It’s only taken
a week for President Trump to give the body politic an immigration enema. The
aim, perhaps, was to flush out a set of bad ideas that Barack Obama had
managed over eight years to instate as “normal.” Namely, that it’s
unnecessary to enforce the immigration laws, or cruel and unusual to do so,
or that national borders are a barbarous anachronism, or that federal laws
are optional in certain self-selected jurisdictions.
But Trump’s
staff sure fucked up the details carrying out his refugee and immigration
ban, most particularly detaining people with green cards, and those already
granted visas. The blunder provoked an impressive blowback of airport
protests, and finally a stay from a federal judge, which muddied the legality
of Trump’s executive order — all in all, a tactical stumble for Prez DT, who
apparently omitted to consult with an array of government agencies and their
lawyers before issuing the decree at close-of-business Friday. For the record,
I’m down with the complaint that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and
Afghanistan were left off the no-come list, since those lands produce more
radical Islamic maniacs than anywhere else.
The reader by
now probably detects my ambivalent feelings in this bundle of issues and
grievances, so let me try to clarify my basic positions: I think borders
matter and they need to be protected. I think our immigration law enforcement
under Obama has been deeply dishonest and damaging to our politics in ways
that go far beyond the question of who gets to come here. I believe we are
under no obligation to take in everybody and anybody who wants to move here.
I believe we need an official time out from the high-volume immigration of
recent decades. I believe we have good reasons to be picky about who we let
in.
The most
dishonest and damaging trope of recent years is the widely-accepted idea on
the Left that illegal immigrants are merely “undocumented” — as if they were
the hapless victims of some clerical error made by the government and
therefore deserving of a pass. Language matters. The acceptance and
repetition of this lie has in effect given permission to the Left to lie
whenever it suits their purposes about all kinds of things, for instance the
delusion that Russia stole the election from Hillary Clinton and that Radical
Islam doesn’t pose a threat to western values (or even exist). And it is
certainly true that they are assisted by legacy media giants such as The
New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR. The Times,
especially is keen to provoke a national crisis that might unseat Trump, by
simply declaring it so in a three-column headline:
The furor seemed
rather out of proportion to the people inconvenienced by Trump’s
administrative blundering: about 300 green card holders out of 300,000
travelers admitted over the weekend — even after the White House walked back
its green card miscue on Sunday. And it gives the impression even to someone
who is allergic to conspiracy theory (yours truly) that some organizing
principle is behind it. That principle may be the deep neurosis of the
Dem/Prog Left reduced to virtue-signaling in their out-of-power echo chamber.
Having no coherent ideas about the immigration issue besides resistance to
it, they offer only sentimental narratives: tears on the statue of liberty,
“dreamers,” sanctuary cities, nation-of-open-arms,
we’re-all-children-of-immigrants, and anyway North America was stolen from
the Indians. The hysteria is impressive, as if the Left has come down with ergot
poisoning, seeing witches (racists, homophobes, misogynists, white privilege
villains, and Russians) behind every juniper shrub in the land.
I’d go as far to
say that this neurosis derives from the general psychological boundary
problems of the current Dem/Prog ethos. Their zeal to erase categories has
resulted in lost categories of thinking — it’s all one big soup of
victimization out there now and everybody better rush to cash in their victim
brownie points while they still can — or as long as Senator Chuck Schumer can
keep the crocodile tears flowing. From my vantage, this country would
actually benefit from having firmer categories of thinking and certainly
firmer categories of behavior.
What really irks
the Left is any defense of Western civilization, especially in something so
concrete as demographics. This defensive impulse has been deeply suppressed
in the recent political life of Europe and America. On the university
campuses, it’s become the equivalent of original sin. Donald Trump turned out
to be a peculiar choice to lead a turnaround from all this, and his
oafishness may eventually deter an effort to restore something like a
self-respecting common culture. But the turnaround is coming to Europe, too,
this year in a set of national elections. Expect
more civil strife as the battle is joined.
