{"id":6222,"date":"2016-09-14T12:33:11","date_gmt":"2016-09-14T12:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/09\/14\/immigration-nationalism-and-xenophobia\/"},"modified":"2016-09-14T12:33:11","modified_gmt":"2016-09-14T12:33:11","slug":"immigration-nationalism-and-xenophobia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/09\/14\/immigration-nationalism-and-xenophobia\/","title":{"rendered":"Immigration, Nationalism, and Xenophobia"},"content":{"rendered":"

R. R. Reno talks sense<\/a> over at First Things<\/em>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Trump insists that anyone residing in the United States illegally is subject to deportation. Many commentators regard such comments as inflammatory. I am baffled by their outrage. What, exactly, is meant by \u201cillegal\u201d if the lawbreaker is immune from consequences?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I am baffled too.  No reasonable person could consider it inflammatory or hateful to enforce just and reasonable laws.  Nor could any reasonable person refer to Trump's Phoenix immigration speech as 'hateful,' yet many liberal commentators did exactly that.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the O'Reilly show recently, a seemingly intelligent liberal referred to a wall such as the one Trump proposes as "hateful."  This illustrates what I call the topical insanity<\/a> of liberals.  On some topics they suffer cognitive melt-down.  Suppose our liberal pal has security doors installed on his house to protect his wife and children.  Would he consider that 'hateful'?  Presumably not.  But then why can't he see that drug trafficking, human trafficking, and the invasion by criminals and terrorists is something that cannot be tolerated?  Why can't he see that the rule of law must be upheld even in the case of the majority of illegal immigrants who simply seek a better life?  Why can't he appreciate how precious the rule of law is, and how important a role it plays in making ours a great and prosperous country that half the world wants to come to?  What blinds him to the necessity of disease control via border control?  <\/span>What we have here on the part of liberals is either topical insanity or willful stupidity which, because willful, ought to be morally condemned.<\/span><\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The very notion of limiting immigration\u2014building a wall\u2014gets Trump described as \u201canti-immigrant.\u201d But isn\u2019t job number one for our political leaders to protect the interests of Americans, which surely entails restricting the number of people who can immigrate?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course.  Note also the verbal obfuscation that contemporary liberals routinely engage in by eliding the obvious distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. Trump is not anti-immigrant, he is anti-illegal-immigrant, as we all should be.<\/span><\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Something strange is going on here, something I don\u2019t fully understand.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Deplorable<\/a>It may be that Reno does not understand, or want to understand, how destructive and vicious leftists are.  I suppose most of us would like to believe that most of our fellow citizens are basically decent people, morally speaking.  But the evidence is against it in the case of leftists.   Morally decent people, for example, don't slander their opponents.  But leftists (and this includes contemporary liberals) routinely slander and disrespect their opponents in lieu of engaging their point of view.  For example, if you point out the clear and present danger of radical Islam, they say or imply that you are in the grip of a phobia.  Now a phobia is an irrational fear, whereas concern about the threat of radical Islam is eminently rational.  <\/span><\/p>\n

A decent person does not impugn the rationality of his interlocutor by dismissing his arguments unexamined  and ascribing to him groundless fears and phobias.  A decent person does not behave as Hillary Clinton recently did when she dumped 50% of Trump supporters into a "basket of deplorables."  <\/span><\/p>\n

Liberals like Bill and Hillary Clinton regularly smear their opponents and then issue hypocritical calls for 'civility.'  What passes for argument among liberals is the hurling of SIXHRB epithets: sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, bigoted. (I borrow the acronym from Dennis Prager)  For example, if you oppose illegal immigration then you are a xenophobe; if you carefully argue against Obamacare then you a racist; if you give reasons why marriage is between a man a woman you are dismissed as a bigot.  If you oppose that slaughter of innocent human beings which is abortion you are waging war against women and interfering with their 'health' and 'reproductive rights.'   If you point out the very real threat of radical Islam, then you are dismissed as an  'Islamophobe' with a mental illness.<\/span><\/p>\n

How is it possible to resist the conclusion that Hillary and her ilk are moral scum?<\/span><\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

A recent essay in Foreign Affairs<\/em> by Kishore Mahbubani and Lawrence Summers, \u201cThe Fusion of Civilizations: The Case for Global Optimism,\u201d outlines a vision for a more globalized, peaceful, and prosperous future\u2014in which nations become less significant. Today\u2019s emphasis on multiculturalism and \u201cdiversity\u201d participates in this vision of the future, one in which differences are overcome and borders are irrelevant. It\u2019s species of utopianism, to be sure, but it has a powerful grip on the moral imagination of the West.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this view, national interest is an impediment to progress. Concerns about identity are, by definition, forms of ethnocentrism bordering on xenophobia. This is why the upsurge of populist concern about immigration . . . are so vigorously denounced by mainstream politicians, journalists, and political commentators.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The above is not only utopian, but incoherent.  On the one hand we are told that "diversity" promotes the overcoming of differences and the making irrelevant of borders.  But what is "diversity" if not a celebration of differences?  An emphasis on "diversity" leads to identity politics which is supposedly what the above authors oppose.  There can be no comity without commonality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Liberals falsely imagine that we are all the same and that we all have the same values.  That is manifestly not the case.  Most Muslims do not share our Enlightenment values.  This is why there can be peace with them only if they stay in their own lands.  You may not like borders, but they reflect unbridgeable differences and make peaceful coexistence possible.  The conservative, unlike the liberal, has a reality-based, sober understanding of how different and how limited we human beings are.  <\/span><\/p>\n

\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a>More Liberal-Left Insanity<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>On Legal and Illegal Immigration<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

R. R. Reno talks sense over at First Things: Trump insists that anyone residing in the United States illegally is subject to deportation. Many commentators regard such comments as inflammatory. I am baffled by their outrage. What, exactly, is meant by \u201cillegal\u201d if the lawbreaker is immune from consequences? I am baffled too.  No reasonable … Continue reading “Immigration, Nationalism, and Xenophobia”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism","category-immigration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}