Let’s start with some of Frum’s immigration-critical statements which Ilana quotes:

What is immigration for? What are we trying to accomplish?

A century ago, the answer seemed obvious. Factories and mines clamored for workers as an underpopulated continent beckoned settlers.

America in the 21st century, however, does not suffer from a generalized labor shortage.

These observations are unobjectionable. The problem with Frum’s analysis, however, is that it only addresses the inadequacy of the self-interested reasons that America may have for importing over a million non-European immigrants a year. It misses the primary reason for our immigration policy, which is not self-interest, but our need to practice liberal goodness: we are demonstrating our openness to all the peoples of the world, and in particular we are demonstrating that we do not discriminate against anyone but admit immigrants regardless of how different they are from us. Such openness and such non-discrimination are seen today, by both liberals and “conservatives,” as the very essence of America.

A further compelling reason for immigration is that we are validating and empowering people’s desires: people from all over the world want to come to America, and so we let them. Not to do so would be selfish, exclusionary, racist, and un-American. For an example of this argument, when Sarah Palin was asked by the Hispanic TV station Univision during the 2008 campaign if she supported “a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants,” she replied:

I do because I understand why people would want to be in America. To seek the safety and prosperity, the opportunities, the health that is here.

Her argument came down to saying that since people want to be in America, we must help them fulfil that desire, no matter how they come here, legally or not.

Since the belief in non-discrimination, openness, and helping people fulfil their desires is what actually drives our immigration policy, any effort to reduce legal immigration would have to confront the inevitable charge that immigration reduction is exclusionary, racist, and un-American. Is David Frum prepared to confront that charge? Hardly. For the last 19 years, he himself has made a career of calling immigration restrictionists racists and seeking to banish them from mainstream debate. In a letter to me in the mid 1990s, he argued that America is morally obligated to have wide open immigration for all the peoples of the world because of our historic discrimination against blacks. Does Frum now say that we are not so obligated? Is Frum–who on the cover of Newsweek in 2009 demonized the mainstream, race-blind, pro-immigration conservative Rush Limbaugh as a dangerous bigot who should “shut up”–equipped to stand against the onslaught of politically correct outrage that would be triggered by any serious attempt to reduce legal immigration?

There is absolutely no sign that this is the case. Frum is playing on the barest surface of the issue. His “questions” about immigration, which Ilana applauds, are not to be taken seriously, because, in his handling of them, they can go nowhere. A man who jacks up anti-conservative Political Correctness to a new level, as Frum did in his Limbaugh article, is the last person in the world who is equipped to take a stand for the supremely un-PC issue of immigration reduction and stick with it.

See more of my commentary on Frum here.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

One thing we do know: American Immigration destroyed those ideas. Whereas the original settlers were British, who created a republic, the new arrivals were Western European Socialists. Communism was developing in Germany and France, 1848-49 they revolted across Europe. Losing, they were banished to the US. They and their ideas quickly moved into the power positions of the US and Washington. President Lincoln and Congress had Communists on staff, civilian and military. One of the goals of the war against the south was to destroy the upper and middle class of the south to create a ‘worker’s dictatoriate’ The south’s history since then and a look at the modern USA will tell you that this is not the republic that Washington, Jefferson or Hamilton founded. One of the reasons is Immigration.

Since you do not criticise any of the other facts, I conclude that this is because you cannot.

I quite agree about your point of the sanctity of the law. This fiasco is like the drug fiasco, largely manufactured and unneccessary. It is also not made any better by blood-and-soil nonsense being dragged in.

I honestly cannot work out what you are saying is wrong with the article. The point you make about the intended destiny for that line, even if true, isn’t under discussion in the article, so I fail to see what your point is.