American Dhimmitude

By Mark Krikorian, National Review Online

March 30, 2006

http://www.nationalreview.com/krikorian/krikorian200603301130.asp

Hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens and their supporters have marched over the past couple of weeks demanding amnesty and opposing stricter immigration enforcement.

This isn’t really about immigration, though — it’s about power.

What we’re seeing in the streets is a naked assertion of power by outsiders against the American nation. They demand that we comply with their wishes and submit our immigration policies for their approval, and implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met. Far from being a discussion among Americans about the best way to regulate immigration, the illegal-alien marches have been marked by the will to power: ubiquitous Mexican flags, burning and other forms of contempt for the American flag, and widespread displays of blatant racial chauvinism and irredentism.

This is precisely the same kind of challenge that aggressive outsiders are making against other parts of the West, including Muslim immigrants in Europe and, in the most extreme form, Palestinians in Israel. Supremacist Muslims have demanded that Europe repudiate Israel, legally prohibit public criticism of Islam, downplay acts of violent Jew-hatred by immigrants, and not deport Muslim illegal aliens....

Of course, we face a lower-calorie version of the challenge faced by Europe and Israel. The outsiders rejecting the legitimacy of our constitutional order are from Christian, quasi-Western backgrounds, and come from countries whence we have successfully taken, and Americanized, immigrants in the past....

But these differences merely mean that we have a better chance of overcoming the challenge — unlike Europe, which may well never persuade its Muslim population to assimilate.

In a recent column, Mark Steyn identified the issue at hand as “civilizational confidence.”...

the issue is whether we have the civilizational confidence to push back and tell the illegal aliens and their fellow-travelers that making immigration policy is the exclusive province of the American people, and that foreigners, legal or illegal, are not part of the American people until we say they are.

Unlike Europe’s supine acquiescence to the demands of its antagonists, there remains a strong nationalist streak in the American public, and so there are stirrings of push-back, among politicians like Rep. Tom Tancredo, pundits such as Cal Thomas, and even private citizens.

If, however, we surrender to the illegal-alien will to power — by caving in to their demands for passage of the McCain-Kennedy amnesty — we would be following Europe into our own version of dhimmitude, wherein a decadent host civilization capitulates to the chauvinist assertions of outsiders.

— Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and an NRO contributor.

Read the complete article.