Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Quote of the Day: Dan Henninger on ‘The Great Migrant Embarrassment’
This quote comes from Henninger’s Wonder Land column in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, October 13.
Republicans have been labeled “anti-immigrant,” notwithstanding their arguments that it’s about the rule of law, not immigrants.
Progressive Democrats have self-defined as pro-immigrant, but under real-world pressure, that stance turns out to be a fraud. The Biden administration’s see-and-do-nothing policy catastrophe–drownings, abandoned children, illegal migrants wandering the nation, a fentanyl-addiction crisis emerging alongside–has shocked most Americans. The sanctuary-city pose has collapsed. Whatever advantage Democrats thought they had on immigration, Team Biden-Harris wrecked it. They claim they inherited the problem. Well, they blew it.
…
Democrats in border states may pay politically in November for Mr. Biden’s nonfeasance on the migrant surge. But this tragic mess will remain, with most Americans wondering when their political leaders will resolve it in a way that honors the ideas the crisis is dishonoring–the border, the law, liberty and opportunity.
One little item that Mr. Henninger does not mention, since it would cast a bad light on his fellow WSJ editors, is that they are some of the ones who cast Republicans as “anti-immigrant,” leaving out the “illegal” part. He and his editorial board might be listened to more if they made that distinction.
Published in Group Writing
Listen? To the likes of us?
Heaven forfend.
I’m anti immigrant and couldn’t care less. Getting up and moving from a cesspool doesn’t make you a good person or part of a sacred class. No more.
I’m anti immigrant and couldn’t care less. Getting up and moving from a cesspool doesn’t make you a good person or part of a sacred class. No more.
Yeah, I’ve near zero remaining respect for the Wall Street Journal. Every time I encounter a link that takes me there, they do me the service of reminding me, by placing a paywall in my way. ( That covers the “near-zero” modifier. )
So is it somehow wrong to oppose legal immigration?
I understand Republicans taking this position, as a political matter. It has somehow come to be considered wicked to wish to stop immigration to this country. Why is that? Why should pro-immigration be the only acceptable policy in our country?
As I understand it, we had very little immigration from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, and things were fine. Better than fine, maybe.
And behind that pay wall are some intriguing WSJ editorials:
Opinion: The Case for Open Borders – WSJ
North America Doesn’t Need Borders – WSJ
Open Nafta Borders? Why Not? (“The solution to the problem of illegal immigration is to make it legal”)
We on the right labor under a structural disadvantage in the fields of punditry and opinion. People of the right are generally productive, while people of the left depend on persuasion. Fewer of us devote time to shaping the country’s opinions because we’re naturally occupied elsewhere.
The single biggest reason for that is that all the Europeans who came here originally, were immigrants. Stopping immigration now – including legal immigration – seems like climbing the ladder and pulling it up behind you.
Then, enter Ted Kennedy (and others) with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. According to Kennedy, “…our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually…Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”
Yeah, Teddy-boy, right…
I understand that sentiment, but I don’t think it’s accurate. First of all, the original inhabitants of the USA were former British subjects who lived in the British colonies. They fought to form a new country, but they didn’t immigrate to become Americans. Second, it’s just not accurate to say that this a country of immigrants. My ancestors haven’t been immigrants for generations. This is a country with a unique legal system, culture, and history that has formed the American people over centuries. This country regularly incorporates new citizens who were born elsewhere, but its policies need not default to welcoming anyone and everyone who wishes to live here. Also, it’s one thing to welcome people to settle this country, letting them succeed or fail according to their own efforts, but quite a different thing to assume anyone can come to take advantage of government welfare.
I agree with almost all of that, my point was that you’ll get even “conservative” Republicans in part not being against immigration, because that’s what they’ll be accused of by the left: not allowing other people to benefit from immigration like YOU and your ancestors have and like you expect your descendants to. And that kind of argument can be effective especially with low-information, first-level-thinking voters.
One result of the current administration’s complete capitulation to the woke agenda and radical gender theory just might be that some potential immigrants think twice before coming here. Or maybe they’ll come and be successful at communicating certain hard realities to Americans who’ve become detached from those realities.
*********
This post is part of the Quote of the Day (QOTD) Group Writing project on Ricochet. We welcome regular contributors and newbies who want to share a quote from the past or present and start a conversation! The October QOTD Signup Sheet is here.
Absolutely. But how hard is it to make an argument like I just did? It just seems intuitively wrong to me that pretend that Americans all relate to the immigrant experience. Even the children of immigrants who were born in the U.S. don’t fully relate to what their parents went through.
And just as an aside, my Texas neighborhood was absolutely packed yesterday with Indian immigrants and/Indian Americans celebrating the Hindu festival of Diwali. It was lovely to see the huge gathering and the women in beautiful saris making their way to the Hindu Temple.
Exactly. The same argument would be made by the (mostly white) left against those Indian (dot, not feather) immigrants: how dare they deny to other people what they have so greatly benefited from themselves?
They’d probably welcome anyone who could pass AP Calculus BC (just based on my experience).
I believe we need limited, controlled, legal immigration to the US, due to the declining of birth rates to below replacement level (we Social Security beneficiaries need lots more workers to fund our retirements-don’t hit me, I didn’t start SS until age 71). However, I would like to see hard-closed borders for one year, as a test to see if our tech companies and agriculture are really on the verge of collapse without lots of cheap immigrant labor.
No we need to create conditions where Americans can have children young and it is easy to raise a family. We don’t need to import foreigners to be our future.
We need both. China has been unable to increase its birthrate, even after canceling the one-child policy. It takes decades and a re-alignment of thought to change such ingrained behavior. Do you really think that millions of employed women will just give up their jobs to stay home and raise many children? The Feminists have changed the way women think about their lives, and that kind of thinking cannot be reversed in a moment, or even in a decade. It is a necessary, but not sufficient change that needs to be made.
I also believe that those illegal, low-skilled aliens who have invaded our country in the past 10 years need to be found and expelled, regardless of their position in our society. They broke our laws, and need to go back where they came from and apply the legal way. I would really like to see a law against money-transfer offshore by any immigrant to our country, legal or illegal. Just think of the billions of dollars that leave each year to support families abroad-that money could be used to support American families and industries. How many illegals would not come here in the first place, if they knew they would not be able to support their families back home?
Then let the population fall. One thing China won’t do is import hundreds of millions of Indians changing their country forever in order to fix a population decline. Neither do the Japanese. Neither does really anyone else except the west. It isn’t a solution to change the entire destiny of your nation. If American women are too into sitting in cubicles in soulless corporations to leave a raise families then that’s their fault. We don’t need hundreds of million from the 3rd world because of the decadence of American women.
Some re-education – or perhaps de-education – of women is needed.
I don’t think people on the left depend on persuasion. I think they appeal to emotions.
I propose a simple trade, we take all the immigrants desirous of escaping Socialist hell-holes. But they have to be exchanged for a Lefty American. The Lefty can go anywhere, except the USA.
Except too many of those escapees just don’t think Socialism has been done RIGHT, but they still want it.
Hasn’t the policy of allowing/encouraging chain migration, including older parents, canceled out the benefits of importing younger workers? I’ve read that, but I don’t have data at my disposal.
The WSJ coined a term meant to cast us in a negative light but that describe almost the entire world, “restrictionist”. Shorthand for someone who wishes to restrict immigration. As opposed to free-spirit hippies and anarchists, I suppose. Only lunatics favor immigration without restrictions. Restrictions are very popular on many things all over the world. The WSJ is asinine on this issue. Anyway, we are “restrictionists”! Wear it proudly.
The family reunification policy?
I guess so.
1000%
Those English people (my ancestors) pouring into Virginia and other east coast colonies by as early as the 1630’s did not change their language, their government, their laws, nor their culture. They did not immigrate. They moved from England to English realms across the seas, the proto-British Empire. Call them settlers or invaders, but they were not in the truest sense immigrants.
We have a stupid system where they should have forced people to procreate W-2 slaves at gunpoint. You don’t procreate? We tax the crap out of you. You procreate a W-2 slave? You get bonuses.
Government actuarial systems are disasters almost 100% of the time.
90% of the illegals are lying about asylum. The only people eligible for asylum are people that are under one way political or religious persecution.
We are not set up at all for lots of low skilled labor being imported.
Robert Putnam’s research about shoving diversity down everybody’s throat is accurate in my experience. Just for the record I have either sought out or stumbled into a lot of diversity for a great deal of my work and social life.
Nobody ever talks about this, but 2/3 of GDP is population growth. If you are going to constantly force the debt to GDP ratio up, you better consider that. Same thing with unfunded liabilities.
#BetterLivingThroughCentralPlanning