There is much heated discussion and angry invective flying over presidential candidate Donald Trump’s immigration plan, including some vicious crossfires between segments of the Republican political coalition.
Meanwhile, normal people hear Trump’s ideas and think: If immigration policy is a law, then violating it is a crime. Why are we refusing to enforce it, and instead rewarding the criminals?
Writing at the Washington Examiner, Byron York counters all the howling about how Trump’s ideas are supposedly outrages that put him beyond the orbit of Pluto in our political solar system by noting that most of what he’s suggesting is actually quite consistent with what a majority of American voters have been telling pollsters for a long time. In fact, York cites a research paper suggesting a quarter of the public is even tougher than Trump on issues such as closing the border entirely and beginning mass deportation proceedings. A slim, but clear, majority is on more or less the same page as Trump.
Of course, the political class considers all of these ideas non-starters, and does not even pretend to care what the American people want. As the authors of the study cited by York put it, “Many citizens support policies that seem to fall outside the range of policy options considered in elite discourse.”
That’s why discussion over the immigration issue has been so heated ever since Trump weighed in, at roughly the same time as the long-standing mainstream media embargo against reporting illegal alien crime shattered under the pressure of a few especially horrific cases. The current generation of American voters hasn’t even been allowed to discuss the immigration issue before now. We have been brusquely informed that the Ruling Class consensus is set in stone, the facts on the ground have been changed forever by decades of deliberate negligence on the border, and everything practical that could be done to address the situation is beyond the pale.
We have been told, in short, that enforcing this particular set of laws is impossible, so we should just lie back and accept the new society, economy, and politics our rulers have created for us… engineered to benefit them at our expense, in everything from cheap labor to reliable imported voting blocs for Big Government. Until Trump came along, the hot political “action” on the immigration issue consisted of making it illegal to refer to illegal aliens as illegal, because the Left devoutly believes liberty and law can only be effectively subdued by making it impossible for the masses to think and speak clearly.
Even the Republican Party – which, unlike the Democrats, still occasionally pays lip service to the rule of law and responsibilities of citizenship – generally feels it necessary to qualify everything they say about immigration with platitudes, bromides, and pandering appeals to the open-borders constituency. They’re terrified of making themselves unappealing to legal Hispanic citizens and voters, which goes to show you where the real “racism” in the immigration debate is coming from. We are fairly explicitly told that enforcing immigration law and securing our voters is impossible – we can’t even talk about it – because a racial voting bloc demands the nullification of those laws.
They don’t even have to do the hard work of organizing, winning elections, and using the machinery of our representative republic to change the law. That would be refreshing, wouldn’t it? An honest discussion of why our $3.5 trillion mega-government, which thinks nothing of wasting billions on luxuries for the political class, and losing billions more to waste and fraud, cannot ever secure the southern border would be illuminating. Instead, we get endless hollow promises that the Ruling Class will get around to it someday, maybe after we bribe them with a few million more reliable left-wing voters. Cut the baloney, tell us straight-up that the border will never be secured, and introduce legislation to revise our citizenship laws accordingly.
That will never happen, because the open-borders crowd is stuffed with liars and cowards. They get what they want through deceit, trickery, and lawlessness. They’re screaming like wounded animals now that people are actually discussing concrete measures that really would resolve the illegal-immigration problem, instead of rewarding scofflaws and making it worse. For the first time in a generation, amnesty shills have to confront proposals for serious enforcement. They’re trying the usual tactic of sneering that it’s all “unthinkable,” but it’s not working.
This is not an endorsement of Trump’s entire package of proposals. Some of those ideas would indeed be tricky to implement, especially on topics such as “birthright citizenship,” where the Supreme Court would inevitably come into play… and nobody should have any illusions about where a Court willing to rewrite ObamaCare on the fly multiple times to keep it alive would come down.
But if we don’t at least put these proposals on the table and discuss them seriously, nothing will ever change. Republicans too often conclude that only political battles with a high probability of immediate success are worth fighting. They’ve learned nothing from watching liberals doggedly advance their causes over the years, accepting no defeat as final, making their demands over and over again until, one day, they were able to shift the political and cultural center of gravity enough to get what they wanted. Too many Republicans retire from the field at first blood, apologize for ever joining battle in the first place, and then wonder why they never seem to win any wars.
Why should children be cynically exploited as hammers to smash American citizenship law, creating solid incentives for people to illegally cross the border and have kids as quickly as possible, in an economy that is having a great deal of trouble providing resources and opportunity for the native-born?
Why should we romanticize the children of immigration scofflaws as “dreamers,” while the children of other lawbreakers are told to suck it up while their parents are punished? Why is anyone surprised that people looking to take advantage of America’s twisted immigration system study it carefully and take the actions necessary to exploit it, ignoring the billowing cloud of lies our politicians blow into the faces of the American electorate? If you want to know how things really work on the border, don’t waste your time asking the President of the United States – just look at what the new illegal arrivals are doing, and why.
As radio host Mark Levin put it during a speech at the Reagan Library to promote his new book Plunder and Deceit, “When is the last time – when is the first time – our kids were discussed when we discussed immigration? How can it be that the illegal immigrant kids are ‘dreamers?’ Nobody talks about our kids as ‘dreamers.'”
Talking this way is not “nativism” or “xenophobia.” American politicians have a duty to the American people. Putting America’s interests first is not one policy position among many acceptable alternatives – it’s their damn job, every last one of them, from every party and faction. Immigration policy must serve American interests, not those of Mexico, Guatemala, or Canada for that matter.
That means we control who enters the country, screen them very carefully, take only the best applicants with the skills we need, and admit them in whatever numbers our society and economy can most comfortably absorb. In the service of that agenda, it is logically necessary to both secure the border, prosecute those who inevitably violate it, and deal swiftly to expel those who violate our laws. The immigration discussion should begin from no other ground. Instead, it’s a wonder if it comes anywhere close to ending there.
And this isn’t just a one-time crisis – it’s a pattern of lawlessness, greed, and dereliction of duty by our Ruling Class that stretches back decades into the past, and will extend decades into the future, unless we stop it… or America degenerates into a place nobody wants to migrate to any more. To extend Mark Levin’s point further, those “dreamers” will stop being romanticized the instant they cease to be politically useful to the Ruling Class, which means right about the time they graduate from college.
The cruelest irony of all is that amnestied young people will emerge from the American educational system just in time to be told that the best jobs are being handed off to highly skilled immigrants with work visas, imported from places where education isn’t run by the American Democrat Party and its union allies, because American tech magnates can’t find enough skilled domestic labor at the right price.
It’s all a scam, a con job that’s been rolling along for years in defiance of the express will of the American people, and it has to stop before the damage becomes irreversible. Also, we must remember that tyranny isn’t just about having too many laws; it’s also about having laws that aren’t enforced. It’s about power without responsibility. It is clear that our rulers feel absolutely no sense of responsibility to the American people as a whole. Their sense of “duty” is entirely transactional – they trade favors for votes and money from powerful interests and organized constituencies. They feel not even a vestigial sense of duty to anyone who isn’t part of their power base – in fact, it’s all they can do to get through an election without insulting them.
Pick Trump’s immigration proposals apart all you like – I highly encourage it, and find the heated nature of the discussion unsurprising, because honest discussion has been ruthlessly suppressed for so long. But stop telling us that everything is unrealistic except the status quo nobody voted for. Stop telling us the country is running on automatic pilot in a crash dive, its fate beyond the control of lawful citizens both native-born and legally immigrated, and we can only remain helplessly strapped into our seats until the rapidly-approaching moment of impact. Stop telling us what is unthinkable, and start thinking.
And tell me: why is Donald Trump – this reality-TV clown, this preposterous distraction, this bomb-throwing billionaire egotist – the only candidate willing to unambiguously state that the first duty of American politicians is to American citizens? Would those who disagree kindly provide us with a list of their priorities, showing us exactly where they think American citizens fall?
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