Discussing illegal immigration with an ambivalent liberal

An acquaintance with whom I had not discussed political issues in many years wrote to me about my article, “The Second Mexican war.” He seemed to agree with my analysis of the problem, but then put up many objections to doing anything about it. While my reply goes over ground that will be familiar to readers, my correspondent’s concerns are so representative of liberal attitudes on this issue that the exchange may be worth reading.

My correspondent writes:

Your article on the second Mexican war is an eye opener for sure….

In your article you say how the Mexicans know how unable we are to enforce immigration laws, but you don’t get into the logistics and impracticality of just how impossible it would be to reverse illegal immigration. The huge numbers and effectiveness of this weeks demonstrations send a clear threat of open insurrection with violence, terrorism, etc. if we try enforcement in any meaningful way. Also, just as Cubans in Florida have enough political power in a swing state to control U.S. policy toward Cuba, the political and economic power of Mexicans has grow so far that there are very few government entities, politicians, corporations, or media organizations that can afford to openly oppose illegal immigration, (which makes it hard to market your work)

You need to propose practical solutions. We have plenty of laws already that are unenforceable. Tougher laws are nothing but tokens to win votes with certain constituencies. Most politicians and people would agree with your position but don’t know what to do about it and therefore give up, allow the status quo, or support legalizing illegal immigrants. If it is a war, it is an insurgency from within and without our borders which is impossible to win. Our laws and due process make it impossible to repel the invasion and enforce immigration laws against so many violators. Military style enforcement would incite a massive insurgent reaction with sabotage and bombings that could easily bring home the situation in Iraq and destroy our country.

To fight a war successfully you need the moral high ground. We don’t have that in Iraq because it was an illegal and unjustified invasion of a sovereign country. How do you counter the historical fact which is the moral justification for legal and illegal immigration from Mexico? The U.S. invaded Mexico and took their land. The official history and propaganda of this country covers up ethnic cleansing tactics and brutal wars used to expand U.S. territory. Except for the heroism of the Texans at the Alamo, we were not taught the truth about the Mexican War so it’s hard to understand that it’s not over and that we might lose it.

In 1990 we were in Japan for a few hours and I had a shocking realization from seeing ordinary Japanese people’s cold reaction to an American family that they really hated us and were still planning to win WWII and take over the U.S., which they were accomplishing successfully at the time by winning the economic war and buying up most of the Pacific islands, including Hawaii and other U.S. assets. If you don’t give Mexicans something they want, you sometimes see scary and violent flashes of the hateful and resentful side that they cover up very effectively with their easy going friendliness, humility, subservient attitude, and hard work.

My reply:

On one hand you say the “war” idea is a powerful mobilizing idea, but then you say that nothing can be done. That’s both contradictory and untrue. Are we to fold up and die because of some demonstrations? Do you think such demonstrations will grow smaller and less aggressive and hostile in the future? We are in the process of turning into a Latin American society (just as George W. Bush celebrated in 2000) with everything that that implies, not just “culturally,” but politically. The paralysis that you and others feel in the face of those demonstrations is only going to grow worse. If that’s not the future you want, we have to do something now.

You are entertaining the false though common assumption that enforcing the law means attempting to remove 12 million illegals all at once, in one great roundup. That sounds so impossible that people dismiss it out of hand and give up on any idea of enforcing the law, and so surrender to the pro-illegal alien side of the argument. But a sudden mass deportation is NOT what this is about. It’s about enforcing the law, effectively, firmly, steadily, and surely, so that illegals go home and don’t keep coming here. Truly penalizing employers would mean they stop hiring illegals and the illegals go home. Truly protecting the border is entirely possible. It’s sheer nonsense and defeatism to imagine that it’s not.

You write:

“You need to propose practical solutions. We have plenty of laws already that are unenforceable. Tougher laws are nothing but tokens to win votes with certain constituencies.”

The practical solutions are all there. True border protection. True employer sanctions. True enforcement of the law. Withdrawing federal funds from cities that violate the law by providing “sanctuary” for illegals.

Ironically, you demand practical solutions, then you shoot down the possibility of any practical solution. You say my article is an eye-opener, which implies that you’re concerned about this problem, but then you make defeatist statements that make any solution impossible.

In fact your entire letter is an exercise in defeatism. You write:

“If it is a war, it is an insurgency from within and without our borders which is impossible to win. Our laws and due process make it impossible to repel the invasion and enforce immigration laws against so many violators.”

Ok, so according to you, there’s NOTHING to be done to defeat this war which you yourself acknowledge is being waged against us. Why then do you ask for practical solutions from me? Your sentence, “If it is a war, it is an insurgency from within and without our borders which is impossible to win,” declares any solution off the table. It is the most self-defeating statement I’ve ever seen.

I remind you that in the mid-1990s, the last time we discussed this subject, you were singing the song of the open border: America the land of freedom; all people should be able to come here; we can handle any numbers; even to worry about the issue was anti-spiritual. And now you, who have been an open borders supporter, are expressing concerns about the results of the very policy you strongly supported in the past, while you are still using the sorts of arguments that helped legitimize open borders and that would make any immigration control impossible.

You’ve gone from “Immigration is great, America is the land of freedom, the more the merrier, God wants us to welcome all people, we can handle everyone, there’s nothing to worry about,” to, “The Mexicans are attacking us from within and without and there’s nothing to do about it.”

You’ve gone in one leap from saying that immigration is fine and that there’s nothing to worry about, to saying that immigration is a disaster and there’s nothing we can do about it.

In both stages of this process you are saying the same thing. Back when it would have been more possible to do something about it, you denied that it was a problem. But now that you admit that it’s a problem, you insist that it’s “too late” to do anything about it!

So I say to you, if you are to participate in this debate, you need to take responsibility for your own past subscription to the beliefs and attitudes that have led to this disaster. You can’t just come in, after having been an open immigration supporter, and say, as though you have no past positions on this issue, “Yeah, it’s a big problem, but there’s nothing we can do about it.” At the moment, you’re an unrepentant open borderite demanding a solution to open borders.

Further, your defeatism doesn’t stop with the notion that “the immigrants are too numerous and there’s nothing we can do about it.” You even trot out the liberal anti-American slogans that we deserve to be invaded. You write:

“How do you counter the historical fact which is the moral justification for legal and illegal immigration from Mexico? The U.S. invaded Mexico and took their land. The official history and propaganda of this country covers up ethnic cleansing tactics and brutal wars used to expand U.S. territory.”

Now please. The United States defeated Mexico in 1848. This was not a problem for 120 years. We had no Mexican immigration problem, and no national guilt problem, until the 1960s, which was when a little revolution occurred (as Sonny Bono said, “The Sixties were great, but only musically”), and lots of Americans and ultimately the country as a whole adopted the anti-American, white-guilt view of the world and lost the belief in America and even in its right to exist as a country. And we did that at the same moment when Mexican immigration was increasing and when we opened up the borders with the 1965 Immigration Act.

Without the U.S. having opened up its borders, all those Mexicans, whom you are now saying we are both helpless to remove and whom we have no right to remove because of our past sins, wouldn’t even be here. They’re only here because of our liberal guilt-ridden policies which told us that we were a racist country that had no right to protect itself.

And now, ironically, you’re using the same white-guilt argument to say that we have no right to do anything about the problem that was created by the white guilt in the first place!

So, once again, you are incredibly divided by this issue. One part of you is genuinely alarmed by the Mexican invasion. But the rest of you remains 100 percent fixed in the liberal attitudes that led to this disaster—you’re intimidated by immigrant activists, and you feel America is a guilty country that has no moral right to defend itself, and also no ability to defend itself. You are thus demanding practical solutions to a problem while still holding to the attitudes that created the problem.

The fundamental reason we are in this crisis is not some objective American guilt, but the hyper liberal belief system that took over America in the Sixties. In the name of an ideal of absolute non-discrimination, this new orthodoxy made the entire history of the country, and the traditional and common sense notions of the past, seem evil, because ALL societies have some degree of discrimination, between the more able and the less able, between members of the society and foreigners, between law abiding citizens and law breaking illegal aliens, and so on. Since the Sixties America has been taken over by a belief system that sees all those normal distinctions as darkness and evil. (This is not to justify all the discrimination that occurred in the past, of course not, but the post-Sixties liberalism didn’t just aim at removing unjust discrimination, it aimed at banning all discrimination, which is not possible, and the attempt to do so is suicidal.) Though these modern liberal ideas are currently dominant and unquestionable in the mainstream, they are very recent, they are not rational, they run counter to the commonsense experience of all mankind though all of history, and they are not compatible with the continued existence of any society. The point cannot be overstated. Modern liberalism with its attack on all discrimination and inequality is an extremist belief system. Once a country adopts modern liberalism with its ideal of non-discrimination, and the resulting guilt over its entire past, it has maybe two or three generations to live.

As recently as World War II, as Tony Blankley talks about in The West’s Last Chance, America had not become the hyper liberal country it is now. We practiced censorship, we arrested and deported enemy aliens, we relocated the Japanese on the West Coast (which under the circumstances was a perfectly rational and necessary thing to do), all done in a rational, responsible, sober way, without hatred and without guilt. Further, we didn’t fight the war for “democracy” or “human rights,” at least primarily; we fought it for “civilization” against “barbarism.” Civilization is a concrete thing that we belong to. It is a non-liberal thing, because liberalism means abstract universal equal rights, and therefore pure liberalism is always opposed to any actually existing country or civilization. Listen to today’s Democratic left. They want open borders, period. They want instant amnesty and citizenship for all illegals, period. That was Kerry’s position in ‘04. Pure liberalism can never wholeheartedly accept or love an actual country or civilization, because that means that there is an “us,” and a “them,” that we favor “us” over them”; and that, to use Kerry’s favorite word when speaking about America, is “arrogant.” Nationhood or allegiance to a distinct civilization is anathema to the vision of universal liberal equality and freedom that took over the West in the post-Sixties period.

This is why one of the main themes at my website is that modern liberalism—in which the liberal values of equality and non-discrimination are the highest values of the society—is incompatible with the existence of any society, and why I say that since 9/11 we are in the apocalypse of liberalism, because liberalism is so evidently unable and unwilling to protect us from the Muslim threat (because liberals cannot bear the thought of fighting for their own guilty society against an enemy), and so, given the actual threat coming from Islam and the imperative need to do something about it, liberalism’s fatal flaws are being exposed as never before. In the same way, liberalism is unable and unwilling to protect us from illegal immigration and mass legal immigration. Therefore, either liberalism (meaning the rule of society by non-discriminatory liberalism and white guilt) must die, or America and the West will die, and liberalism will die with them. Either way, liberalism is doomed. The only question is, will liberalism die before the West dies, giving the West a chance to live, or will liberalism refuse to die, thus dragging the West down with it?

If we are to have a chance to survive, liberal dominance must end. And it must end in the mind and heart of each one of us.

Finally, you undoubtedly fear that to give up liberalism in the way I’m talking about means to become some kind of fascist. I would remind you that America existed for 170 years under the Constitution before it adopted modern liberalism as its ruling credo. At that point the views that had been seen as normal and commonsensical throughout our history began to be seen as fascist. As long as that Sixties-style condemnation of the entire past remains your own outlook, you will never be able to renounce modern liberalism, until the disasters produced by it become so personally threatening and unbearable that you have no choice but to do so. And then you will suddenly turn and become like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs, striking out in sheer instinctive need to survive against barbarian enemies. If you don’t want all of America to become like that, then you must find a rational, non-violent alternative to liberalism now, rather than be forced into a violent and savage alternative to liberalism later.

- end of initial entry -

Stephen T. writes:

Your correspondent writes:

“If you don’t give Mexicans something they want, you sometimes see scary and violent flashes of the hateful and resentful side that they cover up very effectively with their easy going friendliness, humility, subservient attitude, and hard work.”

Actually, a long succession of regimes in Mexico have not given Mexicans “something they want,” have indeed seen “flashes” (good word) of violence, and have dealt with same in a way that Mestizo Mexicans innately understand and respect; i.e. with heavy-handed authority and unflinching brutality. In the next scene, the “scary” Mexicans can be seen once again displaying “friendliness, humility and a subservient attitude.”

Your correspondent doesn’t understand that it is precisely our ambivalence and timidity in enforcing the authority of our laws (asserting our manhood) and physically defending our borders (protecting our turf) that instinctively incites and emboldens Mestizos in particular to rout us—the way that cowering and shrinking in the face one of our California mountain lions will activate an animal instinct that gets you mauled vs. standing your ground, maintaining eye contact, and drawing up to an offensive posture. The anger Mexicans display is actually hot-blooded SCORN toward a lukewarm society too impotent to assert the values most supreme in the Mestizo psyche, combined with their ancient instinct to opportunistically aggress in force of numbers when and wherever they sense such weakness.

LA replies:

Agreed. The fallacy is very like what people think about the Palestinians, that Palestinian rage has been fueled by Israeli “intransigence,” whereas in reality Palestinian rage has been fueled by Israeli appeasement. Liberalism reverses reality by 180 degrees.

The reversal began with Rousseau’s colossal falsehood, in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, that men in a state of nature are peaceful, compassionate, and equal, and that civilization, including Christian civilization, makes them violent, cruel, and unequal. In modern times, Rousseau’s “man in the state of nature” is translated into the non-Western Other, and “civilization” is translated into ourselves, the West. This results in modern people thinking that, since the Cultural Other is naturally peaceful and compassionate, any bad or violent or cruel behavior coming from the Cultural Other (man in the state of nature) must be caused by cruel and violent and anti-egalitarian behavior coming from us (civilization). Just as Islam makes Islam identical with goodness, so that Islam by definition can never be seen as doing anything wrong, in the same way liberalism makes the Cultural Other identical with goodness, so that the Cultural Other by definition can never be seen as doing anything wrong. 250 years after Rousseau, this total reversal of reality, this hideously false and destructive idea, dominates the West, and is leading it to its ruin.

Mark D. writes:

Excellent discussion of immigration with your ambivalent liberal.

His thinking embodies liberalism:

1. Liberalism creates disorder. 2. Liberalism applies more liberalism to appease the disorder. 3. Liberalism fails in its solutions. 4. Finally, liberalism normalizes (“rationalizes”) the disorder as a moral good.

Clark Coleman writes:

As one of your correspondent’s big concerns is the War with Mexico of 1845-48, and another is the sheer numbers of Mexican illegals, perhaps you should ask him if he is in favor of deporting the smaller numbers of illegal immigrants from Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. These immigrants come in much smaller numbers on a per-country basis, and the War with Mexico has nothing to do with them.

Or was the War with Mexico just a typical red herring?


Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 10, 2006 12:35 PM | Send
    

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