The Weekly Standard pushes total surrender to illegal aliens

Carol Iannone writes:

In this article from the Weekly Standard, Harvard Law School professor William J. Stuntz says that any effort to get illegal aliens to leave is doomed to failure, and, furthermore, that any political party seen as opposing amnesty will be punished at the polls by the children and grandchildren of the illegals. Stuntz writes:

Not only will the illegals themselves remain, so will generations of their offspring: a large voting bloc that will be forever barred to the party that wanted to ship their parents and grandparents back to their Central American homes. If the penalties for illegally crossing the border are more than a pittance, immigrants will simply refuse to pay them and remain underground, and no future government will spend the money needed to catch and prosecute them. Given those circumstances, amnesty is less a policy choice than a statement of political reality: the rough equivalent of bankruptcy for a debtor who, without it, will never pay another creditor another dime. To put the point differently, the size of America’s Latino population means that the nation’s border control problem must be solved with that population’s consent. As Donald Rumsfeld might put it, you do immigration reform with the immigrants you have.

Recollect how in the heady days of immigration enthusiasm we were told that immigrants coming here were coming to be part of America, that even illegal immigrants and their offspring would be fashioned into Americans by our super-phenomenal economic engines of assimilation. Does anyone recall hearing at that time that once the numbers of illegals grew large enough, we would have to grant them amnesty and that the political parties would have to support amnesty for tens of millions of illegal immigrants, or else run the risk of being devastated at the polls unto the third and fourth generations? Can anyone think of any reason we should ever again listen to a word out of the mouth of the immigration enthusiasts?

LA writes:

Stuntz writes: “[T[he size of America’s Latino population means that the nation’s border control problem must be solved with that population’s consent.”

Let us be clear that Stuntz explicitly advocates handing control over the direction of our country to the Hispanic population, both illegal and legal, a population that according to his own account requires that we legalize 20 million of their illegal co-ethnics as the condition of social peace. He is, in other words, recommending that we surrender the U.S. to a hostile party. His basis for this perverse position is that we can’t attempt to make illegals leave, because the attempt must fail, and the illegals will stay, and their descendants will be citizens, and those citizens plus the entire Hispanic population, whether it originally entered the U.S. illegally or not, will forever (the ultimate horror from neocons’ point of view) not vote Republican and thus permanently hand the country over to a leftist political party.

Stuntz is so blinded by his urge to Hispanicize America (though of course he doesn’t call it that) that he doesn’t see that his argument actually impels us to move in the opposite direction from what he wants. Since the only options he gives us are (1) we try to make the illegals leave, in which case they remain anyway and they Hispanicize America and the whole Hispanic population becomes permanently hostile to the Republican party; or (2) we let them all remain and we legalize them, in which case they remain and they still Hispanicize America, as well as being overall hostile to the Republican party (since even in the most hopeful realistic scenario a large majority of Hispanics will still vote Democratic, a point the open-borders GOP strategists constantly miss), then that is the strongest possible case for rejecting Stuntz’s two options and adopting a different option: We make all illegal aliens leave no matter what the cost. Stuntz has as much as admitted that Hispanics are an alien presence in our midst who far from respecting our laws, sovereignty, and nationhood seek to undo them. Only a person with no love and care for his country, only a soulless neocon who sees America an abstraction, would say that the solution to the presence in his country of an illegal and hostile population is to let them stay.

Further, let us remember that to make them leave, all we have to do is enforce our existing laws, especially the laws against hiring illegal aliens, and the illegals will start to return to their countries and they will stop coming here. The policy of attrition will work—and it will not produce ill will but rather will spur renewed respect for America which at present the Mexicans do not have.

And why should they have it? Imagine how Mexican immigrants and the Mexican elite react when they read a surrender monkey like Stuntz writing in a “conservative” U.S. magazine. “Even their right-wingers are cowards and fops who are afraid of their own shadow,” the Mexicans must be gleefully saying to each other. “These gringos are ripe for the take-over.”

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LA writes:

For newer VFR readers who haven’t seen it, be sure to read my February 2006 article at FrontPage Magazine, “The Second Mexican War.”

Bill Carpenter writes:

“Weekly Substandard,” is what my liberal wife called it. I let my subscription lapse after opponents to the DREAM Act were referred to as “the nativist claque.”

LA replies:

I stopped reading the Weekly Standard I think two years ago. From statements like the one you quote, I had a definite feeling-conviction that these people were enemies, aliens. I mean that literally. I felt they were not of us, not Americans. They’re into some thing of their own. I never go to that site, unless someone sends me a link to a particular article to read which is not often.

A. Zarkov writes:

His essay in the Weekly Standard adds nothing new to the lame excuses advanced by conservatives for surrendering our borders. He says:

“No American government can afford to track down and expel, fine, or otherwise penalize 12 million of its residents: 17 times the number of convicted felons who enter prison each year (and today’s imprisonment rate has shattered historical records). That much law enforcement is beyond government’s capacity…”

I’ve heard this many times. This line of reasoning says that a government can’t physically expel that many people. So how did the Allies expel 16 million ethnic Germans from their homelands all over Europe, and move them en masse into what is now the Federal Republic of Germany? All this with 1945 transportation technology, and war depleted resources. The word “afford” has nothing to do with not the deporting illegal aliens in our midst. It’s all about the lack of political will to do such a thing.

Stuntz makes another false analogy when he writes:

“Given those circumstances, amnesty is less a policy choice than a statement of political reality: the rough equivalent of bankruptcy for a debtor who, without it, will never pay another creditor another dime.”

It looks like Stuntz thinks that bankruptcy is some kind of constitutional right. It isn’t. Moreover all sorts of debts are not dischargeable in a bankruptcy including some aspects of tax debt, spousal support, student loans, debts for intentional torts etc. That’s right the IRS can make you pay on that debt for the rest of your life. Bankruptcy is a policy choice made by Congress and Congress can change the conditions at any time, just as Congress can demand that all illegal aliens be deported. If anyone thinks it’s impossible to carry out such a mission hire me up and I will do it for you.

The whole immigration debate has a surreal aspect to it. Seemingly normal people take leave of their senses and put forth the most ridiculous excuses. How can a nation that can put 30,000 commercial airline flights in the sky each day, moving at least 3 million people around the country not be able to move 12 million illegal aliens out of the country in say a year?

LA replies:

Because they just don’t want to. Doing so would be distasteful and ugly from the liberal perspective, and so, in their minds, it becomes practically unfeasible as well.

It’s a lack of aliveness. Liberalism is a kind of rot, a kind of death. And the end of that death process is literally letting aliens take over our country, literally allowing America to be Islamized. There is NOTHING in today’s “conservatives” that could stop that. Only the arising of something new in the American people, which is not there at present, can stop it.

Stephen T. writes:

Though I don’t share his “surrender or die” mentality, out here in the Southwest it’s funny to see a Harvard professor breaking the stunning news that Americans who dare resist the annexation of our region by Mexico have reason to be afraid, be very afraid, of the political retribution to ensue a generation from now when the descendants of tens of millions of illegal Mexican aliens take power. Duh. (This just in: When they cheer at their political rallies they shout “Viva La Raza!” not “Hurray for us new Americans.”) It’s a gratifying, though somewhat late-to-the-party admission by an insulated eastern academic that the Mexican mindset differs enormously from every white European immigrant nationality who preceded them. And that our nation under their rule will not be the America those Europeans envisioned and we once knew, but a landscape of mestizo-style strong-arm score-settling beneath a corrupt veneer of one-party, force-of-numbers politics. Stuntz apparently woke up one recent morning and suddenly realized that the Mexican invasion is not, as it turns out, merely a manifestation of Bush’s “good-hearted migrants” to fuel his new world economy by doing jobs Americans won’t do at wages they can’t survive on, but also (gulp) includes an aggressive instinct for expanding blood and turf—and an age-old innate drive for ethnic supremacy first, last, and always. It’s a cultural reflex so strong that a jittery Stuntz now warns us that it actually defies assimilation and can be expected to persist across multi-generations.

Well, I never!

Maybe he’ll drop another bombshell and next divulge the secret that Mexicans are not about to throw that agenda under the train for neocon gringo notions of a “melting pot,” nor sacrifice their impulse for territorial acquisition in order to promote diversity.

LA replies:

Stephen puts the emphasis on Stuntz’s belated awakening to the reality to the reality of the Mexican difference. But I see it as the opposite. If Stuntz is “awakening” to to the reality of the Mexican difference, it is only to tell us to surrender to it.

Which of course is what the neocons do all the time. They initially tell us that immigration is fine, no problem, the immigrants will all assimilate and be part of us and anyone thinks otherwise should shut up. Then the neocons suddenly awaken and say, “Hey, these people are different from us, and they’ve taken over, but, hey, there’s nothing to do about it now, it’s too late.” So, whether the neocons are complaisant about the third-world takeover of America, or afraid of it, they still silence debate about it and urge us to surrender to it. And THAT is the main function of these traitors in the “immigration debate” that they’ve never allowed the conservatism movement to have.

If neocons don’t like being called traitors, the solution is very simple: they should stop acting like traitors.

Vincent Chiarello writes:

There is an aspect of Prof. Stuntz’s commentary about “illegal immigrants”—not once does he use the term “illegal “aliens”—that puts my teeth on edge. A quick review of his curriculum vitae shows that Stuntz, who occupies the Albert J. Friendly Chair at Harvard’s Law School, is an expert—might I call him a “peritus?”—on Christian Legal Theory. I suspect this interest may influence his approach in dealing with illegal aliens present in the country, whose numbers he vastly underestimates. Further, although he seems to encourage enforcing our borders, one wonders how he would do so, and how effective this “enforcement” would be to prevent millions more from arriving in this country illegally. Finally, he tells us that nothing can, or should, be done to those already here. So much of what he writes is rubbish that it is not worth reviewing further, but it is his religious approach that bothers me the most.

Stuntz, who admits to being an evangelical Christian, appears to adopt the rationale that, as a practicing Christian, in addition to being politically unwise, it is unethical and/or immoral to deal with the problem directly; namely, deportation. That approach is negated by the countless examples, including the recent case in suburban Virginia’s Prince WIlliam County, which demonstrate that illegal aliens move to those areas where there is little or no enforcement of current immigration law. Enforce current law and most of the problem will, in large part, resolve itself. Prof. Stuntz must also know that organizations like the ACLU, La Raza, and MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund) spend millions of dollars, often with funding supplied by federal and state governments, to obstruct immigration law enforcement. Still, it is his religious angle sticks in my craw.

The Catholic Church was transformed by “periti,” or experts, who, during the Second Vatican Council sought, and achieved, goals that had nothing to do with the Church, including an exceptional fondness for illegal aliens, who now represent a growing portion of its parishioners in this country. No one will argue that all Christians have a responsibility to treat all newcomers with dignity and compassion, but to claim that such succor is to be extended to those who break the law is a misreading of Biblical, and Magisterial, warrant. Most Christians recognize the public authority of governments to carry out their laws, including immigration statutes currently on the books. Would Prof. Stuntz and others at the Harvard Law School be so uninterested in enforcing the law if, for example, we were dealing with non-enforcement of civil rights laws?

The attempt by Stuntz and others to identify the scourge of illegal immigration into this nation as a religious/moral issue is at once both deceptive and shameless. As an evangelical Christian, he knows better than most the author of these words: Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.

Carol Iannone writes:

I’m glad for the discussion and comments, but readers should remember that deportation, though theoretically possible, would be disruptive and difficult and probably garner sympathy for the illegals. Attrition is he model to support—enforcing existing laws will result in many illegals gradually returning home.

Howard Sutherland writes:

Mr. Chiarello asks, “Would Prof. Stuntz and others at the Harvard Law School be so uninterested in enforcing the law if, for example, we were dealing with non-enforcement of civil rights laws?” The question answers itself. Also, doesn’t Mr. Chiarello know that Prof. Stuntz and others at the Harvard (Yale, Columbia, Georgetown, Stanford, Berserkely, Texas, Michigan…) Law School would surely consider enforcing the immigration law a violation of the civil rights laws!

Rick Darby writes:

Mr. Chiarello may well be correct that Prof. Stuntz’s ideas are influenced by Vatican policy or politics. But I wish the answer was as simple as rendering unto Caesar versus rendering unto God. Caesar (as a metaphor for the U.S. political establishment) is, in this matter, a tyrant: against the wishes of the majority of the people, remaking the country into one with an utterly different culture and values, cut off from its own history. And not only by winking at illegal immigration, but through the legal process—with proposed amnesties, HB-1 visas, “diversity” visas, family visas, and violating common sense by accepting “anchor babies” as U.S. citizens.

“Would Prof. Stuntz and others at the Harvard Law School be so uninterested in enforcing the law if, for example, we were dealing with non-enforcement of civil rights laws?” In framing the issue this way, Mr. Chiarello is just putting into debating club language the standard right-liberal formula, “I have nothing against legal immigration, it’s just illegal immigration I’m opposed to.” That’s taking a poisoned pawn, offering open borders advocates an easy counter-move: “We agree. Make all immigration legal. No more illegal immigration problem.”

David B. writes:

You describe liberalism as a “kind of rot, a kind of death.” Last Saturday night, I had a telephone conversation with my liberal friend who is a Geography professor at a small college. When I tell him that the Democratic Party liberals see white men as the enemy and will discriminate against them, he does not disagree. He says, “I am set for life. It won’t affect me.”

When I say that I refuse to support either party out of principle, Professor F. says, “I am a party man. I vote for the Democratic party.” He never gives a particular reason. Professor F. despises conservatives, or what he thinks are conservatives, as “racists.”

When you ask about IQ differences, he does not dispute them, but says, “I have met hundreds of dumb white people.” About crime, he thinks “Over 90% of black crime is against blacks. White people commit most crime in this country.” Professor F. claims that he would be no more afraid to have a flat tire in the black section of a big city, than in an all white small town.

LA writes:

I think that David B.’s professor friend (and maybe also Ken Hechtman) would agree with the leftist position as I describe it in the below paragraph, from this entry. The paragraph was actually written with William Stuntz in mind, so it’s appropriate to include it here:

And that indeed would demonstrate the normal and predictable evolution of liberalism, from right-liberalism, which (1) states that all peoples are the same as us and can assimilate into our society and (2) therefore concludes that all discriminatory and exclusionary practices are the greatest moral evil; to left-liberalism or leftism, which (1) recognizes that the other peoples whom we have admitted en masse into our society are not like us and even intend us harm, but (2) still maintains the right-liberal belief that discrimination is the greatest moral evil, and (3) therefore tells us that we must appease and acquiesce to those other peoples who intend us harm.

Alan Levine writes:

Thought your and Howard Sutherland’s comments about the outrageous Weekly Standard article were excellent.

But someone should mention, once again, Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback, which disposed of more than a million illegals in just one year. Nothing is necessary to get rid of this problem other than the will to follow Ike’s example.

I bring up this point with some chagrin, as my upcoming book dealing with the 1950s failed to mention Operation Wetback at all, for which I am now kicking myself.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 11, 2008 07:17 PM | Send