An Unsound Argument Against National Borders

The Dark Ostrich extracts the following argument from a TED video:

(1) It is wrong that anyone subject to the force of the law should not be subject to its protection, but

(2) those immediately outside the border and forcibly prevented from entering are subject to the force of the law but not its protection, ergo

(3) this is wrong.

The conclusion follows from the premises, but the conclusion is false. Therefore, one of the premises is false.  Which one? The first. To accept (1) is equivalent to rejecting nations and their sovereignty.

If you insist that the above deductive argument is sound in the technical sense in which most philosophers use the term (valid in point of logical form and possessing premises all of which are true), then I will point out that it is not rationally compelling.  

For it can be run in reverse with no breach of logical propriety.  "One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens."

I could also say that the above argument begs the question at the first premise.

If you accuse me of begging the question, then I say we have a stand-off. I will then suggest that you leave my country and go live in the borderless world of your dreams.

…………………………..

Jacques responds:

"If you accuse me of begging the question, then I say we have a stand-off. I will then suggest that you leave my country and go live in the borderless world of your dreams."

I think it's not even a stand-off (rationally).  Either premise 2 is patently false, or the argument is just invalid, or 1 has to be interpreted in such a way that 1 is patently false: 

First of all, when American immigration agents (legally) deport people or keep them from entering the country, they usually do so in ways that are legal relative to American law.  And they can be charged with crimes themselves if they don't.  They don't mow down would-be illegal immigrants with machine guns or drop them back in Mexico from helicopters.  They don't force them to convert to Islam or steal their pocket change.  When aliens [are] being deported or prevented from entering [,] the legal standing or rights assigned to such people by American law are generally respected, and are supposed to be respected under American law.  So 2 is patently false on one reasonable interpretation. 

BV: I agree.

Maybe the meaning of premise 2 is that illegal aliens, or would-be illegal aliens, are not legally granted exactly the same protections (rights or powers or whatever) as some other people–American citizens, for example.  But then, in order for the argument to be valid, premise 1 would have to say something like this:

BV: That is the way I read premise (2).

(1*) It is wrong that anyone subject to the force of the law should not be subject to all the same legal 'protections'  to which any other arbitrary person subject to the force of the law is subject.

BV: And that is the way I read premise (1).

But 1* is even more absurd than 1.  If 1* were true, then all the following scenarios would be morally wrong:

i. The President of the United States is legally protected by the Secret Service in ways that some Americans are not.

ii. Some citizens who are poor and unemployed are legally protected against starvation and life-threatening illness by means of welfare payments and publicly subsidized healthcare but the President of the United States is not.

iii. Some citizens who are not convicted child molesters are legally protected against certain forms of invasion of privacy in ways that citizens who are convicted child molesters are not.

iv. Some citizens who are not in the process of carrying out an armed robbery are legally protected against gunfire from police officers but some of those who are in the process of carrying out armed robberies are not.

v. Female citizens are legally protected against sexual harassment in ways that male citizens are not.

vi. Citizens who are 7 years old are legally protected against certain forms of self-harm–doing tequila shots at strip clubs, for example, or having sexual relationships with people who are 30 years old–but some other citizens are not. 

BV: Those are all good points.

Well, this could go on for a while.  So either 2 is patently false or 1, on the relevant interpretation, is patently false. 

BV: I say that (1) is false, (2) is true, charitably interpreted, the argument is valid but unsound. I think we agree or could agree on this.

Why then did I say that it is a stand-off?  Because the open borders defender could bite the bullet and insist on (1)/(1*).  To so insist is equivalent to denying the moral legitimacy of nation-states and their sovereignty. If he is denying said legitimacy, and I am affirming it in virtue of running the argument in reverse, then we are at loggerheads and we have a stand-off. 

Of course I could go on to argue why we have need of nation-states and why they are morally justified. But then we are deep into the bowels of political philosophy. What if the opponent turns out to be a (philosophical) anarchist who denies the moral justification of states and their coercive powers?  We will soon encounter other stand-offs. For example, we will soon enough enter the philosophy of human nature (philosophical anthropology).  What if he takes the anarchist line that people are by nature good and that states and their laws are corrupt and corrupting? Of course, one can argue against that too, and as a conservative I will, but have sophisticated anarchists been decisively refuted to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners of political philosophy?

The task of the political philosopher is to dig down to the deepest underpinnings of the 'surface' debates such as DACA, the need for a border wall, etc.  Unfortunately, when we dig deep, we find that we cannot get to bedrock, a bedrock upon which we can all agree.

I fear that I must now open the ComBox.

DACA: It’s About Sovereignty

W. Hunsecker:

Schumer, in his bid for political prominence, did much more than simply, temporarily put the interests of illegal immigrants ahead of the American public who he was elected to serve.  Rather, he endorsed a program – DACA – which does nothing less than facilitate threats to U.S. security and, ultimately sovereignty. DACA has emboldened a population – which has no standing in the American electoral process – to disenfranchise legitimate American voters by participating in an array of political actions which are meant to shape the government and influence policy.  This same population also erodes U.S. elements of national power by claiming places – and potentially displacing citizen and legal permanent resident candidates – in institutions of higher education. Finally, the DACA population represents a potential fifth column for state and non-state actors seeking individuals with little allegiance to (and demonstrated animosity against) the U.S. government.

Democrats: The New Palestinians on Immigration

Roger L. Simon:

Just as the Palestinians twenty-five years and four significant offers after Oslo have demonstrated they really don't want a two-state solution with the Israelis, Democrats have now revealed they don't want to solve the U.S.e immigration problem.

As with the Palestinians, it's all a shell game.

Donald Trump just offered the Dems an agreement on DACA that gives two million "Dreamers" a pathway to full citizenship after 10-12 years — something not even done by Barack Obama! — and the Dems didn't even want to discuss the proposal.  All that happened was their increasingly unhinged minority leader screamed Trump was "making America safe for white people!"

Wonder if the rabid press dogs who all but rolled on the floor begging that Navy doctor to say Trump was somehow unfit or senile after scoring 100% on a cognitive test would demand the same thirty questions be put to Ms. Pelosi?

Never mind.  The point is that Pelosi revealed herself to be a repellent racist… or racialist (someone who plays the race card no matter what). More importantly, the Democratic Party unmasked themselves as not all that interested in the "Dreamers" as people.  They just want to make the Republicans look, well, racist and lose elections. Otherwise they would be jumping up and down for this proposal.

Nancy Pelosi is the stupidest woman in American politics as is obvious if you simply listen to her rants. Stupid and vile, though not as vile as Maxine Waters. Nancy's fund-raising abilities, however, endear her to the destructive Dems. 

Related: Nancy Pelosi on the Word. You won't believe it.

Hillary the Irrelevant

Poor Hillary is reduced to reading from a crummy book  at the Grammys while President Donald J. Trump prepares for his first State of the Union address.

Hillary the Inevitable has become Hillary the Irrelevant.

Meanwhile, Hollywood liberals 'argue' that border control, a constitutionally-mandated function of the Federal government, is 'white supremacist' and that a physical barrier is a symbol of hate.  Actress Alyssa Milano tweets:

Let’s be clear: Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants are rooted in white supremacy. His racist wall is a symbol of hate.

How could any reasonable person disagree with that?

Trump was Right about Feculent Locales

This piece by a former Peace Corps volunteer to Senegal is a must-read. A few quotations:

People defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust – onto you, your clothes, your food, the water.  He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water.  Human feces carries parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country.  Or would teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism.

Last time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand boubou have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame Cathedral.  The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his head not to see.

I have seen.  I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant things are not true.

[. . .]

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown.  The value system was the exact opposite.  You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives.  There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system.  They fail.

We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa.  The kleptocracy extends through the whole society.  My town had a medical clinic donated by international agencies.  The medicine was stolen by the medical workers and sold to the local store.  If you were sick and didn't have money, drop dead.  That was normal.

So here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father's Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn't bathing him, I wasn't surprised.  It was familiar.

In Senegal, corruption ruled, from top to bottom.  Go to the post office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp.  After paying the bribe, you still didn't know it if it would be mailed or thrown out.  That was normal.

One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic.  One day, as the wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides – who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working – collapsed to the ground.  They turned their heads so as not to see her and kept talking.  She lay there in the dirt.  Callousness to the sick was normal.

Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  It's not.  It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.

We think the Protestant work ethic is universal.  It's not.  My town was full of young men doing nothing.  They were waiting for a government job.  There was no private enterprise.  Private business was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world bureaucratic kleptocracy.  It is also incompatible with Senegalese insistence on taking care of relatives.

[. . .]

African problems are made worse by our aid efforts.  Senegal is full of smart, capable people.  They will eventually solve their own country's problems.  They will do it on their terms, not ours.  The solution is not to bring Africans here.

We are lectured by Democrats that we must privilege third-world immigration by the hundred million with chain migration.  They tell us we must end America as a white, Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation – to prove we are not racist.  I don't need to prove a thing.  Leftists want open borders because they resent whites, resent Western achievements, and hate America.  They want to destroy America as we know it.

As President Trump asked, why would we do that?

We have the right to choose what kind of country to live in.  I was happy to donate a year of my life as a young woman to help the poor Senegalese.  I am not willing to donate my country. 

Trump’s Real Sin? He Speaks Taboo Truths

Why the bipartisan preening outrage over the President's craphole comment? Roger Kimball:

Everyone, near enough, knows that he was telling a home truth. It was outrageous not because he said something crude that was untrue. Quite the contrary: it was outrageous precisely because it was true but intolerable to progressive sensitivities.

In other words, the potency of taboo is still strong in our superficially rational culture. There are some things—quite a few, actually, and the list keeps growing—about which one cannot speak the truth or, in many cases, even raise as a subject for discussion without violating the unspoken pact of liberal sanctimoniousness.

Andrew Klavan:

Nothing scandalizes a leftist like the truth. Point out that women and men are different, that black Americans commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime, that most terrorist acts are committed by Muslims, and the Left leaps to its collective feet in openmouthed shock, like Margaret Dumont after a Groucho Marx wisecrack. This is racism! This is sexism! This is some sort of phobia! I’m shocked, shocked to find facts being spoken in polite company!

No one is really shocked, of course. This is simply a form of bullying. The Left has co-opted our good manners and our good will in order to silence our opposition to their bad policies. The idea is to make it seem impolite and immoral to mention the obvious.

The bullying is highly effective and very dangerous. In England, in the city of Rotherham, at least 1,400 non-Muslim girls, some as young as 11, were brutally raped by Muslim immigrants over a period of years in the 2000s. Police and other officials worked to keep the facts hidden because, according to multiple reports, they were afraid of being called racist. Think about that: police officers did not want to seem racist, so they stood by and let their city’s children be raped.

[ . . .]

Here in the states, the First Amendment has so far allowed old-fashioned American loudmouths to fight the system whenever they could find ways around our monolithic corporate media. But the Empire of Lies is quick to strike back. Google/YouTube now stands charged by multiple accusers of singling out conservative voices for censorship, “fact-checking,” and demonetization. Hidden-camera videos released by Project Veritas this week show Twitter employees conspiring to “shadow ban” conservatives on their system. On campus, intelligent conservative speakers of good will like Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Cristina Hoff-Somers have faced violent protests meant to shut them up.

No person of importance on the right seeks to silence anyone on the left. The Left, on the other hand, is broadly committed to ostracizing, blacklisting, and even criminalizing right-wing speech.

 

[. . .]

Let’s state the obvious. Some countries are shitholes. To claim that this is racist is racist. They are not shitholes because of the color of the populace but because of bad ideas, corrupt governance, false religion, and broken culture. Further, most of the problems in these countries are generated at the top. Plenty of rank-and-file immigrants from such ruined venues ultimately make good Americans—witness those who came from 1840s potato-famine Ireland, a shithole if ever there was one! It takes caution and skill to separate the good from the bad.

For these very reasons, absurd immigration procedures like chain migration, lotteries, and unvetted entries are deeply destructive. They can lead to the sort of poor choices that create a Rotherham. Trump’s suggestions—to vet immigrants for pro-American ideas and skills that will help our country—are smart and reasonable and would clearly make the system better if implemented.

So, when it comes to the Great Shithole Controversy of 2018, my feeling is: I do not care, not even a little. I’m sorry that it takes someone like Trump to break the spell of silence the Left is forever weaving around us. I wish a man like Ronald Reagan would come along and accomplish the same thing with more wit and grace. But that was another culture. History deals the cards it deals; we just play them. Trump is what we’ve got.

For all the bad language, for all the loose talk, I would rather hear a man speak as a man without fear of the Nurse Ratcheds in the press and the academy than have him neutered and gagged by a system of good manners that has been misused as a form of oppression. Better impoliteness than silence. Better crudeness than lies.

We have seen the effect of uncontrolled immigration on Europe. It is very, very bad. The fact is: some countries are shitholes. I don’t want this to become one of them.

Immigration and the Obstructionist Congressional Crapweasels

Here:

A great deal of the justified anger of the immigration patriot community is that we are told again and again by the media and politicians that we’re not allowed to care that say, the average El Salvadoran immigrant may be three times more likely as the average Norwegian immigrant or four times more likely than the average Indian immigrant to be on welfare, supported by the U.S. taxpayer.

We’re outraged like Donald Trump was when he saw the truly offensive deal conjured up by Senators Graham, Flake and Gardner in conjunction with Democratic leaders that would give mass amnesty (far beyond DACA) in exchange for a pitiful charade of border security. He’s outraged that these senators would betray GOP voters and interests when, even in his weaker moments, he’s always declared (as he tweeted last night) that building a wall, moving to merit-based immigration, and ending the visa lottery and chain migration are mandatory components for the amnesty deal for DACA. The scandal here isn’t Trump’s predictably profane tongue—it’s that Senators Graham, Flake and Gardner would dare to show him this s***hole of an amnesty deal, in blatant defiance of the core issue positions that led the GOP to 100 year-high legislative majorities, and expect him to bless it.

Lindsey, Jeff, and Cory—you’re fired.

Read it all.

Trump Speaks the Truth and Snowflakes Melt

Here:

Is there any question Haiti is a s***hole? Who’s offended by that? If it wasn’t a s***hole it wouldn’t be one of the most prominent recipients of American charity aid on Planet Earth. And it isn’t like this country has ignored Haiti — we’ve been trying to lift it out of s***hole status for more than a century, with absolutely no result whatever. In 1910, President William Howard Taft granted Haiti a large loan in hopes that Haiti could pay off its staggering international debt and therefore achieve a larger measure of independence from Europe. The result? Haiti defaulted and U.S. tax dollars were poured into a bottomless pit.

[. . .]

The open-borders crowd doesn’t want to talk about that, though, and it wants to call you racist if you’re opposed to a deluge of immigrants from the worst places on earth. That’s why Trump’s “s***holes” objection is big news rather than the fact there are so-called political leaders who can’t agree to reorient our immigration policy toward taking people who can successfully assimilate here.

Between the two, the crude man who tells the truth and looks out for his own citizens is preferable to the genteel man who sells us out for cheap labor or ballot-box fuel for a political machine. If Trump is the former, so be it.

Exactly right. The career politician is concerned primarily about his career and the power, perquisites, and pelf it provides. Despite what he says, the typical Republican is not primarily concerned about the welfare of the country.  So he talks and talks, but never gets anything done, as if politics is endless gentlemanly discourse and nothing more.  Well, talk is cheap and it allows the evasion of hard decisions.  

Relevant is the following quotation from Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1985: 

According to Donoso Cortés, it was characteristic of bourgeois liberalism not to decide in this battle but to begin a discussion. He straightforwardly defined the bourgeoisie as a “discussing class,” una clasa discutidora. It has thus been sentenced. This definition contains the class characteristic of wanting to evade the decision. A class that shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict. (59)

Trump is rude, crude, devoid of gravitas, self-absorbed, and given to exaggeration. He has orange hair. A statement he once made suggests that he is tolerant of pussy-grabbing. But so what given that he understands and threatens to act upon the following:

1) There is no right to immigrate.

2) Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country.

3) There is a distinction between legal and illegal immigration, and the latter must be severely curtailed if it cannot be stopped entirely.

4) Potential immigrants must share the values of the host country and respect its culture.

5) Potential immigrants must be assimilable and willing to assimilate.

6) With respect to immigration to the USA, preference ought to be given to potential immigrants from Ireland and Norway, say, rather than from Haiti, say.

No Democrat really believes (as opposed to insincerely giving verbal assent to) all or even most of the above, and few Republicans would be willing to act upon these propositions.

This is why Trump is our last chance. If he caves, then it's all over.

More on Immigration as the Central Issue of Our Time

Just over the transom from a U. K. reader:

With respect to this post, I agree with much of Douglas Murray's book as well; in fact the only parts I could argue with are his somewhat lenient stance on various English Defence League type people (not his belief in their legal right to state their position though). But the great problem with European immigration is the importation of absolutely regressive thinking, even amongst the true victims of war in Syria and Afghanistan (the 'idiot' Liberals wrongly associate contingent victimhood with innate virtue, never realising that the problem of increased rape and harassment by immigrants is precisely due to the mainstream attitudes all but the educated among their number hold – contempt for women etc).

You're quite right. European 'progressives,' having been enstupidated by political correctness, don't understand that the 'regressives' from Muslim lands do not share their values and have no intention of assimilating, and that it is cultural suicide to let them flood in.  (See here.) These leftists also make the typical 'progressive' mistake of thinking that great virtue attaches to being an underdog, a victim, poor, etc. You will have noticed that leftists have a knee-jerk tendency to take the side of the loser and the underdog even when the underdog owes his status to his own bad behavior and foolishness.  

Of course we should help those who are in dire straits due to no fault of their own. But aid must be rendered in an intelligent fashion, and never at the expense of the country rendering aid. The principle must be: Country First!  Trump's America First! is just a special case of this. For the Germans, Germany First!  And so on.  The prudent and reasonable look to the welfare of their own first, and only thereafter to that of others.

But I don't see a strong parallel with the argument against mainly (as I understand it) Mexican / Central American immigration to the U.S. Among those immigrants are certainly criminals and gangs (some quite well known escapees from Latin American guerilla wars, narco-wars etc), but not, generally speaking religious ideologues or people with culturally inbuilt regressive values, just the normal regressiveness of the uneducated individual from a Western society.

I grant you that there are differences which weaken the parallel.  Better to be invaded by Catholics than by Muslims.  Islam is a toxic political ideology inimical to Western values. Contemporary Catholicism, despite its infestation by leftist termites, is much less of a threat politically. But it is still a threat because Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal, will most of them end up voting for the hard-Left Democrat Party. Here,  by the way, is the reason why the obstructionist Dems so viciously and vociferously oppose Trump's immigration reforms: their long-term strategy is to win demographically.  Illegal aliens from the south are for them undocumented Democrats.  This is also why they oppose photo ID at polling places. They want to make the polling places safe for voter fraud. Good leftists that they are, they hold the end to justify the shabby means.  ('Good' in the preceding sentence functions as an attributive, not a predicative adjective, in Peter Geach's terminology.)

Looking from the outside, and as a frequent visitor to the U.S., my impression is that most Trump voters take more issue with two things: a) being left out of the economic picture no matter how hard they work; their enemy seems to be corporations, Wall Street, and / or big government (Bernie Sanders popularity on the left would seem to be evidence that this is felt across the spectrum of political allegiance); and b) the identity / victim politics of the modern Left, which only cares about LGBT etc as political entities, not normal people, or even 'workers' (the original victim category of Marx). 

I can't see the 'experiment in self-destruction' of the UK being repeated in the US; it looks like a different experiment in self-destruction to me – more to do with abrogation of the responsibilities of government to the private sphere, and eventual failure of democracy combined with a self-absorbed intellectual Leftist politics that no longer cares about the mainstream.

I would be interested to see on your blog a more detailed exploration of these 'failed experiments' as you see them unfolding; how Europe and the US correlate and how they differ. Are different sets of civilisational principles at stake in each place?

'Failed experiments' doesn't seem to be quite the phrase. In Europe and the U.K., the experiments in self-destruction seem to be succeeding.  Sharia courts? No-go zones? Places in England where an Englishman must fear to tread?  I will have to do more research to be able comment on how the U. K. and U. S. cases differ. But I don't think the two experiments in self-destruction are very different.  In both cases a mindless immigration policy engineered by destructive global elitists. 

The Defining Issue of the Day: Immigration into the West of Unassimilable Elements

From Robert W. Merry's review of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, Douglas Murray, Bloomsbury Continuum, 352 pages:

You should carefully study the whole piece. Here are some excerpts. Emphases added.

[. . .]

No, the defining issue of our day is mass immigration into the nations of Western heritage. This growing inflow threatens to remake those nations and overwhelm their cultural identity. This is the issue that played the largest role in getting Donald Trump elected. It drove Britain’s Brexit vote. It is roiling the European continent, mounting tensions inside the EU and driving a wedge between the elites of those nations and their general populations.

Indeed, the central battlefront in the immigration wars is Europe, which accepted a trickle of immigrants in the immediate postwar era due to labor shortages. But over the years the trickle became a stream, then a growing river, and finally a torrent—to the extent that ethnic Britons are now a minority in their own capital city, refugee flows into Germany went from 48,589 in 2010 to 1.5 million in 2015, and Italy, a key entry point, received at one point an average of 6,500 new arrivals a day.

[. . .]

A key point of the book, reinforced through anecdote and abundant documentation, is that Muslim immigrants have not assimilated into their European host countries to any meaningful extent. Indeed, there is a growing feeling among many of the new arrivals that these aren’t host countries at all but merely lands ripe for Islam’s inexorable expansion. An 18-year-old Syrian refugee to Germany, Aras Bacho, writing in Der Freitag and the Huffington Post Deutschland, reflected this attitude when he said German migrants were “fed up” with “angry” Germans—described as “unemployed racists”—who “insult and agitate.” He added, “We refugees…do not want to live in the same country with you. You can, and I think you should, leave Germany. Germany does not fit you, why do you live here?….Look for a new home.”

Consider also the significance of this fact: By 2015 more British Muslims were fighting for ISIS than for the British armed forces. There was nothing hidden about the resolve of many European Muslims to retain their own culture while overwhelming the European one. At a rally in Cologne in 2008, then-Turkish prime minister (later president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a crowd of 20,000 Turks living in Germany, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands that assimilation in Europe would constitute “a crime against humanity.” He added, “I understand very well that you are against assimilation. One cannot expect you to assimilate.” Yet he admonished the five million Turks living in Europe to pursue political influence through democratic means in order to wield a “constitutional element” in transforming the continent.

Reading Murray’s book, one gets an understanding of why he characterizes Europe’s demise as “strange.” The continent’s embrace of its own cultural death is indeed historically aberrational. Civilizations normally fight for the preservation of their cultures, unite to expel invaders, revere their identities and the fundamental elements of their heritage. But the West today is engaged in an extensive and progressive extravagance of civilizational self-abnegation. Murray calls this the “tyranny of guilt” and identifies it as a “pathology.” The concept of historical guilt, he writes, means that hereditary stains of guilt can be passed down through generations—much as Europeans themselves for generations held Jews responsible for the killing of Christ. Eventually this was seen as repugnant, and the Pope himself in 1965 formally lifted the historical burden.

[. . .]

America lags behind Europe in the magnitude of its immigration problem. But, with an estimated 11 million illegals in country and the same prevailing elite sensibility dominating our discourse, the United States eventually will hit a similar crisis point unless current trends are altered or reversed. It’s worth noting that the percentage of Americans born outside the country has approached a historical high of 14 percent—similar to what it was in the 1920s, the last time the country curtailed both the numbers of immigrants and the nations from which they were allowed to come. That may be what’s brewing here today with the election of Trump.

Exactly right. Stupid 'liberals' are still in shock over Trump's election and still cannot understand how he could have won. The main factor responsible for his election is easy to understand. We decent Americans who love our country and stand for the rule of law are sick of illegal immigration and  are very reasonably opposed to the legal immigration of those who do not accept our values.

Those who oppose Trump's immigration proposals are either destructive leftist scum or else pollyannish bleeding-hearts who do not understand the issues.  The lines are clearly drawn and the battle is on for the soul of America. 2018 should prove to be very interesting indeed.  

We are lucky in that we are not Europe or the U. K. We can learn from their experiment in self-destruction. We have a little time, and with Trump in the saddle, a fighting chance.

But will learn? And will we fight?  Some of you have children and grandchildren. Do you care at all what country they will inherit?