printMy mouth dropped open in amazement: Malkin, on Fox News, mustered more than bare-bones, “enforce-immigration-law” mantra for her argument. When asked as to the purpose of immigration law, she unusually referred to the injunction in the Preamble to the Constitution to “promote the general Welfare.”
I was impressed, but also baffled. Malkin is a straightforward reporter, who very rarely is capable of jumping a level of abstraction, beyond the facts, to come up with an original angle. How did she suddenly galvanize a principle to bolster her case? What was going on? (Then I went back to eating, so I forgot the whole episode…drool.)
Today, as I was catching up on Steve Sailer’s latest, I found a possible explanation for Malkin’s buoyed brain. In attempting to answer the question of “What is it that immigration policy is supposed to achieve?”, Sailer quotes from the Preamble:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
He then adds this:
“In other words, American policy should be for the benefit of Americans and our descendents, not for the advantage of, say, the five billion potential immigrants who live in countries with average per capita GDPs lower than Mexico.”
Speaking of third-rate pundits who borrow from their betters without crediting, a line first used in this column, recently “found” its way into a new book by this pseudo-libertarian. The line is: “The National Education Association is the al-Qaida of education.” I wonder where he got it.
Update: In response to the legitimately wry comments hereunder by our reader, let me clarify: This space is generally not given over to speculation. When you have an uncreative, unoriginal, yet immensely popular “pundit,” come up with formulations and ideas a creative, original thinker came up with; when the time line indicates the good guy said it before the gimp did; when the parties are well-acquainted (in one case, the one party used to advertise reading this column, often commented on it, and in more honest moments even acknowledge using it); when there is a power differential between the parties, in other words, when the good guy is nowhere near as influential and as known as the gimp—well, then, it is not unreasonable to wonder out loud about the mysterious, osmotic diffusion at play, enunciated in this post.