The inverted world of U.S. immigration policy

For once, Mark Steyn writes about a real problem in the real world that doesn’t involve easy mocking of the left. His subject is our criminally incompetent and sclerotic immigration system, and the way illegals effortlessly get into America and acquire papers to function here, while legitimate immigrant applicants and visitors often face insanely onerous bureaucratic obstacles to get into the U.S. It’s a variation on Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society: under liberalism, the more illegitimate and dangerous you are, the easier it is for you, and the more legitimate and productive you are, the harder it is for you. Or it’s a variation of Samuel Francis’s thesis on Anarcho-tyranny. Since the authorities are not willing to enforce the law on the people who are actually breaking the law, they must—in order to keep alive the illusion that they’re doing their job and upholding the social order—impose petty tyranny on people who are not breaking the law. So, for example, the U.S. authorities made it so difficult and expensive for a British orchestra to get permission to come to America to perform at Lincoln Center that the orchestra canceled the trip.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 09, 2006 08:58 PM | Send