Why did received opinion melt down so spectacularly when Donald Trump
allegedly said in private that he wanted more immigrants from places like “Norway and Asia” and fewer from places like Haiti and
Africa?
Last Thursday, Senators Dick
Durbin (D-IL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) scheduled a meeting with the president
to try to trick him into supporting their politically suicidal immigration
bill. To their dismay, however, when they arrived they found that Trump had
also invited realist immigration experts such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Rep.
Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), and the president’s speechwriter Stephen Miller.
In the ensuing debate, Durbin and Graham were demolished. So Durbin, his
plot foiled, tried the underhanded ploy of asserting to the press, perhaps
inaccurately, that Trump had used the now-notorious vulgarity to characterize
Haiti.
Of course, Haiti ranks 163rd on the U.N.’s
Human Development Index while Norway ranks first, so, as usual, what drives the
establishment most crazy about Trump is his tendency to tell the rough truth.
Trump was immediately denounced for damaging
America’s diplomatic relations with our crucial strategic ally Haiti and making
it potentially harder for the U.S. military to do whatever it is that it’s
doing in Africa that got four U.S. soldiers killed last October in an African
country that most Americans couldn’t find on a globe and few would risk trying
to even pronounce its name out
loud.
Of course, Senator Durbin could simply have kept his mouth shut. Grown-ups
understand that in private negotiations presidents use crude but often accurate
language (the capital of Haiti is one of the world’s largest cities without a functioning sewage system),
and that it’s wrong for senators to reveal conversations with the president to
other countries.
The subsequent uproar confirmed my long-held observation that the
Washington power structure is drifting toward the bizarrely extremist ideology
that the American people have no right to control their own borders, because
their having any opinion about which immigrants to let in constitutes
discrimination.
As one statesman explained the new
orthodoxy way back in 2004:
America
is not only for the whites, but it is for all. Who is the America? The American
is you, me, and that. When we go to America we will become Americans and there
is no a race or nationalism called America and the Americans are those
Africans, Indians, Chinese, and Europeans and whoever goes to America will
become American…. American is for all of us and the whole world had made and
created America. All the people all over the world had made America and it
shall accordingly be for all of us.
—Col.
Muammar Gaddafi of Libya
Sure, Hillary had Gaddafi sodomized to death in 2011, but that was just politics. On
matters of principle, she gave no indication on the campaign trail in 2016 that
she dissented from his view that “The American is you, me, and that.” (In fact,
the Colonel ought to get points for his use of the presciently gender-inclusive
pronoun “that.”) Legal mumbo jumbo about some people being “citizens” while
other people are “not citizens” is transparently racist.
“The
Washington power structure is drifting toward the bizarrely extremist ideology
that the American people have no right to control their own borders.”
America is to be “a colony of the world,”
as Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-WI) noted a quarter of a century ago. And that’s
because Washington is to be the capital of the world.
That explains much of the frenzy of the response to Trump’s comparison of
Norway with Haiti. For Washington to rule the world, America can’t be allowed
to rule itself.
Obviously, from a human-capital standpoint, it makes sense to try to
attract more Norwegians and fewer Haitians. Oil-rich Norway is probably the
world’s most lavish welfare state, so any Norwegian immigrants are likely to be
high-potential earners who would, on average, pay more in taxes than they would
get in welfare. In contrast, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western
hemisphere, with little welfare and the highest population growth rate, so there is
always danger of a Merkel-type rush for America.
On the other hand, from the Beltway foreign-policy perspective, immigration
is considered a crucial carrot to complement the stick of military action. As I
first pointed out a dozen years ago,
Washington’s grand strategy is:
Invade
the world, invite the world.
It might seem kind of nuts to you and me to be inviting in the cousins of
the people you are bombing because of the inevitability of terrorist blowback.
But to America’s foreign-policy establishment, it seems crucial to be able to
mollify foreigners you are drone-striking by also having many of them move to
America. Some of them might even prove useful in taking over their native
governments.
Norway, though, is far too stable to attract much attention from our Deep
State. Washington will never get to airlift into Oslo a provisional government
of Norwegian-American quislings. So what’s the point of trying to attract
Norwegian entrepreneurs and scientists to America just because they would make
good citizens and spouses? (Further, Norwegians, unlike most immigrants these
days, are not eligible for affirmative action.)
In contrast, the Deep State wants Haitian immigration because it
periodically overthrows the Haitian regime. In 1994, the Clinton
administration, at the behest of the Congressional Black Caucus, invaded Haiti
to return the leftist Jean-Bertrand Aristide from exile in the U.S. back into
power. Then, in the 2004 coup, the Bush
administration more or less kidnapped Aristide, flying him off to exile in
Africa.
How can Washington manipulate Haiti without having a certain number of
Haitians living in the U.S. to supply expertise? Moreover, rewarding Haitian
insiders with visas for their relatives is seen as a cheap way to buy
influence.
On the other hand, it’s not at all clear what the American public (much
less the Haitian public) has gotten out of Washington’s contradictory
interventions in Haiti.
Indeed, it’s hard to think of too many instances in which immigrants
actually helped American foreign policy in the long run.
Perhaps the most favorable example is the role played by Sicilian-Americans
in Gen. George S. Patton’s 1943 invasion of Sicily. While the
British army bogged down trying to keep order in conquered towns, the American
army raced ahead because it had brought along certain Sicilian-Americans to
take over civil administration of liberated cities. These tended to be men of
respect, good fellows who had friends who had friends. In other words: the Mafia.
Mussolini had crushed the Cosa Nostra, but the Americans reinstalled the
Mob in power, which didn’t do Sicily much good in the long run. Indeed, it
didn’t even do the Allies much good in World War II because after a spectacular
beginning, our Italian campaign bogged down into an endless slog against a
ferocious German defense.
Other famous examples of immigrants helping out American foreign policy are
even more dubious.
During the early 1940s, American officials were rapturous that the First
Lady of China, Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek,
had graduated from Wellesley in 1917 (she died in New York in 2003 at age 105).
Her husband kept around other Chinese graduates of American colleges to
schmooze with American visitors and inculcate in them a vision that China would
soon Christianize and become America’s best friend in the whole world. In
reality, however, Chiang had no intention of wasting his strength
enthusiastically fighting the Japanese for us. That, in his view, was our job.
Eventually, in 1949, Chiang was overthrown by Mao in a catastrophic setback for
American foreign policy.
In 1945, the U.S. suddenly found itself in possession of the southern half
of Korea, a bafflingly alien culture. While the American government had studied
closely how to occupy and reform Japan and, on the whole, did a good job of it,
it was largely clueless about Korea.
Fortunately, the American authorities managed to find one patriotic
anti-Japanese activist in exile in the U.S., Syngman Rhee, and
installed him in Seoul as strongman.
Unfortunately, Dr. Rhee turned out to be an unpopular hothead who
frequently threatened to invade North Korea. Distrust of Rhee influenced U.S.
secretary of state Dean Acheson to
disastrously leave South Korea off his public list of Asian countries that the
U.S. would fight to defend, which encouraged Stalin and Kim to invade South
Korea in 1950.
After 9/11, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and won a quick victory. The U.S.
hired as Afghan leader Hamid Karzai, the brother of Washington-area
restaurateurs Qayum Karzai and Ahmed Wali Karzai. If you can’t trust
immigrant restaurant-owners, whom can you trust?
On the plus side, Hamid Karzai proved a snappy dresser. On the
minus side, the Karzai family stole huge amounts of money and alienated most
Afghans. Seventeen
years later, the U.S. is still sort of fighting in Afghanistan.
Perhaps the most spectacular example of an immigrant manipulating American
foreign policy for his own purposes was Ahmad Chalabi, who persuaded the neocons to
have America invade Iraq for him so he could replace Saddam Hussein as
president. But Chalabi, who was notorious among his countrymen for a bank fraud
while in exile in neighboring Jordan, proved so unpopular with Iraqis that the
U.S. couldn’t install him in office.
Visas for the relatives of seemingly American-friendly foreigners have long
been part of Washington’s policy quiver.
For example, Washington has allowed Turkish cult leader Imam Gülen to hole up in
the Poconos and rip off American charter schools through
immigration fraud because he might someday prove useful as ruler of Turkey.
Similarly, the Tsarnaev family who blew up the Boston Marathon in 2013 were
admitted to the U.S. because their Uncle Ruslan, a
Washington-area lawyer, was a potential minister of energy in a hypothetical
independent Chechnya. And Uncle Ruslan was married to the daughter of longtime
CIA insider Graham Fuller.
So it’s often hard to distinguish strategic brilliance from nepotistic
idiocy, but nobody is very interested at all in investigating how the American
Deep State has abused immigration for its own purposes.
In contrast, other countries may be exploiting America’s disregard for
immigration security. For instance, this week The Wall Street Journal
headlined:
Officials
said the businesswoman could be trying to further Beijing’s interests, people
familiar with the matter say
Wendi Deng Murdoch is a six-foot-tall Chinese
adventuress who was married to Rupert Murdoch (the owner of the WSJ),
has been seen with former British prime minister Tony Blair, and is
sometimes rumored to be having an affair with Vladimir Putin. She had
gotten her green card from her marriage to her “first known husband,” the American husband of her
English-language tutor.
Whether or not Ms. Murdoch is really a Chinese agent, she might go down in
history for playing a key role in endangering the Trump administration by
having reunited Ivanka with the
hapless Jared.
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