I linked to this outstanding essay about seven years ago. It is jam-packed with insights. See if you agree. The graphic below is from the essay mentioned:
Schemata such as this are useful up to a point.
Category: Immigration
The Melting Pot
A melting pot can't do its job if unmeltable ingredients are thrown into it.
A Response to Liccione on Border Enforcement
From my Facebook page, 22 March 2019
Michael Liccione writes,
Totally open borders would be a surrender of sovereignty. Totally closed borders would be inhumane. There must surely be a via media that would be neither. But Washington seems unable to define it, because both Capitol Hill and the White House see more to be gained by political posturing than by working together on finding it. And that, my friends, is the problem–in this area as in so many others.
1. Who is for totally closed borders? No conservative of note. Certainly not Trump. Conservatives oppose illegal immigration, but not legal immigration. Nor do they oppose asylum provisions. They oppose the misuse thereof.
2. You can't look for a *via media* where there is a false alternative.
3. There is no moral equivalence between Capitol Hill and the White House. The House Dems and the the anti-Trump Republicans are pursuing a dangerous and morally irresponsible course. Trump is not posturing. He is doing what must be done under the circumstances.
4. Work together? Come on Michael Liccione. I don't mean this personally. I like you and I respect you. But, with all due respect, you are not thinking clearly. You can't work together with a Speaker of the House who incoherently babbles about walls being immoral and her colleagues who wax Orwellian in their advocacy of border security without border barriers. You can't work together with political opponents whose transparent motive is to win demographically by flooding the country with 'undocumented Democrats.'
5. One last shot. Some 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam over a 20 year period. Some 70,000 American died of drugs last year alone due in large part to a porous border. Does that concern you? And that is JUST ONE problem with lax border enforcement.
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And now, three years later, it is easy to see just how right Trump was on all the issues Biden is wrong on. Biden has proven to be a disaster on all fronts, foreign and domestic. The United States and the world are incalculably worse off now than they were when Donald J. Trump was president. In particular, had he been reelected, Putin would not have invaded Ukraine.
Weakness invites aggression, especially when amalgamated with senility and leftist nonsense.
A Socialist Argument for Border Control
Three years ago on this date on my Facebook page. Redacted and improved.
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Suppose you want a massive expansion of the welfare state. You want, among other things, a college education to be free to anyone who wants one. In addition, you want free health care for all, and perhaps a guaranteed minimum income. Suppose further that you want your socialist government to work and not go bankrupt. To will the end is to will the means. Among the means: A stemming of the tide of illegal immigration. So here you have the makings of a socialist argument for border control, an essential component of which is a physical barrier at the southern border. An essential component, not the only one. Mirabile dictu: A socialist argument for a conservative conclusion.
You can't have both open borders and socialism. I say to the libertarians: You want open borders? Go for it, but ONLY AFTER you have stripped the government down to its Lockean functions and instituted something like a Nozickian 'night watchman' state. (See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.) But of course that strip-down is not in the offing: the libertarian dream is u-topian. It's like Nowheresville, man, as Maynard G. Krebs might have said.
The welfare state in the USA is here to stay. The only question concerns its size and scope. Will it metastasize unto the collapse of the nation?
An equal but opposite utopianism to that of the libertarians is the utopianism of the Green New Dealers. To them and their democratic socialist fellow travellers, I say: you are going to have to become what you call 'xenophobes' and 'racists' if you want to implement a workable socialist scheme. You are going to have to become like us conservatives: 'nativists' and 'white supremacists' who hate the Other simply in virtue of his being Other.
Of course, none of these epithets apply to us. You only think they do in your perversity, ill-will, and deliberate self-enstupidation.
Why Not Allow Illegal Immigration?
It is important to present calm, rational arguments for the few people left who can be reached in this way.
No Polity without Comity
No polity without comity, and no comity without commonality.
E pluribus unum is a noble goal. But a durable and vibrant One cannot be made out of just any Many. Not just any diversity is combinable into unity.
This is why the oft-repeated 'Diversity is our strength' is foolish verbiage that could be spouted only by a liberal-left shallow pate.
We blew it as a society and now we are in trouble and teetering on the brink of collapse. No polity without comity, and no comity without commonality. The commonality that insures social harmony requires the stoppage of illegal immigration and reasonable limits on legal immigration together with the demand that potential immigrants be assimilable and willing to assimilate. But we no longer have the will to make that demand. We don't even have the will to protect the borders.
But of course foolishness about immigration and its effects is only one part of the explanation of our decline and eventual dissolution.
Still, we fight on, but only part-time because, being conservatives, we understand that the political is but a limited sphere. So ride the bike, traipse the trails, make music, draw and design, contemplate the constellations, make love to the wife.
Above all, lift up your eyes, if you can, to a Reality superior to this passing scene, superior to this vain world whose vanity will vanish along with it.
Did Sexism Bring Elizabeth Warren Down?
That's what she thinks, but she is fooling herself. Her extremism brought her down. 'Progressive' politics is like a progressive disease: it just gets worse and worse as leftists compete to see who can go farthest Left. But while the leaders of the Democrat Party are sick with the disease and barking mad, most rank-and-file Dems retain their grip on common sense. And so they gave Warren the boot. This despite the great support she received from the distaff contingent.
The over-ambitious 'Cherokee' committed suicide by political correctness. Good riddance! The hyperactive little hustler was a fraud on the personal level who gamed the Affirmative Action system to promote herself, and her ideas were insane: 'free' health care for illegal aliens; inventing new forms of 'racism' including health-care 'racism,' environmental 'racism,' and a couple of others; choosing a trans-gendered child to advise on selection of a Secretary of Education. The last bit of lunacy amounted to political suicide by intersectionality, as Tucker Carlson remarked. If she had exercised some restraint, she, and not the senile Biden, would be going up against Trump, and the Dems would have a shot at beating him.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that funds being used to construct the president’s border wall with Mexico should be redirected to help contain coronavirus, a quickly spreading epidemic with origins in China.
“I’m going to be introducing a plan tomorrow to take every dime that the president is now taking to spend on his racist wall at the southern border and divert it to the coronavirus,” the candidate said during a CNN town hall on Wednesday evening. (Rolling Stone, 27 February 2020)
Leftists have painted themselves into a corner. They think, absurdly, that borders are 'racist.' But even they realize, despite their willful self-enstupidation, that borders are needed for disease control. The solution, however, escapes them: jettison the absurd belief that borders are 'racist.'
They can't see their way out because the race card is all they've got and because of their blind hatred for Donald Trump. What a pathetic bunch of losers!
Will Leftists Now Re-Evaluate their Espousal of a “Borderless World”?
We of the Coalition of the Sane understand that one of the many reasons for enforced national borders is to impede the spread of deadly diseases. So I am hoping that such globalist nitwits as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton will learn something from COVID-19. They will perhaps learn the importance of border control. If they do, something good will have come of the Wuhan virus. One can hope. Here's a report on something the illustrious Mr. Kerry said a few years back:
Taking a jab at Donald Trump for promising that Mexico would pay for a wall on the Rio Grande, the secretary [Kerry] enthused over his vision of a borderless world, and hectored those reluctant to join his flight to Utopia. Once offstage, Mr. Kerry ducked into an armored vehicle surrounded by heavily armed guards who shepherded him from one secure place to the next, and then home, where he could relax behind sturdy walls.
In other words, borders and guns for us, but not for you "bitter clingers" (Obama) and "deplorables" (Hillary).
Just remember, folks, political correctness can get you killed. "Killed dead," as a deplorable might say.
Is Meaningful Dialog Possible with Leftists?
I rather doubt it. Suppose a bunch of leftists such as the editors of Commonweal say the following:
We reject the xenophobia and racism of many forms of ethno-nationalism, explicit and implicit, as grave sins against God the Creator. Violence done against the bodies of marginalized people is violence done against the body of Christ. Indifference to the suffering of orphans, refugees, and prisoners is indifference to Jesus Christ and his cross. White supremacist ideology is the work of the anti-Christ.
First of all, insistence on a nation's right to control its borders is not xenophobic. To suggest that conservatives have no good arguments for border control and that their insistence on it is based on irrational fear of foreigners is SLANDER. How Christian is that?
Second, illegal aliens do not constitute a race of people. So where is the racism in border control? And where is the white supremacism?
Third, every nation has the right to decide whom to allow to immigrate. There is, after all, no right to immigrate.
Reasons for opposing illegal immigration
There are several sound specific reasons for demanding that the Federal government exercise its legitimate, constitutionally grounded (see Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution) function of securing the national borders, and none of these reasons has anything to do with racism or xenophobia or nativism or any other derogatory epithet that slanderous leftists and libertarians want to attach to those of us who can think clearly about this issue.
There are reasons having to do with national security in an age of terrorism. There are reasons having to do with assimilation, national identity, and comity. How likely is it that illegals will assimilate if allowed to come in in great numbers, and how likely is social harmony among citizens and unassimmilated illegals? There are considerations of fairness in respect of those who have entered the country legally by satisfying the requirements of so doing. Is it fair that they should be put through a lengthy process when others are allowed in illegally?
There are reasons having to do with the importation of contraband substances into the country. There are reasons having to to do with the sex trade and human trafficking generally. There are reasons having to do with increased crime. Last but not least, there are reasons pertaining to public health. With the concern over avian influenza, tuberculosis, ebola, and all sorts of tropical diseases, we have all the more reason to demand border control.
Borders are a body politic's immune system. Unregulated borders are deficient immune systems. Diseases that were once thought to have been eradicated have made a comeback north of the Rio Grande due to the unregulated influx of population. These diseases include tuberculosis, Chagas disease, leprosy, Dengue fever, polio, and malaria.
You will have noticed how liberals want to transform into public health issues problems that are manifestly not public but matters of private concern, obesity for example. But here we have an issue that is clearly a public health issue, one concerning which Federal involvement is justified, and what do our dear liberals do? They ignore it. Of course, the problem cannot be blamed solely on the Democrat Party. Republicans like G. W. Bush and John McCain were just as guilty. On immigration, Bush was clearly no conservative; he was a libertarian on this issue. A libertarian on some issues, a liberal on others, and a conservative on far too few.
Illegal Aliens and Black Reparations
Here is another problem for the ill-starred notion of black reparations. Should those who reside illegally in the U. S. pay them? Why not? Don't they benefit from the putative legacy of slavery like everyone else? On the other hand, if you think that only the descendants of slave-holders should pay reparations, then we citizens who are are not descended from slave-holders are off the hook. And what about the blacks who are descended from blacks who held slaves? Do they get reparations too? And who is black anyway? Rachel Dolezal? If race is just a social construct, can I re-identify as black and get in on the goodies? If I can identify as a girl and then compete in an all-female athletic event, why can't I identify as black?
There will never be black reparations for slavery. The idea is just too incoherent for implementation. And it perpetuates the victim mentality that keeps blacks on the bottom. Nor should there be reparations for slavery. See the following. Trigger warning! They are exercises in reasoned discourse.
Kevin Kim on John Pepple on Sweden as Europe’s Sacrificial Lamb
A tip of the hat to Bill Keezer, and greetings to fellow bloggers Kim and Pepple. The titles of their blogs do not, however, earn the coveted MavPhil transparency of content award.
Feed: BigHominid's Hairy Chasms
Posted on: Thursday, September 5, 2019 1:22 AM
Author: Kevin Kim
Subject: Pepple on Sweden
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Is Sweden Europe's sacrificial lamb, to be laid out as a bloody example of what happens when you heedlessly allow an influx of Muslims who refuse to assimilate into your culture? In John Pepple's grim blog post, Dr. Pepple quotes a Frenchwoman who immigrated to Sweden, but who is now leaving the country for Budapest because the crime has gotten so bad, and because PC politicians, who fear being branded as racists, refuse to recognize that there's any problem with current immigration policy and law enforcement. Here's an excerpt of something the woman wrote—one long, cri de coeur sentence:
Go read the rest. A similar picture is being painted of countries like France, which is dealing with its own immigration/assimilation problem. France has a built-in cultural immune system called laïcité or, roughly, secularism. This is why French law has made no bones about disallowing the wearing of religious items like Muslim veils (hijab, etc.). But in the area surrounding Paris, which is filled with tenements and housing projects, there are the same no-go zones, with plenty of robbery, rape, car fires, and so on. In Paris itself, tent cities—with their attendant filth and violence—can be found as well. But once you leave Paris, you'd be forgiven for thinking France is still France. In the area where my buddy Dominique lives, in the small town of Le Vanneau-Irleau, life goes on much as it has for decades, utterly untouched by what's happening in France's big cities. In the United States, there's a similar state of affairs, albeit with somewhat different demographics. Still, the heart of the US problem has much in common with Europe's problem: a lack of political will when it comes to things like immigration and the true causes of poverty, and a lack of will when it comes to law enforcement. Any teacher knows that losing control of the classroom means the students will rule and nothing of significance will be learned. This is basic human psychology: people need structure if they are to live in harmony and to flourish. Without structure, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This is the paradox of freedom: true freedom is, far from being unstructured, veined throughout with structure. The creative freedom and amazing technique you can see in a great painter or martial artist is the result of focus and discipline. It's strange, but it's strictures that allow humans to flourish. And a society is no different from an individual in this regard: a society without strictures—an organic system of rules and laws and unspoken social contracts—becomes flabby and moribund. Look at New York City before and after Rudy Giuliani's two terms: Giuliani enforced the law, and his policies resulted in a few years of glorious prosperity between long periods of poverty and crime. Sweden is experiencing this problem now; so is France, at least in its big cities. The US has its own similar urban problems. As the folk song goes, When will they ever learn? |
I am not Totally Opposed to Open Borders
I'm for half-open borders, borders open in the outbound direction. Anyone who wants to emigrate should be allowed to do so.
Communists need walls to keep people in; we need walls to keep them out. Hence the rank absurdity of the comparison of a wall on our southern border to the Berlin Wall. Now the mendacious leftists who make this comparison cannot be so historically uninformed as not to see its rank absurdity. But they make it anyway because they will say or do anything to win. They are out for power any way they can get it.
It is interesting that even hate-America leftists do not want to leave the United States. They talk about it, but few do it. And where do they say they will go?
Canada is high on the list. Why not Mexico? Are they perhaps racists?
Gun Violence and Border Control: A Plea to Our ‘Liberal’ Brethren
Dear 'Liberal,'
If you are concerned with gun violence, then you ought to be concerned with controlling the border. A porous border allows for human trafficking, drug trafficking, and — wait for it — gun smuggling. Now can you grasp that weaponry illegally brought into the country can and will end up in the wrong hands?
Sure you can! And you CARE SO MUCH, don't you? Then you ought to support President Trump and oppose the obstructionist Democrats who either want open borders or practically promote them via their Trump-hating obstructionism.
Michael Kearns, Profile in Civil Courage
Erie County Clerk Michael "Mickey" Kearns took his first legal step to fight a new state law that allows immigrants in the country illegally to obtain a New York State driver's license.
At the time the illegal aliens receive, illegally, their driver's licenses, they will be able to register to vote, again illegally. Now in possession of photo ID, they will be able vote illegally in our elections.
The contemptible Dems profess to be worried about Russian interference in our elections. But these Democrat scumbags actively support illegal-alien interference in our elections. They are mendacious, hate-America leftists.
So please don't complain about a culture of contempt. Comrades Cuomo and de Blasio and all the rest of their ilk are fully deserving of contempt. Sorry David French, but these people are not fellow citizens but domestic enemies.
The Greatest Risk We are Taking
But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, is the annual importation of well over a million legal and illegal immigrants, many from the failed states of the Third World, in the belief we can create a united, peaceful and harmonious land of 400 million, composed of every race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, creed, culture and language on earth.
Where is the historic evidence for the success of this experiment, the failure of which could mean the end of America as one nation and one people?
There is none. Most people with a bit of life experience know that one can get along and interact productively with only some people. There has to be a broad base of shared agreement on all sorts of things. For example, there ought to be only one language in the U. S. for all public purposes, English. It was a huge mistake when voting forms were allowed to be published in foreign languages. Only legal immigrants should be allowed in, and assimilation must be demanded of them.
No comity without commonality as one of my aphorisms has it.
The Left, however, wants the end of America as she was founded to be, "one nation and one people." That is why leftists support the illegal invasion from the south. But being mendacious leftists they will never openly admit this, but instead speak with Orwellian obfuscation of "comprehensive immigration reform."
The enemy has been identified.
Do not think of leftists and 'progressives' as fellow citizens; they are merely among us as disorderly elements and domestic enemies. There can be no peace with them because they represent an 'existential threat.' Not to our physical existence so much as to our way of life, which is of course more important than our mere physical existence as animals.
But I must add, contra certain of the Alt Right, that "one people" should not be understood racially or ethnically. An enlightened nationalism is not a white nationalism. America is of course 'a proposition nation.' You will find the propositions in the founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence.
I don't give a flying enchilada whether you are Hispanic or Asian. If you immigrated legally, accept the propositions, drop the hyphens, and identify as an American, then I say you are one of us. I'll even celebrate the culinary diversity you contribute.
That being understood, it is also true that whites discovered these America-constitutive propositions and are well-equipped to appreciate and uphold them, and better equipped than some other groups. That is a fact that a sane immigration policy must reflect.
My view is eminently reasonable and balanced. It navigates between the Scylla of destructive leftist globalist internationalism and the Charybdis of racist identity-political particularism.