Michelle Malkin writes about “the unhyphenated, the law-abiding, the gratitude-filled sons and daughters and grandchildren of legal immigrants” and supplies a brief history of the Founding Fathers’ views on immigration and assimilation.
As I’ve often said, the way liberals (including some Republicans who think they’re conservative) talk about immigration, you might get the idea that Emma Lazarus had written the Constitution. Contrary to nonsensical emotional gush about the “wretched refuse,” the Founders were quite sensible and, dare I say, conservative about immigration.
Above all else, their Lockean understanding of government meant that they understood that politics is about the pursuit of legitimate self-interest. They expressed this without apology in saying that they had ordained the Constitution to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” James Madison explained this principle in Federalist No. 10:
As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.
Nothing could be more predictable, Madison was saying, than that the poor and the rich should disagree in politics, or that farmers and merchants should come into conflict over economic policy. The pursuit of self-interest is perfectly natural and legitimate.
The aim of the Constitution was to establish a national government that was limited and balanced in such a way that no one faction might impose its self-interest on everyone, and that competing factional interests might be reconciled peacefully, without the resentment that favoritism would inspire. Modern liberalism is subversive of those goals in three key ways:
- Unlimited Federal Power — Throughout the 20th century, liberals strove to undermine the Constitution’s limits on the federal government, centralizing power in Washington and effectively rendering the states mere administrative districts of the whole. This is why our political life has become so polarized and divisive: Whichever faction controls D.C. can now dictate policy everywhere, so that control of the federal government is the only game that matters.
- Identity Politics — Especially since the 1960s, liberals have sought to divide the population into identity groups, and to exacerbate conflicts between blacks and whites, Latinos and Anglos, women and men, etc. The transparent purpose of this liberal activism is to create a Coalition of the Perpetually Aggrieved as a vehicle to restore the Democratic Party to the political dominance it enjoyed 1933-46.
- Redistributionist Policies — FDR’s fixer Harry Hopkins once explained the political rationale of the New Deal very bluntly: “We’ve going to tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend, elect, elect, elect.” In other words, “Vote for us, and we’ll tax the rich to give you stuff” — bribing voters with money plundered from the wealthy. Such a policy can only gain political ascendancy by the incitement of economic envy, convincing voters that the wealth of the rich is illegitimate, and that the poor somehow have a right to pick the pockets of the rich. Ronald Reagan described this attitude in 1964: “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”
Borrowing the terms Thomas Sowell employed in The Vision of the Anointed: Self Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, we might say that liberalism requires the belief that the self-interests of some people (“targets”) are illegitimate, while the self-interests of other people (“mascots”) are sacred. And perhaps nowhere is this attitude more transparently displayed than in liberal rhetoric about immigration.
Liberals evidently believe that the only interest which merits consideration in discussion of immigration policy is the “rights” of immigrants — the scare-quotes necessitated by the dubious nature of the implicit assertion that being born outside the U.S. automatically confers some distinct set of “rights” which (naturally) Americans are accused of scheming to violate.
On what grounds can a Swede or a Somali or a Salvadoran assert any “right” to emigrate to this country? The United States, like every other country in the world, has laws and regulations prescribing the procedures by which people may seek permission to enter as tourists or on business, to become residents, to seek employment, to become naturalized citizens, etc.
Only by the decision to come here do they become subject to U.S. rules. If they don’t want to abide by these laws and regulations, they can just stay home, with their rights unimpeded — no harm, no foul. Finish this sentence:
The purpose of U.S. immigration law is . . .
C’mon, take a wild guess.
The purpose of U.S. immigration law is to protect the interests of the United States and its citizens.
Liberalism subverts this purpose, by telling us that immigration laws instead are, or ought to be, designed to advance the interests of immigrants. Their interests are legitimate. Your interests are not.
In this sense, immigration is just another redistribution scheme undertaken for the benefit of another identity group in the Coalition of the Perpetually Aggrieved. If you worry that illegal immigration harms the United States, liberals want to make you feel guilty for having such concerns. In effect, liberalism tells Americans:
“Screw you. You’re a bunch of greedy, rich, lazy xenophobes who are only concerned about out-of-control immigration because you hate foreigners.”
So you’re a “target,” as Sowell would say, and illegal immigrants are “mascots.” Therefore you have no interests that are not automatically trumped by the “rights” of illegals, who are presumed to be in need of protection, lest they be victimized by you evil, oppressive Americans. Liberalism sabotages U.S. sovereignty, by attempting to deny Americans the ability to enact and enforce laws that protect our own national interests.
The immigration debate is horribly distorted by this liberal mentality, so that Malkin feels compelled to ask:
Must every response to even the most modest of immigration enforcement measures be “RAAAAACIST”?
Read the whole thing.
