Freeing America From The Immigration Gulag

By Peter Brimelow, VDare.com

June 5, 2006

http://www.vdare.com/pb/060605_gulag.htm

... Now that Congress has returned after the Memorial Day recess, Kennedy-Bush, or some poisonous part of it, may well pass the House and become law. The moral of recent immigration legislation history is that Washington’s insiders have ways of making elected officials talk—and vote.

...the controversy over the Senate’s sell-out has for the first time alerted many ordinary Americans to what is being done to their country and to their children's’ future. They have fought hard to prevent it. They may very well be shocked and dismayed if it goes through.

But, as a scarred veteran of the struggle for patriotic immigration reform, I am not. It has been obvious for some time that this will be a long and terrible war....

And, amid the lies and hysteria that invariably accompany any immigration-enthusiast assault on America, there is clear evidence that immigration reform patriots are indeed going up—and that they will continue to go up, until ultimately they and their cause prevail....

After a trauma like a stroke, the human brain is galvanized to rewire itself around the damaged area. Political trauma has a similar effect. The paradoxical result of Barry Goldwater’s disastrous defeat in 1964 was that it left the American conservative movement with its own independent rapidly-developing networks and institutions. These eventually enabled it to elect Ronald Reagan and solve an earlier generation of problems, bypassing an equally arrogant, ignorant and intransigent political Establishment.

Exactly the same process has been underway among immigration reform patriots. The immense difference between immigration reform in 2006 and ten years earlier is that, then, backroom Republican traitors like Senator Spencer Abraham could sabotage the Smith-Simpson immigration bill, which embodied the reduction proposals of the Jordan Commission, and be protected by Wall Street Journal Op Ed page propaganda. Now there is a critical mass of organizations with websites willing to expose such perfidy in devastating detail and radio talkshows willing to publicize it. These organizations have evolved different specialties and are, generally speaking, as collegial as can be humanly expected. It all reminds me very much of the conservative movement when I first got immigrated into it in 1970.

Of course, the MSM remains pretty much a desert—but increasingly irrelevant, thanks to the internet....

The immigration issue has been gathering over American politics like an immense thundercloud. At first, you get lightning flashes—noble individuals who run as token protest candidates, like our Joe Guzzardi in the 2003 California gubernatorial race. Then you get thunder—contested primaries. Then you get isolated raindrops —captured nominations. Then, you get flurries of raindrops—election victories. Then the storm breaks—the movement comes to power.

It takes time. But you get to recognize the signs.

One sign right now is the absolutely extraordinary difficulty that President Bush has had (and may still have) in getting his amnesty passed....

These signs will appear with increasing frequency and intensifying urgency. But whether the political Establishment chooses to recognize them is another matter.

On the immigration issue, the American elite has reacted with a bipartisan intransigence exceptional in democratic politics. The astonishing spectacle of a seriously unpopular President expending the last of his political capital to impose a policy that alienates his own base and dooms his party to ever-worsening minority status is merely the latest example of this phenomenon. There are several reasons for this bizarre behavior, but the consequence is the same: no evasive action in the face of the gathering storm.

As a result, in the end the current party system may just be swept away. This doesn’t happen often in American politics, but it does happen. Significantly, it was immigration (from Ireland) that provoked the Know-Nothing American Party and destroyed the Whig-Democrat “Second Party System” in the 1850s. The outbreak of the Civil War obscured this, because the Know-Nothings were also generally strong abolitionists—notwithstanding recent efforts to smear them as proto-Nazis—and chose to join the new Republican Party....

I never worried about the immigration debate being “over”. This was always obviously absurd. Almost unique in public policy, immigration enthusiasm contains within itself what Marxists used to call a “fundamental contradiction”. The reason goes to the point that Enoch Powell, who increasingly must be judged the greatest British political leader of modern times, made in his prophetic 1968 immigration speech: “Numbers are of the essence”. By increasing the number of immigrants, the enthusiasts increase the number of problems—their problems....

in case anyone has forgotten, the problems include: crime; disease; destroyed schools; destroyed neighborhoods; congestion; racial friction; linguistic displacement; wage depression; welfare costs; political displacement; and, last but of course not least, the abolition of America....

in respect of immigration, Congress gives and can take away. The sheer power of determined government to reshape social reality is easily forgotten by a generation that has only seen government paralyzed by immigration—if not positively working for the other side.

To see what it really means to have a determined government, compare this bracing account of the Israeli border fence with the wimpy mini-wall Congress may or may not get around to authorizing: [Israeli advice on the Mexico fence: be ruthless, by Shmuel Rosner, Haaretz, May 23 2006]. (“It can work, the expert says and other Israeli know-hows agree. Don't buy the argument of liberal opponents who say ‘no fence can stop people from coming.’ If done in a proper way, the fence can work. It can achieve whatever goal the U.S. wants it to, ‘100 percent, 90 percent, 80 percent prevention. Just make the right commitment and you'll get results.’”).

In fact, it would not even take legislation to start significant portions of America’s illegal immigrant population on the path to self-deportation. If President Bush had given the message via a national TV address that one of our writers recommended—“GO HOME NOW!”—there is no question that a considerable number would have done. There have been many signs that the illegal population very jumpy, perhaps because they know perfectly well that illegal immigrants would be given very short shrift in their own countries. For example, the current debate, and changes in state law largely due to lobbying by D.A. King, has already caused a slowdown in illegals’ (federally subsidized) house-buying in Georgia. [Illegals look at housing with caution, by Teresa Borden and Brian Feagans, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 4 2006].

The steps necessary to redeem America can be quickly sketched. Much of it could be done through Executive Branch action, without additional legislation.

* Shut off the illegal immigrant faucet with a border fence, effective visa controls.

* Clean up the mess caused by the illegal alien presence by: selective summary deportation (as outlined by VDARE.COM’s whistleblower Juan Mann, repeatedly); revived workplace enforcement; punishment of illegals’ employers through fines and tort action; ending of subsidies to illegals through federal and state programs, mandated hospital care, public education, eligibility for Affirmative Action programs etc.; repeal of the anchor baby interpretation of the 14th amendment; taxing illegal presence through imposts on remittances etc.; jail (Guantanamo?) for repeat offenders.

* Moratorium on legal immigration. Not no gross immigration but no net immigration—which would permit an inflow of 200,000 a year or so, enough to take care of hardship cases, needed skills etc.. Abandon the principle of “family reunification”, which in practice has meant uncontrollable chain migration. Immigrants should be admitted on own merits.

* Abolish “refugee” category. In practice, this is simply an expedited, subsidized immigration program for politically-favored groups. Anyway, humanitarian aid is best given in situ—for example, the “Somali Bantu” could have been resettled in Mozambique, not Maine. America is not the world’s Kleenex.

* Quebec-style English-only legislation. It isn’t pretty but this is war. Everyone says they’re in favor of assimilation—prove it. Institutionalizing foreign languages materially disadvantages monolingual Americans, It effectively subsidizes immigrants, legal and illegal. End it.

* Make citizenship mean something. Lengthen the waiting period. End dual citizenship. The naturalization process is a farce. Wait to make sure new voters are actually Americans.

* Strip citizenship from those who have obtained it through fraud. A negative amnesty. Why not?...

We could systematically strip citizenship from those who obtained it fraudulently. Isn’t that nice to know?

Secondly, the plain fact is that no one really has the faintest idea what is politically possible. Least of all the professional politicians. They appear to have been designed by evolution to snuffle along like blind shrews, following their exquisitely sensitive snouts for one day to the next, reacting savagely if asked about next week—let alone year—and thus able to perform 180-degree turns without rupturing their consciences.

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