11/20/2011
Mass immigration has become the decisive issue that distinguishes Right from Left. Progressive insiders have clearly decided that workers’ rights, wage levels, women’s liberation, the environment, unemployment, and all their other putative causes must be sacrificed to the paramount cause: the dispossession of the historic American nation. That’s why the 99 Percent Declaration, supposedly the foundation document of the “Occupy” movement, calls in its Point 11 for
“Immediate passage of the Dream Act and comprehensive immigration and border security reform including offering visas, lawful permanent resident status and citizenship to the world’s brightest People to stay and work in our industries and schools after they obtain their education and training in the United States”. [VDARE.com links added].
— all policies that, paradoxically, would enrich the “one percent” and immiserate the “99 Percent” that the movement purports to represent.
In a significant development, the left-libertarian Reason magazine has now joined its progressive friends, declaring that its ostensible libertarian goal of limiting government power is secondary to making sure that policy-driven demographic transformation continues — whatever the cost,
Indian immigrant Shikha Dalmia (email her) makes these priorities clear with her distinctly unReasonably titled column, Alabama’s War on Immigrants (November 15, 2011).
Dalmia presents a hysterical picture: she says the state of Alabama has launched an “all-out jihad” designed to “strike terror” in Hispanic communities. The “draconian” Alabama illegal immigration law is a product of “blatant inhumanity,” a product of a “restrictionist fury” sweeping across Middle America.
Of course, somehow, amidst the thunder of the reconstituted panzers rolling along the Auburn plains in service to the war effort, illegals are also self-righteously parading in front of Alabama police, chanting “Undocumented, unafraid!”, to the applause of the Mainstream Media and the studied inaction of the Obama Justice Department. They are also being supported by Democratic state representative Alvin Holmes, who last appeared in Reason magazine for opposing craft beers because “Yo, what’s wrong with the beer we got? It drink pretty good.” Apparently, Reason believes this eloquent statesman is now a hero of limited government, channeling the spirit of Bastiat in the midst of Alabama’s Totaler Krieg.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Alabama is being sued by the government of Mexico and ten other Latin American countries, who recognize that enforcing America’s immigration laws could jeopardize their efforts to dump their lumpenproletariat on the U.S. taxpayer.
And of course the “American” federal government is also acting predictably. Eric “My People” Holder, presumably another of Reason’s free market heroes, found time from shipping weapons to Mexican drug cartels to kill Border Patrol Agents to sue the state of Alabama for daring to enforce the law.
(Needless to say, Vermont’s overt declaration that it is now a sanctuary state has drawn only benign indifference from the Feds.)
In fact, far from being the vanguard of the “restrictionist fury,” Alabama is one of a number of U.S. states fighting a desperate rearguard action against a ruling class committed to “electing a new people”.
While the Obama Administration makes false claims about deporting “record numbers” of illegals, its end run around Congress continues, implementing an Administrative Amnesty to legalize as many undocumented Democrats illegal aliens as possible.
The Obama Administration has also sent agents down to Alabama to confer with its allies among various “community organizers,” various racial collectivist groups (the good kind — non-white), and illegals who are living with so much fear they give their names to national MSM reporters.
The director of Latinas Unidas de Alabama — no doubt a group primarily focused on the corporate tax rate — squealed delightedly, “I never thought I’d be hanging out with the FBI and Department of Justice so much, but they’re on our side.”
So they are, and so is Shikha Dalmia. The question: why?
Dalmia argues: “A civilized society doesn’t forever tolerate such blatant inhumanity. Ultimately, some triggering event forces it to confront its turpitudes.”
Thus she claims that, because conservatives did not champion the sacred cause of Civil Rights, they were unable to credibly argue against the massive expansion of government power that resulted. And, even though libertarians should technically oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and racial preferences, they can’t talk about them today because conservatives opposed them for the wrong reasons fifty years ago (she says — in fact most Republicans did support Civil Rights legislation):
“The Civil Rights era also inaugurated affirmative action programs giving less qualified blacks a leg up. This was unfair, but a nation experiencing a massive guilt attack couldn’t make such fine moral distinctions. And conservatives, who’d lost their credibility by being on the wrong side of history, couldn’t convince it otherwise.
“Something of this sort is likely to repeat itself. Restrictionists can’t forever suspend America’s innate sense of justice and equality. Ultimately, the country will have to take responsibility for the havoc their agenda has wreaked on the Hispanic community — especially since Hispanics will comprise a third of the population by 2050. It’ll be impossible to reject their demands for government reparations and programs.”
Noted that Dalmia concedes that affirmative action helps “less qualified blacks.” While this is true, saying this makes her a racist and we shouldn’t listen to racists. But we’ll pretend a non-racist made this argument — and actually analyze it.
What is immediately striking is how Dalmia takes it as a given that actual Americans should have no say in the kind of country that their children will have to endure. Of course, Americans polled in 1965 or even today would not voluntarily a choose to throw away the present United States of America in exchange for the overpopulated, bankrupt, Third World country it is set to become by 2050. Indeed, the proponents of the nation-breaking 1965 Immigration Act explicitly denied that this was their intent.
Nonetheless, especially for a reporter in mourning over “restrictionist fury” that is sweeping all before it, it’s noteworthy that Dalmia simply assumes that there will be no reversal of mass immigration. The opinion of the American people on this existential issue simply will not matter.
Indeed, for Dalmia the fact that Americans are being allowed to express an opinion on these issues at all is part of the problem.
Not only will Americans not be allowed to keep their country, but the social pathologies of the invaders will become their fault — and their responsibility. Even though illegals voluntarily came to the country, by definition breaking the law as their first act on American soil, Americans actually owe them. Just as Affirmative Action quotas designed for the descendents of slaves now benefits the daughters of a President of the United States whose father was not even an immigrant, so anchor babies will have more advantages in obtaining jobs and education that any Son or Daughter of the American Revolution.
And Dalmia is saying this is a good thing. In fact, it is because contemporary Americans have not kept out illegals that their descendants, the Americans of 2050, will all just have to accept an ever-growing hostile population within their ranks that will forever hold a grudge for something a few states allegedly did decades before.
Dalmia asserts that the consequences of the Alabama law will create “broken families” and poverty. Of course, illegals could keep their families intact by not breaking the law and coming here. Indeed, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, current policy has accomplished the amazing feat of creating another minority group that is both larger and has a higher childhood poverty rate than blacks. As patriotic immigration reformers have been arguing for years, mass immigration is indeed leading to the creation of permanent poverty and an ever-greater number of dependents.
Despite her libertarian rhetoric, Dalmia obviously knows little about economics. This she writes: “even George Borjas, the Harvard economist much loved by restrictionists because he opposes more open immigration policies, grudgingly admits [illegal immigration] raises an average American’s wealth by about 1 percent.” (Link, to a secondary source, in original). In fact, Borjas doesn’t talk about “wealth” at all — for his actual views on immigration’s derisory contribution, see here.)
But as a libertarian ideologue, Dalmia would no doubt claim that the solution to immigrant failure is an even more liberalized labor market. However, the problem is that in the presumably limited government paradise of California, which has not enacted Alabama-type legislation, the unemployment rate is higher than in Alabama, Hispanic unemployment even surpasses 20% in some California cities, the government is going bankrupt, and Americans are fleeing the state.
Dalmia compares the immigration restriction movement in the South to slavery. But she has it exactly backwards. The slave owners of the Antebellum South would have been nodding along to Dalmia’s economic boilerplate about so-called “free trade” and globalization, while the Yankees wanted protective tariffs and socially mobile labor. The “Slave Power” today is made up of corporate interests like Tyson Chicken and Onion Emperors that use illegal cheap labor and gleefully dump the externalities on the taxpayer. Just like the slaveowners of yesteryear, they hide their greed with proclamations of Christian charity. Just as in days past, it is the patriotic working and middle classes will suffer in the oncoming conflagration.
The solution, in Dalmia’s eyes: complete surrender. If we have completely open borders, Hispanics will have no reason to want revenge on Americans for living here.
The problem with this theory: immigration is not the most important issue to Hispanics. The most important issues are education, jobs, and health care. Even if a Republican presidential candidate, Hispanic voters would want more government programs and more welfare — because they are poor, uneducated and doomed to be unsuccessful in a First World society.
That’s why, despite increasingly embarrassing pandering on the part of Republicans, Latinos vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats.
If Dalmia really wants to win over Latinos, she needs to forget about immigration and start defending Obamacare.
There is no necessary link between open borders and libertarianism. Even the most doctrinaire Open Borders libertarian is aware that the policy only makes sense if there is no welfare state, no racial collectivism and systematic favoritism as government policy, and no way for the employers of “undocumented workers” to dump the costs on taxpayers.
Not only does Dalmia ignore the existence and increasing growth of government patronage for privileged groups, she defends it. In fact, she concedes the entire game to immigration restrictionists. Mass immigration will create an ever-increasing group that is mired in poverty, voting for socialism, calling for more government programs and race-based privileges, and hostile to the individualist, free market policies Reason claims to care about (“It’ll be impossible to reject their demands for government reparations and programs.”)
But she thinks these are reasons to support immigration — because, ultimately, it is more important be in lockstep, and to be seen in lockstep, with the progressive agenda of demographic transformation.
Dalmia’s unmistakable assumption: the America that existed before America’s post-1965 mass immigration disaster — the historic American nation — was irredeemably evil because it didn’t have enough people that looked like her.
To paraphrase Dalmia, the question is what do libertarians hate more: big government — or the historic American nation?
If it is the former, they need to adopt the cause of patriotic immigration reform.
And if it is the latter, libertarians should stop pretending to care about liberty and be more forthright about supporting their leftist allies in the governments of Latin America and in the Minority Occupation Government of the United States.
James Kirkpatrick travels around the United States looking for a waiter who can speak English and a libertarian who believes in America.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.
