Tag: immigration

Courtesy of a half second-generation immigrant speaking with The National Council of The Race:

After running through his talking points on the debt negotiations, Obama turned his attention to a subject just as thorny: immigration reform. Acknowledging that some civil rights activists have criticized his administration for deporting 1 million undocumented residents, Obama said: “I share your concerns; I understand them. We are responding. We are enforcing flawed laws in the most humane way possible.”

With a nod toward the deadlocked debt talks, he added: “Some want me to bypass Congress and change laws on my own.”

The audience began chanting “Yes, you can!” a play off the president’s 2008 campaign slogan.

Note that these are the very Hispanics that Karl Rove and George W. Bush were sure would vote Republican because they’re so Catholic and traditional. How utterly astonishing that the magic of a geographic relocation has not caused these Mexican, South and Central American immigrants to suddenly develop a due respect for the concepts of limited government and the separation of powers developed by English Protestants two centuries ago!

Mr. Harris weighs in with what some will likely consider to be a surprising, (and disappointing), conclusion. But it speaks well for his integrity and actually approaches an intelligent response. It also explains why the “Christian fundamentalist” theme is rapidly disappearing from the media:

It has been widely reported that Breivik is a “Christian fundamentalist.” Having read parts of his 1500-page manifesto (2083: A European Declaration of Independence), I must say that I have my doubts…. As I have only read parts of this document, I cannot say whether signs of a deeper religious motive appear elsewhere in it. Nevertheless, the above passages would seem to undermine any claim that Breivik is a Christian fundamentalist in the usual sense. What cannot be doubted, however, is that Breivik’s explicit goal was to punish European liberals for their timidity in the face of Islam.

I have written a fair amount about the threat that Islam poses to open societies, but I am happy to say that Breivik appears never to have heard of me. He has, however, digested the opinions of many writers who share my general concerns—Theodore Dalrymple, Robert D. Kaplan, Lee Harris, Ibn Warraq, Bernard Lewis, Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, Walid Shoebat, Daniel Pipes, Bat Ye’or, Mark Steyn, Samuel Huntington, et al. He even singles out my friend and colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali for special praise, repeatedly quoting a blogger who thinks she deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. With a friend like Breivik, one will never want for enemies.

One can only hope that the horror and outrage provoked by Breivik’s behavior will temper the growing enthusiasm for right-wing, racist nationalism in Europe. However, one now fears the swing of another pendulum: We are bound to hear a lot of deluded talk about the dangers of “Islamophobia” and about the need to address the threat of “terrorism” in purely generic terms.

First, it’s quite clear that Breivik was a Christian in the sense of Christendom, not Jesus Christ. As The Perfect Aryan Male, who is a lawyer occasionally required to do work with Saudi visas, explained it, when you go to Saudi Arabia you have to choose between checking “Christian” or “Muslim” on your application. The Saudis couldn’t care less about personal beliefs, your self-identification, or if you pretend to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster, they simply want to know if you are a member of the Umma or the Dar al-Harb.

Second, Harris has recognized what so many people seem to find inexplicable. Breivik targeted the future politicians of the Labour Youth because the quislings of the Labour Party are responsible for Norway’s open borders and the subsequent Islamic immigration. While Breivik may or may not have been a bigot, it is clear that his murderous attack was not a bigoted act, but rather, an explicitly political one. This is something he addresses directly in the manifesto when he writes about how it is not the wild animals who are to blame for entering the zoo, but the zookeepers who hold the gates open and permit them to enter.

(That being said, given the pictures of the Labour Youth that have been released, it wouldn’t be surprising if a significant percentage of the victims were not, in fact, ethnic Norwegians.)

Third, I believe Harris is incorrect with regards to his analysis of the probable consequences. Contra the blithe assumptions of the media, I suspect that Breivik’s mass murder will tend to increase the enthusiasm for nationalism on both the European Right and Left because it has increased and underlined what were already the extraordinarily heavy costs being imposed upon European societies by the multiculturalists and immigration enthusiasts within it. As Harris notes, many people, of various creeds, already harbor serious concerns about the incompatibility of Islam and secular society.

There are national elections approaching in Switzerland and France. We should be able to determine if Breivik will have any discernable effect upon the political situation by seeing if the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam People’s Party (CH) and National Front (FR) perform better or worse than they did in the previous elections.

Of course, as Kevin Williamson noted, it is self-evident that Breivik is a lunatic of the sort defined by Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum.

A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

An explosion in Oslo:

6.01pm: John Magnus, chief foreign correspondent of Oslo’s VG newspaper, told the Guardian he was sitting at his desk when the massive explosion in central Oslo today blew him off his chair.

It was 3.26 in the afternoon. The whole building was shaking. It was dancing. There was glass flying through the newsroom. I was on the far side of the building from where the prime minister’s office is. The entire glass front of our building has been blown out …

I saw people screaming and covered in blood. There were at least four people I saw who looked lifeless with their faces covered. We’ve had it confirmed that two people are dead but there are other locations that the emergency services have not reached yet.

Naturally, this bombing will no more lead the Norwegian people to reconsider the wisdom of permitting Muslim immigration than the vast increase in the number of rapes committed by Muslim men. But it should. The multiculturalists will be quick to point out the mathematically obvious fact that that most Muslims don’t set off bombs. But this is irrelevant. Because it is also a fact that if a nation does not permit Muslims to enter its borders, it is far less likely to ever suffer any such incidents.

Expansionist Islam offers a challenge to the freedom of religion, (a right that does not actually exist in most countries outside the United States), that few secularists or Christians are presently capable of understanding. It should be eminently clear by now that simply repeating the multicultural mantra that “diversity is our strength” is not going to serve any purpose. At some point, it is going to become abundantly clear to everyone on all sides that the separatist practices of the past were not “outdated raciss bad-thought”, but the result of observation and experience.

UPDATE – According to the latest reports, the killer was a native Norwegian opposed to Muslim immigration, the Norwegian Labour Party, and the Worker’s Youth League. The political camp appears to have been the main target and the bombing merely a diversion. If this is indeed the case, it will represent the long-simmering immigration invasion moving to the inevitable next stage, as it looks as if the killer’s objective may have been to reduce the size of the next generation of left-wing quislings. Regardless, the possibility that certain political policies may have provoked such a violent response cannot logically be taken as any sort of rational justification for the continuation of those societally destructive policies.

From Wikipedia: “The Workers’ Youth League (Bokmål: Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking, Nynorsk: Arbeidaranes Ungdomsfylking, or AUF) is the youth organization affiliated with the Norwegian Labour Party. AUF was formed in April 1927, following the merger of Left Communist Youth League and Socialist Youth League of Norway. Its ideology is social democracy and democratic socialism. The current leader is Eskil Pedersen. Many former leading figures in AUF have gone on to serve in significant positions in government, such as the incumbent Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg.”

Lest you doubt my assertion that sufficient amounts of immigration invariably imposes unwelcome change on the native population:

Dennis Jackson said it was over-reaching cultural sensitivity that led to being told his annual Santa appearances must cease at St. Peter Head Start classes for young children. Jackson said he was told “it was against some people’s wishes” for him to make the half-hour appearances for two classes catering to about three dozen children. He said St. Peter Head Start personnel gave him no reason for the action. He’s made Santa appearances there the past four years to dispense candy bought at his own expense….

Chris Marben, who coordinates regional Head Start programs through Mankato-based Minnesota Valley Action Council, said as much. “We have Somali families in the program,” she said. “We’re respecting the wishes of families in the program.”

Marben should be fired and those obnoxious Somali families should be sent back to Somalia. This is why distrust, dislike, and even downright hatred of immigrants is not only quite reasonable on occasion, but can be well-merited. All the people in Mankato want to do is celebrate Christmas the way they have always done, and thanks to a few obnoxious immigrants acting in combination with a petty autocratic bureaucracy, they are not permitted to do so. If the Somalis so dislike Santa, then they should stay in Santa-free Somalia.

Consider the Misean take on the subject, himself an immigrant to the United States: “Immigrants soon find their place in urban life, they soon adopt, externally, town manners and opinions, but for a long time they remain foreign to civic thought. One cannot make a social philosophy one’s own as easily as a new costume.”

Illegal immigration isn’t the problem, too much immigration is. Legalizing those here illegally would only have made the problem worse, as the consequences of the 1986 amnesty conclusively demonstrate.

The Senate on Saturday blocked a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for certain young illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children, completed two years of college or military service and met other requirements, including passing a criminal background check.

Cue the sob stories… but if you’re moved by emotional appeals rather than logic, you might at least consider the fate of the many unemployed Americans, most of whom would be able to find work if millions of immigrants did not have those jobs. And spare the ignorant “jobs Americans won’t do” argument, which reveals nothing more than a failure to consider supply and demand. Let’s face it, most businesses that employ immigrants, legal or illegal, would employ even cheaper Chinese prison labor if they could figure out a way to get them over here.

I mentioned this VDH column about his journeys through the California backcountry in yesterday’s post about immigration waves, but it’s really worth reading just in case you didn’t notice the link:

During this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike on a 20-mile trip over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County. I also drove my car over to the coast to work, on various routes through towns like San Joaquin, Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have been driving, shopping, and touring by intent the rather segregated and impoverished areas of Caruthers, Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier, and Selma. My own farmhouse is now in an area of abject poverty and almost no ethnic diversity; the closest elementary school (my alma mater, two miles away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent white, and well below federal testing norms in math and English.

Here are some general observations about what I saw (other than that the rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly maintained and reverting to what I remember seeing long ago in the rural South). First, remember that these areas are the ground zero, so to speak, of 20 years of illegal immigration. There has been a general depression in farming — to such an extent that the 20- to-100-acre tree and vine farmer, the erstwhile backbone of the old rural California, for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.

On the western side of the Central Valley, the effects of arbitrary cutoffs in federal irrigation water have idled tens of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land, leaving thousands unemployed. Manufacturing plants in the towns in these areas — which used to make harvesters, hydraulic lifts, trailers, food-processing equipment — have largely shut down; their production has been shipped off overseas or south of the border. Agriculture itself — from almonds to raisins — has increasingly become corporatized and mechanized, cutting by half the number of farm workers needed. So unemployment runs somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.

Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.

But remember, immigration is good for America! No matter what the empirical evidence might lead one to conclude, the important thing is that the theoretical case remains solid.

Thomas Friedman laments American decline:

Former President José María Figueres of Costa Rica has a saying I like: “There is no Planet B” — so we’d better make Plan A work to preserve a stable environment. I feel the same way about America these days. There is no America B, so we’d better make this one work a lot better than we’ve been doing, and not only for our sake. When Britain went into decline as the globe’s stabilizing power, America was right there, ready to pick up the role. Even with all our imperfections and mistakes, the world has been a better place for it. If America goes weak, though, and cannot project power the way it has, your kids won’t just grow up in a different America. They will grow up in a different world. You will not like who picks up the pieces.

This is extraordinarily ironic, coming as it does from an elite Jewish liberal. He quite clearly doesn’t recognize that it is the very causes he has championed for decades, from diversity, equality, and secularization to free trade, immigration, and globalization, that have so weakened America in the manner that concerns him now. While he is correct in saying that a successful and powerful America committed to its core values could again become a world leader, his definition of those core values almost surely includes those values that have proven so pernicious to American success, power, and world leadership.

The North American landmass isn’t going to disappear. There will still be Americans proper – descendants of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who founded the nation on principles derived from the Bible and the Magna Carta – as well as those who call themselves Americans but have no cultural, ethnic, or religious connection to the historical America that is now essentially gone. The results of the great experiment are now sufficiently observable that we can pronounce the failure of the Viral America hypothesis.

It is now clear that one cannot catch Americanism. Just as the Irish, German, Scandinavian, and Italian immigrants never fully grasped the English concepts of liberty and limited government*, thereby transforming what had been a voluntary union of sovereign states into an involuntary empire ruled by a sovereign central government, the subsequent wave of immigration from Mexico and other third-world nations has transformed what had been a rich and powerful empire into an impoverished and corrupt one. Read Victor Davis Hanson’s haunting article on the devolution of central California into third world poverty; it will give you a more clear perspective on what has already happened and what is eventually in store for many communities across the country.

This is not to say that it was ever the intention of the various waves of immigrants to destroy the very haven they sought, it was merely the natural consequence of immigrants bringing their cultures with them, as they always do. And history clearly demonstrates that this is always the consequence when a sufficiently large number of people migrate to new lands. There is a reason that the northern province of Italy is still named Lombardia after the people who settled there after invading in 568 rather than after those they displaced, after all. It does not matter what historical example of mass immigration one examines, the result is invariably the same and it does not matter if the immigration is legal or illegal. The only variable of any significance is the percentage of the population represented by the immigration. Consider, for example, the original English colonists. Did they adapt to the ways of the Indian tribes or did they bring their native English way of life with them and transform the area they inhabited?

This is also not to say that the native population does not undergo its own transformation over time, but the transformations happen much more quickly and to a much greater extent with the arrival of new influences. The adaptation of black ghetto culture by white suburban teenagers following the end of segregation is one of many cases in point. But keep in mind that the point here is not whether the transformation is good or bad, it is only to note that the transformation has taken place and, for better or for worse, the new blended culture is never going to be the same as the one that it replaced.

From the New York Times: “In 1980, the foreign-born population in the United States was about 4.5 million. By 2000, it had reached 11.3 million, bringing the foreign-born population to about 13 percent of the total. In the early 20th century, after the last big wave of immigration to the United States, immigrants had reached 15 percent of the population.”

Therefore, Friedman is wrong as one cannot expect to make America A work when it has been transformed into America A + (M+I2+G+S+J+3). America A no longer exists. This is the B-Ark nation.

*Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, I invite you to compare the number of Irish, Italian, German, and Scandinavian political philosophers who have written on liberty and limited government with the number of English philosophers who published works on the subject.