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Ron Paul and legal immigration discussed at LibertyPost
LibertyPost, which I’m told was created by and for the many people who have been ostracized from Free Republic over the years, has a very long discussion thread regarding my comments about Rep. Ron Paul. A person generating a lot of controversy in the early part of the discussion says that I don’t know what I’m talking about when I say that Paul would have no problem with America becoming a Mexican or Muslim or Chinese country, because I didn’t ask Paul if that is his view. But of course that’s Paul’s view. It’s implied in his support for our current legal immigration policy which is turning us into a Mexican, Muslim, Chinese, etc. country. No person can support the basic principle of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, which opened U.S. immigration on an equal basis from all countries and cultures on earth, and also added essentially unlimited extended family preferences beyond each country’s quota (which is why a handful of Third-World countries have dominated immigration), and maintain that he wants to preserve America as a distinct historic nation and culture. A blindness affecting many modern conservatives is that they endorse explicitly universal principles, such as the indiscriminate immigration from every country on earth that we have under our existing immigration laws, while still somehow imagining that America will continue to be America. And when, after denying for years that the immigration is altering America in any negative way that matters, they suddenly realize to their shock that America is indeed changing into non-America, they are left with nothing to say against this, because their universalism, which supports the immigration, is an explicit, formal principle, while their particularism, which would oppose it, is only an implicit, informal feeling, and so the principle rolls over and crushes the feeling. The lesson is that if we want to preserve America as a particular country, we have to have particularist principles as well as universalist principles. (Note: While I thank the commenter who posted my entry at LibertyPost , I wish he had maintained the original paragraph and character formatting, without which it is difficult if not impossible to tell the difference between Vdare’s questions, Rep. Paul’s answers, and my commentary.)
Here’s a classic. Reply No. 22 in the LibertyPost thread quotes an article by Paul on immigration and concludes:
There is nothing wrong with immigration if its legal!And the comment is signed: JustUsealittleBrainPower. That’s perfect. Just a little brain power—very little—will tell a person that “that there’s nothing wrong with immigration if it’s legal.” It apparently takes more than a little brain power to realize that if all legal immigration is good, then there is nothing wrong with five million, ten million, twenty million immigrants per year, and indeed that there can be no limit on the scale or type of immigration at all. The fact that it’s legal makes it good. In the same way, just a little brain power will lead people to believe nonsensical syllogisms such as “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande, therefore we should we open to Mexican immigration,” or, “Immigrants are only coming here to work, therefore we should be open to immigration,” or, “All parents in the world want good things for their children, therefore we should support spreading democracy to every country,” or, “We democratized Germany and Japan, therefore we can do the same with Iraq.” Apparently it takes more than a little brain power to see through these slogans.
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