Maverick Philosopher

Is the Rule of Law Geographically Variable?

'Liberals' seem to think it is. The rule of law fades as one approaches the southern border, fading out entirely at the border. And then there are those pockets where it holds selectively. These are known as sanctuary jurisdictions. Some are as large as California. But to whom do they provide sanctuary?

An Unsound Argument Against National Borders

The Dark Ostrich extracts the following argument from a TED video:

(1) It is wrong that anyone subject to the force of the law should not be subject to its protection, but

(2) those immediately outside the border and forcibly prevented from entering are subject to the force of the law but not its protection, ergo

(3) this is wrong.

The conclusion follows from the premises, but the conclusion is false. Therefore, one of the premises is false.  Which one? The first. To accept (1) is equivalent to rejecting nations and their sovereignty.

If you insist that the above deductive argument is sound in the technical sense in which most philosophers use the term (valid in point of logical form and possessing premises all of which are true), then I will point out that it is not rationally compelling.  

For it can be run in reverse with no breach of logical propriety.  "One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens."

I could also say that the above argument begs the question at the first premise.

If you accuse me of begging the question, then I say we have a stand-off. I will then suggest that you leave my country and go live in the borderless world of your dreams.

................................

Jacques responds:

"If you accuse me of begging the question, then I say we have a stand-off. I will then suggest that you leave my country and go live in the borderless world of your dreams."

I think it's not even a stand-off (rationally).  Either premise 2 is patently false, or the argument is just invalid, or 1 has to be interpreted in such a way that 1 is patently false: 

First of all, when American immigration agents (legally) deport people or keep them from entering the country, they usually do so in ways that are legal relative to American law.  And they can be charged with crimes themselves if they don't.  They don't mow down would-be illegal immigrants with machine guns or drop them back in Mexico from helicopters.  They don't force them to convert to Islam or steal their pocket change.  When aliens [are] being deported or prevented from entering [,] the legal standing or rights assigned to such people by American law are generally respected, and are supposed to be respected under American law.  So 2 is patently false on one reasonable interpretation. 

BV: I agree.

Maybe the meaning of premise 2 is that illegal aliens, or would-be illegal aliens, are not legally granted exactly the same protections (rights or powers or whatever) as some other people--American citizens, for example.  But then, in order for the argument to be valid, premise 1 would have to say something like this:

BV: That is the way I read premise (2).

(1*) It is wrong that anyone subject to the force of the law should not be subject to all the same legal 'protections'  to which any other arbitrary person subject to the force of the law is subject.

BV: And that is the way I read premise (1).

But 1* is even more absurd than 1.  If 1* were true, then all the following scenarios would be morally wrong:

i. The President of the United States is legally protected by the Secret Service in ways that some Americans are not.

ii. Some citizens who are poor and unemployed are legally protected against starvation and life-threatening illness by means of welfare payments and publicly subsidized healthcare but the President of the United States is not.

iii. Some citizens who are not convicted child molesters are legally protected against certain forms of invasion of privacy in ways that citizens who are convicted child molesters are not.

iv. Some citizens who are not in the process of carrying out an armed robbery are legally protected against gunfire from police officers but some of those who are in the process of carrying out armed robberies are not.

v. Female citizens are legally protected against sexual harassment in ways that male citizens are not.

vi. Citizens who are 7 years old are legally protected against certain forms of self-harm--doing tequila shots at strip clubs, for example, or having sexual relationships with people who are 30 years old--but some other citizens are not. 

BV: Those are all good points.

Well, this could go on for a while.  So either 2 is patently false or 1, on the relevant interpretation, is patently false. 

BV: I say that (1) is false, (2) is true, charitably interpreted, the argument is valid but unsound. I think we agree or could agree on this.

Why then did I say that it is a stand-off?  Because the open borders defender could bite the bullet and insist on (1)/(1*).  To so insist is equivalent to denying the moral legitimacy of nation-states and their sovereignty. If he is denying said legitimacy, and I am affirming it in virtue of running the argument in reverse, then we are at loggerheads and we have a stand-off. 

Of course I could go on to argue why we have need of nation-states and why they are morally justified. But then we are deep into the bowels of political philosophy. What if the opponent turns out to be a (philosophical) anarchist who denies the moral justification of states and their coercive powers?  We will soon encounter other stand-offs. For example, we will soon enough enter the philosophy of human nature (philosophical anthropology).  What if he takes the anarchist line that people are by nature good and that states and their laws are corrupt and corrupting? Of course, one can argue against that too, and as a conservative I will, but have sophisticated anarchists been decisively refuted to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners of political philosophy?

The task of the political philosopher is to dig down to the deepest underpinnings of the 'surface' debates such as DACA, the need for a border wall, etc.  Unfortunately, when we dig deep, we find that we cannot get to bedrock, a bedrock upon which we can all agree.

I fear that I must now open the ComBox.

Liberals Have Lost Their Minds Over Immigration

Damon Linker

DACA: It's About Sovereignty

W. Hunsecker:

Schumer, in his bid for political prominence, did much more than simply, temporarily put the interests of illegal immigrants ahead of the American public who he was elected to serve.  Rather, he endorsed a program – DACA – which does nothing less than facilitate threats to U.S. security and, ultimately sovereignty. DACA has emboldened a population - which has no standing in the American electoral process – to disenfranchise legitimate American voters by participating in an array of political actions which are meant to shape the government and influence policy.  This same population also erodes U.S. elements of national power by claiming places – and potentially displacing citizen and legal permanent resident candidates – in institutions of higher education. Finally, the DACA population represents a potential fifth column for state and non-state actors seeking individuals with little allegiance to (and demonstrated animosity against) the U.S. government.

Democrats: The New Palestinians on Immigration

Roger L. Simon:

Just as the Palestinians twenty-five years and four significant offers after Oslo have demonstrated they really don't want a two-state solution with the Israelis, Democrats have now revealed they don't want to solve the U.S.e immigration problem.

As with the Palestinians, it's all a shell game.

Donald Trump just offered the Dems an agreement on DACA that gives two million "Dreamers" a pathway to full citizenship after 10-12 years -- something not even done by Barack Obama! -- and the Dems didn't even want to discuss the proposal.  All that happened was their increasingly unhinged minority leader screamed Trump was "making America safe for white people!"

Wonder if the rabid press dogs who all but rolled on the floor begging that Navy doctor to say Trump was somehow unfit or senile after scoring 100% on a cognitive test would demand the same thirty questions be put to Ms. Pelosi?

Never mind.  The point is that Pelosi revealed herself to be a repellent racist... or racialist (someone who plays the race card no matter what). More importantly, the Democratic Party unmasked themselves as not all that interested in the "Dreamers" as people.  They just want to make the Republicans look, well, racist and lose elections. Otherwise they would be jumping up and down for this proposal.

Nancy Pelosi is the stupidest woman in American politics as is obvious if you simply listen to her rants. Stupid and vile, though not as vile as Maxine Waters. Nancy's fund-raising abilities, however, endear her to the destructive Dems. 

Related: Nancy Pelosi on the Word. You won't believe it.

Hillary the Irrelevant

Poor Hillary is reduced to reading from a crummy book  at the Grammys while President Donald J. Trump prepares for his first State of the Union address.

Hillary the Inevitable has become Hillary the Irrelevant.

Meanwhile, Hollywood liberals 'argue' that border control, a constitutionally-mandated function of the Federal government, is 'white supremacist' and that a physical barrier is a symbol of hate.  Actress Alyssa Milano tweets:

Let’s be clear: Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants are rooted in white supremacy. His racist wall is a symbol of hate.

How could any reasonable person disagree with that?

The Moronic Level of Leftist Race-Baiting

Joy Reid takes the cake for liberal-left race-baiting stupidity and viciousness:

1) Tucker Carlson has a distant ancestor who immigrated legally to the USA from Switzerland.

2) Tucker Carlson is opposed to illegal immigration.

Ergo

3) Tucker Carlson is a hypocrite and a white nationalist.

The Craphole Contretemps Continues

But Rod Dreher is having second thoughts. Worth your time.

Trump was Right about Feculent Locales

This piece by a former Peace Corps volunteer to Senegal is a must-read. A few quotations:

People defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust – onto you, your clothes, your food, the water.  He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water.  Human feces carries parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country.  Or would teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism.

Last time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand boubou have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame Cathedral.  The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his head not to see.

I have seen.  I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant things are not true.

[. . .]

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown.  The value system was the exact opposite.  You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives.  There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system.  They fail.

We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa.  The kleptocracy extends through the whole society.  My town had a medical clinic donated by international agencies.  The medicine was stolen by the medical workers and sold to the local store.  If you were sick and didn't have money, drop dead.  That was normal.

So here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father's Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn't bathing him, I wasn't surprised.  It was familiar.

In Senegal, corruption ruled, from top to bottom.  Go to the post office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp.  After paying the bribe, you still didn't know it if it would be mailed or thrown out.  That was normal.

One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic.  One day, as the wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides – who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working – collapsed to the ground.  They turned their heads so as not to see her and kept talking.  She lay there in the dirt.  Callousness to the sick was normal.

Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  It's not.  It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.

We think the Protestant work ethic is universal.  It's not.  My town was full of young men doing nothing.  They were waiting for a government job.  There was no private enterprise.  Private business was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world bureaucratic kleptocracy.  It is also incompatible with Senegalese insistence on taking care of relatives.

[. . .]

African problems are made worse by our aid efforts.  Senegal is full of smart, capable people.  They will eventually solve their own country's problems.  They will do it on their terms, not ours.  The solution is not to bring Africans here.

We are lectured by Democrats that we must privilege third-world immigration by the hundred million with chain migration.  They tell us we must end America as a white, Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation – to prove we are not racist.  I don't need to prove a thing.  Leftists want open borders because they resent whites, resent Western achievements, and hate America.  They want to destroy America as we know it.

As President Trump asked, why would we do that?

We have the right to choose what kind of country to live in.  I was happy to donate a year of my life as a young woman to help the poor Senegalese.  I am not willing to donate my country. 

What the 'Dreamer' Fight is About

Hanson

Trump's Real Sin? He Speaks Taboo Truths

Why the bipartisan preening outrage over the President's craphole comment? Roger Kimball:

Everyone, near enough, knows that he was telling a home truth. It was outrageous not because he said something crude that was untrue. Quite the contrary: it was outrageous precisely because it was true but intolerable to progressive sensitivities.

In other words, the potency of taboo is still strong in our superficially rational culture. There are some things—quite a few, actually, and the list keeps growing—about which one cannot speak the truth or, in many cases, even raise as a subject for discussion without violating the unspoken pact of liberal sanctimoniousness.

Andrew Klavan:

Nothing scandalizes a leftist like the truth. Point out that women and men are different, that black Americans commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime, that most terrorist acts are committed by Muslims, and the Left leaps to its collective feet in openmouthed shock, like Margaret Dumont after a Groucho Marx wisecrack. This is racism! This is sexism! This is some sort of phobia! I’m shocked, shocked to find facts being spoken in polite company!

No one is really shocked, of course. This is simply a form of bullying. The Left has co-opted our good manners and our good will in order to silence our opposition to their bad policies. The idea is to make it seem impolite and immoral to mention the obvious.

The bullying is highly effective and very dangerous. In England, in the city of Rotherham, at least 1,400 non-Muslim girls, some as young as 11, were brutally raped by Muslim immigrants over a period of years in the 2000s. Police and other officials worked to keep the facts hidden because, according to multiple reports, they were afraid of being called racist. Think about that: police officers did not want to seem racist, so they stood by and let their city’s children be raped.

[ . . .]

Here in the states, the First Amendment has so far allowed old-fashioned American loudmouths to fight the system whenever they could find ways around our monolithic corporate media. But the Empire of Lies is quick to strike back. Google/YouTube now stands charged by multiple accusers of singling out conservative voices for censorship, “fact-checking,” and demonetization. Hidden-camera videos released by Project Veritas this week show Twitter employees conspiring to “shadow ban” conservatives on their system. On campus, intelligent conservative speakers of good will like Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Cristina Hoff-Somers have faced violent protests meant to shut them up.

No person of importance on the right seeks to silence anyone on the left. The Left, on the other hand, is broadly committed to ostracizing, blacklisting, and even criminalizing right-wing speech.

 

[. . .]

Let’s state the obvious. Some countries are shitholes. To claim that this is racist is racist. They are not shitholes because of the color of the populace but because of bad ideas, corrupt governance, false religion, and broken culture. Further, most of the problems in these countries are generated at the top. Plenty of rank-and-file immigrants from such ruined venues ultimately make good Americans—witness those who came from 1840s potato-famine Ireland, a shithole if ever there was one! It takes caution and skill to separate the good from the bad.

For these very reasons, absurd immigration procedures like chain migration, lotteries, and unvetted entries are deeply destructive. They can lead to the sort of poor choices that create a Rotherham. Trump’s suggestions—to vet immigrants for pro-American ideas and skills that will help our country—are smart and reasonable and would clearly make the system better if implemented.

So, when it comes to the Great Shithole Controversy of 2018, my feeling is: I do not care, not even a little. I’m sorry that it takes someone like Trump to break the spell of silence the Left is forever weaving around us. I wish a man like Ronald Reagan would come along and accomplish the same thing with more wit and grace. But that was another culture. History deals the cards it deals; we just play them. Trump is what we’ve got.

For all the bad language, for all the loose talk, I would rather hear a man speak as a man without fear of the Nurse Ratcheds in the press and the academy than have him neutered and gagged by a system of good manners that has been misused as a form of oppression. Better impoliteness than silence. Better crudeness than lies.

We have seen the effect of uncontrolled immigration on Europe. It is very, very bad. The fact is: some countries are shitholes. I don’t want this to become one of them.

Related articles

Trump has his enemies dancing to his tune with 's-hole countries' comments - |

Immigration and the Obstructionist Congressional Crapweasels

Here:

A great deal of the justified anger of the immigration patriot community is that we are told again and again by the media and politicians that we’re not allowed to care that say, the average El Salvadoran immigrant may be three times more likely as the average Norwegian immigrant or four times more likely than the average Indian immigrant to be on welfare, supported by the U.S. taxpayer.

We’re outraged like Donald Trump was when he saw the truly offensive deal conjured up by Senators Graham, Flake and Gardner in conjunction with Democratic leaders that would give mass amnesty (far beyond DACA) in exchange for a pitiful charade of border security. He’s outraged that these senators would betray GOP voters and interests when, even in his weaker moments, he’s always declared (as he tweeted last night) that building a wall, moving to merit-based immigration, and ending the visa lottery and chain migration are mandatory components for the amnesty deal for DACA. The scandal here isn’t Trump’s predictably profane tongue—it’s that Senators Graham, Flake and Gardner would dare to show him this s***hole of an amnesty deal, in blatant defiance of the core issue positions that led the GOP to 100 year-high legislative majorities, and expect him to bless it.

Lindsey, Jeff, and Cory—you’re fired.

Read it all.

Trump Speaks the Truth and Snowflakes Melt

Here:

Is there any question Haiti is a s***hole? Who’s offended by that? If it wasn’t a s***hole it wouldn’t be one of the most prominent recipients of American charity aid on Planet Earth. And it isn’t like this country has ignored Haiti — we’ve been trying to lift it out of s***hole status for more than a century, with absolutely no result whatever. In 1910, President William Howard Taft granted Haiti a large loan in hopes that Haiti could pay off its staggering international debt and therefore achieve a larger measure of independence from Europe. The result? Haiti defaulted and U.S. tax dollars were poured into a bottomless pit.

[. . .]

The open-borders crowd doesn’t want to talk about that, though, and it wants to call you racist if you’re opposed to a deluge of immigrants from the worst places on earth. That’s why Trump’s “s***holes” objection is big news rather than the fact there are so-called political leaders who can’t agree to reorient our immigration policy toward taking people who can successfully assimilate here.

Between the two, the crude man who tells the truth and looks out for his own citizens is preferable to the genteel man who sells us out for cheap labor or ballot-box fuel for a political machine. If Trump is the former, so be it.

Exactly right. The career politician is concerned primarily about his career and the power, perquisites, and pelf it provides. Despite what he says, the typical Republican is not primarily concerned about the welfare of the country.  So he talks and talks, but never gets anything done, as if politics is endless gentlemanly discourse and nothing more.  Well, talk is cheap and it allows the evasion of hard decisions.  

Relevant is the following quotation from Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1985: 

According to Donoso Cortés, it was characteristic of bourgeois liberalism not to decide in this battle but to begin a discussion. He straightforwardly defined the bourgeoisie as a “discussing class,” una clasa discutidora. It has thus been sentenced. This definition contains the class characteristic of wanting to evade the decision. A class that shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict. (59)

Trump is rude, crude, devoid of gravitas, self-absorbed, and given to exaggeration. He has orange hair. A statement he once made suggests that he is tolerant of pussy-grabbing. But so what given that he understands and threatens to act upon the following:

1) There is no right to immigrate.

2) Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country.

3) There is a distinction between legal and illegal immigration, and the latter must be severely curtailed if it cannot be stopped entirely.

4) Potential immigrants must share the values of the host country and respect its culture.

5) Potential immigrants must be assimilable and willing to assimilate.

6) With respect to immigration to the USA, preference ought to be given to potential immigrants from Ireland and Norway, say, rather than from Haiti, say.

No Democrat really believes (as opposed to insincerely giving verbal assent to) all or even most of the above, and few Republicans would be willing to act upon these propositions.

This is why Trump is our last chance. If he caves, then it's all over.

Related articles

A Basic Liberal Assumption: Every Political Party is Tolerable

More on Immigration as the Central Issue of Our Time

Just over the transom from a U. K. reader:

With respect to this post, I agree with much of Douglas Murray's book as well; in fact the only parts I could argue with are his somewhat lenient stance on various English Defence League type people (not his belief in their legal right to state their position though). But the great problem with European immigration is the importation of absolutely regressive thinking, even amongst the true victims of war in Syria and Afghanistan (the 'idiot' Liberals wrongly associate contingent victimhood with innate virtue, never realising that the problem of increased rape and harassment by immigrants is precisely due to the mainstream attitudes all but the educated among their number hold - contempt for women etc).

You're quite right. European 'progressives,' having been enstupidated by political correctness, don't understand that the 'regressives' from Muslim lands do not share their values and have no intention of assimilating, and that it is cultural suicide to let them flood in.  (See here.) These leftists also make the typical 'progressive' mistake of thinking that great virtue attaches to being an underdog, a victim, poor, etc. You will have noticed that leftists have a knee-jerk tendency to take the side of the loser and the underdog even when the underdog owes his status to his own bad behavior and foolishness.  

Of course we should help those who are in dire straits due to no fault of their own. But aid must be rendered in an intelligent fashion, and never at the expense of the country rendering aid. The principle must be: Country First!  Trump's America First! is just a special case of this. For the Germans, Germany First!  And so on.  The prudent and reasonable look to the welfare of their own first, and only thereafter to that of others.

But I don't see a strong parallel with the argument against mainly (as I understand it) Mexican / Central American immigration to the U.S. Among those immigrants are certainly criminals and gangs (some quite well known escapees from Latin American guerilla wars, narco-wars etc), but not, generally speaking religious ideologues or people with culturally inbuilt regressive values, just the normal regressiveness of the uneducated individual from a Western society.

I grant you that there are differences which weaken the parallel.  Better to be invaded by Catholics than by Muslims.  Islam is a toxic political ideology inimical to Western values. Contemporary Catholicism, despite its infestation by leftist termites, is much less of a threat politically. But it is still a threat because Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal, will most of them end up voting for the hard-Left Democrat Party. Here,  by the way, is the reason why the obstructionist Dems so viciously and vociferously oppose Trump's immigration reforms: their long-term strategy is to win demographically.  Illegal aliens from the south are for them undocumented Democrats.  This is also why they oppose photo ID at polling places. They want to make the polling places safe for voter fraud. Good leftists that they are, they hold the end to justify the shabby means.  ('Good' in the preceding sentence functions as an attributive, not a predicative adjective, in Peter Geach's terminology.)

Looking from the outside, and as a frequent visitor to the U.S., my impression is that most Trump voters take more issue with two things: a) being left out of the economic picture no matter how hard they work; their enemy seems to be corporations, Wall Street, and / or big government (Bernie Sanders popularity on the left would seem to be evidence that this is felt across the spectrum of political allegiance); and b) the identity / victim politics of the modern Left, which only cares about LGBT etc as political entities, not normal people, or even 'workers' (the original victim category of Marx). 

I can't see the 'experiment in self-destruction' of the UK being repeated in the US; it looks like a different experiment in self-destruction to me - more to do with abrogation of the responsibilities of government to the private sphere, and eventual failure of democracy combined with a self-absorbed intellectual Leftist politics that no longer cares about the mainstream.

I would be interested to see on your blog a more detailed exploration of these 'failed experiments' as you see them unfolding; how Europe and the US correlate and how they differ. Are different sets of civilisational principles at stake in each place?

'Failed experiments' doesn't seem to be quite the phrase. In Europe and the U.K., the experiments in self-destruction seem to be succeeding.  Sharia courts? No-go zones? Places in England where an Englishman must fear to tread?  I will have to do more research to be able comment on how the U. K. and U. S. cases differ. But I don't think the two experiments in self-destruction are very different.  In both cases a mindless immigration policy engineered by destructive global elitists. 

The Defining Issue of the Day: Immigration into the West of Unassimilable Elements

From Robert W. Merry's review of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, Douglas Murray, Bloomsbury Continuum, 352 pages:

You should carefully study the whole piece. Here are some excerpts. Emphases added.

[. . .]

No, the defining issue of our day is mass immigration into the nations of Western heritage. This growing inflow threatens to remake those nations and overwhelm their cultural identity. This is the issue that played the largest role in getting Donald Trump elected. It drove Britain’s Brexit vote. It is roiling the European continent, mounting tensions inside the EU and driving a wedge between the elites of those nations and their general populations.

Indeed, the central battlefront in the immigration wars is Europe, which accepted a trickle of immigrants in the immediate postwar era due to labor shortages. But over the years the trickle became a stream, then a growing river, and finally a torrent—to the extent that ethnic Britons are now a minority in their own capital city, refugee flows into Germany went from 48,589 in 2010 to 1.5 million in 2015, and Italy, a key entry point, received at one point an average of 6,500 new arrivals a day.

[. . .]

A key point of the book, reinforced through anecdote and abundant documentation, is that Muslim immigrants have not assimilated into their European host countries to any meaningful extent. Indeed, there is a growing feeling among many of the new arrivals that these aren’t host countries at all but merely lands ripe for Islam’s inexorable expansion. An 18-year-old Syrian refugee to Germany, Aras Bacho, writing in Der Freitag and the Huffington Post Deutschland, reflected this attitude when he said German migrants were “fed up” with “angry” Germans—described as “unemployed racists”—who “insult and agitate.” He added, “We refugees…do not want to live in the same country with you. You can, and I think you should, leave Germany. Germany does not fit you, why do you live here?….Look for a new home.”

Consider also the significance of this fact: By 2015 more British Muslims were fighting for ISIS than for the British armed forces. There was nothing hidden about the resolve of many European Muslims to retain their own culture while overwhelming the European one. At a rally in Cologne in 2008, then-Turkish prime minister (later president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a crowd of 20,000 Turks living in Germany, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands that assimilation in Europe would constitute “a crime against humanity.” He added, “I understand very well that you are against assimilation. One cannot expect you to assimilate.” Yet he admonished the five million Turks living in Europe to pursue political influence through democratic means in order to wield a “constitutional element” in transforming the continent.

Reading Murray’s book, one gets an understanding of why he characterizes Europe’s demise as “strange.” The continent’s embrace of its own cultural death is indeed historically aberrational. Civilizations normally fight for the preservation of their cultures, unite to expel invaders, revere their identities and the fundamental elements of their heritage. But the West today is engaged in an extensive and progressive extravagance of civilizational self-abnegation. Murray calls this the “tyranny of guilt” and identifies it as a “pathology.” The concept of historical guilt, he writes, means that hereditary stains of guilt can be passed down through generations—much as Europeans themselves for generations held Jews responsible for the killing of Christ. Eventually this was seen as repugnant, and the Pope himself in 1965 formally lifted the historical burden.

[. . .]

America lags behind Europe in the magnitude of its immigration problem. But, with an estimated 11 million illegals in country and the same prevailing elite sensibility dominating our discourse, the United States eventually will hit a similar crisis point unless current trends are altered or reversed. It’s worth noting that the percentage of Americans born outside the country has approached a historical high of 14 percent—similar to what it was in the 1920s, the last time the country curtailed both the numbers of immigrants and the nations from which they were allowed to come. That may be what’s brewing here today with the election of Trump.

Exactly right. Stupid 'liberals' are still in shock over Trump's election and still cannot understand how he could have won. The main factor responsible for his election is easy to understand. We decent Americans who love our country and stand for the rule of law are sick of illegal immigration and  are very reasonably opposed to the legal immigration of those who do not accept our values.

Those who oppose Trump's immigration proposals are either destructive leftist scum or else pollyannish bleeding-hearts who do not understand the issues.  The lines are clearly drawn and the battle is on for the soul of America. 2018 should prove to be very interesting indeed.  

We are lucky in that we are not Europe or the U. K. We can learn from their experiment in self-destruction. We have a little time, and with Trump in the saddle, a fighting chance.

But will learn? And will we fight?  Some of you have children and grandchildren. Do you care at all what country they will inherit?

The Melting Pot

The famous pot can work but only if the ingredients placed in it are meltable and blendable. A wise immigration policy cannot be all-inclusive.  That used to be understood.

Every Day . . .

. . . throw something away.  That is one of my self-admonitions.  A truly radical approach to de-cluttering, however, is Swedish Death Cleaning.

Curiously, I came across the just embedded hyperlink while doing a search on the question whether Swedes have a death wish, given their foolishly warm embrace of Muslim immigrants.

This embrace makes Swedish Death Cleaning all the more advisable for Swedes, especially for Jewish Swedes who are having a hard time of it, especially given the invasion of Muslims who for some strange reason are not instantly accepting the ultra-liberal attitudes of their hosts.

Of Coulter and Kant, Screwed Pooches, and Milked He Goats

Ann Coulter:

Everyone who screwed the pooch on this one better realize fast: All that matters is immigration. It's all that matters to the country, and it's all that matters for winning elections.

She's right: read what she has to say. 

What caught my eye, however, was the expression 'screw the pooch.'  I now send you to Slate for an explanation of its meaning, thereby proving that that site is good for something.

The irrepressible Coulter also avails herself of the expression, 'milk a he-goat':

We'll have to watch helplessly as "establishment Republicans" fight "anti-establishment Republicans" over the right to milk a he-goat. Both sides will lose, and Democrats will sweep Congress and destroy our country.

Now that's a very old expression; I first encountered it in Kant in a particularly delightful form at A 58 = B 83 of his Critique of Pure Reason:

To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if the question is absurd in itself and demands unnecessary answers, then, besides the embarrassment of the one who proposes it, it also has the disadvantage of misleading the incautious listener into absurd answers, and presenting the ridiculous sight (as the ancients said) of one man milking a he-goat while the other holds a sieve underneath.

The true Kant aficionado will of course know that Kant invoked this simile already in his pre-Critical period in his 1770 Latin Inaugural Dissertation, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis.  See, for the Latin, Daniel S. Robinson, "Kant and Demonax--A Footnote to the History of Philosophy," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 10, No. 3 (Mar., 1950), pp. 374-379.

Below, Professor Robinson misspells Norman Kemp Smith's name. In an age of literary irresponsibility we need more pedants like me. Or maybe not.

Once More on Immigration and the Retromingent Left

One point that needs to be made over and over in the teeth of retromingent leftist incomprehension is that immigration is justified only if it benefits the host country.  Donald Trump understands this; Hillary and her ilk do not.  

This is another reason why his defeat of Hillary is cause for jubilation among those who can think straight. It is also a large part of the explanation why Trump won the 2016 election and why it is an excellent bet that he will win again in 2020, assuming that the Wirtschaftswunder he has ignited continues.

No doubt it is good for Muslims that they be allowed to flood into Germany; but what the Germans need to ask is whether there is any net benefit to them of this in-flooding.  And the same for every country.

The guiding idea here is Country First. America First is just a special case. A good government looks first to the welfare of its own citizens, just as good parents look first to the welfare of their own children.*

Good governors also understand that one cannot force the integration of worldviews in collision. Sharia and the West do not mix.

This is not 'racist' and for two reasons. First, Islam is a religion and its adherents, Muslims, do not constitute a race. Second, even if Muslims did constitute a race, there is nothing 'racist' in any plausible sense of the term about recognizing that comity presupposes commonality.

Far from being 'racist,' what I am urging is just common sense, a commodity in short supply among lefties whom I call retromingents because of their tendency to micturate on the past and its wisdom.

These 'progressives' are transgressive of tradition, and to that extent regressive. 

To say it again: there is no right to immigrate. Correlatively, there is no obligation on the part of any country to accept immigrants.  

On the growth of Europe's Muslim population, see here.

_________________

*To ward off any misunderstanding of the analogy: I am not suggesting that government stands to citizens as parents to children. 

Illegal Immigration and the Misuse of Scripture

At the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, we read:

Why is the Catholic Church involved in the immigration issue? There are several reasons the Catholic Church is involved in the  immigration debate. The Old and New Testaments, as well as the encyclicals of the Popes, form the basis for the Church's position.  In Gospel of Matthew, Jesus calls upon us to "welcome the  stranger,for what you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto me. " (Mt. 25-35, 40).

There is a deep mistake being made here, and we should try to understand what it is. The mistake is to confuse the private and public spheres and the different moralities pertaining to each.

The problem of confusing private and public morality is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin, 1968, p. 245):

The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth interests of the community.) [Arendt cites Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen. As a philosopher/Christian, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

A Catholic bishop, therefore, who is pro illegal immigration on the strength of the "welcome the stranger" passage demonstrates a failure to understand the simple point that Arendt underscores.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug-smuggler or a human-trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law-breaking. I must be concerned with public order and the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's lawbreaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's."

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops who cannot comprehend the simple distinctions I have tried to set forth.

A Struggle for the Soul of America

The acquittal in San Francisco of an illegal alien of all homicide charges throws into unusually sharp relief the difference between the destructive leftists who seek a "fundamental transformation" of the United States and the patriots who defend the country as she was founded to be.  Heather MacDonald:

Advocates for illegal immigrants are unrepentant after yesterday’s shocking acquittal on all homicide charges of an illegal-alien confessed killer. The advocates are defending the sanctuary policies that had set in motion the 2015 killing in San Francisco; they have also doubled down on their opposition to any deportation of illegal aliens, criminal or otherwise. If ever there were a clarifying moment regarding what is at stake in the battle for the immigration rule of law, this is it.

Jose Ines Garcia Zarate was a poster boy not just for the folly of sanctuary policies but also for the mass low-skilled Hispanic immigration that has transformed California. A barely literate drug dealer from Mexico with a second-grade education, no English, and a penchant for criminal aliases, Garcia Zarate had been deported five times by federal immigration authorities following convictions for various crimes.

[. . .]

Donald Trump turned the Steinle case into a powerful rallying cry for immigration enforcement during his presidential run. The illegal-alien lobby, by contrast, denied that San Francisco’s sanctuary policy had anything to do with the killing. California even strengthened its status as an immigration scofflaw after the Steinle homicide. This October, Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 54, the California Values Act, which turns the entire state into an immigration-enforcement-free haven for all but the most heinous illegal-alien criminals. (Brown has been assiduously silent on the Garcia Zarate acquittal.) San Francisco imperceptibly tweaked its local sanctuary policy following the killing; today, it would again release Garcia Zarate if asked under the same conditions to hold him for ICE custody.

According to Garcia Zarate’s attorneys and other illegal-alien advocates, the only blame in this case belongs to Donald Trump and anyone who wants to enforce the immigration laws. “From day one, this case was used as a means to foment hate, to foment division and to foment a program of mass deportation,” public defender Francisco Ugarte said. Ugarte manages the immigration unit at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, where he advises criminal illegal aliens on how to avoid deportation for their crimes. “Nothing about Mr. Garcia Zarate’s ethnicity, nothing about his immigration status, nothing about the fact that he is born in Mexico had any relevance as to what happened on July 1, 2015,” Ugarte said. Actually, the case is almost exclusively about immigration policy; had this country had the ability to protect its borders and deport illegal alien criminals, Garcia Zarate would not have been sunning himself on the Embarcadero on July 1, 2015, but would have been back in Mexico.

There you have it. Which side are you on?

Will you tell me that we need to 'come together,' and 'drop the labels,' and 'find common ground'?  There is no common ground here. Either you stand for national sovereignty and the rule of law, or you don't. Either you distinguish between legal and illegal immigration or you don't. Either you stand for the defunding of 'sanctuary' jurisdictions or you don't, leaving aside the denialist lie that there are no such jurisdictions! 

By the way, this denialism shows just how corrupt so many on the Left are. Unable to defend the indefensible, they deny that it exists!

A correspondent takes a less-than-sanguine view of what's coming:

At this point I believe that a shooting civil war in this country is inevitable; a government that fails in its first duty to protect its citizens is no longer legitimate, and the Left will not leave except it is forced out.

On second thought, this is a sanguine view in a root sense of the word: bloody.  No reasonable person could want full-on civil war and the destruction of civil order.  Everyone should calmly reflect on just how horrible that would be. But if it comes to that we will know whom to blame.

I don't expect it to come to that. But I expect increasing violence.  The wise hope for the best but prepare for the worst.  The prudent are taking precautions and coming to realize that 'lead' is also a precious metal . . . . 

UPDATE (12/3)

Hi Bill,

Just read your item on the shocking verdict in SF. I would call it "incomprehensible"  --  as Steve Sailer points out, the jury had a range of options that should in any rational world have resulted in a homicide finding  --  but it is all too comprehensible if we see this trial not as a search for truth and justice, but as a skirmish in a rapidly warming "cold civil war".

I noted this passage in your post:

"No reasonable person could want full-on civil war and the destruction of civil order.  Everyone should calmly reflect on just how horrible that would be." 

I couldn't agree more. There is a terrible eagerness among the younger firebrands of both Left and Right to "cry havoc", and the calm reflection you ask for is very little in evidence. War may come  --  and when it does we will, as you say, know whom to blame  --  but when it does it will be awful.

I wrote a post of my own about this almost exactly two years ago; it's here, if you'd be interested.

Best as always,

Malcolm

Inconvenient Truths about Migration

Required reading. Yes, kiddies, this will be on the final. Conclusion:

It seems to me that anyone who thinks about such matters is bound to agree with Goodhart that citizenship, for most people, is something they are born into. Values are grown from a specific history and geography. If the make-up of a community is changed too fast, it cuts people adrift from their own history, rendering them rootless. Liberals’ anxiety not to appear racist hides these truths from them. An explosion of what is now called populism is the inevitable result.

The policy conclusion to be drawn is banal, but worth restating. A people’s tolerance for change and adaptation should not be strained beyond its limits, different though these will be in different countries. Specifically, immigration should not be pressed too far, because it will be sure to ignite hostility. Politicians who fail to “control the borders” do not deserve their people’s trust.

It's true: liberals are terribly anxious about being pegged as racists and this anxiety blinds them. But there is nothing racist about insisting on the rule of law and the defense of the borders.

Besides, illegal immigrants do not constitute a race of people.  Liberals are not stupid, so they must know this, right?

"But Trump's wall is nonetheless racist since the vast majority of illegal immigrants are Hispanic."

Not so. Granted, most of the illegal entrants are Hispanic, but what sane conservatives oppose is not the race or ethnicity of illegal immigrants but the illegality of their mode of entry.  Suppose, per impossibile, that England were directly to our south. We would oppose their illegal entry as well. 

One good thing about Mexicans, however, is that their cuisine is vastly superior to anything the English have on offer.

Control of the borders is a constitutionally-mandated function of the Federal government.  As I said, liberals are not stupid; so they do have the capacity to grasp that when politicians fail to uphold the Constitution, decent law-abiding citizens won't like it. This is perhaps the main reason Hillary was handed her walking papers.  

"But isn't the Great Wall of Trump hateful?"  

Well, is it hateful when you lock your doors at night, screen applicants to your company, supervise with whom your children associate?

Securing one's domicile is not an expression of hatred of the Other, but an expression of love of one's family.

Sanctuary City Denialism

There are those who attempt to downplay the depth of our social and political disagreements. But no honest and intelligent observer can fail to note just how deep they go. 

One sort of disagreement is over the attributes of an object admitted to exist.  That's bad enough. Worse still are those disagreements over the very existence of the object. And perhaps the worst form of denialism or eliminativism is the form in which the object denied manifestly exists.

For example, it is manifestly the case that there are beliefs and desires. But there is a species of loon in the philosophy of mind who, unable to make sense of these intentional states, denies their existence.

In the political sphere we have a tribal Hispanic such as Francisco Hernandez who denies the very existence of sanctuary jurisdictions. He does not admit their existence and defend them, which would be slightly respectable. The mendacious bastard denies their very existence.  See for yourself.  The brilliant Mark Steyn sits in for Tucker Carlson. Camarota refutes Hernandez.

Is it not obvious that politics is war? There are very nice people who say we need to come together, drop the labels, and have 'conversations.' Their hearts are in the right place, but where are their heads?

Or to change the metaphor: what planet do they live on? Uranus?

Come together? On what common ground?

Have a conversation? What's to discuss?  Should we have a conversation about the validity of arithmetic? (I'm not talking about the foundations of arithmetic, or the Peano axioms, or anything like that, but about the arithmetic you learned or should have learned in grade school.) 

Mayor of Albany Lies on Tucker Carlson Show

Kathy Sheehan, mayor of Albany, New York, while defending sanctuary cities, told an egregious lie on Tucker Carlson's show tonight (11/16) when she said that 'undocumented' (her word) workers were not in the U. S. illegally.  Although Carlson eventually called her on it, he failed to clarify the distinction that Sheehan was mendaciously and confusedly exploiting.  

Is Illegal Immigration a Crime?

It is. Illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime. 

If a foreign national enters the country on a valid travel or work visa, but overstays his visa, failing to exit before the expiration date, then he is in violation of federal immigration law. But this comes under the civil code, not the criminal code. Such a person is subject to civil penalties such as deportation.

So there are two main ways for an alien to be illegal. He can be illegal in virtue of violating the criminal code or illegal in virtue of violating the civil code. 

Those who oppose strict enforcement of national borders show their contempt for the rule of law and their willingness to tolerate criminal behavior, not just illegal behavior.

This is very serious business especially when the criminally illegal aliens are also criminal in the manner of MS-13 gang members.   

Sheehan may well have her heart in the right place as so many benighted liberals do.  She came across to me as a nice Irish Catholic girl out to make the world a better place. Being of the female persuasion, she probably thinks  of government maternally.  If so, this tendency might help explain why she has trouble with such simple distinctions as the one I drew above. 

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Jury picked in murder case that stoked immigration debate

It is. Illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime. 

If a foreign national enters the country on a valid travel or work visa, but overstays his visa, failing to exit before the expiration date, then he is in violation of federal immigration law. But this comes under the civil code, not the criminal code. Such a person is subject to civil penalties such as deportation.

So there are two main ways for an alien to be illegal. He can be illegal in virtue of violating the criminal code or illegal in virtue of violating the civil code. 

Those who oppose strict enforcement of national borders show their contempt for the rule of law and their willingness to tolerate criminal behavior, not just illegal behavior.

This is very serious business especially when the criminally illegal aliens are also criminal in the manner of MS-13 gang members.   

Sheehan may well have her heart in the right place as so many benighted liberals do.  She came across to me as a nice Irish Catholic girl out to make the world a better place. Being of the female persuasion, she probably thinks  of government maternally.  If so, this tendency might help explain why she has trouble with such simple distinctions as the one I drew above. 

It Bears Repeating

1) There is no right to immigrate.  Correlatively, no nation is under any obligation to accept immigrants.

2) Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country. Trump understands this; leftists don't. Another reason to rejoice that Trump is president.

You don't like his style? Suck it up.  He is doing good things for the country.

Diversity Visa Program? An outrage to any sane American.

Fratelli d'Italia

The Italians are wising up. Georgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy exposes the Left's migrant agenda.

Mark Steyn on Borders

Here:

The left is quite explicit: Borders are fascist and racist, and thus the organizing principle of the world for the last four centuries - the nation state - is an illegitimate concept. The globalist establishment is not that upfront about it: they're more of the view, publicly, that the nation state is an obsolescent and increasingly irrelevant concept. This is, in fact, "burning the Constitution", and even the very concept of constitutions, and of the Peace of Westphalia - for the two most fundamental aspects of any state are borders and citizenship. If there are no borders, there are no citizens, only competing tribes of identity politics - like Dreamers. And, if , as his name surely suggests, a Dreamer trumps a citizen, and if anyone on the planet is a potential American, then American citizenship is objectively worthless.

Words matter. Which is why seeing too many of the conservative commentariat meekly swallow the open-borders crowd's framing of the issue is so dispiriting. In this case, the Dream is a nightmare - of the end of nations, and of ordered societies.

"We Are All Immigrants"

Charlie Rose told this blatant lie during his 60 Minutes interview of Steve Bannon. I never thought much of Rose, but now I think even less of him. And of course he refused to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Bannon was too restrained. He should have punched back harder.

Reason to End Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Act

Andrew C. McCarthy explains:

The problem is the substance of executive action. DACA is defective in two ways. First, it presumes to exercise legislative power by conferring positive legal benefits on a category of aliens (the “dreamers,” as concisely described in Yuval Levin’s Corner post). Second, it distorts the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion to rationalize this presidential legislating and to grant a de facto amnesty. These maneuvers violated core constitutional principles: separation of powers and the president’s duty to execute the laws faithfully.

There has never been a shred of honesty in the politics of DACA. Democrats have taken the constitutionally heretical position that a president must act if Congress “fails” to. They now claim that to vacate DACA would be a travesty, notwithstanding that the program is blatantly illegal and would be undone by the courts if President Trump does not withdraw it. For his part, candidate Trump loudly promised to repeal Obama’s lawless decree but, betraying the immigration-permissivist core that has always lurked beneath his restrictionist rhetoric, Trump has wrung his hands through the first eight months of his presidency. As for the Republican establishment, DACA is just another Obamacare: something that they were stridently against as long as their objections were futile, but that they never sincerely opposed and — now that they are accountable — cannot bring themselves to fight.

Trump Pardons Joe Arpaio

And conservatives cheer. Of course. Paul Mirengoff gets it right:

Arpaio was accused by the Obama Justice Department and other left-wingers of targeting Hispanics. Indeed, the legal case that led to his conviction arose from claims of racial profiling. But in Maricopa County, the illegal immigrant population is overwhelmingly Hispanic. Had the County been plagued by mass illegal immigration by Koreans, chances are Sheriff Joe would have targeted Asians. And he would have been right to do so. Sheriffs shouldn’t be expected to check their common sense at the door.

To be sure, the pardon of Arpaio is, at least in part, a political act by a president who campaigned on a tough-as-nails immigration policy and who received Arpaio’s backing. But there’s a pretty good argument that the prosecution of Arpaio was also political.

It was the highly politicized, left-wing Obama Justice Department that chose to prosecute Arpaio in connection with the hot button political issue of enforcing immigration laws. The judge whose order Arpaio defied apparently was satisfied with civil contempt. Team Obama went criminal on the octogenarian sheriff. And it did so, according to Arpaio’s lawyers, just two weeks before he stood for reelection.

The pardon thus can be said to represent a political end to a political case.

Some may defend the pardon by comparing it to egregious pardons of the past, like President Clinton’s pardon of wealthy fugitive Marc Rich and President Obama’s pardon of a Puerto Rican terrorist. Arguing form [from] these outliers strikes me as misguided. Their pardons were so flagrantly unjust that the same argument could be used to defend a great many indefensible pardons.

No such argument is required to defend Trump’s pardon of Arpaio. It was a reasonable exercise of the pardon power.

Clinton and Obama used the pardon power destructively, pardoning scumbags. Trump used it constructively, pardoning one who upheld the rule of law.

You say Arpaio is a racist? Do you understand that illegal aliens do not constitute a race?

But there is no point in addressing liberals with rational arguments. They don't inhabit the plane of reason. They will ignore your arguments and go right back to calling you a racist. They have found that that works, and they are out to win by any means.

Is Trump Divisive?

To say of Trump or anyone that he is divisive is to say that he promotes (political) division. But there is no need to promote it these days since we already have plenty of it. We are a deeply and perhaps irreparably divided nation.  So it is not right to say that Trump is divisive: he is standing on one side of an already existing divide.

Trump did not create the divide between those who stand for the rule of law and oppose sanctuary cities, porous borders, and irresponsibly lax legal immigration policies.  What he did is take up these issues fearlessly, something his milque-toast colleagues could not bring themselves to do.  

And he has met with some success: illegal immigration is down some 50%. 

Liberals call him a bigot, a racist, a xenophobe. That they engage in this slander shows that the nation is bitterly divided over fundamental questions. 

Too often journalistic word-slingers shoot first and ask questions never. Wouldn't it be nice if they thought before their lemming-like and knee-jerk deployment of such adjectives as 'divisive'?

Language matters.

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California sues DOJ over threats to withhold federal funds to sanctuary cities

Dayton, Drugs, and Borders

Looks like I 'got' while the 'gittin' was good.  

I taught at the University of Dayton from 1978 to 1989 before moving on to Case Western Reserve University. Dayton the town was a boring place, but not a bad place to live in in those days. According to this Daily Mail piece, however, it has turned into an opioid hell-hole, indeed the worst such hell-hole in the entire country:

For this town, celebrated as the home of the Wright Brothers and birthplace of aviation, is now the epicentre of a horrific epidemic ripping apart families and communities.

[ . . .]

Montgomery County in Ohio, which includes Dayton, is currently thought to have highest rates of deadly overdoses in America. It is expecting 800 drug deaths this year – more than triple its 2015 tally. The 420 already logged easily exceeds last year’s total.

From the The New York Times:

In some Ohio counties, deaths from heroin have virtually disappeared. Instead, the culprit is fentanyl or one of its many analogues. In Montgomery County, home to Dayton, of the 100 drug overdose deaths recorded in January and February, only three people tested positive for heroin; 99 tested positive for fentanyl or an analogue.

Fentanyl isn’t new. But over the past three years, it has been popping up in drug seizures across the country.

Most of the time, it’s sold on the street as heroin, or drug traffickers use it to make cheap counterfeit prescription opioids. Fentanyls are showing up in cocaine as well, contributing to an increase in cocaine-related overdoses.

The most deadly of the fentanyl analogues is carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer 5,000 times stronger than heroin. An amount smaller than a few grains of salt can be a lethal dose.

How do fentanyl and its analogues get into the country?  A lot of it comes from China via the U. S. Mail. But it also comes over the southern border  from Mexico by foot, car, drone and -- wait for it -- catapults!

So, to point out the obvious, here we have another good reason to control the borders.   

Dear 'liberals,' there is nothing hateful about a wall along the southern border. When you lock your doors at night, do you thereby demonstrate hatred of those outside your house? No, you demonstrate love and concern for those inside. Please try to think clearly about the issue while setting aside your irrational prejudices against conservatives. We are not xenophobes and we are not racists.  Besides, if you think about it, you should be able to grasp that illegal aliens do not constitute a race.

As for 'xenophobia,' if you look it up, you will see that xenophobia is an irrational fear of foreigners and things foreign. But a fear of drug traffickers, human traffickers, MS-13 gangsters and other illegal aliens of the criminal persuasion would seem to be rational, would it not?  

So my plea to you liberals is to give clear thinking a chance. For your own good.

In this Prager U video, Charles Krauthammer presents a workable and humane solution to the problem of illegal immigration and makes an impressive case for a border wall. About five and one half minutes long.

I'm not Totally Opposed to Open Borders

I'm for half-open borders, borders open in the outbound direction.  Anyone who wants to emigrate should be allowed to do so. 

Communists need walls to keep people in, we need walls to keep them out.  Hence the rank absurdity of the comparison of a wall on our southern border to the Berlin Wall.  Now the mendacious leftists who make this comparison cannot be so historically uninformed as not to see its rank absurdity.  But they make it anyway because they will say or do anything to win.  They are out for power any way they can get it.

It is interesting that even hate-America leftists do not want to leave the United States. They talk about it, but few do it. And where do they say they will go? Canada is high on the list. Why not Mexico? Are they perhaps racists?

Build the Wall

In this PragerU video, Charles Krauthammer presents a workable and humane solution to the problem of illegal immigration. About five and one half minutes long.

Quotation of the Day

From Malcolm Pollack's Cower of London entry:

When you won’t build a wall around your country, you must build walls around everything inside your country.

Along the same lines, is it not insane for Western countries to expend blood and treasure battling ISIS and other Islamist terror groups in their lands while allowing Muslims to enter our lands largely unvetted?

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Time for a Moratorium on Immigration from Muslim Lands?

Here we go again. The third terrorist attack in the U. K. since March of this year. And so time to re-run the following entry from 5 December 2015. Please think it through for your own good and that of your descendants.

.............

And now San Bernardino.  It is surely 'interesting' that in supposedly conservative media venues such as Fox News there has been no discussion, in the wake of this latest instance of Islamic terrorism, of the obvious question whether immigration from Muslim lands should be put on hold.  Instead, time is wasted refuting silly liberal calls for more gun control.  'Interesting' but not surprising.  Political correctness is so pervasive that even conservatives are infected with it.  It is very hard for most of us, including conservatives, to believe that it is Islam itself and not the zealots of some hijacked version thereof that is the problem.  But slowly, and very painfully, people are waking up. But I am not sanguine that only a few more such bloody events will jolt us into alertness.  It will take many more.

So is it not eminently reasonable to call for a moratorium on immigration from Muslim lands?  Here are some relevant points.  I would say that they add up to a strong cumulative case argument for a moratorium.

1. There is no right to immigrate.  See here for some arguments contra the supposed right by Steven A. Camarota.  Here is my refutation of an argument pro.  My astute commenters add further considerations. Since there is no right to immigrate, immigrants are to be allowed in only if they meet certain criteria.  Surely we are under no obligation to allow in those who would destroy our way of life.

2.  We philosophers will debate until doomsday about rights and duties and everything else.  But in the meantime, shouldn't  we in our capacity as citizens exercise prudence and advocate that our government exercise prudence?  So even if in the end  there is a right to immigrate, the prudent course would be to suspend this supposed right for the time being until  we get a better fix on what is going on.  Let's see if ISIS is contained or spreads.  Let's observe events in Europe and in Britain.  Let's see if Muslim leaders condemn terrorism.  Let's measure the extent of Muslim assimilation.

3. "Overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land, according to a worldwide survey by the Pew Research Center." Here.  Now immigrants bring their culture and their values with them.  Most Muslims will bring a commitment to sharia with them.  But sharia is incompatible with our American values and the U. S. Constitution.  Right here we have a very powerful reason to disallow immigration from Muslim lands.

4.  You will tell me that not all Muslims subscribe to sharia, and you will be right.  But how separate the sheep from the goats?  Do you trust government officials to do the vetting?  Are you not aware that people lie and that the Muslim doctrine of taqiyya justifies lying? 

5.  You will insist that not all Muslims are terrorists, and again you will be right. But almost all the terrorism in the world at the present time comes from Muslims acting upon Muslim beliefs. 

Pay attention to the italicized phrase. 

There are two important related distinctions we need to make.

 

There is first of all a distinction between committing murder because one's ideology, whether religious or non-religious, enjoins or justifies murder, and committing murder for non-ideological reasons or from non-ideological motives.  For example, in the Charlie Hebdo attack, the murders were committed  to avenge the blasphemy against  Muhammad, the man Muslims call 'The Prophet'  and consider Allah's messenger.  And that is according to the terrorists themselves.  Clearly, the terrorist acts were rooted in Muslim religious ideology in the same way that Communist and Nazi atrocities were rooted in Communist and Nazi political ideology, respectively.   Compare that to a mafioso killing an innocent person who happens to have witnessed a crime the mafioso has committed.  The latter's a mere criminal whose motives are crass and non-ideological: he just wanted to score some swag and wasn't about to be inconvenienced by a witness to his crime.  "Dead men tell no tales."

 

The other distinction is between sociological and doctrinal uses of terms such as 'Mormon,' 'Catholic,' Buddhist,' and 'Muslim.'  I know a man who is a Mormon in the sense that he was born and raised in a practicing Mormon family, was himself a practicing Mormon in his early youth, hails from a Mormon state, but then  'got philosophy,' went atheist, and now rejects all of the metaphysics of Mormonism.  Is he now a Mormon or not?  I say he is a Mormon sociologically but not doctrinally.  He is a Mormon by upbringing but not by current belief and practice.  This is a distinction that absolutely must be made, though I won't hold it against you if you think my terminology less than felicitous.  Perhaps you can do better.  Couch the distinction in any terms you like, but couch it.

 

Examples abound.  An acquaintance of mine rejoices under the surname 'Anastasio.'  He is Roman Catholic by upbringing, but currently a committed Buddhist by belief and practice.  Or consider the notorious gangster 'Whitey' Bulger who is fortunately not an acquaintance of mine.  Biographies of this criminal refer to him as Irish-Catholic, which is not wrong. But surely none of his unspeakably evil deeds sprang from Catholic moral teaching.  Nor did they spring from Bulger's 'hijacking' of Catholicism.  You could call him, with some justification, a Catholic criminal.  But a Catholic who firebombs an abortion clinic to protest the evil of abortion is a Catholic criminal in an entirely different sense.   The difference is between the sociological and the doctrinal.

 

6.  Perhaps you will say to me that the percentage of Muslims who are terrorists is tiny.  True.  But all it takes is a handful, properly positioned, with the right devices, to bring the country to a screeching halt.  And those who radicalize and inspire the terrorists need not be terrorists themselves.  They could be imams in mosques operating in quiet and in secret.

 

7.   You will tell me that a moratorium would keep out many good, decent Muslims who are willing to assimilate, who will not try to impose sharia, who will not work to  undermine our system of government, and who do not condone terrorism.  And you will be right.  But again, there is no right to immigrate.  So no wrong is done to good Muslims by preventing them from immigrating. 

 

8.  Think of it in terms of cost and benefit.  Is there any net benefit from Muslim immigration?  No.  The cost outweighs the benefit.  This is consistent with the frank admission that there are many fine Muslims who would add value to our society.

 

9.  Perhaps you will call me a racist.  I will return the compliment by calling you stupid for thinking that Islam is a race.  Islam is a religious-political ideology.

It is Saturday night and I'm 'Islamed out.'  I could say more but I've had enough for now.   So I hand off to Patrick J. Buchanan, Time for a Moratorium on Immigration?

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From the Mail Bag: Islam and the West

Immigration Policy Comes First

I have been discussing Islamist terrorism with a couple of Brits who are open to the sorts of things I say. One of them I know is a conservative; the other I think is.  What struck me is that both make a curious lefty move.  The move is well-described by Heather Mac Donald:

Defenders of the open-borders status quo inevitably claim that if a terrorist is a second-generation immigrant, like Abedi [the Manchester suicide bomber], immigration policy has nothing to do with his attack. (Abedi’s parents emigrated to Britain from Libya; his immediate family in Manchester lived in the world’s largest Libyan enclave outside Africa itself.) Media Matters ridiculed a comment about the Manchester bombing by Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt with the following headline: FOX NEWS HOST SUGGESTS ‘OPEN BORDERS’ ARE TO BLAME FOR MANCHESTER ATTACK CARRIED OUT BY BRITISH NATIVE.

My correspondents are not open-borders advocates, but they seem to want to decouple questions about immigration policy from questions about 'homegrown' terrorists.  That strikes me as foolish. I answer them in the words of Heather Mac:

Pace Media Matters, a second-generation Muslim immigrant with a zeal for suicide bombing is as much of an immigration issue as a first-generation immigrant with a terrorist bent. The fact that second-generation immigrants are not assimilating into Western culture makes immigration policy more, not less, of a pressing matter. It is absurd to suggest that Abedi picked up his terrorist leanings from reading William Shakespeare and William Wordsworth, rather than from the ideology of radical Islam that has been imported into Britain by mass immigration.

Of course! Isn't that blindingly obvious?

And another thing. 

'Homegrown terrorist' is an obfuscatory leftist phrase.  That is why I enclosed it in sneer quotes above.   Why obfuscatory?  Because it elides an important distinction between those terrorists who are truly homegrown such as Timothy McVeigh and those who, while born in the USA, such as Omar Mateen, derive their 'inspiration' from foreign sources.  Mateen's terrorism comes from his understanding of what Islam requires, namely, the liquidation of homosexuals. There is nothing homegrown about Islam.  This in stark contrast to the American sources of McVeigh's terrorism.

It is perfectly obvious why liberals and leftists use 'homegrown terrorist' in application to the likes of Mateen: they want to deflect attention from the real problem, which is radical Islam.

Language matters!

Heather Mac's article is here. 

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Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam (Revised and Expanded)

Andrew C. McCarthy on the Islamist Challenge to Religious Liberty

McCarthy knows this subject from the inside and sees things with blinding clarity:

. . . the challenge of Islam must be confronted head-on and without apology. That is unavoidable. You can’t flinch. It is a certainty that the Democrat-media complex — of which Islamist organizations are members in good standing — is going to smear you as a racist “Islamophobe.” (Yes, this is another race-obsessed “progressive” narrative, so Islam gets to be the “race,” so that defenders of the Constitution and Western culture can be cast as “the oppressor.”) You have to be content with knowing that you are not a racist, with knowing that you are defending religious liberty, including the religious liberty of pro-Western Muslims.

There is a single battle that must be won. American culture must be convinced that Islam, while it has plenty of diversity, has a mainstream strain — sharia supremacism — that is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology hiding under a religious veneer.

Permit me a respectful quibble. (I say 'respectful' because McCarthy's qualifications in this area far exceed mine.) A more measured way of putting the point would be by saying that sharia supremacism is at once both a totalitarian political ideology and a religion.  It is a hybrid ideology that blends the religious with the political. The religiosity of sharia supremacism is not a mere veneer.  But this is a mere quibble since, either way, the practical problem remains and the goal of the "single battle" is the same: to keep sharia-based Islam out of the U. S. A.

Intellectually, this should not be a difficult thing to do. Sharia supremacism does not accept the separation of religion from political life (which is why it is lethally hostile to reform Muslims). It requires the imposition of classical, ancient sharia law, which crushes individual liberty (particularly freedom — of conscience, of speech, and in economic affairs). It systematically discriminates against women and non-Muslims. It is cruel in its enforcement. It endorses violent jihad to settle political disputes (since such disputes boil down to whether sharia is being undermined — a capital offense).

What I have just outlined is not a “theory.” Quite apart from the fact that sharia supremacism is the subject of numerous books, studies, public-opinion polls, and courtroom prosecutions, one need only look at life in Saudi Arabia and Iran, societies in which the regime imposes sharia. As I mentioned a few days ago, one need only look at the State Department’s warnings to Americans who travel to Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, what should be easy to establish intellectually is difficult as a practical matter. Sharia supremacists and their progressive allies maintain that Islam may not be parsed into different strains. For legal purposes, they insist it is a monolith that is protected by religious-liberty principles — notwithstanding that a) progressives are generally hostile to religious liberty and b) sharia supremacists themselves would destroy religious liberty. Perversely, then, they argue that the First Amendment is offended by national-security measures against anti-American radicals who would, given the chance, deep-six the First Amendment in favor of sharia.

This may well be the heart of the issue. If Islam is a religion like any other, then it is protected by religious-liberty principles. If so, any attempt to keep sharia-supporting Muslims out of the country would run counter to the values enshrined in the First Amendment, specifically, the first clause thereof.  It would constitute discrimination on the basis of religion.

The issue, then, is whether Islam is a religion like any other.  Clearly, it is not. If McCarthy is right, then it is a political ideology masquerading as a religion; if I am right, it is a hybrid ideology.  Either way, it is a political threat to our political system which is premised on the separation of church/mosque/synagogue and state. 

It is essential to win this debate over the political nature of sharia supremacism. Our law has a long constitutional tradition, rooted in the natural and international law of self-defense, of excluding aliens on the basis of radical, anti-American political ideology. Thus, if sharia supremacism is deemed a political ideology, we can keep out alien adherents of a cause that both inspires the terrorists of today and, wherever it is allowed to take root, produces the terrorists of tomorrow.

Yet, we also have a strong commitment to religious freedom. If at the end of the debate — assuming we ever have the debate — our culture’s conclusion is that sharia supremacism equals Islam, equals religion, equals immunity from governmental protective measures, then the Constitution really will have become a suicide pact. We will have decided that anti-constitutional sharia radicals are just as welcome as any other Muslim.

Sharia supremacists are like communists: they use our values against us. They hypocritically invoke them to subvert them. If we allow them to do this we are fools and we deserve to perish. Our magnificent Constitution must not be allowed to become a suicide pact.

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From the Mail Bag: Islam and the West

This from a U. K. reader:

You wrote:

So what measures should we in the West take?  

I will mention just the most obvious and most important one: severely curtail Muslim immigration.  There is no right to immigrate, and correspondingly, we are under no obligation to let in subversive elements.    We have a culture and a way of life to protect, and their culture and way of life are inimical to ours. Muslims who enter the USA should be forced to sign a statement in which they renounce Shari'a, and then they must be monitored for compliance.

This is not a religious test but a cultural-political test:  do you share our values or not?  Chief among these values is toleration.

I agree with you -- it mainly comes down to value systems (I wrote a blog post on just this a couple of years ago). But a couple of points:

1. In my experience there are two types of Muslim immigrants to the West: educated graduates who have no interest whatever in Islam, and who sometimes actively hate it. I have worked with and have close friends fitting this description. The second are uneducated, and are far more likely to embody the kinds of values we mostly find repellent in the West; some of these people commit crimes against women and children thinking them to be normal privileges, and create cultural ghettos (however some have been victims of religious persecution). So I think curtailing Muslim immigration is too coarse a tool; I'd rather deprive totalitarian theocratic regimes of their better people, both for the sake of those individuals, and in the hope of keeping such regimes from gaining greater power (or perhaps their more courageous citizens overthrowing said dictatorships).

BV: The reader's idea is very interesting: take the best and brightest from Muslim countries, thereby causing a  'brain drain'; this will weaken totalitarian theocracies and possibly lead to their overthrow. And of course the reader is absolutely right that not every Muslim is a Sharia supremacist.  

The difficulty, of course, is to separate the sheep from the goats (to employ a New Testament image for the sake of maximal political incorrectness). It's a problem of vetting. This is made difficult by the doctrine of taqiyya which justifies a Muslim's lying to non-Muslims.  Practically, it will be very difficult to separate the assimilable Muslims from the non-assimilable ones.

Given this fact, it would be wise to curtail Muslim immigration, at least for the time being. 'Curtail' does not mean stop.  It means reduce in extent or quantity.  Or one could have a temporary total stoppage which is what a moratorium is. One of the questions that has to be asked, and that people are afraid to ask is this: what is the net benefit to a Western country of Muslim immigration?  I am assuming, as any rational person must, that immigration can only be justified if it works to the benefit of the host country. 

A second problem with the reader's suggestion is that it will have the effect of weakening the Muslim countries that suffer the 'brain drain.' But we want them to flourish, don't we?  If they flourish, then they are less likely to practice and export terrorism.  Happy people don't cause trouble. And happy people don't leave their homelands. Lefties such as Obama and Hillary are not entirely wrong: the more economically prosperous the Muslim lands, the lower the appeal of radical Islam.

2. I think one way to go about dealing with traditional Islam (which is the problem, not so-called 'political Islam' - Islam is inherently 'political') in the West is to find a way to legislate against the promotion of ideologies containing certain features - primarily those the conflict with our basic notions of human rights, i.e. freedom of thought and expression, non-discrimination on the basis of innate qualities (sex, race etc), and so on; ideologies that tend toward fascism. We need to think more on how we would deal with a serious movement of National Socialism or Italian Fascism today. No names of any religion or ideology need be mentioned, just the unacceptable features. Here 'legislate' probably doesn't mean in law, but by other means; it might even mean immigrants renouncing Sharia as you say. But unfortunately, the majority of Jihadist terrorism in Europe comes from citizens born into the cultural ghettos with their alternate value systems and deep resentments. No immigration policy can touch them.

It is interesting to note that we still have the absurd crime of blasphemy on the statute books in the UK, but there is nothing to protect our system of common law or values.

BV: I agree that Islam is inherently political: it is as much a political ideology as a religion. I call it a 'hybrid' ideology.  People who speak of 'political Islam,' however, have in mind the project of a reform of Islam which would render it consistent with Western political principles and values. I am thinking of Zuhdi Jasser, for example. Part of his proposed reform is a separation of mosque and state. I fear that his proposal is utopian; if it could be achieved, however, Islam would cease to be the world-wide problem it is.

As for 'legislation' that is not achieved by passing laws, I just don't understand what that could be.

My reader suggests that no change in immigration policy will affect the jihadis that are born in cultural ghettos in our countries. But that is just false. Suppose that Muslim immigration into the U. K. were stopped. Then no jihadis could be born in the U. K. to the potential Muslim immigrants who would have been stopped.  The young troublemakers already in the U. K. will grow old and become less troublesome.

Meanwhile, you just have to get ruthless with terrorists. That includes the swift and sure application of the death penalty. Do you love your country or not? Do you value your way of life? Are English values and ways worth defending? Or are you a bunch of decadents who don't care whether you live or die?  

As an American who feels a certain piety toward the Mother Country, I hope you grow a collective pair before it is too late.

Paul Gottfried contra New York Magazine re: 'White Nationalism'

Here:

As for me, I can’t understand how my work of almost 50 years amounts to a “nativist strategy.” Most of what I’ve published is scholarship on various historical subjects and hardly a strategy for promoting whiteness or ethno-nationalism. What I have argued when writing political polemics is the following: States that are culturally homogeneous tend to be more stable than those that are not; multiculturalism is a means by which certain elites can generate ethnic and social problems that they then put themselves in charge of and from which they derive benefit. Moreover, multiculturalism is a quintessential political religion, in that it offers moral and spiritual redemption through revolutionary change under the direction of an all-powerful political class. I’ve also mocked the view that whatever American “liberal democracy” and the post-Western “West” have become at this point in time should be a model for universal conversion. The American government should not be running around the globe forcing on others our latest version of “democratic” enlightenment.

The editors of New York may disagree with my priorities and analyses, but I don’t see how this disagreement proves that I’m a white nationalist. 

I'd say Gottfried 1; NYM 0. 

In my What Does 'America First' Mean? I argue, among other things,  that an enlightened nationalism is not to be confused with nativism or white nationalism.

What Does America First Mean?

America First does not mean that that the USA ought to be first over other countries, dominating them.  It means that every country has the right to prefer itself and its own interests over the interests of other countries. This is compatible with respecting other countries' interests and right to self-determination. 

So America First has nothing to do with chauvinism which could be characterized as a blind and intemperate patriotism, a belligerent and unjustified belief in the superiority of one's own country. America First expresses an enlightened nationalism which is obviously compatible with a sober recognition of national failings.  

An enlightened nationalism is distinct from nativism inasmuch as the former does not rule out immigration. By definition, an immigrant is not a native; but an enlightened American nationalism accepts legal immigrants who accept American values, which of course are not the values of the Left or the values of political Islam.

An enlightened nationalism is not isolationist. What it eschews is a fruitless meddling and over-eager interventionism. It does not rule out certain necessary interventions when they are in our interests and in the interests of our allies.

So America First is not to be confused with chauvinism or nativism or isolationism.

It is also not to be confused with xenophobia. The America Firster has no irrational fear of persons or things foreign. The same holds for every enlightened nationalist.

An enlightened nationalism is not a form of idolatry. 'America First' is not in competition with 'God First.' The principles belong to different orders.  The first is a 'horizontal' principle defined over countries; the second is a 'vertical' principle having to do with countries and God. Obviously the following two propositions are logically consistent:

1) Every country has the right to prefer itself and its own interests over the interests of other countries.

2) No country is an appropriate object of worship; only God is worthy of worship.

Finally, an enlightened nationalism is not white-supremacist. I will now quote Rabbi Aryeh Spero, not only because he makes good points, but to distance myself from those Alt-Rightists who are anti-semitic and white-supremacist:

It is not “white supremacism” when people with self-respect display love and admiration for their background and history, wish to defend it, and are proud of it. It is normal and healthy. The opposite is rootlessness. Nor are sincere calls for the maintenance of Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian ethos, as liberals today accuse, “code words for racism”.

The purpose of the shaming we now see coming from liberals against fellow Americans is to muzzle us, so that what we believe is no longer able to be heard or transmitted. It is an enforcement of our political impotence. Longer term, the never-ending demonization is designed to end our civic and religious heritage. Through left-wing bullying and scorn, our heritages are being replaced by the new theologies of progressivism and non-distinctiveness.

That's right; I quibble only with the good rabbi's misuse of 'theology.'  Just as progressivism is not a religion, as I have lately argued ad nauseam, it is also not a theology. 'Theology' refers either to God's knowledge of himself, which lies beyond our ken, or to our attempted knowledge of God. But progressivism has no truck with God, being secularist and atheist in its core forms.

You should read all of Rabbi Spero's piece. 

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Andrew C. McCarthy is always good.

Is Illegal Immigration a Crime?

It is. Illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime. 

If a foreign national enters the country on a valid travel or work visa, but overstays his visa, failing to exit before the expiration date, then he is in violation of federal immigration law. But this comes under the civil code, not the criminal code. Such a person is subject to civil penalties such as deportation.

So there are two main ways for an alien to be illegal. He can be illegal in virtue of violating the criminal code or illegal in virtue of violating the civil code. 

Those who oppose strict enforcement of national borders show their contempt for the rule of law and their willingness to tolerate criminal behavior, not just illegal behavior.

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A Berlin-Style Wall?

The pointlessness of much contemporary political discourse was brought home to me once again last night. One Giselle Fernández was a guest on the O'Reilly Factor. In a blatant display of typical liberal-left mendacity she referred twice to a southern border wall as a "Berlin-style wall." 

Perhaps the best evidence of the greatness of America and the failure of communism is that communist regimes need walls to keep people in whereas we need walls to keep them out.  Hence the rank absurdity of the comparison of a wall on our southern border to the Berlin Wall.  Now the leftists who make this comparison cannot be so obtuse as not to see its rank absurdity.  But they make it anyway because they will say and do anything to win.  

There is no point in further 'conversations.' Action by us, defeat for them.

For a good laugh, see the Telegraph piece below.  Germany was once the land of poets and thinkers (Dichter und Denker). Then it became the land of judges and hangmen (Richter und Henker) And now? Untergang des Abendlandes.

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What's Wrong with Illegal Immigration?

1. First of all, we must insist on a distinction that many on the Left willfully ignore, that between legal and illegal immigration. (Libertarians also typically elide the distinction.)  Legal and illegal immigration are separate, logically independent, issues. To oppose illegal immigration, as any right-thinking person must, is not to oppose legal immigration. So no one should be allowed to enter illegally. But why exactly? What's wrong with illegal immigration? Aren't those who oppose it racists and xenophobes and nativists whose opinions are nothing but expressions of bigotry and hate?  Aren't they deplorable people who cling to religion and guns?  Doesn't everyone have a right to migrate wherever he wants?

2. The most general reason for not allowing illegal immigration is precisely because it is illegal.  If the rule of law is to be upheld, then reasonable laws cannot be allowed to be violated with impunity simply because they are difficult to enforce or are being violated by huge numbers of people.  Someone who questions the value of the rule of law is not someone it is wise to waste time debating.

But of course a practice's being illegal does not entail its being unjust or wrong or reasonably opposed.  So we need to consider reasons why immigration controls are reasonable.

Reasons for opposing illegal immigration 

3. There are several sound specific reasons for demanding that the Federal government exercise its legitimate, constitutionally grounded (see Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution) function of securing the national borders, and none of these reasons has anything to do with racism or xenophobia or nativism or any other derogatory epithet that slanderous leftists and libertarians want to attach to those of us who can think clearly about this issue.

There are reasons having to do with national security in an age of terrorism. There are reasons having to do with assimilation, national identity, and comity. How likely is it that illegals will assimilate if allowed to come in in great numbers, and how likely is social harmony among citizens and unassimilated illegals?  There are considerations of fairness in respect of those who have entered the country legally by satisfying the requirements of so doing. Is it fair that they should be put through a lengthy process when others are allowed in illegally? 

There are reasons having to do with the importation of contraband substances into the country. There are reasons having to to do with the sex trade and human trafficking generally. There are reasons having to do with increased crime. Last but not least, there are reasons pertaining to public health. With the concern over avian influenza, tuberculosis, ebola, and all sorts of tropical diseases, we have all the more reason to demand border control.

Borders are a body politic's immune system. Unregulated borders are deficient immune systems. Diseases that were once thought to have been eradicated have made a comeback north of the Rio Grande due to the unregulated influx of population. These diseases include tuberculosis, Chagas disease, leprosy, Dengue fever, polio, and malaria.

You will have noticed how liberals want to transform into public health issues problems that are manifestly not public but matters of private concern, obesity for example. But here we have an issue that is clearly a public health issue, one concerning which Federal involvement is justified, and what do our dear liberals do? They ignore it. Of course, the problem cannot be blamed solely on the Democrat Party. Republicans like G. W. Bush and John McCain are just as guilty. On immigration, Bush was clearly no conservative; he was a libertarian on this issue. A libertarian on some issues, a liberal on others, and a conservative on far too few.

Illegal aliens do not constitute a race or ethnic group

4. Many liberals think that opposition to illegal immigration is anti-Hispanic. Not so. It is true that most of those who violate the nation's borders are Hispanic. But the opposition is not to Hispanics but to illegal entrants whether Hispanic or not. It is a contingent fact that Mexico is to the south of the U.S. If Turkey or Iran or Italy were to the south, the issue would be the same. And if Iran were to the south, and there were an influx of illegals, then then leftists would speak of anti-Persian bias.

A salient feature of liberals and leftists -- there isn't much difference nowadays -- is their willingness to 'play the race card,' to inject race into every issue. The issue of illegal immigration has nothing to do with race since illegal immigrants do not constitute a race. There is no such race as the race of 'llegal aliens.' Opposition to them, therefore, cannot be racist.  Suppose England were to the south of the U. S. and Englishmen were streaming north.  Would they be opposed because they are white?  No, because they are illegal aliens.  

"But aren't some of those who oppose illegal immigration racists?" That may be so, but it is irrelevant. That one takes the right stance for the wrong reason does not negate the fact that one has taken the right stance. One only wishes they would take the right stance for the right reasons.  Even if everyone who opposed illegal immigration were a foaming-at-the-mouth redneck of a racist, that would not detract one iota of cogency from the cogent arguments against allowing illegal immigration.  To think otherwise is to embrace the Genetic Fallacy.  Not good.

5. The rule of law is a precious thing. It is one of the supports of a civilized life. The toleration of mass breaking of reasonable and just laws undermines the rule of law.

6. Part of the problem is that we let liberals get away with obfuscatory rhetoric, such as 'undocumented worker.' The term does not have the same extension as 'illegal alien.'  I discuss this in a separate post.  But having written thousands of posts, I don't quite know where it is. 

7. How long can a welfare state survive with open borders?  Think about it.  The trend in the USA for a long time now has been towards bigger and bigger government, more and more 'entitlements.' It is obviously impossible for purely fiscal reasons to provide cradle-to-grave security for everyone who wants to come here.  So something has to give.  Either you strip the government down to its essential functions or you control the borders.  The first has no real chance of happening.  Quixotic is the quest  of  strict constructionists  and libertarians who call for it.  Rather than tilting at windmills, they should work with reasonable conservatives to limit and eventually stop the expansion of government.  Think of what a roll-back to a government in accordance with a strictly construed constitution would look  like.  For one thing, the social security system would have to be eliminated.  That won't happen.  Libertarians are 'losertarian' dreamers.  They should wake up and realize that politics is a practical business and should aim at the possible.  By the way, the pursuit of impossible dreams is common to both libertarians and leftists.

'Liberal' arguments for border control

8. Even though contemporary liberals show little or no understanding for the above arguments, there are actually what might be called 'liberal' arguments for controlling the borders:

A. The Labor Argument. To give credit where credit is due, it was not the conservatives of old who championed the working man, agitated for the 40 hour work week, demanded safe working conditions, etc., but the liberals of those days.  They can be proud of this. But it is not only consistent with their concern for workers that they oppose illegal immigration, but demanded by their concern. For when the labor market is flooded with people who will work for low wages, the bargaining power of the U.S. worker is diminished. Liberals should therefore oppose the unregulated influx of cheap labor, and they should oppose it precisely because of their concern for U. S. workers.

By the way, it is simply false to say, as Bush, McCain and other pandering politicians have said, that U.S. workers will not pick lettuce, clean hotel rooms, and the like. Of course they will if they are paid a decent wage. People who won't work for $5 an hour will work for $20. But they won't be able to command $20 if there is a limitless supply of indigentes who will accept $5-10.

B. The Environmental Argument. Although there are 'green' conservatives, concern for the natural environment, and its preservation and protection from industrial exploitation, is more a liberal than a conservative issue. (By the way, I'm a 'green' conservative.) So liberals ought to be concerned about the environmental degradation caused by hordes of illegals crossing the border. It is not just that they degrade the lands they physically cross, it is that people whose main concern is economic survival are not likely to be concerned about environmental protection. They are unlikely to become Sierra Club members or to make contributions to the Nature Conservancy. Love of nature comes more easily to middle class white collar workers for whom nature is a scene of recreation than for those who must wrest a livelihood from it by hard toil.

C. The Population Argument. This is closely related to, but distinct from, the Environmental Argument. To the extent that liberals are concerned about the negative effects of explosive population increase, they should worry about an unchecked influx of people whose women have a high birth-rate.

D. The Social Services Argument. Liberals believe in a vast panoply of social services provided by government and thus funded by taxation. But the quality of these services must degrade as the number of people who demand them rises. To take but one example, laws requiring hospitals to treat those in dire need whether or not they have a means of paying are reasonable and humane -- or at least that can be argued with some show of plausibility. But such laws are reasonably enacted and reasonably enforced only in a context of social order. Without border control, not only will the burden placed on hospitals become unbearable, but the justification for the federal government's imposition of these laws on hospitals will evaporate. According to one source, California hospitals are closing their doors. "Anchor babies"  born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income.

The point is that you can be a good liberal and oppose illegal immigration. You can oppose it even if you don't care about increased crime, terrorism, drug smuggling, human trafficking, disease, national identity, national sovereignty, assimilation, the rule of law, or fairness to those who have immigrated legally. But a 'good liberal' who is not concerned with these things is a sorry human being.

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James Kalb on Illegal Immigration

This is a re-run from 24 April 2010.  The quotation from James Kalb is worth studying.  

But the times they are a'changin' and with Trump in the saddle, a man with the cojones to punch back hard against destructive leftards and quisling wimp-cons, we are likely to see some improvement.   Trump's dressing-down yesterday  of the lamestream media was a delight to watch.

..............................

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has signed into law Arizona Senate Bill 1070.   Illegal aliens are of course up in arms over it.  But why do the ruling elites tend to tolerate mass illegal immigration?  Why are they not upholding the rule of law? James Kalb (The Tyranny of Liberalism, ISI Books, 2008, pp. 49-50) writes,

As to immigration, the people value the ties that make them a people and believe that the country should be run for their own benefit.  Ruling elites, by contrast, are concerned with the power and efficiency of  governing institutions, the status and security of those who run them, and maintenance of the liberal principles that support and justify their rule.  It is in their interest to expand the human resources available to them, even at the expense of those who are already citizens, and to weaken the mutual ties that make it possible for the people to resist rational management and to act somewhat independently.  In addition, any moderately self-seeking ruling class prefers cooperating with members of the ruling class in other countries to representing the interests of their constituents. The practical result of such influences has the suppression of immigration as an issue in the interest of an emerging borderless world order. Restrictionist arguments are scantily presented in the mainstream media, and concern with cultural coherence, national identity, or even the well-being of one's country's workers is routinely denigrated as ignorant and racist nativism.

Kalb's book is proving to be an insightful and stimulating read.

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Liberal Immigration Hyper-Hypocrisy

Trump Labor Secretary nominee Anthony Puzder is under fire for having employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper.  But why should liberals care given that they do not distinguish legal from illegal immigrants while standing for open borders and sanctuary jurisdictions in defiance of the rule of law? Suddenly, these destructive leftists care about immigration law? Liberals should praise Puzder for giving the poor woman a job.  After all, as they say, no human being is illegal!

What the Left is doing here is employing a Saul Alinsky tactic.  The fourth of his Rules for Radicals reads:

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

Leftists judge us by rules for which they have nothing but contempt. 

The ordinary hypocrite will not practice what he preaches, but at least he preaches, thereby paying lip service to ideals of conduct that he puts forth as binding on all.   The Alinksyite leftist is a hyper-hypocrite who preaches ideals of conduct, not to all, but to his enemies, ideals that he has no intention of honoring.

Of course, I am not saying that Puzder did not do wrong in hiring the illegal immigrant. He did, assuming he knew she was illegal.

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Proof that I am a Native American

A while back a front page story in the  local rag of record, The Arizona Republic, implied  that one is either a native American, a black, or an Anglo. Now with my kind of surname, I am certainly no Anglo. And even though I am a 'person of color,' my color inclining toward a sort of tanned ruddiness, I am undoubtedly not black either.

It follows that I am a native American. This conclusion is independently supported by the following argument:

1. I am a native Californian.
2. California is in America.
3. If x is native to locality L, and L is within the boundaries of M, then x is a native M-er.
Therefore
I am a native American.

This argument is impeccable in point of logical form, and sports manifestly true premises. What more do you want?

Note that (2) is true whether 'America' is taken to refer to the USA or to the continent of North America.

Let us also observe that since I am a native American, it cannot be the case that "we are all immigrants" as far too many liberal knuckleheads like to claim.

We need more mockery of liberals. There is little point in attempts to engage them on the plane of reason, for that is not the plane they inhabit.

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Bridges or Walls?

We already have a 'bridge.' Its name is 'legal immigration.' Now we need a wall. Its name is 'rule of law.'