By Paul Nachman
02/13/2015
The late Lawrence Auster had a list of “Usual Suspects,” meaning those who regularly wrote about the existential threat of Islam to Western civilization yet failed to hint at even the obvious first step in a solution: Ending immigration by Muslims into the countries of the West.In August, 2009, Auster reviewed his perpetual frustration with the Suspects, especially Mark Steyn, in Steyn Speaks! … About Muslim Immigration. In 2008, he’d ruminated about something on-point that Daniel Pipes had written about Muslims and immigration back in 2002 — and apparently never again (A Note On Pipes).
Unfortunately, Lawrence Auster left the world in March, 2013, so we can’t know what he would have thought of a Pipes article from late last year, Sweden to Opt for Suicide by Immigration? [National Review Online, December 30, 2014].
But the very title of Pipes’s article brings to mind Auster’s 1990 magnum opus on immigration, The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, which Peter Brimelow, writing in Alien Nation, termed "perhaps the most remarkable literary product of the Restrictionist underground, a work which I think will one day be seen as a political pamphlet to rank with Tom Paine’s Common Sense."
(Of course, Pipes might not have provided the title for his piece as it appeared at National Review Online, but at Pipes’s own website, the piece has a similar title: Did Swedes Just Decide for National Suicide?)
The second paragraph from Pipes’s article lays out his case:
[T]he realities of immigration are apparent for all to see: welfare dependency, violent bigotry against Christians and Jews, and a wide range of social pathologies from unemployment to politically motivated rape. Accordingly, ever-increasing numbers of Swedes find themselves — despite known hazards — opting out of the consensus and worrying about their country’s cultural suicide.In the rest of his brief article, Pipes doesn’t explicitly call for cutting immigration — so Auster might still be frustrated by him — but he does skate pretty close to doing so.
So let’s call that a welcome case of a big-shot seeing immigration — at least Muslim immigration — clearly. Progress!
There’s more. Robert W. Merry is a prominent Washington author/journalist and political editor of The National Interest, where last fall his essay Barack Obama’s Assault on America [November 22, 2014] included:
I present these musing under the rubric, “Requiem for the American Republic.” I do so with a profound sadness at the destruction wreaked upon our civic system through the decades-long phenomenon of uncontrolled immigration. In presenting his new policy of granting illegal immigrants legal status through executive action, President Obama said he did so in part because of “who we are as Americans.” Who we are is a nation of laws. Our government has ignored the law for a generation or more in allowing law-breaking immigrants to enter the country. Now the president doubles down on that assault on American law by promulgating an unconstitutional executive order.Note that Merry’s concern is at the largest scale, for our “civic system.” I.e., it’s not just a matter of whether (or not) tolerating illegal aliens gains us access to cheap lettuce.
Next is Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, mentioned nowadays as a possibly plausible aspirant for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Jindal, despite being the son of immigrants from India, is generally dumb as a stump on immigration itself. (For evidence, see his National Review Online essay Botching Immigration Again, July 9, 2013.)
Nevertheless, immigration- and Islam-realist Andrew McCarthy, also writing at National Review Online [What Bobby Jindal Gets about Islam — and Most People Still Don’t, January 24, 2015] called attention to an important speech Jindal recently gave in London. Said McCarthy:
With mere anarchy loosed upon the world, it would be easy to miss the fact that, in England this week, Bobby Jindal gave as important and compelling a speech as has been delivered in years about America — our leadership role on the world stage, our preservation as a beacon of liberty.Here’s the section of Jindal’s speech, presented at the Henry Jackson Society on Monday, January 19, that will likely be of most interest to immigration-patriots:
Historians rightly referred to America as the great melting pot…and it was.The lines I’ve bolded should be enough to freak out most of America’s political class, for whom the idea of assimilation has been passe, or worse, [PDF] going back at least a generation.But over time, a different philosophy has crept in, and that philosophy now dominates the thinking of the American Left, and perhaps even the mainstream of thinking in Europe.
This philosophy holds the notion that assimilation is not necessary or even preferable. But it really goes further than that.
This philosophy holds the view that it is wrong to expect assimilation, that assimilation is colonialist, assimilation is backward, and assimilation is in fact evidence of cultural bigotry and insensitivity.
They think it is wrong to expect that people who chose to immigrate to your country should be expected to endorse and abide by your laws.
They think it is unenlightened, discriminatory, and even racist to expect immigrants to endorse and assimilate into the culture in their new country.
This is complete rubbish.
[Emphasis added]
If Jindal is willing to utter such blunt truths about assimilation, perhaps he’s educable about immigration more generally. There’s a promising recent sign on this in Jindal: Congress Should ‘Absolutely’ Defund Obama’s Immigration Order by Andrew Johnson [National Review Online, December 5, 2014.]
Last but not least, Jay Cost, a regular at The Weekly Standard, has a current article at The Federalist (February 11, 2015), The Republican Party Is Not Your Friend, with this opening:
I had a bad dream the other night that I still cannot get out of my head. It’s January 20, 2017. Inauguration Day. The Republican candidate for president has triumphed over Hillary Clinton, ushering in the largest Republican majority since 1929. The inaugural balls are finished, the parties over.So we have another big-shot demonstrating that he’s caught on to the Central Immigration Truth: It’s the legal immigration (and guestworkers), stupid!The new president retires to the Oval Office, and sits down with the top leaders of Congress to ask: “Okay. We have the largest majority we’re ever going to see again. What do we do with it?”
“Let’s accelerate depreciation!” somebody says.
“Let’s repeal the inheritance tax!” another chimes in.
The new president, nodding solemnly, responds, “Okay, okay. These are good. But what we really need to do is quadruple our guest-worker visas.”
Nightmarish? Yes. Fanciful? Maybe a little (bad dreams are like that), but it still derives from a stark truth: the Republican Party, while far preferable to the unchecked liberalism of the Democrats, is not all that conservative.
Besides showing heartening awareness on The National Question, Cost’s article is a very interesting brief review of how the Republican Party has systematically evolved since its formation in 1854.
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