John Derbyshire: Trump’s Immigration Bill Makes CNN’s Acosta Squeal Like A Pig. That Justifies It Right There!

By John Derbyshire

08/04/2017

This week, as it happens, there’s been an unusual quantity of good news out of Washington D.C. — not great, throw-your-hat-in-the-air news; but hopeful news, news about our government moving in the right direction — above all, on immigration.

Current U.S. immigration policy can fairly be described as antiwhite capitalist — an ugly blend of antiwhite ideology and the crudest kind of crush-the-workers capitalism.

Both our big political parties are on board with this. The Democrats increasingly the antiwhite party, see their future in bringing in more and more nonwhites to vote for them. The Republicans are completely controlled by cheap-labor business lobbies.

Antiwhite capitalism works for both parties; that’s why it has a stranglehold on our national life. It doesn’t work for non-elite white Americans. That’s why last November’s election gave us President Trump and not President Clinton.

Wednesday this week President Trump proposed legislation to reform our immigration laws, drafted by two Republican Senators: Arkansas’ Tom Cotton and Georgia’s David Perdue.

Some highlights:

1. 

   It ends chain migration. At present, if you are a citizen or legal permanent resident, you can sponsor your parents, your siblings, and your adult children for permanent residence. No longer: Under the proposed reform, it'll be spouse and dependent children only.

2. It ends the so-called "diversity lottery," which gives permanent residence to 50,000 random people from anywhere, by lottery from the millions who apply–14½ million in 2015, the last year we have numbers for. Almost half of those were from Africa.
3. It caps refugee numbers at 50,000 in any year.
4. Applicants for permanent residence would be graded on a points system, with points decided by age, education credentials, English-language skills, professional awards, investment resources, and job offers.
5. Guest workers would have to show job offers paying more than what is being paid to local Americans.

From my point of view, the proposed bill is a curate’s egg: good in parts.

Cutting back chain migration to just spouse and dependent children, for instance, is a very sensible reform. Likewise dumping the horrible, stupid "diversity lottery." Diversity, above the minimal salt-in-the-stew level, creates nothing but trouble. We can’t taste the stew, we've dumped so much salt in it.

There are some nits to pick, though. The refugee cap is way too high, for instance. Fifty thousand a year? Here are government figures for the actual number of refugees admitted in fiscal years 2016, -15, -14, -13, and -12, in thousands: 85, 70, 70, 70, 58. So fifty thousand is a very modest reduction.

Refugee contractors whine about not meeting 110,000 “target” for FY17 , by Ann Corcoran, RefugeeResettlementWatch, June 22, 2017

Given that, as I have explained, refugees and ourselves are all better off if they're parked in countries with similar cultures; and given also that, as documented in detail by Ann Coulter in ¡Adios America!, the refugee program is addled with fraud, the proper ceiling here: ZERO.

The guest-worker reform would quickly be gamed by smart immigration lawyers, just as they have gamed the present system, where employers are supposed to show they can’t find an American worker to hire. Employers go through the motions on that, but everyone knows it’s bogus.

Most problematic in the President’s proposal: the points-based system–giving permanent residence to the smartest, best-credentialed foreigners.

The long-term result of that, as VDARE.com has occasionally noted, is that the legacy nation might end up working for an overclass of smart Asians. That’s a recipe for racial resentment and civic disorder here in America. (I mean, of course, yet more racial resentment and yet more civic disorder).

It also strips poor countries of their most talented people. I couldn’t personally care less about that, but most Americans are more moralistically inclined than I am. People who claim to fret about world poverty should be asked why it’s good to enrich America by making poor countries poorer.

My ideal immigration policy is minimalist: a policy that serves Americans, and one that Americans can understand:

• New permanent residents? Don’t need any. Exceptions: spouse and dependent children of current citizens. Guys who've helped us overseas. Solzhenitsyn.
• Temporary guest workers? Don’t need any. Exceptions: that concert pianist, some world-class physicist teaching on exchange at a U.S. university. A few thousand similar cases.
• Tourists and businessfolk on temporary visas with no right to work? Sure, carefully monitored on entry and exit, easily done with modern data management and i.d. systems.
• Students? In very limited numbers.

Best of all, it opens up the issue of immigration so that Establishment figures have to discuss it. Which they hate to do; and which, as CNN’s Jim Acosta showed in that clip with Stephen Miller, they do so excrutiatingly badly, it makes great TV and gets citizens talking, and helps dispel the clouds of ignorance. Senator Lindsey Graham, who, has already declared his outrage over the bill, is the very model and archetype of an Antiwhite Capitalist.

This proposed bill makes a mighty crack in the dam. There’s no going back to the regime of blanket ignorance and sentimentality on immigration.

This ignorance has been willed. People–including educated and influential people, non-sinister people who are not directly benefiting from the scams, would rather not hear about, not talk about immigration. It’s radioactive.

This is especially the case on the Respectable Right, whose inmates creep around in mortal terror that someone might call them racist.

Mind if I quote myself here? I’m writing on VDARE.com two years ago. Quote:

In the year or so prior to presidential elections in 2004, 2008, and 2012, GOP hopefuls would drop by at National Review to share their thoughts with us. The hopeful would meet with a dozen or so editors and contributors in the magazine’s library.

I think it was always the case that I was the only person in the room ever to ask a candidate about immigration policy. As I did so, the other staffers present would squirm and examine their fingernails. I recall thinking, time and again: "What’s the matter with you guys? It’s just a policy." (The hopefuls were invariably clueless.)

Ah, the melancholy of being right too soon! We're like those "premature antifascists" of the 1930s, who opposed Hitler and Mussolini before it was respectable to. Prophets without honor.

The general level of ignorance is still deep, though, even among the licensed commentariat. Let me give you an example: columnist and Fox News talking head Charles Krauthammer.

Yeah, yeah; I can hear your eyes rolling already: cucky neocon Israel-first GOP establishment front man. Scanning back through my archived columns, my own very occasional references to Krauthammer have been in that general area, too.

Recently, though, I've been warming to the guy. In his appearances on Tucker Carlson’s show, he has said mostly sensible things.

Whether this is a cynical trimming of sails or honest enlightenment, I can’t say, not having paid close enough attention to Krauthammer the previous twenty years. It’s a change of direction, regardless, and I’m disposed to be charitable. We are promised that more joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance.

Here was Dr. Krauthammer speaking on Fox Wednesday this week, about the President’s proposed reforms of immigration law.

The pushback is going to come from the Chamber of Commerce–who I think you could appease by having a guest-worker program as Reagan did …[Krauthammer: Trump Immigration Reforms ‘A No-Brainer’ — Current Immigration System ‘Does Not Make Sense’, by Ian Hanchett, Breitbart, Aug 2, 2017]

I'LL TRY TO KEEP CALM HERE!!! — though the frustration level is exceeding high.

Let me quote, in as level a voice as I can maintain, from a piece I wrote here on VDARE.com three years ago. The editors of the New York Post had given it as their solemn, considered opinion that "America is desperately in need of a guest-worker program."[ NY City Council speaker’s immigration misstep, New York Post, October 4, 2014]

They didn’t print my Letter To The Editor. Always loth to let good copy go to waste, I reproduced it here, with some scathing remarks about the lazy ignorance of New York Post editorialists:

I assume that by "guest-worker program" you mean a category of U.S. visas allowing foreigners to work in the U.S.A. without permanent settlement rights.

Our country already has many such visa categories. Under the heading "Temporary (Nonimmigrant) Worker" the website of the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service lists 21 guest-worker visa categories: CW-1, E-1, E-2 (two types), E-3, H-1B, H-1C, H-2A, H-2B, H-3, I, L-1A, L-1B, O-1, P-1A, P-1B, P-2, P-3, Q, R-1, TN. These categories encompass all kinds of workers, from seasonal agricultural laborers to concert pianists.

Why does the Post think we are "desperately in need of a guest-worker program" when we already have 21 such programs?

Suffice it to say, with utter certainty, the number of our guest-worker programs is greater than zero.

The fact that the United States has a whole thick sheaf of guest-worker programs is not a secret. Two years ago Michelle Malkin and John Miano wrote a book, Sold Out, dissecting the whole rotten beast.

Yet Charles Krauthammer, a very intelligent man, never heard of those programs: not the E-3 visa nor the O-1, not the P-1A nor the H-1B, none of them. Like the New York Post editorialists, he thinks it is bright and spiffy–original, perhaps daring–to propose the U.S.A. having a guest-worker program … WHEN WE ALREADY HAVE A WHOLE BULGING FILE CABINET OF THE DARN THINGS AND HAVE HAD FOR DECADES. I came to the U.S.A. in 1985 on a guest-worker visa. HEL-LO?

Sentimentality? Dostoyevsky described one of his characters as "evil and sentimental." I wouldn’t myself say that sentimentality is always evil, but that’s the way to bet.

It’s sure the way to bet when listening to immigration talk. You know what I’m referring to: huddled masses, wretched refuse, my grandpa landed with just a hundred dollars in his pocket. Famine ships, pogroms, Ellis Island … you know all the heartstring-pullers that get dragged out in service of antiwhite capitalism.

Quote from Dr. Johnson, in "The Vanity of Human Wishes,"

How Nations sink, by darling Schemes oppress'd,

When Vengeance listens to the Fool’s Request.

How Nations sink, by Racketeers oppress'd,

When sentimental Tales the public Sphere infest.

All that sentimentality is in service of a poisonous nation-killing scam. Hence the pleasure–the ecstatic, joyful pleasure–of watching Stephen Miller make CNN propagandist Jim Acosta bend over and squeal like a pig

Immigration policy is just policy, like interstate highway management or farm price supports. It should be arranged to the advantage of the American people, coldly and realistically, not in compliance with myths and poems.

If you, my listeners, can get the Constitution changed and elect me President, I promise that on Day One I will order the dynamiting of Ellis Island.

Deal?

>

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com:FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.