Victor Davis Hanson writes that
the open-borders movement is race-obsessed to the core. Its message is anti-diversity, and anti-inclusiveness. Latino activists (in the age of the Redskins controversy, how has the racist rubric La Raza continued [3]?) have essentially hijacked U.S. immigration policy and set the following parameters: almost all illegal immigration shall come only across the southern border from Mexico and Latin America. Almost all legal immigration shall be predicated on family ties, which ensures Latinos will be privileged over all other groups, regardless of skill sets or education. If one objects that such a de facto policy is ethnocentric and does not result in ethnic, cultural, or professional diversity, then he is rendered a xenophobe. Racialists through extra-legal means have expropriated federal immigration law. It no longer exists. The losers are the Kenyan dentist, the Filipino nurse, the Estonian doctor, the South Korean architect — any who are not Latino, any who do not break U.S. immigration law, and any who have professional degrees and skill sets to offer America. How is that not biased to ignore all notions of diversity and meritocracy in favor of using only ethnic criteria?
Hanson also writes that there is a health crisis: obesity among Latino immigrants and their American-born children. I see the obesity among our own American citizens, and it is a huge problem. I did not know that it is even worse among Latino immigrants. I have not seen that here in the affluent suburb in Colorado, where I live. There are many Latinos here, but they are certainly not fatter than the average resident of this affluent American suburb. Is he talking mainly about women and children? The men I see are hard-working laborers, and definitely not obese. The obesity I see is mostly among women, white and black.
But, what about comprehensive immigration reform? Hanson writes:
Comprehensive immigration reform is a chimera. It simply does not exist. Talk to any Latino activist in private and ignore what the Democrat and Republican hierarchy profess and the paradox is clear. Secure the border? I know of no supporter of comprehensive immigration reform who, as a requisite for compromise, wants to finish the fence [5], fine employers who hire illegals, and deport those who have broken numerous federal laws. To do so would weaken all the forces that Democrat operatives see breaking their way, that Latino elites see as essential to their own self-appointed perches as group spokesmen for the perennially dispossessed, and that employers see as a way to ensure cheap good labor.
Deportation is now a joke. When the Obama administration bragged of near-record deportations before the 2012 election, we knew it was a lie. And so it was, predicated on redefining “deportation” as temporary turn-back at the border. Otherwise explain to a supporter of CIR that you favor deporting those with criminal records, with no work history, with long residence on public assistance, with only a brief residence in the U.S. — and yet would be willing to grant green cards to those working, paying taxes, not employing false names and fraudulent documents, with long tenure in the U.S., with no record of criminality or public assistance — and outrage still follows! Continue the conversation and you learn that CIR is a synonym for blanket amnesty and its supporters do not wish to deport anyone, to close the border, or fine any employers. Republicans know that as well as Democrats. In my experience, the Tea Party is not very likely to want to deport everyone while the race industry and Chamber of Commerce are very likely to want to deport no one.
If immigrants came in manageable numbers, if they arrived in legal fashion on the basis of ethnically blind and meritocratic criteria, if the host believed in the melting pot and promoted integration, assimilation, and the mastery of the English language, if the arrivals were reminded why they were leaving their homelands and why they were entering the United States, then we could manage. But, alas, the very opposite of these criteria is true.
It has become a cachet of elites to mouth platitudes about “comprehensive immigration reform” as they carefully construct their own apartheid existences in Nancy Pelosi style [6]. They are not so much immune from the ramifications of their own ideology as found guilty of racial bias and prejudice by their very efforts to talk in the abstract in a way that offers them psychological recompense for never living that way in the concrete.
