02/05/2010
Vdare.com joins with our friend The Kvetcher in congratulating Stephen Steinlight on his recent Op-Ed in The Jewish Week. As The Kvetcher points out this is theFirst Steinlight Op-Ed printed in mainstream Jewish periodical since HIAS Smear Email Campaign(In other words, this repression attempt, back last spring, was quite effective.)
Steinlight’s Straight Talk About Jews And Immigration February 2 2010 was occasioned by the CIS/Zogby poll Religious Leaders vs. Members: An Examination of Contrasting Views on Immigration
Steinlight argues this poll
reveals an historic shift in American-Jewish opinion on immigration, marking the end of consensus on what seemed an iconic allegiance, absolute and immutable. The ascending trend is support for immigration law enforcement, not illegal immigration. Nostalgia for a mythologized past is being superseded by concern about America’s future.Complaining about the attempts by the Jewish Establishment and community media to obscure the more striking results
60 percent oppose immigration by foreign workers who take jobs from Americans; 60 percent believe government has never made a serious effort to enforce immigration law… on “attrition” (utilizing tighter border controls and stricter immigration law enforcement to encourage self-deportation by illegal aliens): 80 percent endorse it.he asserts
It is absurd to argue that the immigration policy good for our grandparents and parents — who migrated to a fundamentally different America, an industrial colossus needing countless unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers and with a largely empty continent to fill — still makes sense in a post-industrial knowledge-based economy with a modern welfare state…He concludes:Contemporary low-skill immigration (especially illegal immigrants, a large majority of whom don’t have high school diplomas and 30 percent haven’t finished ninth grade) threatens to re-barbarize American capitalism, destroy the social safety net, and create a permanent underclass. Immigration is a zero-sum game in some respects, and low-skill immigration has brutal consequences for the most vulnerable Americans.
… it’s likely a growing majority of American Jews opposes illegal immigration because a confident American identity makes them empathize with fellow Americans first, not immigrants. Jews will forever passionately oppose xenophobia, but American identity has surmounted the immigrant past.For the sake of America, we must all hope this is true — despite contrary evidence.
One thing is unquestionably true. Stephen Steinlight, The Kvetcher and a small band of others like Norm Matloff and Larry Auster, have chosen a Patriotic path which has been arduous and lonely. VDARE.com salutes them.
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