Leading neocon says we should admit one million Haitians into the U.S.

Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state under President Reagan and son-in-law of the dominant neoconservative, Norman Podhoretz, argues in the Washington Post that in order to help Haiti we should greatly increase Haitian immigration. His idea is that Haitian immigrants making money here and in other Western countries will send far more money back to their native country and help alleviate its poverty than will ever be provided by foreign aid:

“Rebuilding” and “recovery” would merely take Haiti, this hemisphere’s poorest country, back to where it stood before the Jan. 12 earthquake. Surely, our goal is to do better. [emphasis added.] We must increase aid but also allow Haitians to help themselves, and there is no way they can do that sitting in a devastated nation. A substantial number of Haitians must be allowed to move to richer countries—including ours.

Abrams says that we should admit a “substantial” number of Haitians, but doesn’t say how many that is. However, he provides a strong hint of his thinking. He complains that there are at present only a half million Haitians in the U.S. sending money home, as compared with 1.3 million Dominicans in the U.S. sending money home, and 1.5 million Salvadorans in the U.S. sending money home. His clear suggestion is that we should raise the number of Haitians in the U.S. from the present 500,000 to at least the Salvadoran level of 1.5 million. Meaning that we should immediately bring a million Haitians into this country.

I’ve been following the immigration issue for a long time, but this is a pro-immigration argument I don’t remember having heard before. The usual liberal/neocon argument for expansive immigration consists of variations of the following statements: (1) that America must not discriminate against nonwhites and non-Europeans, and (2) that America is a “nation of immigrants” and has been created by immigrants, that immigration is the very essence of America, and that we can no more put limits on immigration than we can stop eating. Both those arguments are insanely liberal and destructive to any hope of America as a sustainable and recognizable country, but at least they have some reference to America (or rather to the liberal version of America), to its (liberal) purposes, its (liberal) ideals, its (liberal) character, and its enrichment through the riches of diversity. By contrast, Abrams’s policy has nothing to do with either American well being (even conceived in liberal terms) or American inclusion. It is a policy of pure self-sacrifice for the sake of another country. We let Third-Worlders come here, not because they have ANYTHING to do with us, not because they will ASSIMILATE into our culture, not because they will CONTRIBUTE to our economy, not because they will EXPAND and ENRICH our diversity, but because they will help enrich (or rather marginally raise the abysmal poverty level of) the Third World hell hole from which they come. Indeed, any notion that the immigrants should be loyal to America or be committed to America is excluded from the start, since the whole idea is that the immigrants come her in order to help their home country.

Now look again at the passage from Abrams’s article I quoted above:

“Rebuilding” and “recovery” would merely take Haiti, this hemisphere’s poorest country, back to where it stood before the Jan. 12 earthquake. Surely, our goal is to do better. [emphasis added]

Clearly, Abrams’s policy is intended to address, not the present earthquake disaster, but the poverty that existed before the present disaster. Haiti is an extremely poor country, and that is the problem we must solve.

In brief, Abrams’s position is that we should raise the economic level of that extremely poor country by (a) letting its people come here and (b) make money here but (c) not spend their money here but instead (d) send their money back home.

Now, if we should have this policy toward Haiti—not to help it recover from the recent earthquake, but to help it alleviate its endemic extreme poverty, shouldn’t we have the same policy toward all very poor countries?

Haiti is at present the ninth poorest country on earth. That means that there are eight countries (and I think they’re all in black Africa) that are poorer than Haiti, including such as Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Niger, and Eritrea.

By Abrams’s altruistic reasoning, we should admit, not just a million Haitians into America, but also 1.5 million people from each of those eight countries into America. That is, we should immediately allow into America 13 million blacks, increasing America’s black population from the current 35 million to 48 million. We should turn America into a workers’ transit hotel for the poorest countries on earth.

That’s what the neocons—who constantly effuse about how much they “love” America—want to do to America. And I have a basis for saying “neocons” and not just Elliot Abrams, because it is a fact that anyone who is in Norman Podhoretz’s circle reflects Podhoretz’s intellectual influence, an influence that is also reflected in the neocon movement as a whole.

A final point: Abrams criticizes DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano for saying that temporary protected status is only for Haitians who were in the U.S. as of January 12, 2010 (before the earthquake), and that “TPS will apply only to those individuals who were in the United States as of January 12, 2010.”

Once again, we see how the “conservative” Republicans (Bush, McCain) and the Jewish neocons are more aggressive proponents of open borders than the Democrats.

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Jonathan W. writes:

Elliot Abrams neglects to mention that much of the money Haitians admitted to the U.S. will earn will be from affirmative action type jobs. Since they are black, they will immediately upon entry to the United States be entitled to job hiring preferences over white Americans. Most of these people have low IQs and have no useful skills, so if they are able to earn money at all, it will be through unnecessary state positions or positions for which they are not qualified in the private sector. These corporations will of course have to hire these Haitian immigrants lest they run afoul of the Civil Rights Act. And of course there will be high costs to America, in terms of incarcercation, education, and heatlh care expenses for these Haitians and their U.S. born children. It would be cheaper for us to just give them the money directly.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 24, 2010 03:23 PM | Send