Immigration and sovereignty.
By Paul J Cella Posted in Law — Comments (30) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
One of the strongest arguments for a generous immigration regime is the appeal to sentiment that is often captured in that tiresome catchphrase that we are “a nation of immigrants.” Most Americans, I wager, have some basic sympathy for this sentiment, as also for the aspiration that motivates so many people to come here to work. I know I do, and I am as firm an opponent of mass immigration as you will find. But it is not easy to see how this past weekend’s direct action appeals will facilitate this sentiment. Some asseverate, indeed, that the magnitude of the demonstrations in cities all over the country will put to rest what they call the nativist faction. I find this prediction very difficult to credit. Direct action by illegal immigrants, organized by the activists who would make them their instruments, seems a strategy calculated to inflame and polarize. American moderates, like Glenn Reynolds, who are generally kindly disposed to immigration, will be much less kindly disposed toward a illegal-immigrant interest group, organized and militant, of the kind that is presaged by this latest development.
There were some almost comical revelations in the parade of experts, activists, analysts, and agitators, some sincere and civic-minded men, some cynical manipulators, some mere mountebanks, which came before our television screens over the past few days. The whole drift of these revelations was to again demonstrate the dramatic division in this country, which is not ideological or partisan, but more nearly class-based; the political and economic elite (and the group-rights activists) versus the people. Several times I heard a television or radio guest complain bitterly that one of the problems with the Sensenbrenner bill is that it makes illegal presence a felony. Horrors. Who is advising these characters? Do they imagine that by disclosing their contempt for the territorial integrity of the nation (which is what they do when they assume that the violation of that integrity should be but a minor offense, if an offense at all), they will gain sympathy for those for whom they claim to speak? At other times I heard the guests demand, in somewhat strident terms, a very precious thing: equality. But again, the real discovery is in the assumption: Are they asking us, the people of this republic, to consent to the obliteration of the distinction between citizen and noncitizen? Equality between citizen and alien: let us see how far a faction resting on such a principle of politics as this gets.
Using terms such as “citizen” and “alien,” especially in contradistinction, raises alarm bells with a lot of people. Well it should. But let us not forget that the very unit of political analysis and judgment in a republic is the citizen. In other forms of government, along with their attendant schools of political philosophy, other units are favored. What form, historically, has used “worker” as its unit? What manner of political philosophy has apprehended men merely by the value of their labor?
One of the signal triumphs of America has been her uneasy but nonetheless real and noble achievement of, all at once, equality and liberty. This achievement has been exceedingly rare, and most of the great philosophers of politics have been haunted by the difficulty of resolving the tension between the two principles. Tocqueville was certainly haunted by it, and even spoke in the Introduction to his great work of a “religious awe” that struck him in studying the problem. Rousseau’s notion of the General Will was an ambitious and dazzling attempt to reconcile the two. Lincoln, whose development of the American constitutional order has always raised the hackles of the partisans of pure liberty, set his great project toward the goal of making “that all men are created equality,” something more than mere rhetorical flourish for us. And so it was. In America man has, mirabile dictu, found himself both free and equal, though the journey has been halting and bloody. Much the liberty of the ancient world was built upon the back of slaves, and much of the work of the sacred equality introduced by Christianity was to gradually eliminate that terrible and recurrent institution. Christianity was so bold as to say that even in slavery a man is equal. But in any case, I think it fair to say that one of the great accomplishments of America has been that reconciliation which made her a free republic of equal men under law. And the equality consists in the law which made them citizens.
Mass immigration — in direct, sustained defiance of law — threatens this accomplishment. It augurs a transformation of our political order from a territorially-extensive republic into a more vaguely-defined empire, where domestic tranquility is achieved only by granting autonomy to ethnic enclaves; where a firm class structure is introduced; where the authority of the citizen is usurped; where equality is broken even as it is celebrated and liberty reconceived in purely materialist or economic terms. We would still be free to prosper, aye — though often on the back of a laboring class valued primarily for its labor — but we would not be free to self-govern. And how long domestic tranquility can endure under such an arrangement — or how it can endure without the firm hand of despotism — is an open question.
Some have set forth Prohibition as a similar example of sustained lawbreaking, adducing it also as an example of the folly of some law — as if the question of sovereignty were comparable to the question of private temperance. Prohibition merely made criminals of normal people; therefore territorial integrity, which makes criminals of mere trespassers, should be abandoned? Both mandated temperance and territorial integrity are phony; and their enforcement not simply foolish but impossible? Surely this cannot be taken seriously.
But the question of sovereignty is indeed at stake here, whether or not we want to take it up in earnest. Shall the “deliberate sense” of the people — that is, the citizenry — remain sovereign, or shall some other principle be introduced? If circumstances necessitate a great shattering of the distinction between citizen and noncitizen, how can it be said that the former still rules? One strives in vain to discover how We the People can still be said to govern this nation if our policy is determined by the demonstrations of people marching under the flag of a foreign power [scroll down], along with those whose interest attaches their allegiance to corporations whose province is global not national.
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apolitical, Russian-born wife was nearly as furious as was I. One day the history of this era will be written, and the connivance of the interested, elite factions in this manifestly subversive activity will be discussed under a chapter heading referring in one fashion or another to 'decline'.
Been explained so clearly. They will regret the marches. The sea of Mexican flags was a wake up call.
...of a telegenic 80 year old Honduran grandmother of twelve (all of whom are birth citizens) being sent to Riker's Island, complete with orange jumpsuit, do you think that will net a plus or minus to the GOP*? Because if you make illegal status an automatic felony we end up with that sort of scenario, whether you like it or not.
BTW, I am neither ignoring nor conceding the ethical and moral arguments; I wished to bring up solely a pragmatic point addressing your post, and I have done so.
Moe
*Trust me, the media will find her, or somebody who'll be equally a PR disaster.
As soon as civil unions started to look achievable they abandoned them and switched to an all SSM all the time strategy. The left has a knack for going too far and alienating the public.
But a wise policy would be to initiate any deportation program on groups within the illegal population that would not pose such a PR disaster. Would the GOP suffer greatly from a wave of deportations of illegals already being prosecuted for other felonies: DUIs, drunk-and-disorderly, fraud, etc.?
Any wave of deportations, if carried out with sufficient firmness (not harshness) and accompanied by some dramatic sanctions against employers exploiting the cheap labor, would induce a concomitant wave of voluntary deportations, which is exactly the kind of deportations we like best.
We should not forget that the incentives so often highlighted by the pro-immigration side work both ways.
- The sea of Mexican flags was a wake up call.
While not quite as obviously out of place as the sea of Danish flags that suddenly appeared in Palestine during the "cartoon riots," the sudden appearance of all those Mexican flags is of similar dubiousness. Which is to say that somebody was passing them out at the demonstration. Which means that somebody bought them for the purpose of passing them out.
And we need to find out who that was. Nobody with money is that stupid. There is something going on here that we need to understand. Somebody wants there to be racial polarization over this. I don't believe it's José Bricklayer. It's somebody screwing with U.S. domestic politics.
Do you think the Tancredo for President people bought a whole bunch of Mexican flags to hand out at rallies? Or... maybe it was the.... Evilcons!
could be solved or at least ameliorated by deporting the illegal aliens who are currently guests of the state for other offenses (and who comprise HALF of all such guests in that state). 'Course, first you have to build the wall so they can't just waltz back across as free men, THEN you deport them.
OTOH, if someone commits a crime against American citizens, we usually want to extradite them TO America so we can try and punish them rather than rely on the good graces of their home country to do so. So maybe shipping lawbreakers back to a hero's welcome isn't such a bright idea. <g>
Or some Soros front. Or some International A.N.S.W.E.R. front.
some foreign power with a strong interest at stake, and a web of offices in our cities.
by marching though the streets demanding open access, waving Mexican flags, chanting "Mexico, Mexico" and claiming that it is they who are at home and the rest of us are interlopers.
In the LA case they had whole high schools turning out to demonstrate. One that caught my eye was an interview with a teenager whose parents, both US citizens, came to this country thirty years ago who was demanding immigrant rights on the basis that California was actually part of Mexico. We have a young man who was born and raised here by US citizen parents agitating for the "Mexicanization" of California.*1
The argument is often made that immigrants just want to become part of the American dream and that assimilation comes quickly and certainly by the second or third generation. But I think that was immigration before the advent of advocacy groups; that's the immigration up to the last third of the 20th Century. No one spoke, agitated, organized for the Irish, German, Polish, Italian, Chinese, Cuban immigrants. As individuals the found or made their place in the society; in large part by keeping the cultural parts of their former life and exchanging the old social and political parts for those of their new home.
But things are different now. We have organized immigrant movements; we have demands for bilingual education; we have demands for services in the immigrants language. Immigration is different now than the old model and I think we make a mistake to view it with the early 20th Century nostalgia.
In the 1950's we had a landmark Supreme Court decision banishing "separate but equal" public schools. Look around you and you will see demands for separate but equal treatment for immigrants. Government services that are provided in numerous other languages so as to not inconvenience immigrants. Election ballots in languages other than English so as to enable non-English speaking voters; people who cannot engage in the public debate because for the most part it is in English but can vote anyway.
What this weekend demonstrated to me is not people who want to live in America, but people who want to live in a prosperous Mexico. But Mexico cannot, or will not, provide the opportunities they want/need so their solution is to come the the US and make it into the Mexico they can't have "at home."*2
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*1 Yes I realize it is only one person but because it was someone at random, and given the 'tenor' of the rest of the demonstrations, I submit it probably represents a broader set.
*2 Certainly there were other than Mexicans there, but the vast majority of the demonstrators, and indeed the vast majority of illegals are Mexican; that's not anti-Mexican, that's just statistics.
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Remember, this is the city that had a radio station advertising itself as serving Los Angeles, Mexico instead of Los Angeles, California.
And we did recently have Mexico playing in the World Baseball Classic, which would be an obvious reason to go buy some flags.
but I wouldn't discount groups like MEChA, La Raza, and the "immigrant rights" advocacy groups.
"What this weekend demonstrated to me is not people who want to live in America, but people who want to live in a prosperous Mexico."
What's the benefit in riling up the natives with bombastic claims that they're here to take over when they're in a distinct minority? Racial polarization won't work to their political benefit.
with the Sensenbrenner bill. The only problem is going to be those Senate Republicans who will let their TV screens determine how they will vote.
The Republicans need to start pushing the following soundbite line, since that is what drives the MSM and its sheep who follow them:
"WE ARE A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS, NOT A NATION OF ILLEGALS".
Then explain in simple terms that allowing illegal aliens to dictate our immigration policy not only flys in the face of everything we stand for, but does a disservice to those immigrants who have entered this country legally and abided by the rule of law. We will set a very bad precedent if we let illegal mob rule (and I'm not splitting hairs here just because illegals are forming a legal protest march) influence and ultimately determine what our legislators will enact as the law of the land.
"They" are not thinking about the rest of the country, just the part that they "control." They are agitating "the base." They, particularly MEChA, La Raza, et al, don't see Illinois as part of ancient Aztlan, but they most certainly see Southern California that way.
...we need a policy of showing noncitizen convicts the door. My bleeding heart isn't that sanguine on the issue. :)
The same thing communists get out of organizing anti-war rallies.
It will be the first Catholic Charities worker who gets arrested and charged under the Sensenbrenner bill. Or LDS Social Services. Or Salvation Army. Or whatever religious group is the one that gets tagged.
That's where it starts to fall apart.
There are a lot of minor offences that are also felonies. Gun offenses for instance. Some of the multitude of gun felonies could easily be committed by accident. Or filling out any one of a number of different government forms incorrectly. Sneaking into a country is a very big deal by comparison.
Right after the DOJ finishes perusing your library records to see if you checked out any Al Franken books. This is a liberal smokescreen every bit as much as the library record searches that never were. Don't fall for it.
We will sign with Mexico, the
"People for Land Treaty".
In it, contains the specifics on how much land Mexico must turn over to the United States for each 10 person's coming through Mexico illegally into the Unted States. And, the plan comes with it's own "easy to use" 3 step methode.
- We take the total number of illegal aliens that we more or less know about that came through Mexico and are currently residing here in the U.S and divide that by 10. (Let's see 11,000,000 divided by 10 equals 1.1 million acre's of land that Mexico currently owes us.)
- When we assimilate this land into U.S. territory, that would provide plenty of room for all the illegals and a place for them to start a new life, complete with industry, jobs and new opportunites.
- After a few short decades, the U.S. should own the vast majority of Mexico and all it's resources.
Or we can just let things go as they are now and the situation will occure in reverse through mass immigration.
The surest way to indicate your minority view status is to have a public rally of some kind. The bigger the rally, the more a minority status you have. Think about it. All of the biggest public rallies we've ever seen in this country are for views held by a minority of Americans. These pro-illegal alien rallies in recent days are no differnet.
I only hope our elected officials can see this.
...am I then a dupe for the liberals, a plant for them or a shill?
...saying anything of the sort. All I'm saying is this priests going to jail thing is a smokescreen the liberals came up with. It has been grossly misrepresented to try to drive a wedge in the conservative position on immigration.
...I read the 'this' as referring to my original comment. I retract all and sundry evil glares in your general direction. :)
Just send a few divisions the way of Vera Cruz and Ol' Mexico, fix the problem at its root.
On a Federal installation is also a Felony. Just to a better perspective on Federal Trespassing...
Hey! That's another felony illegals could be charged with!
I would venture to guess that huge numbers of Americans saw those seas of Mexican flags on TV this weekend, and were not happy. You'd think someone would catch on, but they never seem to do so.