William Kristol’s repulsive arrogance on illegal immigration

On Sunday morning on Fox Five News with Chris Wallace, William Kristol said:

I’m a liberal on immigration…. What damage have they done that’s so great in 20 years [since the 1986 amnesty]?… What’s happened that’s so terrible in the last 20 years? Is the crime rate up in the United States in the last 20 years? Is unemployment up in the United States in the last 20 years?

And they’ve been contributing to the U.S. economy and not damaging U.S. society. There have been marches with Mexican flags, which conservative talk radio is up in arms about. I mean, are these people serious? Are these people—what, are they going to be traitors to the U.S.?

… I am pro-immigration, and I am even soft on illegal immigration.

Isn’t that something? The neocons, and in particular the Jewish neocons, have been long seen by the paleo right as people who only care about spreading an American democratic empire abroad and who, in their pedal-to-the-metal support for open borders, are indifferent to the actual well-being, and even the long-term survival, of America as a distinct country. The neocons, of course, see such suspicions as nothing but irrational bigotry against Jews. And so what does Kristol do? He comes right out and says on national television that he couldn’t care less about the mass invasion of this country by illegal aliens. He looks at 500,000 illegals and their co-ethnics demonstrating in Los Angeles,—illegal aliens demanding rights from the government of this country while carrying Mexican flags and signs saying that this continent belongs to them, not to us—and it has no effect on him. He’s pleased to inform us that personally he’s not bothered by it. Even Brit Hume was put off by Kristol’s smiling demeanor.

It would be one thing for Kristol to disagree with those who want to stop illegal immigration. It’s another thing to act as if he’s never read the arguments against it, has no knowledge of the profoundly disruptive effects it has had on the cities and regions most affected, and has no awareness of or sympathy with the anguish millions of Americans people feel about it. He is also ignorant of the vast contribution illegals make to crime. As with President Bush, it is simply not a part of Kristol’s makeup to have any critical thought about mass Third-World immigration (“I’m a liberal on immigration, I am even soft on illegal immigration”), so he can’t bother taking in what his colleagues on the other side of the debate are saying, or noticing the most basic facts about the issue.

I’m reminded of an interview in the early 1990s with William Kristol’s parents, Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. At the time, they were living in an apartment on New York’s Central Park South where they had lived for ten years. They told the interviewer that they had never gone for a walk in Central Park, right across the street from their apartment. They seemed quite pleased with themselves in the way they said this.

What this stunning confession represented to me was: these people have their careers, they write their articles and books, but they themselves are completely apart from and uninterested in the actual America they live in, even as, from their aerie, they advise it on its politics and culture. And now the Kristols’ son puts his parents’ dégagé attitude toward America into practical, political expression: faced with an ongoing mass invasion of this country by hostile cultural aliens, he tells us, with a smug smile, that he couldn’t care less.

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Stephen writes:

Did you catch Ben Stein doing the debate segment on CBS Sunday Morning? The subject was illegal immigration and if you had tuned in during the middle of his spiel, you might have thought he was talking about some race of supreme beings from a far superior planet. Typical of neo-cons, most of his advocacy was focused not on the reality of the coming Mexican annexation of California, but more restricted to rhapsodic paeans to the illegal immigrants themselves.

It was the old “Mexicans aren’t equal to Americans—they’re actually much BETTER!” spin.

Another thing should be noted about Stein. He has two homes: one in Beverly Hills, the other in Malibu.

Neither are noted as primary destinations for squatting hordes from the third world. The Malibu residence is not a gated home, nor a gated neighborhood, it’s a gated MOUNTAIN.

Wildflower-plucking hikers who inadvertently stray off the trail in public lands near Ben Stein’s neighborhood can expect to be confronted by grim-faced private security guards riding ATVs and carrying Glocks on their hips. I think its safe to assume that Mr. Stein doesn’t have a lot of multi-families of illegal Mexican nationals crammed into the single-family residences in (either of) his neighborhoods, blasting the block with music, covering every inch of vertical surface with graffiti, and firing guns into the air to announce their victories in post-midnight cock fights.

I guess they’re a lot easier to appreciate from a distance.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 02, 2006 09:46 PM | Send