The Left’s Immigration Radicalism

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The Democratic betrayal of the Dreamers

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES - - Tuesday, January 30, 2018
ANALYSIS/OPINION:

If the waves of illegal immigrants wading the Rio Grande to get into the United States were likely to be Republican voters, as a wide-awake wise man observes, Chuck Schumer would be on the border now, laying bricks, and scolding Nancy Pelosi, his apprentice hod-carrier, to keep the mortar coming for President Trump’s “big, beautiful” wall.

But Lindsay Graham’s fevered fantasies notwithstanding, most of the illegals aren’t likely to be Republicans, and the relentless Democratic scorn for border security is on full display, rejecting President Trump’s generous and expanded offer of honorable compromise to protect the “Dreamers.”

The proposal offers the Democrats much more than they have been asking for, not just the legalization of 700,000 young people brought here by their illegal-immigrant parents, but a path to citizenship and voting rights, and more than doubling to 1.8 million the number of others who could benefit from salvaging the Obama executive order extending amnesty to the Dreamers, which the ex-president conceded was unconstitutional.


Mr. Trump clearly does not want to send the Dreamers back to where they came from. No one can realistically envision the logistics of deporting 700,000 young people who have never known any home but America, though the president has been called “Amnesty Don” by border hawks with unrealistic ideas on how to solve an immigration mess largely created by the Democrats.

Logically, and realistically, the Democrats and their allies, who dream of an America without borders, should have leapt at the offer. But logic and realism have no place in the immigration debate. A spokesman for Mrs. Pelosi, whose designer dresses were not (truth to tell) designed for hod-carrying duties, calls Mr. Trump’s offer a “ransom” in pursuit of an “anti-immigrant wish list.” This wish list, written before the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, includes $25 billion for construction of 800 miles of border fencing, eliminates chain migration that would have enabled admission of hundreds of thousands of “sisters and cousins and aunts” of illegal immigrants already here, and cancels the diversity visa lottery which creates opportunity for the best-qualified immigrants.

Big spending Democrats, who never met a taxpayer dollar they thought worth saving, have suddenly become budget hawks eager to pinch pennies on securing the nation’s borders. Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate where he is regarded by his own party colleagues as a man with a loose mouth, says Mr. Trump wants to waste billions on “an ineffective wall.” (If it’s a “more effective” wall he wants, he has never before said so.)


Messrs. Durbin and Graham had drafted an earlier immigration proposal that would have given Democrats even more of everything. Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, taking time out from his day job of trying to stay out of prison, ridiculed the White House offer as a “compromise between the far right and the alt-right,” and boasts it’s “dead on arrival.” Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, calls the president’s proposal “shameful.”

The ferocity of the Democratic opposition to a plan that would make Dreamer dreams come true, and assure citizenship and eventually voting rights to 1.8 million illegal immigrants, is a bit puzzling. Jennifer Palmieri, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, acknowledged in a recent memorandum that the Dreamers are a “critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success.”

Indeed, when Mr. Schumer, in an unbecoming pout, angrily rescinded his earlier offer to fund a token percentage of the cost of a wall on the border, he revealed without meaning to the truth about the partisan fight over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The Democrats regard the Dreamers as valuable pawns in a scheme to get the open borders they want.

Trump will not agree to the amnesty the Democrats seek. But terrified of the party base that moves ever farther to the left, the Democrats must keep the issue unresolved and boiling. They want no restrictions at all on illegal immigration, and seek nothing less than the Californication of the rest of the country. The Dreamers can see the resolution of their predicament, if only the Democrats will let them have it.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/30/editorial-deliverance-is-at-hand-but-the-dreamers-/
 
Tom B said:
The Left’s Immigration Radicalism

NOAH ROTHMAN / JAN. 18, 2018


Observers on the right must have been confused by the controversy that erupted following Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recent appearance on Fox News. What he advocated sounds at first glance like common sense.

“When we admit people to our country, we should be like Canada,”
Sessions said. “What good does it do to bring in somebody who’s illiterate in their own country, has no skills, and is going to struggle in our country and not be successful?” Based on these comments, you could be forgiven for thinking a plague of unskilled illegal immigrants had descended upon the United States. Rest easy; a combination of increased border enforcement and a tightening labor market—trends that predate the Trump administration—resulted in a decline in the low-skilled illegal immigrant population.

The statistics are beside the point. The attorney general is packaging unsavory preconceptions about immigrants in a marketable pitch to centrists based on meritocratic assumptions. The fact is that Jeff Sessions is not qualified to determine who will or will not be a “successful” immigrant to the United States.

Sessions’s vision of a meritocratic immigration regime assumes that success is beyond the reach of under-educated immigrants—a judgment based only on his own preconceptions. That’s not just immodest but antithetical to conservatism, a philosophy which, at root, recognizes that the billions of daily interactions and events that we call the economy routinely frustrate those bold enough to issue predictions about its trajectory. Sessions’s vision of a meritocratic immigration system really isn’t that meritocratic at all; not if it is based on his presumptions about who should and who should not have the chance to prove their worth.

There is truth in the notion that under-educated, low-skilled immigrants are no benefit to some Americans, but not because they are unlikely to be successful. Precisely the opposite; they are more likely to be successful, shutting low-skilled Americans out of the market. Those on the left who revel in the condition of the native-born Americans displaced by this phenomenon shouldn’t laugh too loudly. Whether they recognize it or not, they are the mirror image of the right’s hardliners. What’s more, they are helping fuel the polarization that led to the ascension of an administration that ran explicitly on a restrictive approach to immigration.

Outgoing Illinois congressman Luis Gutierrez, a man with ambitions for higher office, exemplifies the blinkered radicalism of the left when it comes to immigration. This week, Gutierrez announced his opposition to the Trump administration’s desire to end “chain migration,” the practice by which American green card holders and U.S. citizens transfer their family members into the United States. Gutierrez insisted that American residency should be transferable to an immigrant’s siblings, parents, spouses, and children, regardless of whether or not they’ve demonstrated the capacity or interest to assimilate into American society. That’s not meritocracy; it’s charity.

Of course, there are those on the intellectual left for whom meritocracy is an illusion indulged only by those who don’t know the extent to which their successes are not their own. That’s the view of Linfield College English Professor Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, author of The Postcolonial Citizen: The Intellectual Migrant, who claimed the “logic of meritocracy that is built on this racist assumption that everyone has had the same access and opportunities.” It’s the view of columnist Jo Littler, who insists that “meritocracy is a myth.” Western democracies like the U.S. and the U.K. are closed systems in which wealth and opportunities are reserved for those with connections to people with an abundance of wealth and opportunity. Meritocracy “is a smokescreen for inequality.”

What these successful opinion-makers have marketed as wisdom is really just blinding resentment. In the United States, in particular, there are no rigid class strata, and there most certainly isn’t any closed loop that guarantees the wealthy that status in perpetuity. “Citing tax scholar Robert Carroll’s examination of IRS records,” National Review’s Kevin Williamson observed, “Professor [Mark] Rank notes that the turnover among the super-rich (the top 400 taxpayers in any given year) is 98 percent over a decade—that is, just 2 percent of that elusive group remain there for ten years in a row. Among those earning more than $1 million a year, most earned that much for only one year of the nine-year period studied, and only 6 percent earned that much for the entire period.” Among those who found their way onto Forbes Magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans in 2016, a record 42 of them were immigrants from 21 different countries. Together, they have a combined net worth of over $250 billion.

Among liberals, however, this kind of old-school class envy is practically passé. What’s really in vogue isn’t resentment toward American capitalism but American culture. For many on the post-Marxist left, race and identity have supplanted wealth and power as the traits by which structural haves and have-nots can be identified and pitted against one another. For nearly two decades, liberal ideologues have debated whether assimilation into American society was possible or even desirable. Not only does assimilation represent the tacit acceptance of and submission to American racism, but it is the surrender of cultural heritage and traits that are superior to America’s heterogeneous soup of appropriated customs. “Assimilation, instead of bringing upward mobility, brings downward mobility,” Aviva Chomsky wrote in 2007. “It’s not lack of assimilation that keeps them marginalized—it’s assimilation itself.”

As the decades have shown, and as the literate left would likely concede, assimilation continued apace, and it has not yielded a racial hierarchy. A 2015 study conducted by Harvard sociologist Mary Waters for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that immigrants, particularly second-generation immigrants, are integrating into society faster than migrants of earlier generations. This is not without its setbacks; the strain on U.S. English language programs in schools and the evidence suggesting low-skilled migrants “appear to be filling low-skilled jobs that native-born Americans are not available or willing to take” increase social tensions. But assimilation is occurring, and all parties are richer for it.

America in the 1990s and 2000s experienced an immigration boom and, as historian Arthur Schlesinger said, “Mass migrations produce mass antagonisms.” Even though the undocumented and legal permanent-resident populations have leveled off since the collapse of the economy in 2008, America’s politics haven’t caught up with the trends. As the light and heat around immigration fade, so, too, should the insufferable generalities about immigrants bandied about by opinions makers on both the left and the right. At least, that would be ideal.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/american-society/lefts-immigration-radicalism/
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DREAMer Thanks Trump, Rips Pelosi & Schumer for 'Using Us as Pawns'
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As seen on Fox & Friends Weekend


A Mexican native whose mother brought him to America at age 1 said President Trump has shown "leadership and compassion" toward DACA recipients like himself, while Democrats have conversely used them as "pawns."

Hilario Yanez, who goes by Eli, said Trump showed courage to tackle the illegal immigration issue comprehensively during his first year in office.

"Here's a guy who wants to provide a pathway to citizenship for myself and really make a difference in my life," he said, adding that if the president believes a border wall is necessary for national security, then he would support it.

"I think it’s time for people who want to come to the United States to focus... on skills so [they] contribute to the American economy right way," Yanez, who was born in Tampico, Tamaulipas said.



Yanez said top Democrats have "no clear message" on immigration policy, other than to "us[e] us as pawns."

"They never should have shut down the government over DACA," he said, mentioning Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) by name. "There is plenty of time on the table to fix this. March 5 is the deadline."

Yanez said he gets "goosebumps" when he hears the "Star-Spangled Banner" and said he would never take a knee like some athletes have, and declared a willingness to serve in the armed forces if asked.

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