Bush Answers Kennedy’s Calling

Bush, Democrats, Republicans

…all immigration policy by definition amounts to top-down, statist, central planning. But the least invasive policy is one that respects a nation’s historical and cultural complexion and the property rights of its taxpayers. Bush’s batch of soon-to-be amnestied illegal aliens are voracious tax consumers, who will cost more in social services than they pay in taxes over a lifetime. By contrast, immigrants who arrived between 1870 and 1920, during the Great Migration, although poor, did not constitute a burden, because the Welfare State as we know it did not exist.
Moreover, what Bush in his dotage termed “the great American tradition of the melting pot” is no more. In previous decades, immigrants assimilated. In the spirit of the times, they are now encouraged to acculturate to the politics of petulance. As a result, too many seem to harbor a vestigial resentment toward the host society and to cling to an almost-militant distinctiveness.
Clearly, unfettered immigration and the interventionist state, as Ludwig von Mises noted, cannot coexist.

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily.com column, “Bush Answers Kennedy’s Calling.”

Immigration Infarct

America, Bush, IMMIGRATION

Bush’s immigration infarct was studded with his trademark non sequiturs:

We are a nation of immigrants; therefore we must uphold that “tradition,” he puled. And “to secure our border, we must create a temporary worker program.” In both assertions, the second proposition doesn’t follow from the first—even if America is indeed a nation of immigrants, it doesn’t follow that it has to remain so. Similarly, it is quite possible to seal the border without creating a guest worker program (with its attendant bureaucracy).

One of the many moral infelicities Bush has committed on the matter of immigration is to have decided that the longer an illegal alien has been in the U.S., and thus violated its laws, the shorter his road to citizenship. Another was to praise these plucky folks for heroically forging documents and lying to employers about their status in the country.

Sanctimonious admonitions were in no short supply—but were directed at … the American people. They were told to “conduct this debate on immigration in a reasoned and respectful tone.” “We must always remember,” said The Man Who Pulverized Iraq, “that real lives will be affected by our debates and decisions.”

Since Those Jobs The American People Aren’t Doing were also mentioned, I, in turn, wish to refer the POTUS to a report by researcher Edwin S. Rubenstein, according to which illegals make up only 13 percent of hotel industry workers, 11 percent of restaurant and food service workers, and 10 percent of construction workers.

Will the president pray tell who the other mystery workers are?

Send Us Your Con Men and Women

Christianity, Europe, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Morality

What do you know, a day after The Decider (Bush’s nickname for himself) praised millions of illegal immigrants for heroically forging documents and lying to employers about their status in the country, The American Enterprise Institute has opened its arms to a prominent Dutch counterfeiter, and is, evidently, sponsoring her immigration to the United States.

She’s the Somali-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom I’ve mentioned—favorably—before. Ali’s an outspoken and brave critic of Islam. She assisted Theo van Gogh, the slain Dutch filmmaker, in exposing the enslavement of women in Muslim countries. It goes without saying that followers of the religion of peace want to kill her.

Little did I know that she is liberal only with respect to views she endorses. According to Lawrence Auster, Ali has sought to ban conservative, Christian, and immigration restrictionist parties in Europe. Writes Auster:

She was also among the 12 signers of a leftist anti-Islam manifesto in March 2006 that said, ‘It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.’ The clear implication is that Christian ‘theocrats’—which by contemporary standards means anyone who actually believes in Christianity—are Ali’s enemy as much as jihadists are.

Ali, moreover, lied on her Dutch asylum application. Duly, after being a Dutch citizen for 14 years, and a member of that parliament, to boot, immigration minister Rita Verdonk has revoked her citizenship.

I’m not saying I support this ruling. The details are sketchy, and Ali claims to have “admitted lying to win asylum in the Netherlands when she was vetted as a candidate for parliament in 2002.” What makes me even more suspicious is that “a Dutch court ruled that she must leave her home in The Hague because neighbours felt she was a security risk.” That’s preposterous! What right has the court to evict her from her home because thugs have threatened her life? Let the court banish the thugs from the country!

I’d say that Ali is a candidate for asylum in the United States, although I’m not sure she’d be better protected here than in Europe. What I question is her candidacy for a fellowship with an American think tank.

Wait a sec, what am I thinking? Having no coherent political philosophy or lacking veracity—even talent—are not always impediments to being hired by such places. For example, Rachel Marsden, a convicted Canadian stalker, worked for Paul Weyrich’s D.C. think tank, the Free Congress Foundation, which is dedicated to fighting America’s “long slide into cultural and moral decay.” I’m sure there are other examples—of lack of talent, at least, if not of out-and-out wrongdoing.

* Image courtesy Point Of Inquiry.

Is Israel Done For?

Britain, Israel, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Politics

I suspect Joseph Farah is right; Israel is a lost cause. It is now a thoroughly left-liberal, post-Zionist society, bereft of a sense of the goodness of its history and institutions. Its secondary and tertiary schools have adopted the evil Palestinian and radical Left propaganda as Bible from Sinai.
In many ways, Israel is not unlike Britain, which forfeited the Whig interpretation of history in favor of a negative view of the nation’s past and liberal institutions. Or the United States: it too has come to reduce its founding to a narrative of the oppressed and the excluded.
Israelis now accept that they must expiate for—rather than celebrate—the “miraculous revival of an old people in a spirit of humanism and freedom, on a barren piece of land,” to quote Walter Laquer.
I was overcome with similar sentiments to Joseph Farah’s after recently reestablishing contact with “girls” I grew up with in Israel. The one, a pedagogue, tells me sans shame that her daughter refuses to study Hebrew in high school (apparently she is accorded such an option.). The girl also refuses to be identified as a Jew in her identity document. She confuses a show of hatred for her culture—language and religion—with a sign of sophistication and individualism, not realizing that hers is the herd’s position. These days deracinated liberalism is the norm—it takes courage to be a proud Jew. The girl comes from a fine family of pioneers.
Another friend, a single woman with a doctorate in math, also from an admirable family, is a rank leftist, who berates Bibi (Netanyahu) for having freed up the Israeli economy considerably during his tenure, and for retaliating against Palestinian barbarism. Turn the other cheek is her motto.
What worries is not so much the policy of this or the other Israeli administration. I expect little from politicians. Given the views my friends express, I worry, as Joseph Farah does, that the “people—themselves fail to discern right from wrong.”