By Paul Nachman
11/04/2011
In late September, VDARE heralded the publication of John Fonte’s Sovereignty Or Submission
John O’sullivan’s foreword
More recently, Kathryn Lopez of National Review Online published an interview with Fonte that includes this exchange:
LOPEZ: Tell me a little about the moral case for patriotic assimilation. How can that be helpful to the public-policy debate about immigration? For pastors working with immigrants, many of them undocumented, as they say?
FONTE: As I said earlier, I’m talking mostly about American constitutional morality. Illegal immigrants have come here against the consent of the American people (democratic consent is expressed by the American people as a whole through our body politic, not by individual outlaw employers who want cheap labor). The clergy who are aiding and abetting illegal immigration are showing open contempt for a core concept of our constitutional morality: government by consent of the governed.
Also, in terms of religious morality, these pastors, by supporting a vast increase in cheap labor, are undermining the economic status of our poorest and most vulnerable American citizens, many of them, of course, African-American and Latino. In this regard, Big Religion (clerical elites rather than most parishioners) has joined forces with Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Media. In addition, all of them support multiculturalism, bilingualism, and dual citizenship, which erect barriers to the patriotic assimilation of immigrants. So, I’m not impressed by the alleged “compassion” of any of these elites.
Two comments:
1. One sentence of Fonte’s, "The clergy who are aiding and abetting illegal immigration are showing open contempt for a core concept of our constitutional morality: government by consent of the governed," belongs in the quotations toolkit of everyone who writes letters to the editor, for use in responding to the typical whimpering stories about illegal aliens' cruelly downtrodden existences.
2. The gulf between Big Religion, Big Business, and Big Labor on the one hand and the American people on the other has been discussed in detail by the Center for Immigration Studies, based upon an online survey conducted for the Center by Zogby that queried a ~42,000-person sample representative of the adult population of the United States. Those resultes are reported in Religious Leaders vs. Members: An Examination of Contrasting Views on Immigration [250-kB PDF] and Business and Labor on Immigration: Contrasting Views of Leaders vs. Rank and File [320-kB PDF].
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