You Must Be a Nativist If You….

At OpinionJournal.com today, Brendan Miniter pins the term “nativist” on an awful lot of issue positions, and even on the idea of figuring out what’s going on.

It must therefore be that Mr. Miniter’s dictionary has a definition “nativist” that you and I aren’t familiar with.

According to Miniter (with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy), you must be a nativist if:

• You are “pushing for a study to determine the ‘cost’ of illegal immigration–a forerunner to legislation.” (Oklahoma)
• Support “pass(ing) a bill making English the state’s official language.” (Pennsylvania)
• Want to “hold field hearings on illegal immigration.” (Pennsylvania)
• Dare to criticize an opponent for supporting a bill “that would allow children of illegal immigrants to take advantage of a state scholarship program.” (Arkansas)
• You support “using the tax code to go after businesses that hire illegal aliens” and having employers “lose tax deductions if they are found to have illegal aliens on the payroll.” (Colorado)
• You support “putting a referendum on the ballot this fall to deny illegal aliens government services that aren’t mandated by the federal government.” (Colorado)

In Miniter’s dictionary, you must be a “nativist” if you support any one of the items listed above, or any one of a plethora of other reasonable and responsible ideas for preserving our borders, language, and culture while allowing an appropriate number of immigrants to legally enter our country each year.

For what it’s worth, I think legal immigration levels of about double what we allow now could be managed (an increase from about 1 million to about 2 million a year) — IF and only if the flow of illegals is reduced to a trickle. This level of legal immigration is proportionally consistent with what the country was able to assimilate in the first half of the 20th century.

But going back to Miniter, since it would be difficult to find a person who doesn’t support at least one of the above items, or some other reasonable idea for border control and enforcement that would conflict with The Journal’s “There Shall Be Open Borders” mantra, all I can conclude is that he must think that, with the exception of everyone who isn’t on the Journal’s editorial board or part of the ignorant Beltway elite, we are all nativists now.
___________________________

UPDATE: Bryan at Hot Air rips apart Miniter’s rewrite of electoral history.

UPDATE 2: Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air video today exposes the REAL nativists at La Raza (The Race), the organization that Corporate America and pandering politicians can’t get enough of. One Hot Air commenter suggests that a more correct name for the organization would be La Racista.

UPDATE 3: For intellectual firepower, I’ll take Thomas Sowell over the collective talents of the Journal’s Editorial Board any day. Or, based on his column today, is Sowell a nativist too because he doesn’t bow to “There Shall Be Open Borders”?