African Muslim polygamists in U.S.

Howard Sutherland writes:

Robert Spencer passes up yet another opportunity to call for reducing or ending Moslem immigration. Spencer cites an unusually frank NYT article about the Moslem Africans who died in a recent Bronx house fire and their myriad kin who have somehow got to America and established themselves. While he rightly deplores the polygamy that accompanies Moslems into Western lands, he will not call for keeping it out by not letting them in. The best he can manage is this lame conclusion:

[African woman quoted by the NYT] added a coda: “If you leave your country, you have to come with the good things, not bring the bad things with you.”

[To which Spencer will only add:] Ms. Dia, I couldn’t agree more.

How about encouraging Ms. Dia, et al., not to leave their countries for ours in the first place?

So, for all his good work telling us what Islam is really about, Spencer remains a Usual Suspect, still unable or unwilling to call for the only thing that can solve our Islam problem.

As an aside, I think the only reason the NYT was willing to cover this in such detail, even though the story doesn’t make African “immigrants” or Moslems generally look good, is that the editors must have found the oppression-of-women feminista angle (real enough in this case) irresistible.

LA replies:

You have to understand: When Spencer says that he “couldn’t agree more” that people should not bring their bad things with them to America, he thinks that he is being a hardliner on immigration. That’s why he calls me a liar for suggesting otherwise.

Instead of emitting some vague feel-good notion that, yes, it would be better if people did not their bad things with them to America, what he should have said was: The United States should not admit immigrants from cultures that practice polygamy, period. That would be a meaningful statement. What he said was meaningless.

Of course, when the 1965 Immigration Reform Act was passed that opened the doors of immigration equally to every country on earth, on the basis that we should only care about the individual worth of prospective immigrants and not their culture or race, almost no one asked questions such as: Do people who practice polygamy belong in the United States? The mandate of universal non-discrimination trumped all such considerations. And it is still doing so today, even among those who—practicing the unprincipled exception—complain about this or that aspect of immigration.

Maureen C. writes:

CUNY law website discusses the requirements for citizenship. An immigrant can be excluded for bad moral characters, which includes polygamy and alien-smuggling.

“If you are a polygamist or have ever smuggled aliens into the United States for economic gain, you will fail to meet the good moral character requirement.”

So the US has laws on the books that prohibit polygamy. We merely no longer enforce our laws (or lawyers intervene to ensure that laws can be ignored for payment of a lawyer’s fee). The lack of will to enforce laws is rooted in the relativist morass of morality the country wallows in. The liberals have created a society in which laws no longer function, because morals, the underpinning of laws, no longer function.

LA replies:

Thanks to Maureen for digging that up. How about that. It’s sort of like the English situation I discussed recently re the unexpected mass immigration from Eastern Europe. Yes, the British had the legal authority to prevent that influx, but morally they no longer believed they had the right to do that. So liberalism gets us both ways; either the laws themselves are thoroughly liberal, or, if the laws themselves are not thoroughly liberal and allow some non-liberal leeway, people won’t believe in such non-liberal laws and so won’t enforce them anyway. It seems to me the latter situation gets closer to the heart of liberalism, which is not laws, but people’s (liberal) moral sense.

Bruce B. writes:

“When Spencer says that he “couldn’t agree more” that people should not bring their bad things with them to America, he thinks that he is being a hardliner on immigration.”

Yes, everyone to the right of the “hardliners” in invisible. There’s a billboard I drive by every day for Rush. It says something like “Crossing the Line” but with “Crossing” X’d out and “Ignoring” written in. The idea is that he’s somehow the fearless, hardcore right. It seems follows that everyone to the right of him is a Nazi or invisible.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 13, 2007 03:22 PM | Send