October 19, 2016
Source: Bigstock
Why, then, did immigration become America’s sacred cow in the 21st century?
For one thing, immigration naturally tends to be a political perpetual-motion machine. It’s easy to start off by saying that it’s no problem to let in a few members of Nationality X because there are so few of them in America, so there’s nothing to worry about. But soon politicians are feeling that it’s impossible to stop more of them from coming because there are already so many of them here.
Second, the GOP put up such little resistance to more immigration that liberals had to move left to protect their standing. For example, when George W. Bush got to the left of the NYT editorial board in 2001 on immigration, they finally flipped toward favoring amnesty. Similarly, by Sept. 10, 2001, Bill Clinton was telling Australian tycoons that he believed in “the ultimate wisdom of a borderless world” (much as Hillary told Brazilian plutocrats in 2013 that she favored “hemispheric” “open borders“).
Third, the Democrats slowly figured out that mass immigration was the easy road to Chicago-style one-party rule.
In 1997, Peter Brimelow and Ed Rubenstein published an article in National Review, “Electing a New People,” laying out a numerical model of how the GOP was destroying itself by tolerating high immigration. They were among the first to point out what now seem like obvious truths”such as, that the GOP is in effect the white party, so the smaller the white percentage of the electorate in the 21st century, the worse the GOP does.
Looking back from almost two decades later, my guess is that Democrats took that groundbreaking article much more seriously than Republicans did. Democratic strategists began to publish their own version of the Brimelow-Rubenstein theory, such as the 2002 book by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority.
The more Democrats realized they could obtain permanent hegemony not by winning over the American people, but by repeopling America, the more they denounced rational inquiry into the merits of immigration. If you read the WikiLeaks transcript of what Hillary secretly told the smart guys at Goldman Sachs about immigration policy for $225,000, you”ll notice it’s just the same lowbrow tripe you hear everywhere else about how immigration is who we are.
In contrast, denouncing the rigging of elections through mass immigration has a noble history in American intellectual life. The first great work of social-science theory in American history, Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 anti-immigration pamphlet Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, which inspired Malthus and Darwin, originated as a protest against the Proprietors” party, which was run by William Penn’s heirs in London, rigging elections in Pennsylvania by importing German immigrants to vote against Franklin’s self-government party.
The questions today are similar to those in Ben Franklin’s time: Do American voters have the right to independence and self-rule, to determine who is let in and who is not, to have borders?
Or is America to be a colony of the world?
