Post by MARIO on May 31, 2006 11:47:31 GMT -8
BOAT PEOPLE
By Mark Steyn
I hate writing about immigration, really I do. I’m an immigrant myself and it’s hardly my place to say who should or shouldn’t be let into America. I feel like the weekending New Yorker who snaps up the last 18th century farmhouse in Vermont and then goes to Town Meeting to whine about the proposed subdivision on the edge of the village.
Nonetheless, like most legal immigrants, I resent the conflation made by everyone from the President down between the vast army of the Undocumented and those of us who are Documented to our eyeballs (literally: my retinal scan is in the Homeland Security computer, but fortunately it’s incompatible with the FBI computer, so my eyeballs can go on a bank-robbing spree through the Midwest with impunity). We legal immigrants paid gazillions of dollars, went through INS hell, and filled in all the stupid paperwork, like the form demanding to know whether we’re coming to America with the intent of practicing (a) genocide or (b) prostitution. As it happens, I’m a genocidal prostitute but I took a gamble that the government doesn’t really check these things, and so far it seems to be panning out.
I came here, like millions of others, to do the jobs Americans won’t do – in this case, the back page column of National Review (it was offered to Maureen Dowd and Anna Quindlen, but they fled in terror). However, I in turn also employ several Americans: as one of my grateful minions likes to say, “In our case, we need immigrants to come here to hire Americans to do the jobs immigrants won’t do.” They in turn disburse their earnings in the local economy. By contrast, the fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community send so much money back home to their family members that these “remittances” now outrank tourism and oil as Mexico’s biggest source of foreign income. I raised a biometrically scanned eyebrow when I heard that, but it’s true. As a subject of Her Britannic Majesty, I hate to keep walloping you guys over the head with my imperialist pith helmet. But, because you were short-sighted enough a century ago to disdain nation-building in Mexico, Mexico is now nation-building in America. President Fox has every incentive to keep outsourcing what would otherwise be his domestic instability north of the border – and thus any illegal immigration deal the Mexican government goes along with will be, almost by definition, not in America’s interest.
There’s no equivalent to this in the entire history of US immigration. Indeed, it is so at odds with traditional patterns of immigration that it demands a whole new terminology. Instead, 90% of the political class is doing its best to rhetorically normalize this uniquely deformed scenario. Or as Carol Moseley Braun put it during the 2004 Presidential campaign:
My late mother used to say it doesn’t matter if you came to this country on the Mayflower or a slave ship, through Ellis Island or across the Rio Grande, we’re all in the same boat now.
I take my hat off: That’s beautifully coded. Whether you came here as slave owner or slave, filing the paperwork in triplicate or through the express check-in, everyone’s an immigrant and all the rest is quibbling. Who are we to distinguish between some uptight white-bread Pilgrim disembarking at Plymouth Rock and Mahmoud abu Halima, a hardworking young man forced to live in the shadows because he wanted to live the American dream and do the jobs that Americans won’t do. Fortunately, he was pardoned in the ’86 amnesty. In his case, the dream involved destroying America and the job Americans would’t do was blowing up the World Trade Center, which he did in 1993. But, like Carol says, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Illegal-Americans, Islamist-Americans, Incendiary-Americans, we’re all in the same boat now, even if it’s a seaplane coming through the window of a New York skyscraper.
What unnerves me is that there’s no basic difference between the President’s philosophical disposition and Carol Moseley Braun’s. And that’s alarming because it implicitly delegitimizes the basic notion that a state has the right to determine which non-citizens shall cross its borders. In practical terms, the Braun-Bush view concedes that the southern border is the American version of the Pakistani tribal areas, a land where the state’s de jure sovereignty can only ever be honored in the breach. And, beyond that, it communicates the same lack of will we rightly bemoan from the Europeans vis a vis the Islamists.
That’s not to say America’s Mexicans are the equivalent of Europe’s Muslims: at the very minimum, they’re less unassimilable. But, as the Continent is discovering, you have to have something to assimilate with, not merely a multicultural nullity. And every time I pull up at the payphone in downtown Burlington, Vermont and read instructions in Spanish – in a jurisdiction with a statewide total of seven Latinos and where the only linguistic minority is French-Canadian – I marvel at a society so secure it’s voluntarily cooperating in the erection of what almost every other country on the planet knows to be one of the biggest obstacles to national cohesion.
No one should underestimate the tensions in bicultural societies with even relatively small differences. Never mind Rwanda or Bosnia, think Canada and the United Kingdom. To accede to the bilingualization of your country and to import a population that disputes your border would seem likely at the very minimum to set you up for the destabilizing tribalization that afflicts both Quebec and Ulster politics. If you’re lucky. That seems a high price to pay for a cheap pool boy. It may be an economic issue to Vincente Fox; this side of the border, it’s about sovereignty.
www.steynonline.com/pageprint.cfm?edit_id=25
By Mark Steyn
I hate writing about immigration, really I do. I’m an immigrant myself and it’s hardly my place to say who should or shouldn’t be let into America. I feel like the weekending New Yorker who snaps up the last 18th century farmhouse in Vermont and then goes to Town Meeting to whine about the proposed subdivision on the edge of the village.
Nonetheless, like most legal immigrants, I resent the conflation made by everyone from the President down between the vast army of the Undocumented and those of us who are Documented to our eyeballs (literally: my retinal scan is in the Homeland Security computer, but fortunately it’s incompatible with the FBI computer, so my eyeballs can go on a bank-robbing spree through the Midwest with impunity). We legal immigrants paid gazillions of dollars, went through INS hell, and filled in all the stupid paperwork, like the form demanding to know whether we’re coming to America with the intent of practicing (a) genocide or (b) prostitution. As it happens, I’m a genocidal prostitute but I took a gamble that the government doesn’t really check these things, and so far it seems to be panning out.
I came here, like millions of others, to do the jobs Americans won’t do – in this case, the back page column of National Review (it was offered to Maureen Dowd and Anna Quindlen, but they fled in terror). However, I in turn also employ several Americans: as one of my grateful minions likes to say, “In our case, we need immigrants to come here to hire Americans to do the jobs immigrants won’t do.” They in turn disburse their earnings in the local economy. By contrast, the fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community send so much money back home to their family members that these “remittances” now outrank tourism and oil as Mexico’s biggest source of foreign income. I raised a biometrically scanned eyebrow when I heard that, but it’s true. As a subject of Her Britannic Majesty, I hate to keep walloping you guys over the head with my imperialist pith helmet. But, because you were short-sighted enough a century ago to disdain nation-building in Mexico, Mexico is now nation-building in America. President Fox has every incentive to keep outsourcing what would otherwise be his domestic instability north of the border – and thus any illegal immigration deal the Mexican government goes along with will be, almost by definition, not in America’s interest.
There’s no equivalent to this in the entire history of US immigration. Indeed, it is so at odds with traditional patterns of immigration that it demands a whole new terminology. Instead, 90% of the political class is doing its best to rhetorically normalize this uniquely deformed scenario. Or as Carol Moseley Braun put it during the 2004 Presidential campaign:
My late mother used to say it doesn’t matter if you came to this country on the Mayflower or a slave ship, through Ellis Island or across the Rio Grande, we’re all in the same boat now.
I take my hat off: That’s beautifully coded. Whether you came here as slave owner or slave, filing the paperwork in triplicate or through the express check-in, everyone’s an immigrant and all the rest is quibbling. Who are we to distinguish between some uptight white-bread Pilgrim disembarking at Plymouth Rock and Mahmoud abu Halima, a hardworking young man forced to live in the shadows because he wanted to live the American dream and do the jobs that Americans won’t do. Fortunately, he was pardoned in the ’86 amnesty. In his case, the dream involved destroying America and the job Americans would’t do was blowing up the World Trade Center, which he did in 1993. But, like Carol says, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Illegal-Americans, Islamist-Americans, Incendiary-Americans, we’re all in the same boat now, even if it’s a seaplane coming through the window of a New York skyscraper.
What unnerves me is that there’s no basic difference between the President’s philosophical disposition and Carol Moseley Braun’s. And that’s alarming because it implicitly delegitimizes the basic notion that a state has the right to determine which non-citizens shall cross its borders. In practical terms, the Braun-Bush view concedes that the southern border is the American version of the Pakistani tribal areas, a land where the state’s de jure sovereignty can only ever be honored in the breach. And, beyond that, it communicates the same lack of will we rightly bemoan from the Europeans vis a vis the Islamists.
That’s not to say America’s Mexicans are the equivalent of Europe’s Muslims: at the very minimum, they’re less unassimilable. But, as the Continent is discovering, you have to have something to assimilate with, not merely a multicultural nullity. And every time I pull up at the payphone in downtown Burlington, Vermont and read instructions in Spanish – in a jurisdiction with a statewide total of seven Latinos and where the only linguistic minority is French-Canadian – I marvel at a society so secure it’s voluntarily cooperating in the erection of what almost every other country on the planet knows to be one of the biggest obstacles to national cohesion.
No one should underestimate the tensions in bicultural societies with even relatively small differences. Never mind Rwanda or Bosnia, think Canada and the United Kingdom. To accede to the bilingualization of your country and to import a population that disputes your border would seem likely at the very minimum to set you up for the destabilizing tribalization that afflicts both Quebec and Ulster politics. If you’re lucky. That seems a high price to pay for a cheap pool boy. It may be an economic issue to Vincente Fox; this side of the border, it’s about sovereignty.
www.steynonline.com/pageprint.cfm?edit_id=25