Derbyshire says Democrats are better on immigration

John Derbyshire, on the basis of a column by New Republic editor Peter Beinart in today’s New York Post (not online yet), adopts Beinart’s idea that the Democrats are moving to the right of the GOP on immigration. Derbyshire concludes:

[Amongst other things, this disposes of Stanley Kurtz’s argument for voting Republican in the midterms-that only by doing so can we be sure of good immigration-law enforcement. A better strategy for those of us who care about the National Question would be to (a) send a copy of Peter Beinart’s article to every Democrat we know, and (b) stay home Election Day.

While I have not read the Beinart piece yet, Derbyshire’s reasoning seems dangerously out of touch with reality. The Democrats have been all-out open borders for years. In ‘04, all the Democratic presidential candidates attacked Bush’s amnesty as being too conservative. They wanted instant citizenship for every illegal. This past year, the Democrats voted overwhelmingly for the most extreme open borders proposal in history. It was the House Republicans who stopped it cold, refusing even to go into a House-Senate conference on the bill.

But now, on the basis of a couple of “signs” discerned by Peter Beinart, a writer who in his New York Post columns is always looking for some angle to re-legitimize liberalism in the eyes of conservatives, and whose judgments in these matters are not to be trusted in any case, Derbyshire suddenly announces that the Democrats are to the right of the Republicans on immigration (!) and that we shouldn’t vote to maintain the GOP majority in the House.

Here’s the truth: If there is a Democratic majority in the House next year, the Democrats will join with George W. Busherón to pass the open-borders bill that failed this year. The only thing that could stop the bill would be an uprising by the people.

(See my follow-up to this post.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 28, 2006 01:10 PM | Send