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Samuelson—the brave new thinker that wasn’t
Well, Robert Samuelson has gotten me dizzy, but it’s partly my own fault. In a column a couple of weeks ago, he supported amnesty, for which he was criticized in these pages. See Paul Nachman’s letter to Samuelson here and further comments here. Then, in a subsequent column, enthusiastically greeted by me here, Samuelson turned around and came out strongly against amnesty, or so I thought. I was flat-out wrong. I took his jeremiad against the guest worker program to be a rejection of amnesty as well. In fact, he didn’t even mention the word amnesty. But he was so vociferously opposed to the guest worker program that you felt he had had an epiphany and was four-square against any accommodation to illegal immigration. I only realized the truth today, when Samuelson wrote yet another piece making it clear he’s for amnesty. As I said, trying to follow his argument can make you feel your head is spinning. Samuelson writes: “We can’t run an immigration system that condones mass illegality. Most illegal immigrants deserve legal standing—and a path to citizenship.” I had to stop and read that passage three times (I was reading it aloud to a friend on the phone) to make sure Samuelson was saying what he seemed to be saying: We must refuse to condone mass illegality, and the way we refuse to condone mass illegality is by rewarding 12 million illegal aliens with legal standing in this country! Much of the rest of the article is on that level. His reason for insisting on amnesty is that we can’t make the illegals leave, and it’s bad for society to have such a large population of illegals here. His assumption is that making illegals leave would involve some sudden, draconian roundup of 12 million people, which would lead to massive unrest and be impracticable in any case. This of course is a false argument, as has been shown over and over again. It’s not a matter of mass deportations, but of simply enforcing our laws, steadily and surely, which will steadily reduce the number of illegals in the U.S. and the numbers trying to enter. It’s a disgrace that a writer who claims to know something about the issue mindlessly dismisses the option of real law enforcement.
Samuelson is a brave new thinker—of the 1986, Simpson-Mazzoli variety. His brilliant program: surrender to the illegals who are already here, while talking tough about stopping more of them from coming in. But if you lack the toughness to do anything about illegals once they have crossed the border into the U.S., why should anyone believe that you have the toughness to do all the things you would have to do to stop them from crossing the border in the first place? A logical question. But this is not about logic, and it is not about protecting our country. It is about a liberal pretending to himself that he’s protecting our country, when in reality he’s surrendering to national suicide. Email entry |