Bad news and good news: This week demonstrated once again, as if
it needed demonstrating, that there are two major political parties in the
U.S.A.:
·
The party of Open Borders on behalf of Cultural Marxists, anti-white ethnic lobbies,
and public-sector employee lobbies.
What, you don’t think Open Borders is a good idea? Well, shame on
you, you racist; but hey, by all means enjoy having your weird cranky opinion
in the privacy of your chambers. Just don’t expect to have any political
representation in the nation’s legislature.
Those thoughts were of course inspired by this Wednesday’s vote by
the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee. The
purpose of the vote: to approve a budget for the Department of Homeland
Security to cover DHS operations through the coming fiscal year, which starts
October 1st.
Fair enough. DHS operations have to be funded, and the House is
the place to authorize the funding. Which they did: $51.4 billion for the
coming fiscal year. The problem is with some of the amendments that got tacked
on to the budget bill.
You’ll recall that a few weeks ago Attorney General Jeff Sessions tightened the
rules on granting asylum. Obama had loosened them
so that any foreigner showing up with a sob story about an abusive husband or
gang violence in the neighborhood back home could go into asylum proceedings …
with permission to stay and work in the U.S.A. until the proceedings, which are
backed up for years, take place.
No, said Jeff: asylum can be claimed only if you have a
well-founded fear of persecution at home because of your race, religion,
nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.
That’s still too broad in my opinion—what counts as “a particular
social group”? Bird-watchers? Skate-boarders? Mixed Martial Artists?
Alcoholics? It’s way better than what went before, though.
But not to the congressweasels on the Appropriations Committee.
One of them, Rep. David Price of North Carolina, may his name live in infamy,
proposed an amendment to reset grounds for asylum back to the Obama standard.
Congressrat Price is a Democrat, so while this is deplorable, it’s
what you’d expect.
What’s far worse is that the Price amendment passed the committee on a
voice vote, with the approval of the committee chairman, Rodney
Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, and the chairman of the homeland security
subcommittee, Kevin Yoder of Kansas…who are both Republicans!
Yoder actually spoke in
favor of the Price amendment.
Since it was a voice vote, we don’t (not accidentally) have a
precise tally of what committee members thought about the Price
amendment—which, or course, basically throws open our borders to anyone who’s
been coached with a sob story.
We do know, however, that only one of the committee’s thirty
Republican members spoke out against it: Rep. John Carter of Texas. Blessings
on you, Congressman; shame on your GOP colleagues.
Not content with sabotaging the Trump Administration’s efforts to
tighten up border control, congressreptiles Frelinghuysen and Yoder allowed
three other amendments, each one opening our borders wider. All three passed on
voice votes. One of them—proposed by Yoder himself!—expanded chain migration
and employment-based settlement. The other two, both proposed by Republicans,
expanded the H-2 programs for low-skilled workers.
Way to go, Republicans! That’s what the country voted for in 2016:
more low-skilled workers, more chain migration, and asylum for anyone that got
yelled at in the street in Tegucigalpa.
This is not the end of the story, of course. In our hydra-headed
system, the Senate has to pass its own bill, and then there’s the
reconciliation process. So this betrayal is far from becoming law.
But why?
Speaking of gutless, spineless congressional RINO cuckweasels
sabotaging our President, Paul Ryan crawled out of his burrow the other day to
denounce what he called “identity politics”:
That is not conservatism. That is racism, that is nationalism,
that is not what we believe in, that is not the founding vision, that is not
the Founders’ creed, that is not natural rights, that is not natural law.
[Paul Ryan: 'White Identity Politics' of Alt-Right Isn't
Conservatism, but Racism, by Rachel del Guidice, Daily Signal, July
19th 2018.]
Just one more time, listeners, if you’ll please excuse me. I know
you’ve heard this before, but
it can never be quoted too
often:
In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your
economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and
religion.
That was of course the late Lee Kuan Yew, speaking in 2005.
[SPIEGEL Interview with
Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew: "It's Stupid To Be Afraid",
August 8, 2005]
As VDARE.com’s own
Twittermeister has noted, congressional Republicans aren’t much
interested in doing politics. They shuffle around for a few years doing the
bidding of donors, then quit and
go to work as consultants to those donors on
fat contracts.
Paul Ryan might of course prove me wrong when he leaves Congress
in January, but … that’s not the way to bet.
Now the good news: For those of us working the immigration beat,
Birthright Citizenship is a familiar old chestnut. Every so often in our
commentary we take it out, toss it around a bit, then put it back in the
closet.
There are never any political developments on the issue. The
political Establishment decreed long ago that Birthright Citizenship for the
children of non-citizens, including illegal aliens, is implicit in the
Fourteenth Amendment. There are constitutional scholars who say no, it isn’t,
and Congress could end Birthright Citizenship for children of illegals via
legislation—or perhaps even the President could end it by executive order.
We know of course that any legislative or executive efforts of
that kind would end up in the Supreme Court. But if the Supremes ruled that
yes, Birthright Citizenship for children of illegals is implicit in the
Fourteenth, we the people could move for a Twenty-Eighth Amendment to end it.
Hey, it’s high time we had a new Amendment. They used to come at a
pretty steady clip: twelve of them in the Twentieth Century, average one every
eight years. We haven’t had one since 1992, though. Come on, citizens, let’s
give those ratification muscles some exercise!
This is all well-trodden territory among Patriotic Immigration
Reformers. We tend to forget, though, how radioactive the topic is among
mainstream pundits— especially for some reason Jewish-American Republicans.
Whisper the faintest skepticism about Birthright Citizenship to John Podhoretz,
he turns purple and starts screaming. I speak from experience.
I spotted a similar case this week, reading the New York Post over my breakfast oatmeal. There was an op-ed by Karol
Markowicz, one of the Post’s regular
columnists.
Markowicz is not a bad sort. She’s originally Russian-Jewish,
brought here as a small child in the big wave of Lautenberg Amendment
refugee migration from the U.S.S.R. after 1975. Politically
she’s center-right; probably a Never Trumper, though I haven’t checked. Most of
the things she writes about aren’t interesting to me, but that’s not her fault.
So, jolly good luck to Karol Markowicz, with no animosity from me at all.
But here she was writing about Birthright Citizenship:
Michael Anton, a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College
and a former national-security official in the Trump administration, argued
in The Washington Post last week that the US should end Birthright Citizenship. His
idea is noxious—and unconstitutional, as the 14th Amendment grants Birthright
Citizenship.
[How to turn immigrants into full-blooded Americans, by Karol Markowicz; New York Post, July 22 2018.][Links added].
Markowicz is wrong, of course: The Fourteenth Amendment did not
grant Birthright Citizenship to every person born in our territories. It
didn’t, for example, grant it to American Indians. They had to wait until 1924
to get citizenship by act of Congress.
Leaving that aside, though, before the lady said that ending
Birthright Citizenship is unconstitutional, she said it was “noxious.” My
dictionary defines “noxious” as “poisonous, harmful, injurious to health.”
Pretty strong language, then.
You might therefore assume that ending Birthright Citizenship is
an idea way out of the mainstream, with very little currency among civilized
people.
So let’s run a check on that. Pop quiz:
· Which
of the following ten countries give Birthright Citizenship to the children of
illegal aliens? Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan,
New Zealand, Spain, United Kingdom.
·
Answer: None
of them.
Only thirty countries grant
automatic Birthright Citizenship, and only two of the thirty are
on the International Monetary Fund’s 31-country list of advanced economies—us,
and Canada.
That does not of course prove anything about the desirability or
otherwise of giving Birthright Citizenship to the children of illegal aliens.
It may be that the thirty countries that do it are right while the 145
countries that explicitly don’t are wrong. I’ll certainly allow that
possibility.
It does, though, make Karol Markowicz’s usage of the word
“noxious” look mighty strange. A rule in place in twenty-nine advanced
countries but not in the other two is “poisonous, harmful, injurious to
health”? And it’s not Maxine Waters saying so, or Luis Gutierrez, or Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez; it’s a mild-mannered, smart, generally sensible, center-right
opinionator.
This is the weird warped spacetime in which we have to debate
immigration policy in the United States.
Until now. Now Mike Anton (the author, under a pseudonym,
of “The Flight 93 Election”) has been allowed to raise the issue, in of all places in the Washington Post, and provided an innovative and easy solution.
Over to you, President Trump.
John
Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjectsfor all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some
kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming
Conservative Pessimism and
several other books. He has had two books published by
VDARE.com com:FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT(also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT
II: ESSAYS 2013.