Column of the Day: Steyn on What the “Immigration” Debate Is All About
As the title says, Not just immigration: It’s societal transformation –
From the Washington Times: “The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment.”
Well, I think that’s the kind of moderate compromise “comprehensive immigration reform” package all Americans can support, don’t you?
….. Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain, in a quintessentially McCainiac contribution to the debate, angrily denied that the Senate legislation was an “amnesty.” “Call it a banana if you want to,” he told his fellow world’s greatest deliberators. “To call the process that we require under this legislation amnesty frankly distorts the debate and it’s an unfair interpretation of it.”
He has a point. Technically, an “amnesty” only involves pardoning a person for a crime rather than, as this moderate compromise legislation does, pardoning him for a crime and also giving him a cash bonus for committing it. In fact, having skimmed my Webster’s, I can’t seem to find a word that does cover what the Senate is proposing, it having never previously occurred to any other society in the course of human history. Whether or not, as McCain says, we should call it a singular banana, it’s certainly plural bananas.
This is not an “immigration” issue. “Immigration” is when you go into a U.S. government office and there’s a hundred people filling in paperwork to live in America, and there are a couple of Slovaks, couple of Bangladeshis, couple of New Zealanders, couple of Botswanans, couple of this, couple of that. Assimilation is not in doubt because, if you’re a lonely Slovak in Des Moines, it’s extremely difficult to stay unassimilated.
This is not an “illegal immigration” issue. That’s when one of the Slovaks or Botswanans gets tired of waiting in line for 12 years and comes in anyway, and lives and works here and doesn’t pay any taxes, so the money he earns gets sluiced around the neighborhood supermarket and gas station and topless bar and the rest of the local economy, instead of being given to Trent and Arlen and Co. to toss into the great sucking maw of the federal budget.
But a “worker class” drawn overwhelmingly from a neighboring jurisdiction with another language and ancient claims on your territory and whose people now send so much money back home in the form of “remittances” that it’s Mexico’s largest source of foreign income (bigger than oil or tourism) is not “immigration” at all, but a vast experiment in societal transformation. Indeed, given the international track record of bilingual societies and neighboring jurisdictions with territorial claims, it’s not much of an experiment so much as a safe bet on political instability.
I don’t recall Ohio Senators DeWine, Voinovich, or any other senator anywhere else in the country running on a platform of “societal transformation at a substantial risk of political instability,” do you?
This is one of those times when I think the Founding Fathers made a mistake in not allowing voters to recall elected federal officials. Senators subject to the possibility of a recall wouldn’t dare contemplate the sellout legislation they have been voting on, and in some cases voting for, during the past week. (Of course, our Founding Fathers didn’t contemplate direct election of US Senators; that was what many constitutional scholars believe was a critical blunder we made on our own in 1913 with the ratification of the 17th Amendment.)
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