The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Ourselves and Our Posterity’

Posted on | July 23, 2019 | 2 Comments

The comments on my post yesterday about “oikophobia” blew up after it was linked by Vox Day — thanks! — and some of the new commenters took the conversation in directions I had not anticipated. Vox made his point simply: “The Dirt isn’t Magic. Neither is the Paper.”

Magic Dirt Theory, the ludicrous idea that geographical location has a transformative power, is a core theme of arguments by the open-borders lobby. We are expected to accept, as Vox has described it, “their idiotic theory that all immigrants will magically become Real Americans, real life nephews of their Uncle Sam, reborn on the Fourth of July by virtue of geographical relocation, thereby instantly negating of all of their racial, ethnic, religious, political, and cultural traditions.” No intelligent person actually believes this, and yet Magic Dirt Theory is one of the fundamental premises of all immigration arguments of the type that involve a solemn invocation of Emma Lazarus’s “huddled masses.”

Vox also scorns Magic Paper Theory, the idea that legal procedures are what really matter in terms of the immigration debate. Vox has criticized Sarah Hoyt for “den[ying] the existence of America as a nation of blood and soil,” and while I would certainly prefer to avoid any insult to Mrs. Hoyt, I think Vox raises a more subtle point: Conservatives who rest their arguments on the distinction between illegal immigration (bad) and those immigrants who “play by the rules” (good) are guilty of ignoring the way our immigration laws have been corrupted, beginning with the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. Leaving aside Vox’s invocation of “blood and soil” to examine immigration law as a matter of policy (as Peter Brimelow did in Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, which I recommend to anyone who wishes to understand this problem), we discover that the American people have been cruelly deceived by the political class.

Americans were given many promises by Ted Kennedy and the other advocates of that 1965 “reform,” who repeatedly and emphatically insisted that the new law would result in no significant demographic change in the country. All those promises were proven false within 20 years, so that by 1986, a Democrat-controlled Congress was able to compel President Reagan to sign a new “reform” (the Simpson-Mazzoli bill) that granted amnesty to millions, in exchange for what Americans were told would be stricter enforcement in the future.

The open-borders lobby within the Republican Party (which is nearly coterminous with the #NeverTrump crowd) has misrepresented the 1986 amnesty as something that Reagan actively promoted, rather than a measure forced upon him by Democrats in Congress. Reagan biographer Craig Shirley has debunked this revisionist mythology:

Everything that Ronald Reagan did was set against the backdrop of the Cold War. . .
It was 1986 when immigration became an issue at the forefront for the United States, when President Reagan signed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. The Cold War was at its peak. He noted that the legislation was not for the sake of votes, or the sake of appeasement. It was for American security.
“Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people, American citizenship,” he said. Note also that this action was not blanket amnesty. While it offered citizenship to many illegal immigrants, it banned employers from hiring illegal immigrants — a major issue in today’s immigration debate — and set to enforce tighter immigration laws.

In 2006, Ed Meese explained the lessons learned from that amnesty:

I was attorney general . . . during the debate over what became the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. President Reagan, acting on the recommendation of a bipartisan task force, supported a comprehensive approach to the problem of illegal immigration, including adjusting the status of what was then a relatively small population. Since the Immigration and Naturalization Service was then in the Department of Justice, I had the responsibility for directing the implementation of that plan.
President Reagan set out to correct the loss of control at our borders. Border security and enforcement of immigration laws would be greatly strengthened — in particular, through sanctions against employers who hired illegal immigrants. If jobs were the attraction for illegal immigrants, then cutting off that option was crucial. . . .
The lesson from the 1986 experience is that such an amnesty did not solve the problem. There was extensive document fraud, and the number of people applying for amnesty far exceeded projections. And there was a failure of political will to enforce new laws against employers. After a brief slowdown, illegal immigration returned to high levels and continued unabated, forming the nucleus of today’s large population of illegal aliens.

Here is one of Reagan’s top lieutenants explaining that the good intentions behind the 1986 amnesty paved the road to our current hell. Many conservatives at the time argued against the 1986 amnesty, and it was their foreboding of doom — rather than the sanguine optimism of Reagan — which was ratified by actual events. One need not insult Sarah Hoyt for her pride in becoming a naturalized citizen to say that the value of American citizenship has been diminished by legislation and administrative policy (i.e., DACA) that amount to a refusal to defend our nation against foreign invasion. By a species of political fraud, Americans have been denied the ability to decide who is allowed to share “the blessings of liberty” that our forefathers sought to secure for us, and in enacting various swindles in the name of immigration “reform,” we see that our decadent elite have acted without “the consent of the governed.”

It is a consciousness of such betrayal that inspires the pessimism about America’s future we see in poll numbers about whether the country is heading in the “right direction” or is on “the wrong track.” In November 2016, just days before Trump was elected, an Ipsos/Reuters poll found that nearly two-thirds (64%) of Americans answered “wrong track” — more than twice as many as the 25% who said “right direction.” If our government cannot be trusted to “preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people, American citizenship,” to quote Reagan, then what is likely to become of “the blessings of liberty”?

We need not impugn the good intentions that led Reagan to sign the 1986 amnesty bill in order to say that the consequences were disastrous, nor do I think that Sarah Hoyt meant to justify bad policy by celebrating her acquisition of American citizenship. Her story of emigrating from Portugal — settling, of all places, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where the locals frequently mistook her for a Mexican — was a cheerfully humorous first-person narrative, surely not intended as a policy argument. Still, I think Vox Day’s larger point, that Magic Paper is no more a panacea than Magic Dirt, is essentially right. Under current law, the United States continues admitting as permanent residents many millions of people who don’t seem very likely to become “real life nephews of their Uncle Sam.”

Anyone who points out the fallacies of liberal mythology will predictably be smeared as a “racist,” and after being endlessly assailed with this insult, some conservatives will just shrug and go headlong over the cliff: “Fine. Whatever. I’m a racist. Who cares?” We can resist this temptation to auto-defenestration, however, by asking a simple question: “What is ‘racism’?” What does this word actually mean to those who use it as a weapon to disqualify anyone who disagrees with them?

Asking such questions will not, of course, protect you from the “racist” label — your liberal accuser doesn’t care what the word actually means, and can probably offer no evidence in support of his accusation, except that you’re not a liberal — but questioning the definition helps clarify the nature of your adversary’s animosity toward you. Whether you are more “racist” than anyone else (including your liberal accuser) is ultimately irrelevant to purpose of such accusations. A liberal doesn’t have to know anything about you personally, in terms of your life experiences and your interactions with people of different ethnic groups, to call you a “racist.” This is merely an insult, an assertion of your moral inferiority in an attempt to silence or discredit you by impugning your character.

By making the accusation of “racism” so promiscuously, and often in absurd ways contradicted by fact, the Left has devalued the word by stripping it of any useful meaning. Ralph Northam can wear blackface and not be discredited, because he’s a Democrat, while any Republican who criticizes a radical kook like Ilhan Omar is denounced as a “racist.”

This is not our fault. The ordinary American, without any special influence among the political elite, cannot be blamed for the results of policies that he never ratified, to which his consent was never really solicited. The division of our nation, with finger-pointing accusations of “racism” being hurled around in a war of words occasioned by the consequences of our failed immigration policy, cannot be blamed on the majority of American citizens who oppose these policies (or who would oppose them, if the issue were ever presented clearly to them in a factual manner). Perhaps even a majority of Democrats are unhappy to see a dangerous idiot like Ilhan Omar representing their party in Congress, which might prompt them to begin investigating how this Jew-hating radical became an American citizen in the first place.

While we are examining the meaning of words, perhaps Democrats (and also David French, but I repeat myself) need to research the etymology of patriotism. They will discover that it originates with a Greek word referring to the land of one’s ancestors (patris, “fatherland”). However uncomfortable you might feel about Vox Day’s use of the phrase “blood and soil” in connection to the debates over immigration, nevertheless we ought to consider how this ancient sense of patriotism — a willingness to defend one’s ancestral homeland — has been lost in recent decades.

As I remarked Monday, the authors of our Constitution said their purpose was to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” and if we are their posterity, we ought to be willing to defend the legacy of liberty that they bequeathed to us. If our corrupted and chaotic immigration system is a threat to our liberty (and I think my readers will agree it is), then we are unworthy of our inheritance if we refuse to do what is necessary to eliminate that threat. If you are smeared as a “racist” for speaking the truth about this situation, at least you have the consolation of knowing you are not a coward.



 

Category: Immigration, Racism

Comments

2 Responses to “‘Ourselves and Our Posterity’”

  1. 25 July 19 – Dark Brightness
    July 24th, 2019 @ 3:41 pm

    […] are seeing little Hamans demanding we worship their habits. Who try to defenestrate us if we discuss their evil. But to those we should not vow. They want to destroy any semblance of the truth, and clothe their […]

  2. Daybook. – Dark Brightness
    July 25th, 2019 @ 6:33 am

    […] We need not impugn the good intentions that led Reagan to sign the 1986 amnesty bill in order to say that the consequences were disastrous, nor do I think that Sarah Hoyt meant to justify bad policy by celebrating her acquisition of American citizenship. Her story of emigrating from Portugal — settling, of all places, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where the locals frequently mistook her for a Mexican — was a cheerfully humorous first-person narrative, surely not intended as a policy argument. Still, I think Vox Day’s larger point, that Magic Paper is no more a panacea than Magic Dirt, is essentially right. Under current law, the United States continues admitting as permanent residents many millions of people who don’t seem very likely to become “real life nephews of their Uncle Sam.” Anyone who points out the fallacies of liberal mythology will predictably be smeared as a “racist,” and after being endlessly assailed with this insult, some conservatives will just shrug and go headlong over the cliff: “Fine. Whatever. I’m a racist. Who cares?” […]