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Immigration and the rule of liberalism
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with autonomy, self-rule, freedom, equality or democracy as limited aspects of something larger. The problems come when those things are made ultimate standards. [Emphasis added.] And as practical political measures I don’t see why the Declaration of Independence or Constitution have to be interpreted as making them ultimate standards.Along similar lines, I have been saying for years that liberalism can only be non-harmful when it is part of a social order that is not itself liberal. Liberalism must be contained and guided by non-liberal things, it must not be the highest principle of our society. Yet since the 1960s it has become such, progressively sweeping away all other principles and values. Take immigration. Prior to 1965 America practiced explicit discrimination, under a national quota act designed to maintain the ethnic composition of the U.S. to what it had been in the early 20th century (though in practice there were significant exceptions made for refugees after World War II). The national quota act was the opposite of liberal. It was based on the idea that America has a certain substantive civilizational and cultural character, defined in part by the historic ethnic composition of her people, and that we are going to discriminate in order to maintain it. The 1965 Immigration Act, which opened immigration on an equal basis to all nations in the world including Islamic nations, was explicitly designed to conform with the liberal principles of the equality of rights before the law and of the “equal worth” of all people. As I wrote in The Path to National Suicide, the 1965 Immigration Act was the 1964 Civil Rights Act applied to the world at large. After the Civil Rights Act had been passed, it became morally impossible for liberal America to keep its discriminatory immigration laws in place, and non-discrimination, which is the very essence of liberalism, became the ultimate guiding standard of U.S. immigration policy, unquestionable and unchallengable. That’s how the Muslims and other non-assimilable peoples got here, through our abandonment of discrimination based on history, culture, and ethnicity. And that is where we still are today, with millions of American “conservatives” thinking that strict non-discrimination, particularly with regard to whom we admit into America, is the essence of conservatism!
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