as the “unprincipled exception” which is the one thing that a people who practice liberalism must be capable of if they are going to survive long term. I can’t see Bush make an unprincipled exception to his liberal ideology on the issues that matter—democratisation, open borders, his insane “anti-racism” which is often thoroughly misplaced and often invoked at the wrong time.

LA replies:

Fascinating.

I argued this past week that what drives Bush et al is the moral inability to resist non-whites, which turns into a positive compulsion to surrender to them.

But your argument is at least equally plausible. It is pure ideology at work. Bush is an extreme liberal ideologue who cannot compromise his ideology for anything, even his own political survival. In the end, he turns out to be such a “principled” man that he is incapable of unprincipled exceptions.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 30, 2006 11:15 PM | Send