Jeb Bush is trying to turn on a ten-centavos coin. Well, let’s say he’s turning on a dime.
Last week, he was doing what he’s been doing for many years — praising imported diversity, lauding migrants’ Latino culture, and happily chatting to voters in Spanish.
But on Monday, he suddenly announced that he likes Americans’ evolved common culture and wants a common language, presumably English.
Blame Donald Trump for the campaign-trail conversion — GOP voters are showing their preference for a pro-American alternative to the Bush family’s long-standing patronage of incoming Hispanic migrants and their pro-government culture.
“We should not have a multicultural society,” Bush said during an impromptu conversation in Iowa with a young woman who helps settle government-funded refugees and migrants from Burma, Congo, and Latin America settle in the American state.
The way to aid assimilation, Bush said, is better education and the ability to speak English.
“English. Being able to speak English, a common language is important. We need to get back to that,” he said.
Score another win for Trump, who has relentlessly needled Bush’s fondness for Spanish speeches and Latino culture.
Bush’s sudden embrace of a common culture and language is a sharp break from his family’s history over the last several decades.
His brother, George W. Bush, supported a 2007 amnesty bill that would have further weakened America’s culture by effectively opening the borders for at least one year.
Jeb Bush supported President Barack Obama’s 2013 immigration bill, which would have boosted immigration up to 33 million people in one decade. If it had not been stopped by the GOP’s base and by House Speaker John Boehner, it would have transformed the country into a low-wage marketplace by importing three migrants for every four American 18-year-olds.
The Obama bill — which was partly drafted by GOP 2016 candidate Sen. Marco Rubio — would also have allowed the president to import huge blocs of foreign migrants via a revamped refugee law.
Obama has long made it clear he wishes to drown Americans’ anti-government culture in a wave of new government-dependent, unassimilated migrants.
Since 2011, for example, he’s quietly allowed at least 240,000 low-skill migrants from Central Americans to settle in America’s towns and cities. He has also imported more than 250,000 Muslims each year. His November 2014 effort to amnesty 5 million illegal migrants was more dramatic, but has been blocked by Texas courts.
Unsurprisingly, immigration-boosting bills are very unpopular with voters — and are very strongly supported by Jeb’s business allies. That’s because Wall Street’s investors see their stock prices rise amid the annual flood of cheap labor and the additional spending allowed by taxpayer aid to poor migrants.
Despite Bush’s clumsy embrace of his fellow Americans’ own culture, the old Bush-style pro-migrant attitude revealed itself when Jeb quickly promised federal funding for settling foreign migrants in America.
The federal government now imports 70,000 refugees per year, from such culturally alien places as Burma, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and the Congo. Some of the Burmese and Congo migrants are now being settled in Iowa.
Obama wants to push that inflow up to 100,000 refugees per year.
Federal contractors settle the migrants in local communities, leaving the locals to pay for the huge long-term financial and social costs of educating and aiding multiple generations of migrants from failed, pre-modern cultures. The problem is often worsened by many migrants’ inability or refusal to assimilate into American’s free-wheeling, individualistic, sink-or-swim culture.
“The federal government allows refugees in,” Bush told the young woman. “They have to settle in their [unassimilated] community, and they cost more on a short-term basis for sure, [and the cost] should be borne by the federal government,” he said.
Bush’s comment — that migrants “cost more on a short-term basis” — reflects his statistically weak claim that most migrants will reach average levels of productivity amid the rapid growth of high-tech automation.
Bush’s impromptu and heartfelt support for more refugees, however, clashes with his new campaign-trail support for a common culture.
“We’re creeping towards multiculturalism, and that’s the wrong approach,,” Bush said in front of watching TV cameras. “When you create pockets of isolation, and in some cases, the assimilation process has been retarded because it has slowed down. It is wrong. It limits people’s aspirations,” said Bush.
But Bush’s real sympathies were revealed when the woman said she’s also settling Latino “refugees.”
That’s when Bush corrected her, unsmiling, saying “Not refugees among Latinos.”
Bush’s wife was born in Mexico, and she is the emotional source of Bush’s emotional advocacy for additional mass migration of Latinos into Americans culture. Migrants who cross illegally into the U.S, Bush said in April 2014, are performing an “act of love” for their foreign families in their homeland.
His emotional support for foreign migrants is very unpopular among Americans who prefer presidents that admire acts of love for actual Americans.
Through the conversation with the Iowa advocate, three Iowa voters stared stone-faced at Bush. Maybe Trump’s advance team can recruit them to sit on his bleachers during his next appearance in Iowa.