The Thomas Chronicles

Beating a dead horse

On the first of this month, Charles Krauthammer began his article on the recent Illegal Immigration Bill with this very commonsensical statement:

“Beware legislative behemoths. Beware “comprehensive immigration reform.” Any bill that is 380 pages long is bound to have nooks and crannies reflecting private deals, quiet paybacks and ad hoc arrangements that you often don’t learn about until it’s too late.”

Even Peggy Noonan, who normally swings from conservative to liberal depending on the issue, chimed in on the bill saying:

Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it’s being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill’s Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay’s pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you’re not, you cur, you gun-totin’ truckdriver’s-hat-wearin’ yahoo. It’s all so complex, and you’d understand this if you weren’t sort of dumb.

But it’s not so complex. The past quarter-century an unprecedented wave of illegal immigrants has crossed our borders. The flood is so great that no one–no one–can see or fully imagine all the many implications, all the country-changing facts of it. No one knows exactly what uncontrolled immigration is doing and will do to our country.

It is difficult to believe that the senators who crafted this bill in secret really wanted an open and honest debate about one of the most critical issue of our time. Unlike previous times, when the MSM had a virtual monopoly over public opinion and visible public discourse, the American people are much more sophisticated and much more politically savvy today than in previous generations. We don’t have a Peter Jennings or a Edward Murrows to whom we can give our trust. We live in an era where the news that’s fit to print no longer lies between the pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Not much is taken for granted. Nothing on someone’s say so. I don’t know if this is going to be a good thing or a bad thing in the long run, but our leaders’ ability to curtail public debate has become severely limited.

For one thing, our good senators know that bloggers and other tech-savvy “John Does” out there are viewing them through an enormous electron microscope. It’s called the Internet. The dissemination of information and the speed in which it is done is breathtaking. A burp from a senator can reverberate throughout the universe and back in the whiplashing five seconds it takes for a person to upload it to his website. Which of our good representatives did we see napping during a speech on the House floor via YouTube?

Perhaps they are painfully aware of just how visible they are to the American public because they first disseminated this immigration bill on Saturday morning at 2 o’clock in the bleeding morning— well before the first coffee pot burned on the warming pad. To add insult to injury, this entire bill, this behemoth which would become 700 pages after it’s drafted, was debated for less than six days. And I’m not even sure about the six because it kept on being revised.

And now the behemoth is back, and it’s already throwing elbows every which way…

Now are they going to try to con us again, or are they actually going to do something productive?

(Read ongoing coverage here and here and here.)

Global US Citizens

I got to thinking today about the nature of citizenship. I think it was something Mark Steyn said about Senator Reid’s ludicrous comment that got this thought rolling. Senator Reid said a couple of weeks ago:

“This week we will vote on cloture and final passage of a comprehensive bill that will strengthen border security, bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows, and keep our economy strong.”

I mean really. Just what does citizenship mean in a world where people insist on globalization?

A couple of months ago, I got into a heated argument with a co-worker about America and Americans. This woman, who for the sake of convenience we’ll call Jane, was a Chinese-American immigrant who was just naturalized and granted citizenship. To such gifts from our government she shrugged. She already has an ex-patriot for a husband, and they are both of the consensus that Americans are really boorish, dumb and generally uncultured.

“If I had kids,” she said, “I’m going to move back to Singapore to raise them.”

“Why the hell would you do that?” The thought of America’s gift of citizenship to her flashed across my mind.

“Because I want my kids to believe in something,” she said. She gesticulated her arms, adding emphasis to her words. “I don’t want them to become Americanized, to become mongrels. I want them to speak Chinese. America doesn’t believe in anything because it believes in everything. At least in Singapore, you have a single cohesive culture.”

Then, she had the audacity to call me an uncultured country bumpkin because I dared to say that I have a great affinity for old school Texas values. (I would have loved to have grown up in the American countryside, but alas, I’m a cityslicker.)

Despite being very upset from all her anti-Americanisms (even after we just granted her citizenship!), I got to thinking. Well… what DOES America believe? And what does citizenship mean in today’s world, anyhow? Are we just confused mongrels with an identity crisis?

I was left studdering when I tried to answer that question because I don’t really know anymore. I know what I would like it to be, which is not the same thing as what it has become. And as I write this, I don’t know if she’s wrong.

I would dearly love for Americans of this generation to stand faithful with the ideals of their fathers. Values such as decency, fairness, manners, liberty, individualism and freedom… and the moral courage necessary to fight for it.

In my version of America, citizenship means that you are taking on enormous responsibilities and duties. Your enfranchisement, your vote, means that you are one of the selected few men elected by birth or by naturalization to the solemn duty of electing officials who will affect the fate of the entire world.

In the America I love, we the people own this country. We are its government and its sovereign. And we get to be the ones who decide the course we take, not an entrenched bureaucratic civil servant who have never known a day of real work in his life (Yes, I am talking about many of our good Congressmen and Senators.).

In reality, I don’t think we can expect immigrants, legal or illegal, to give their loyalties to a country that doles out citizenship promiscuously simply because, as with all promiscuity, it’s value becomes cheap; therefore, not worth much consideration. I’m not saying this is right. It’s just the way things are. And if we, de facto, declare the globe and all inhabitants thereof to be U.S. citizens, the concept of citizenship is truly dead, because global citizens will demand all the prerogatives of U.S. citizenship without any of the duties and responsibilities inherent in the concept of citizenship.

Advocates of this bill and many of our globalist legislators, Democrats AND Republicans alike, would give a Chinese national or a Mexican national the same rights and privileges as an American citizen, whether he be a citizen by birth or by naturalization. This makes the entire concept of citizenship a joke, a fraud, and by its ridicule, any expectation of loyalty and patriotism will also be destroyed. It’ll go the way of the Dodo. The loyalty of these immigrants will be attached to their home countries, their ethnic group, their race.

And America? Well, America would be that envied, hated, affluent employer that hands out generous paychecks to employees in complete disproportion to their actual contribution. We all get out of the system much more than what we put in. The difference is, in this scenario, we Americans are the system and the employers.

Or as Mark Steyn phrased it:

Talk about “a fast track to citizenship”! Never mind probationary visas, Z-visas and Green Cards, in the eyes of the Democrat steering “comprehensive immigration reform” through Congress these guys are already “undocumented Americans”. Was it simply a slip of the tongue? (Speaking of which, I thought thanks to George W Bush we had “the worst economy since Herbert Hoover”. When did it get “strong”?) Or did Senator Reid mean it?

If he did, the very concept of citizenship is dead, and the Senate might as well opt for “really comprehensive immigration reform” and declare everyone on the planet a US citizen with backdated Social Security entitlements. As Le Monde’s famous headline of September 12th 2001 put it, “Nous sommes tous Americains.” Literally.

I believe that any solution to illegal immigration will involve some sort of massive deportation, especially of the criminals, but any solution to this problem will also involve massive amnesty to the illegals already here. If we’re honest with ourselves, we must also recognize our own contribution to this mess. We enjoy our cheap labor, our cheap fruits, our cheap burgers. This slop of a mess didn’t happen in a vacuum.

But this does not also mean that we should give them all blanket citizenship either, through indefinite Z Visas or whatever other hair-brain scheme. We’ve got to find some middle ground… but this bill ain’t it.

President Bush and Illegal Immigration

Unlike many of the President’s conservative critics, I am willing to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt on this issue. With all due respect, President Bush has been living atop the Acropolis for a bit too long to know what’s it like down in the rough and ready streets. President Bush, the majority of our congressmen and many a D.C. bureaucrats don’t live on the street-level with this issue. They would occasionally go down, look at the Piraeus and the millions of people down there full of life and diversity and think that it’s wonderful. That is, as long as they don’t have to go down and interact with the unwashed masses.

I give the President much more leniency on this issue than all the others though. President Bush belongs to a billionaire family. That in itself elevates him above the common plebeians and their level of everyday living, but he has another added dimension. He is the President of the United States. He is so busy his restroom breaks are scheduled… Literally!

Every time we see him in public, he looks physically and emotionally drained; so much so that his speeches sound as though he’s trying to eat a four-course meal and speak at the same time. With such a schedule and barely no one around him that he can trust any longer (thank you, Dems!), does anyone truly think he would have a chance to read 700-page monstrosity of a bill with a lawyer’s grasp of nuance, the importance of which can make or break our entire nation?

I don’t think so. Any fair-minded person wouldn’t think so.

Being that our President is caged inside his duties for our sake (and we can tangibly see it’s destroying him), he does not see what illegal immigration is doing to America. More importantly, the illegal immigrants of today’s world is NOT the illegal immigrants of the 1970’s and 19780’s. Back then, they kept their nose clean, worked hard and sent their hard-earned cash back to their destitute families back in Mexico. Many of them did this selflessly and they had a vigorous, virile code of honor.

However, times have changed. Illegal immigrants of this quality haven’t come across the border for decades; at least, I don’t think that’s the governing ethic of their behavior for a long time. Some old school Mexicans still have these virtues and arrive this side of the border, but again, I don’t know the percentages.

Our emergency rooms are inundated. We pay an enormous cost for liability car insurance because of all the scams from the illegal population (the ethic being, get in a car wreck and win the lottery in a litigation happy America! Victor Hanson has an illuminating illustration of this from his blog.). Violent crimes, rapes, murders, robberies have risen exponentially everywhere there’s a concentration of illegal immigrants. My friend’s sister, who lives in Arizona, has reported that her house has been looted by illegals passing by not once, but multiple times. It’s come to the point where she has to move it’s gotten so dangerous.

Also, places where illegals immigrants have become the majority, rank political corruption suddenly sweeps in.

There have been a series of reports about Cudahy City a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, and how the rise of gangs, the culture of corrupt politics, violence and intimidation, and tribal factionalism resemble a Mexican border town.

But why wouldn’t islets of Mexico sprout up, when the country has lost confidence in assimilation, requires nothing of the immigrant, doesn’t believe the English language should be our national cultural currency—and has allowed somewhere between 11-16 million illegal aliens living in apartheid communities?

All this was true by 1980 in segregated towns like Orange Cove, Parlier, or Mendota, California that had schools in crises, medieval city politics, and recall after recall—each alleging that the in-bunch was somehow stealing money through tribal favoritism and nepotism.

The antidote? Close the borders now (through a multifaceted plan of verifiable IDs, employer sanctions, fortification, increased security, and scrapping of bilingual government services). And then once done, fight the next decade over guest workers, amnesty, immigration numbers, etc. But if one were to close the borders now, the other problems will lessen by the time we get to them.

This, however, isn’t to say there aren’t any Mexicans and Latin Americans assimilating. Many of them are, and I’ve had the great privilege to befriend some of those I’ve met. Growing up in Houston, and now Los Angeles, I’ve met quite a few assimilated Mexicans and Latin Americans, but there also seems to be an enormous number of them that aren’t assimilated… and they show no desire to.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was sharply criticized today for being anti-illegal immigration because he said that many illegal immigrants don’t want to assimilate.

SAN FRANCISCO — California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s remarks that immigrants should avoid Spanish-language media if they want to learn English quickly left some Hispanic journalists shaking their heads.

“You’ve got to turn off the Spanish television set” and stay away from Spanish-language television, books and newspapers, the Republican governor said Wednesday night at the annual convention of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. “You’re just forced to speak English, and that just makes you learn the language faster.”

Schwarzenegger, who immigrated to the U.S. from Austria, was responding to a question about how Hispanic students can improve academic performance. The audience included many journalists who work for Spanish-language media outlets.

“I know this sounds odd and this is the politically incorrect thing to say and I’m going to get myself in trouble,” he said. “But I know that when I came to this country, I very rarely spoke German to anyone.”

“I’m sitting shaking my head not believing that someone would be so naive and out of it that he would say something like that,” Alex Nogales, president and CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, said Thursday.

Nogales said immigrants need Spanish-language media to stay informed and “function in this society.”

What Governor Schwarzenegger said was just basic common sense. To assimilate and learn to speak a foreign language, the best way to do it is immerse yourself into the culture. It’s obvious many an illegal immigrant aren’t doing this. In fact, there are more Spanish speaking radio in Los Angeles than English ones, and if you’re talking about just the local stations, there are probably more Spanish TV stations than English ones as well.

Now, I think the President is mostly ignorant of this. How can he possibly know what’s it like for the average American when he’s conducting World War III, balancing the economy and just trying to keep the country afloat?

I think the President is acting from what he believes is best for the country, but on this one issue, I also think he’s woefully ignorant of the reality of the situation.

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