The end of the American political order.
It's not possible to be an alarmist on this bill.
By Paul J Cella Posted in Immigration — Comments (33) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I am sorry to polarize and embitter further, but the fact is that we have an immigration bill on the table, with a good chance of passage and enactment into law, that amounts to the overthrow of American sovereignty. Am I exaggerating? Please take a moment to read Prof. Kris Kobach’s New York Post column from a couple days ago. The provisions he has unearthed simply beggar the imagination. I quote two of his points:
The bill effectively shuts down our immigration-court system. If an alien in the removal process is eligible for the Z visa, the immigration judge must close the proceedings and offer the alien the chance to apply for the amnesty. The wheels of justice won't just turn slowly, they'll go in reverse.
The bill transforms the federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from a law-enforcement agency into an amnesty-distribution center. If ICE officials apprehend an alien who appears eligible for the Z visa (in other words, just about any illegal alien), they can't detain him. Instead, ICE must help him apply for the Z visa.
So the bill puts our security officers at the service of foreign trespassers, and it actually prohibits enforcement rather than strengthening it.
Read on.
The opponents of mass immigration as often called nativists. Whether that is fair or not I leave aside for now. What is clear, though, is this: the ideology behind this bill is Alienist. Its mark is a pronounced favoritism for the alien as against the native. Our own Dan McLaughlin, a moderate on immigration, helpfully demonstrated the partiality of the bill for aliens over citizens on tax policy. Modern progressive taxation, the lifeblood of the Managerial State, acts upon the American citizen like a sort of inquisition. Everyone is made into a defendant: each year you must lay bare your entire financial life, the burden of proof resting on you, or face stiff penalties and even jail time. In principle the message is that you have no property of your own, which is not subject to the whim of the Managers.
We accept this inquisitorial outrage with an equanimity not unlike the Spaniards of the 16th century, with their Inquisition. Occasionally some bold politician will rise in objection, saying that higher rates of taxation are ineffective even from the position of the state; lower rates will produce greater revenue! No one dares utter the truth of the matter: that the entire system is morally suspect — naturally enough considering that the idea of progressive taxation emerged from the mind of Karl Marx.
But as Mr. McLaughlin showed, the proposed immigration bill exempts illegal aliens (and only illegal aliens) from this system — until they become legal residents, as which point the Inquisition bears down on them as on any common citizen.
Imagine the almost comical absurdity of this hypothetical parallel: the Spanish Inquisition exempted the Moriscos from its machinations. In fact the Morisco Revolt in southern Spain (the bloody war waged against the remnants of the Muslims in Spain after the expulsion of most of them) was the event the solidified the Inquisition as an agency of the Spanish Crown, thereby making it immeasurably more fearsome and cruel. Heresy was joined to treason, and the new modern monarchs, now under the spell of modern political theory, were not slow to crush it. The Inquisition was, of course, capable of cruelty before, but the new theory gave it terrible power; it was a modern institution now. And the mark of modernity in politics is the concentration of irresponsible power.
The proposed immigration bill advances this still further, ironically by overthrowing part of the modern order in politics: the sovereignty of the nation-state. By evacuating national sovereignty, by establishing a series of privileges for the alien over the citizen, by ramming down the throat of the people their dispossession, it moves political power to a still more distant, abstract and unaccountable level. Under the hard rule of iron monarchs the nation-state became the agency for an unprecedented concentration of political power — no mediaeval despot ever had one tenth of the power of Louis XIV, and Louis had not one tenth of the power of Napoleon, who in turn hardly dreamed of Stalin’s irresponsible power. And our doom is also a marvelous irony: for the nation-state itself is now an anachronism, and its hold upon the affections of the people is the most potent resistance to the further concentration and abstraction of political power, in short, to the enlargement of the modern trend in politics. The sovereign nation must be extinguished, just as it was once used to extinguish the old order; and it must be extinguished, above all, in the United States, where in the federal system some remnant of the old order remains. The immigration bill will do this terrible thing. In its core principles of Alienism and Globalism, it aims to overthrow the nation-state as the unit of measurement in politics.
The proposed immigration bill is, I think — to summarize my abstruse reflections — the overthrow of the American political order.
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...will be a powerful diminution of the power of the American federal state, as I said in a comment here a few days ago. I think the legislation will pass, because it advances the interests of a range of powerful elites (and I use that term without irony). The fact that it's obviously counter to the best interests of the American nation seems completely lost on those who run the American state, and this to an astonishing degree. The fruit of hubris is.... well, you know.
is that I think he's too optimistic. In addition to the issues he cites, I have absolutely zero confidence that ANY of the so-called "enforcement" provision will ever be fully implemented. As one example, the WH poster from a couple of days ago noted the employer fines in the bill, without bothering to fess up to the fact that the Administration will not bring action against employers NOW under the current law.
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CongressCritter™: Never have so few felt like they were owed so much by so many for so little.
But I think they will be replaced by more responsive leaders.
this bill has no chance of becoming law as-is.
We are governed by oikophobes.
My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ shall speak with the voice of them that weep. Spare me, O Lord, for my days are truly as nothing.
As Mark Steyn has suggested, if this bill passes, we should all apply for Z Visas.
if the bill passes, what is to stop someone from using a variety of fake alias to apply for a large number of visas? He could just go from one office to another. Then he could sell "Get into the USA Free Passes" on E-bay
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
If you weren't able to get through the other day to talk to your senators, try now. I was able to get through to both Georgia Senators and gave them the same message.
I'll vote Democrat for the first time in 20 years against them if they vote for this bill.
Romney or Fred.
Currently writing non-political stories over at first-cut-stories.blogspot.com
There is no way you can further inflame and or provoke when it comes to this bill, the only thing you can do is stop talking about it and let the heat off, don't do that. This must be front and center every single morning on every site so that people are reminded on a daily basis how the government is selling our American soul down the river to business. So do not feel in any way that you are doing a diservice to this community, you are doing the patriotic service that is needed by this community, thanks.
than I could possibly have done in my blog.
Is there any better reason for wholesale changes to prevent what the title of this article indicates?
But I am alarmed. The goal of a legalization process should not be to legalize all illegal aliens, but rather to set a sufficiently high bar that those who pass over it can be said in some sense to have earned permanent legal residence and/or citizenship. Part of the problem is that laying bare the details of how they propose to make this work only underlines the fact that the practical mechanisms for doing a good legalization bill may simply not exist.
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
We can take comfort in the fact that if Senator Domenici's mother were alive today, the ICE (aka the INS) would be looking out for her interests and not for the interests of those thick-headed, bigoted, legalistic Americans.
They that are with us are more than they that are against us.
Eloquent, as usual, Paul.
I'm nowhere near as despondent, however, as your post suggests. It is because I have innate faith in the strength of the American political system and the American people. I'd like to believe that this country is still a People who have a government, not a State that has subjects. I may be proven wrong, but I really hope not.
What I do think will happen, however, is a dramatic realignment within the polity of the United States. Whoever votes for this bill will be thrown out of office in short order -- except for those from the "sanctuary states" in the Union. And even they may face incredibly stiff challenges fueled by voter anger. I think the Republican Party is headed for a major fracture, not over abortion and the Christian Right as most liberals might have thought, but over this issue. But the same goes for Democrats too -- I can't imagine the Democrats of Arizona and Texas and California going along with the party bosses from sanctuary states and tolerating this evisceration of the country.
What may happen instead is a wholesale realignment with massive shifts of Globalists out from the GOP into the Dems, and of Americanists out from the Dems into the GOP. That may have ehtnic lines as well with the Dems hoping to solidify their grip on the Latino vote by sacrificing the White vote (having taken the Black vote for granted).
I do agree with everything you wrote about how bad this bill is, how it is an abdication of sovereignty, how awful its transformation of law enforcement into criminal abettors, etc. I just think this bill will be repealed the moment that the next Congress is sworn in, if it happens to pass this one.
-TS
"What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you'd like it to mean?" - Justice Antonin Scalia
I have concluded that America would have been far better off if his mother had been deported before he was born.
Includes this information.
A senior Republican official said yesterday that while the chances of the bill, which opens pathways to citizenship for most of the U.S.'s 12 million illegal immigrants, are "50/50" in the House and that the White House would spend its time lobbying Democrats, rather than Republicans, to achieve a majority.
Yesterday, the Senate beat back an amendment by Sen. Byron Dorgan that would have scrapped the bill's new guest worker program. The defeat of that effort was interpreted as a sign that a solid majority of Senators are prepared to support the bill's main tenets, for now.
I'm starting to think Bush will go down in history as the greatest President the Democratic Pary ever had.
Take some time out from lobbying your Senators and spend some time on your Congressman.
on the Senate side?
Romney or Fred.
Currently writing non-political stories over at first-cut-stories.blogspot.com
Interesting non-Republican Senate votes against taking up the immigration bill: Dorgan, Baucus, Tester, Sanders. ... P.S.: Candidates Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Dodd just happen to miss the vote. Kerry too.
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
Title VII: Section 707 spells out the details. The term “assimilation” disappears; the concept of “Americanization” never appears; and the Euro-speak weasel word “integration” enters the text. Thus, 100 million federal dollars will be given to states and cities to award grants to “nonprofit organizations with experience working with immigrant communities” for “effective integration of immigrants into American society.”
In plain language this means that the State of Illinois’s Office of New Americans funnels federal funds to groups like La Raza and MALDEF. The type of “integration” that the new citizens will be learning can be gleaned from remarks of Jose Luis Gutierrez, the head of the Illinois Office of New Americans as reported in the Chicago Tribune April 6, 2007.
“The nation-state concept is changing. You don't have to say, `I am Mexican,' or, `I am American.' You can be a good Mexican citizen and a good American citizen and not have that be a conflict of interest. Sovereignty is flexible.”
Gutierrez is a dual citizen who is actively involved in Mexican politics. He votes in both the US and Mexico and is active in political campaigns in both nations. His political allegiance is clearly divided. He will not choose the United States over Mexico. Remember this is the guy in charge of assimilation; sorry, I mean “integration.”
More about Gutierrez.
Jose Luis immigrated to the United States 18 years ago, from the state of Michoacan, Mexico. He received his Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine in Mexico, and a Master in Urban Teaching in the States. He has committed his life to be a community activist and as an educator. He has been working as a community leader in several agencies and organizations. He actively participated in the campaign for the Mexican vote abroad, and was elected member to the Advisory Council of The Institute of Mexicans Abroad (CC-IME). He was the board President for the Latino Progress Institute. He served as President of the Federation of Michoacanos in Illinois (FEDECMI), and he is the founding member of The National Alliance of Latin-American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC).
The more time it is debated, the more outrage will be heard by Republicans. I think it will be tough to get the bill through in its current form. Then it still has to get through the House. I don't think we will see this bill, as it is currently structured, become law.
“.....women and minorities hardest hit”
I have watched this deterioration of our national sovereignty going on for the past 45 years. If this bill passes, let me just say that I'm glad I'm 63 years old and only have another possible 15 or so years to live, but you younger people must participate/live through the downfall of the U.S. for many years longer that I. I've lived in the best time in the history of the world, not to mention the best time in the history of the U.S., but I definitely fear for you younger people and your children. I foresee dark days for you, as the U.S. as we know it will not be the same for the remainder of your lifetimes. Good luck! This bill takes a giant step into the abyss, from which the U.S. will likely never recover. I foresee regional wars among our citizens, massive political and social upheaval, and changes that no one at present can possibly imagine, not to mention the ramifications from the degradation of our National SECURITY! Unless the people of this Country wake up and vote ALL these idiots out of office, it's my prediction that you can kiss this Wonderful Country good-bye.
...nearly forty years. Unlike you, due to cancer, I have only 1 or 2 years left. Yet I care deeply for our progeny, and continue to be active wherever I can.
I concur with your progostication, and hope we wake up!!!
Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
We're grateful to you for still caring and still fighting for this wonderful country of ours. May you receive your reward to overflowing.
They that are with us are more than they that are against us.
Well, I am 46, and I too, have watched the deterioration of our national sovereignty since the 70's. The ratification of treaties/agreements that 100% of the time are not in the best interests of the US, despite how our leaders sell it. I have said it before, the fix is in. We used to have a Gross National Product, now it is called Gross Domestic Product. We used to have National Holidays, now they are moved to a convenient Monday. Our soveriegnty and national identity is slowly being eroded in these subtle, yet seemingly innocent ways. It is all to set us up for integration in a "New World Order".
This bill or some gussied up version of it will be passed. The republican and democratic parties are both controlled by the people ready to sell us out.
Let's try to fight it, but the die is cast, only a major revolution can stop the forces already in place.
and they opposed the guest worker provision, call them and thank them for their stand and ask that they stick to it and not allow this bill to pass as long as this provision is in place. Twenty-nine of them tried to get the guest-worker provision removed.
If you have a Republican Senator supporting the bill, be a little blunter. It's sad that only Coburn and Vitter opposed this provison. If a few more of the conservatives had joined with the Democrats then the entire bill would have crashed in flames.
in the Democrat machine by dividing up their union friends. The oldtime trades and crafts unions don't like immigration at all and are still powerful in the Blue/Purple manufacturing states. The wall-to-wall unions and public employee unions, e.g., SEIU, AFSCME, like it since they do or want to represent millions of low-skill workers. This is the basis of the schism that exists in the AFL-CIO, and there is no reason not to exploit it by having Republicans in a position to do so cuddle up with the trades and crafts unions a bit; the enemy of my enemy is my friend and it forces any Democrat and even some Republicans taking union money to make some very hard choices.
In Vino Veritas
will appreciate this article. At the Huffington Post, of all the unlikely places.
It is as I told a friend of mine as much as I hate the nastiness that is the hard left, when I checked KOS after the surrender of the Dems on the war, it is not the American people who have gotten us to this bitter hate between parties and for the left of America it is the politicians. They have lied and promised and lied some more to each of their respective bases and in the recent history of the US they could well have gotten away with it as they always have, new media which of course includes this site has changed the ability of those who would take us for idiots to lie to us ever again. It has taken 40 years to get this jaded:)
to the Defendant/State. I can't say I'm shocked.
As Crank pointed out, at the insistence of the Bush Administration a total tax amnesty has been granted to illegal aliens. Implicit and explicit throughout the bill, amnesty also is granted to employers who also evaded taxes, failed to file 1099's, and file I-9's. The aliens also seem exempt from retroactive prosecution for identity theft, document fraud, and the forgery necessary to facilitate all of these crimes. The same happened last year.
Again, this recent round doesn't appear to be the handiwork and fallout of and from the Democrats who now run the Senate but of the president, who apparently was worried they would be tougher than the GOP was last year. That apparently would have been the case despite the exhortations we had to take last year's bill because this one would be worse under the Democrats.
If the public ever understands this two-tier system that punishes citizens and LPRs and rewards illegal aliens, all hell will break loose. Our uni-party nomenklatura has banked this can stay swept under the rug. My bet is it won't be.
Good work again, Paul. I'm with Jaded, too: more, please.
And I mean that in all sincerity. I've always thought that. All I can say is that if this is our political order, it can't be overthrown fast enough.
There's a brisk effrontery to this bill's insistence on accelerating immigration when the thrust of public opinion seems to be toward limiting it, but absent this bill, the trends it seeks to intensify will continue unabated. There is near-consensus on the desirability of relatively unrestricted immigration across the entire American power structure. Almost all identifiable segments of the American power elite, at every level, favor it, for a variety of ideological, as well as more venial, motives. The upshot of this is that whatever Congress is forced to do when the eyes of America's people are on it, the various unaccountable centers of power, such as the civil service, will act at every turn to undermine any restrictions.
I'm enough of a reactionary, too, to put in a kind word for the Inquisition. By 16th century standards it was relatively humane, and Spain did manage to keep order while France, England, and Germany were riven with religious wars for over a century. But I digress.
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I don't want to shred the whole constitution, just the parts the ACLU wrote.
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I don't want to shred the whole constitution, just the parts the ACLU wrote.
I have been on the fence (pun intended) about this bill, believing it to be better than last year's McCain-Kennedy, but not as good as I'd like it to be. This post places me squarely in the anti camp.
I don't know if I'd go as far as to say it's the end of the soverign state, and I know I wouldn't say it as eloquently as you have, but the idea that our enforcement agencies now must become quasi-social welfare agencies is a step too far for me to support.
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Develop alternatives to existing policies and keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. Milton Friedman