The Immigration Fiasco

During a period of study in London in the early 1980s I was making daily use of the splendid library at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies. The library is in the main SOAS premises on Malet Place, but the school also has some overflow accommodation in the fine old Georgian houses around Bedford Square. I used to walk past one of these houses on my way to the library. You could look down at basement rooms, below street level, in which were desks, shelves and filing cabinets piled high with innumerable books and folders, all behind a door that said: DEPARTMENT OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES.

One evening I happened to be walking past these premises with a SOAS staff member. He told me the following story about the place. I have no idea whether the story is true; but it might very well be, and in any case it's a good story.

Back in the 1960s (said my informant) one of those basement rooms was the office of a little old English lady who had dedicated her life to the study of Cambodia. She was, he said, short and round, with coke-bottle glasses and unkempt hair, and her dearest wish in life was to be left alone in her basement room poring over 16th-century Cambodian manuscripts. For many years this wish was granted to her. Nobody else was interested in Cambodia. To judge from a famous remark by Sir Winston Churchill — "I have lived for 78 years without hearing of bloody places like Cambodia" — very few English people at that time even knew of the country's existence.

Then, one day, an American president decided to invade Cambodia. In the course of making the necessary preparations, his administration discovered that nobody in Washington, D.C. knew anything about the country. Cambodia expertise was suddenly trading at a premium. Cabinet officers alerted their aides, the aides alerted their deputies, the deputies alerted their assistants, the assistants alerted their secretaries, and very soon U.S. bureaucrats were scurrying all over the world looking for Cambodia experts.

Thus it came to pass that one day the little old lady in Bedford Square heard her doorbell ring. Rousing herself from her scrutiny of the edicts of the Ang Duong monarchy, she went and opened the door. There she found standing two senior staff officers from the Pentagon, with a couple of civilians in tow. After some introductions and explanations, the little old lady was whisked away in a huge black car belonging to the U.S. embassy. She was flown to Washington on a specially equipped plane, and ushered into the war room deep beneath the Pentagon. There she dwelt for several months, while the movers and shakers of American diplomacy picked her brains and gave her documents in Cambodian to translate.

Eventually Cambodia sank in importance to the American president. The little old lady's services were no longer required. The Pentagon laid on the special plane again, to fly her back to London. She returned to her cluttered basement room on Bedford Square, closing the door thankfully behind her. "And there she can still be found," concluded my narrator. "Undisturbed for many years now, and close to retirement."

I've been feeling a little bit like that old lady recently. I don't know diddly about Cambodia, but I know something about immigration. Not enough to claim real expertise; but I have followed the issue for some years, have been through the immigration mill myself of course, spent my first few years in the USA among people for whom each other's immigration status was a common topic of conversation, have read all the books, and am pretty familiar with all the arguments. I have even written occasional pieces for immigration websites. When, on January 7, the president put forward his proposals for a "temporary worker" plan, my ears perked up. Here was a topic on which I had a decently good background. I could join in the debate without having to do much homework.

My enthusiasm quickly turned to dismay. As commentary on the Bush plan began to appear, it became ever more obvious that most conservative commentators had never in their lives given more than a few seconds' thought to immigration issues. The crassest falsehoods ("it is not actually illegal to enter the country without documentation"), the stalest fallacies ("jobs that Americans won't do"), the hoariest myths ("Hispanic immigrants are natural conservatives") came tumbling from their word processors. Theories long ago debunked ("immigration has no impact on poor Americans") were tossed around with utter seriousness. An alarming number of my fellow pundits seemed to have the utmost difficulty distinguishing between

as issues. The word "illegal" was often casually omitted where it was necessary, so that I had to read a sentence twice to figure out if the word "immigrant" meant

There seemed to be a general vague feeling that it was churlish, or improper, or politically incorrect, or something, to distinguish between the two things. A very respectable commentator, the opinion-page editor of a large newspaper, who in fact has no clue what my opinion on immigration is, called me "anti-immigrant" because I had opposed the President's proposal on illegal immigrants. (Note: I am myself an immigrant. My wife is also an immigrant. Half our friends are immigrants. "Anti-immigrant" — feu!)

As just a single example of the kind of thing I mean, listen to all the talk about how it is unfair to prosecute employers who hire illegal aliens because it is "impossible" to devise any system that would check a job applicant's status. Well, fiddlesticks. We need only make the Social Security card scannable, so an employer could run it through one of those $20 scanning gadgets the drugstore swipes your credit card through. It could be done very easily, if our government bureaucracies were capable of doing anything one percent as well as the private sector does. If my Visa card can be verified in ten seconds, why can't my Social Security card?

(When my own immigration "case" was crawling its slow way through the system, it happened that I was involved in mailing a lot of packages and tracking them to their destinations. Companies like UPS and FedEx make this easy to do from your home computer. With a few keystrokes you can tell where your package has got to. So why couldn't I do this with my immigration case? Track its progress as I track the movement of a parcel? Because the INS — now the BCIS — is too stupid, lazy, and incompetent to establish such a system, that's why. There was in fact no way at all to know the progress of my case. I just had to wait till I was called. You can't phone the Immigration Service. They don't answer phones, or mail, or e-mail.)

I have come to the sad conclusion that American-born Americans simply cannot think rationally about immigration. This is true even of most conservatives. Liberals, of course, are perfectly hopeless. Here is what liberals believe.

There are two kinds of people: good, kind people who love immigrants, and bad, cruel people who hate immigrants.

That's it, that's the entire liberal mindset on the matter. No analysis or discussion is permitted. You can even see this cast of thought beneath the surface of some conservative commentary, in fact. All the nuances of this vast and tangled issue — legal vs. illegal (Yes: Legality as opposed to illegality counts as a nuance in immigration discussions!), domestic enforcement vs. entry control, overstayers, chain migration, border policy, "anchor babies," skill sets, bilingual education, illegal-alien criminality, Fourteenth Amendment, and public-health issues and the rest — all are lost. One libertarian commentator noted with frowning disapproval that some conservatives "support limits on legal immigration." Good grief! Do they really? What are they, some kind of racists? There should be no limits at all — doesn't everybody know that?

And swirling around the whole issue is a thick fog of sentimentality and nostalgia, through which can be dimly glimpsed the grand old icons: the cabin and the shtetl, the famine ships and the Lower East Side, the olive groves of Sicily, and picturesque campesinos playing soft love songs on guitar in the old Southwest. If you look very closely you can sometimes catch sight of other, less pretty things: cold cash self-interest and naked racism. ("Let's see, I can have my yard work done for $10 an hour by a cheerful small brown foreigner, or for $20 an hour by a surly large black American. Hmmm.....")

Never mind. Not only is America incapable of thinking about immigration sensibly — much less of doing anything about it! — she is also incapable of thinking about the subject for very long. This present spasm of interest will blow over in a week or two. The arguments will all be forgotten. America will sink back into her sweet lotus dreams of "diversity," of "cheap labor," of "open borders," of shtetls and cabins and Ellis Island and Hester Street. Politicians will reply to immigration questions, on the rare occasions they are asked, with emollient platitudes about us being a "nation of immigrants," to approving nods and applause. A few more border-patrol officers will quit in frustration, a couple more Arizona ranchers will sell up in despair after their house is trashed by invaders for the 30th time, there'll be a few more gang-initiation murders in Los Angeles, another sector of the low-wage labor market will bid goodbye to its last American citizen, and some deep-eyed silent young men carrying curiously heavy packages will slip across the border amidst the throngs of campesinos, heading for a large city.

And I, and other people who know about immigration, and care about it, will go back to our rooms and shut the doors, quietly thankful that the fuss is over. We knew, after all, as the little old Cambodia lady very likely did, that nothing much good would come of it.

as issues. The word "illegal" was often casually omitted where it was necessary, so that I had to read a sentence twice to figure out if the word "immigrant" meant

There are two kinds of people: good, kind people who love immigrants, and bad, cruel people who hate immigrants.

No Matians are not attacking us. You should have read on, and checked out the article: Immigration & The American Future.

The cultural values, norms and priorities of every society on earth reflect those who comprise that society. Those who pretend that all people are interchangeable do but project their hostility towards the realities of the human experience; their intolerance towards those who want to preserve their own legacies, etc..

As I wrote after the line you quoted:

Those Conservatives who are intimidated into silence by the hissing venom of indoctrinated Leftists, spraying the air as they call you "nativists," "racists," and "xenophobic," are a major part of the problem. We will either face this problem, now, or your grandchildren will have no place in the land of their forebears.

The unique qualities of America--as opposed to qualities that we really do have with many other peoples--reflect the unique nature of the early settlers, and their experiences in overcoming adversity, and building new societies from the ground up. These are reflected in their adversion to dependence on Government; in the understanding of the function of Government, as reflected in the Declaration of Independence, and in their respect for diversity--true diversity, not the degrading vision of the modern Left--where we have very different priorities and social values from State to State, while acknowledging what we also have in common, under the broad umbrella of the Constitution.

William Flax

Where did the early settlers come from and what were some of the influences on their "overcoming adversity" and "building new societies"... i.e. what were their ethnic identies??

The greatest numbers came from England, Scotland, with lesser numbers from the Netherlands, Ireland, France (Huguenots), etc.. The principal influences on their overcoming adversity, etc., were in their own strengths of character, rather than any fixed ideas they brought with them--although many were sustained by a strong religious faith (not necessarily the same faith). They were not representative of the over-all populations from which they came so much as of people with particular, rather hard nosed traits that stood out among those older populations. The building of societies from the ground up reflected the fact that they came in relatively small numbers--those boats in that era couldn't carry that many at one time, for that matter--and had to clear a wilderness, and set up their own social institutions. (It was a slow trip, and uneconomic in the 17th Century, for any of the mother countries to even try to interfere too effectively in what they were doing, anyway.)

It was when this pattern changed, dramatically, with the French & Indian War, and the greater British military presence, and attempts at a new level of control, etc., that the new breed which grew out of a lot of parallel settler experiences, among some very differently oriented settlers, reacted with the American Revolution, and the birth of a true American ethnicity.

This is a very fragmentary outline, but it will suggest my drift.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

So I can assume you adhere to the philosophy that Native Americans, Black Americans and the Spanish did not participate in the building of this "ethnicity" of what it is to be an American??

O.K., here comes the demagoguery. It should have been obvious to you, that I was addressing the origin of the group that came to define American at the time of the Revolution. Those whom you call "Native Americans"--an insult to the Indians, because they had their own very distinct ethnicities (plural) at the same time, and American is a European word coined to refer to the original white settlers--in many cases fought with great bravery and suffering to preserve their ways and values from the encroaching "American" development. That they lost is no reason to deny them their actual identities (again plural).

With regard to the Negroes, present largely in the South, they did indeed contribute a great deal to the developing Southern culture of the times and those immediately subsequent; and to this day are a part of that culture. But it is not accurate to suggest that they were really considered a part of the American ethnicity at the time. Whether you like it or not, they were not, both because of the racial aspect, and the fact that initially most of them were in bondage. But certainly, their interest today is one as the hand, to use Booker T. Washington's metaphor, with their White neighbors, over this question of immigration. They are the immediate victims of open borders; the jobs being taken, taken primarily from the least skilled (and least able to defend themselves) class of their race.

The Spanish were not found in any significant numbers in the original 13 States. There was an old Spanish culture in Florida, which was acquired in 1819; and which like those of the Indians, must be considered a rival ethnicity prior to that acquisition. Having never been to Florida, I do not know if it has survived to this day, or in what form--as opposed to the new Cuban-American group in South Florida--but they are not one group. While we respect both, they are distinct in their historic development, as would be other Spanish language ethnic groups, encountered with the annexation of Texas and in the Mexican War and its aftermath.

There are also old minority groups from Northern Europe, that have maintained a certain ethnic separation, such as the Amish.

No one is demeaning any of these people. But none of these other ethnic groups, to which you refer, or the broader spectrum to which I refer, had a hand in setting up the entity known as the United States of America, from a compact of the 13 sovereignties, recognized in the Treaty of Paris, which we call the Constitution. That Constitution reflects the values discussed in the Declaration of Independence; and those values--and the unique slant on them--reflect the experiences of those whom I described earlier.

William Flax

Those whom you call "Native Americans"--an insult to the Indians

I'll make sure my girlfriend knows that being called a "Native American" is an insult.

The Spanish were not found in any significant numbers in the original 13 States.

Really?? Check your history about Georgia.

And just slightly beyond the 13 original colonies... who do you think Louisiana belonged to before the French??? Who explored the Missouri river first... I'll give you a hint their is a rare American half dollar from 1935 dedicated to him... and just slighlty beyond that, where did the names of half the states come from as well as the Ocean to the west?? And who was first to try and controll the Missispi??

And what nations do you think donated to the American rebels during the Revolutionary War??? Russia?? No. China?? Wrong again. And what nation was one of the first to identify the US as an independent nation???

Here is a summary of a book that may open your eyes.

Spain and the Independence of the United States

" The role of Spain in the birth of the United States is a little known and little understood aspect of U.S. independence. Through actual fighting, provision of supplies, and money, Spain helped the young British colonies succeed in becoming an independent nation. Soldiers were recruited from all over the Spanish empire, from Spain itself and from throughout Spanish America. Many died fighting British soldiers and their allies in Central America, the Caribbean, along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis and as far north as Michigan, along the Gulf Coast to Mobile and Pensacola, as well as in Europe.

Based on primary research in the archives of Spain, this book is about United States history at its very inception, placing the war in its broadest international context. In short, the information in this book should provide a clearer understanding of the independence of the United States, correct a longstanding omission in its history, and enrich its patrimony. It will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the Revolutionary War and in Spain's role in the development of the Americas. "

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that the Spanish help was everything that you say. It is certainly no greater than that rendered by the Bourbon Monarchy in France, whose navy showed up at the key moment to win the war at Yorktown. Does anything in that event make us more French than the influence of the Huguenots, whom that same Bourbon Monarchy had expelled, had made us earlier by settling in key States, and influencing the behavior and culture of their neighbors?

Having allies is very important. But allies do not become part of your nation. You will not find me hostile to Spain, France or any other country on the face of the earth, except at times when they are hostile to us. But there is a unique American ethnicity, which grew out of the settlers of the original 13 colonies--each of which had its own separate ethnicity, by the way--and it is that unique American nation, whose values are represented in our common doctuments.

Those Spanish and French settlers in areas later acquired are also rooted citizens of equally sovereign American States. I do not disparage them in the slightest; and have always opposed attempts to impose uniform value systems on the several States. But there is one uniform value system, that is limited to those matters agreed upon in 1776, recognized in 1783, and codified in 1787 to 1789. And that is the fundament of Americanism, as distinct from Virginianism, Massachusettsism, etc..

I would never suggest that the rooted, old settler Spanish or French elements in the regions they settled first, need to adopt to the predominant Anglo-Saxon culture, other than in a recognition of the origins of their being a Federal system in the United States. It should not be threatening to any of them. But as they seek respect, they need to accord it. The fact that we have old diversity, does not entitle the Left to destroy any of our ethnic values, nor change the ongoing character of the American Union; and that is precisely what is at issue with the tremendous increase in Third World immigration.

William Flax

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