Thread: Assimilating to the GOP - Immigration

Assimilating to the GOP PDF

The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal, Mark Krikorian, Sentinel, 304 pages

By Scott McConnell

No contemporary American political movement has had more difficulty finding an effective tone than the immigration-reform lobby. Its aim of slowing down the rate of immigration has long been supported by popular opinion, but it has never found majority elite support in either party. The eloquent arguments pushed by National Review in the early 1990s, particularly Peter Brimelow’s powerful brief for the American nation as a product of shared culture and ethnicity, were for the most part rejected or shunned by the conservative establishment, which on this issue did not even pretend to follow the impulses of its populist base.

Yet for those convinced that the United States needed a better immigration policy, Republican establishment rejection did not end the matter. A dozen years ago, when I first saw Mark Krikorian—then the new director of the Center for Immigration Studies—I thought he was the best possible voice for making the immigration-restriction argument persuasive to Americans. Young, wonkish, sufficiently ethnic in background and sensibility to be empathetic to the immigrant experience, highly intelligent with a firm grasp of all the policy detail deployed by both sides in the debate, Krikorian had an uncanny ability to normalize the issue, to dampen its emotive aspects and defuse the smear words (nativist, racist, etc.) that proponents of high immigration habitually threw at their opponents. The growth in influence of the Center for Immigration Studies under his leadership confirms this judgment. Especially striking is the headway Krikorian has made in courting influential Republicans: this book is blurbed by both David Frum and Bill Bennett. But history works in curious ways, and the embrace of immigration reform by the conservative establishment presents some difficulties of its own.

Krikorian’s excellent New Case Against Immigration is a lucid elaboration of arguments made by CIS during the past decade. What will strike many as new is his insistence that the trouble is not that immigrants aren’t as smart, industrious, or able to assimilate as the storied Ellis Islanders but that America has so changed as to put mass immigration in an entirely different context. Krikorian explicitly rejects the notion that the predominantly Mexican ethnicity of the new immigration is an issue, pointing out that America has always had an elastic definition of “whiteâ€

By becoming part and parcel of the Republican Right, the immigration-reform movement risks becoming absorbed by the Right’s jingoism, turning into another means of expressing American superiority over foreigners, people to be kept out at home and bombed abroad. This may not be Kirkorian’s sentiment, but it is the mindset of many of the companions with whom the immigration-reform movement now travels. While such allies may fuel the movement’s success, they render it a mixed blessing.

Last time I checked, it was conservatives ( at least in the religious sphere) who were most active in addressing issues of poverty and underdevelopment in other countries. Anybody hear of the volunteer missions effort? You can hardly walk into a fundamentalist church these days without seeing some notice about a volunteer trip to sombrero land.

They are "kept out at home?" I don't know but there are job opprtunities in their home countries---but, just like Americans, they may have to relocate. Many of them don't seem to feel any remorse for hopping freight trains for free transportation to the North.

And "bombed abroad?" Are we bombing people abroad? Dropping bombs from the free jetliner transit for deportees? Please inform me.

Originally Posted by Captainron

And "bombed abroad?" Are we bombing people abroad? Dropping bombs from the free jetliner transit for deportees? Please inform me.

This is another vailed reference to the war in Iraq and civilian casualties. It sounds like some smug Leftist is trying to say that we don't value foreigners in general because we are trying to exterminate Muslims in Iraq by bombing them so watch out! Those mean-spirited Right Wingers hate "hispanics" too, so we have to keep our eye on them!

Give me a break. I am so sick and tired of this Left-wing jargon everywhere i go.

I knew what "bombed abroad" meant--but they were making it sound like a standard foreign policy practice. Clinton bombed abroad, too. And also, apparently , allowed missile targeting technology to go to China. Thanx Bill----guess I'll have to move 200 hundred miles away from any major West Coast city to be safe!