Jeff Jacoby: “staunch conservative” for open borders

Alan Roebuck had the following exchange with columnist Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe. Jacoby gave his permission for the exchange to be posted. I comment on Jacobys’ responses below.

AR to JJ:

Dear Mr. Jacoby:

I am writing this letter in response to your article “What if we Deport Them All?” which I read in the Boston Globe online.

Whenever possible, I prefer to emphasize points of agreement before talking about my disagreements with someone. But I do not know anything about your beliefs on this issue other than what appears in your article, with which I entirely disagree.

An entire book, if not an entire library could be written on this topic, but I’ll keep it brief.

You failed to mention the most important aspect of mass immigration from Third-World countries: having too many outsiders is always bad for any society, regardless of how virtuous the outsiders may be. 12 million Chinese Christian saints in America would have a massively destabilizing effect, regardless of how saintly they are. The fact that many illegal immigrants are not saintly only compounds an unacceptable problem.

Your assertion that we need these illegal aliens to prevent an economic disaster is preposterous. Sure, if I could wave a magic wand and make all of them instantly return home right now the result would be an economic catastrophe. But that is not how an actual deportation would occur. A real deportation would occur gradually, over many years, in which we slowly apply pressure to lawbreakers, and the markets would adjust themselves, as they always do. As a patriotic American, I’m sure you would prefer to pay slightly higher prices rather than see your nation dissolved through ethnic balkanization.

The only reason we don’t acknowledge the threat from too many outsiders is because of the Unofficial State Religion of liberalism. Liberalism is our official way of thinking about all aspects of reality, and our leaders, especially our political leaders, almost never oppose it fundamentally. According to liberalism, one must be infinitely tolerant and welcoming of outsiders. Thus, to talk seriously of protecting our borders, that is, protecting our identity, would be unacceptable heresy. But heresy or not, it must be done.

JJ to AR:

Dear Mr. Roebuck,

Thanks very much for your note. As a staunch conservative, I don’t worship in the Church of Liberalism. I fully support security controls, and have long advocated full-bore assimilation and Americanization of immigrants who come here.

But I also support a policy of allowing labor to flow as easily across the border as goods and services can, and I don’t agree with you that we have “too many outsiders.” What is your assessment based on? A lower percentage of the population is foreign-born today than was the case 100 years ago, when no quotas existed to artificially distinguish between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants. Back then, too, there were heated complaints about how the foreigners weren’t speaking English, were making a mess of the cities where they settled, had strange customs, weren’t assimilating. Only then the immigrants being described were Russians, Poles, and Italians. Before that it was the Chinese, and before that the Irish, and before that, the Germans.

Immigration always brings certain dislocations, but haven’t the overall benefits been well worth it? Is there any reason to think that today’s immigrants will gradually blend in to the American mainstream any less effectively than all the foregoing waves of immigrants did?

All the best,
Jeff Jacoby

AR to JJ:

Dear Mr. Jacoby:

Thank you for your attention to my email. Public figures (especially liberals, which I am relieved to hear you are not) don’t often respond to challenges from John Q. Public.

There is, of course, no universal answer to the general question, How many outsiders is “too many”? But it seems clear to me that we have gone well beyond the “too many point.” You wrote “A lower percentage of the population is foreign-born today than was the case 100 years ago.” But 100 years ago we didn’t have the following:

A fully-developed leftist establishment encouraging minorities, both native-born and immigrant, to think of themselves as members of their ethnic group rather than as Americans.

The single largest immigrant group being a people who, both informally and through the words of their educational, cultural and governmental leaders, have a major historic grudge against America and many of whom want to retake the Southwest, whether officially or just culturally.

A well-developed and widely-believed theory of how America is guilty, and therefore not worthy of being defended, which theory leads nonwhite outsiders to believe themselves justified in hating traditional America, and regarding the nation as obligated to give them what they want.

As someone once said, it is as if America is suffering from a spiritual case of AIDS: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, which renders us unable to adequately defend against bad ideas and threatening trends. (By “spiritual”, I mainly mean the world of ideas, all which distinguishes man from beast.)

You wrote “Is there any reason to think that today’s immigrants will gradually blend in to the American mainstream any less effectively than all the foregoing waves of immigrants did?” It is clear to me that many of today’s immigrants and children of immigrants (i.e., tens of millions of our neighbors) do not wish to assimilate, and this is not just because they just happened to make that choice. It is because of the ideas that they imbibe: leftism, multiculturalism, pious Islam (which requires Koran-believing Muslims to not cooperate with unbelieving governments and to work whenever possible for the imposition of Islamic law), and Mexican irredentism, to name just a few.

I see no effective spiritual force opposing these trends, just a weakened idea of America as defined by freedom, democracy and tolerance. But these abstract universal ideals are not sufficient to create a self-sustaining nation. To be a nation in the fullest sense, the people have to have a deep sense of connectedness with each other, arising from a sense of shared history, culture and religion. Mass immigration and leftism fundamentally disrupt all these things.

JJ to AR:

The solution is obvious: We should let in the immigrants and deport the native-born leftists!

Cheers,
JJ

—end of initial entry—

LA writes:

The exchange confirms my long held view that Jeff Jacoby is a thoughtless person whose mind is impermeable to any ideas about immigration other than open-borders clichés. That he calls himself a “staunch conservative” is a bad joke. His basis for calling himself a conservative is that he advocates “full-bore assimilation and Americanization.” At the same time he says that we should be as open to the importation of immigrants as we are to the importation of goods—in other words, he supports virtually open borders. But how can there be “full-bore assimilation” if we have virtually open borders? Only a mindless person could believe such a thing.

And what are Jacoby’s pro-immigration arguments? That the percentage of immigrants now is no greater than it was 100 years ago. Yes, but that was at the height of immigration. Should that be the standard? In any case, it doesn’t tell us anything about the actual effect of the present immigration on America. He doesn’t know and doesn’t pretend to know anything about how immigration is changing America. He just sings the Jewish open borders song, making the immigration of a hundred years ago that brought his own ancestors here the argument for open immigration today.

As I’ve said before, if America had known, when it admitted all those Jews in the late 19th and early 20th century (including my ancestors), that their descendants would insist that the immigration into America of their ancestors meant that America must leave its borders open forever, would America have let those Jews in?

The basic problem is that many American Jews—and Jacoby habitually puts his own Jewishness front and foremost in his columns—do not look at immigration in terms of how it affects America; they look at immigration as a symbol affirming their own worth as Jews in America.

John Hagan writes:

You quickly exposed the motive behind Jacoby’s alienist views, and it is indeed predicated on clichés, cheap sentimentality, and an open-borders fetish that borders on self-annihilation. He’s incapable of rational thought on the subject of immigration, and when a polite reader emails him like the gentleman you quoted on your blog you can watch Jacoby predictably devolve into an unserious buffoon who’s only retort is a snarky response.

Jacoby and I shared a mutual friend at one time, so I know first-hand how he uses his Jewish heritage to defend his open-borders view of the United States. It’s all about HIS family, and how the United States allowed them into the country when they needed a place to go. It’s a highly emotional, irrational, and in the end personal view of how the nation should conduct its immigration policy.

Years ago, when he used to return my emails regarding immigration, guess what Jacoby latched onto? You guessed it, my Irish heritage! He would point out that what if “my” people were locked out of coming to America; like I was advocating should happen to current immigrants, how would I “feel” about that. I explained to Mr. Jacoby that the United States has a right to make any laws it wishes, and if “my” people did not get in, so be it.

Jacoby is not rational on the subject of immigration, and to try and reason with an individual such as this is depressing. He shows how powerful the urge of self-destruction is in Western man. It would be an oddity, and somewhat amusing to read his statements on immigration if there were not thousands just like him peppered throughout the American elite class.

Gintas J. writes:

Mr. Hagan makes a good comment.

My parents’ families, refugees from Lithuania (aka “The Soviet Union”), ended up in the U.S. occupation zone in Germany. It was a near-run thing getting to the U.S. It wasn’t wide open; there was a real chance they’d get “repatriated” to Lithuania. See Operation Keelhaul for the gist of what was happening.

They needed a relative in the U.S. to sponsor them. It seems like luck that they made it to the U.S. I think the U.S. never recognizing the annexation of the Baltic States into the USSR gave them a little advantage.

It’s not given to us to know what might have happened, I can only speculate. We could speculate on the bad side, but why not speculate wildly on the good side? Why, I could have been president of Lithuania today! Oh, the loss to Europe …

Even being born and raised here in America I nevertheless have a bittersweet sense of being an American with an attachment to Europe. I feel somewhat of an alien here in the U.S., I was raised in a household with a strong European flavor.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 21, 2007 04:06 PM | Send