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/
Will News Media Recall Schumer's 2013 Vow to Not Shutdown Over Immigration? Back in 2013, with Democrats controlling the Senate and White House, a study by the Media Research Center determined that the broadcast networks mostly blamed Republicans for that year's government shutdown. In the midst of the shutdown, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (now the Democratic Senate leader) actually went on ABC's This Week on October 6, 2013 to assure host George Stephanopoulos that Democrats would never shut the government down over an issue such as immigration. Schumer: We want to negotiate without a gun to our head. Speaker Boehner comes in and he says, basically -- it's sort of like this: Someone goes into your house, takes your wife and children hostage, and then says 'Let's negotiate over the price of your house.' You know, we could do the same thing on immigration We believe strongly in immigration reform. We could say, 'we're shutting down the government, we're not gonna raise the debt ceiling, until you pass immigration reform.' It would be governmental chaos. With a shutdown showdown currently looming over the Democrats' demands on immigration, will the networks recall Schumer's words if a shutdown comes to pass? Or will they stay true to form and blame Republicans? https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/n...ia-recall-schumers-2013-vow-not-shutdown-over
All intellectually honest people know that the left represents illegals to a much greater degree than American citizens, in the same fashion that they have always been more concerned with the rights of criminals than the victims.
The republicans should be begging the dems to shutdown the government. Of course, cuck republicans are desperately trying to carve out some form of craven surrender so they can get the amnesty their corporate paymasters are demanding and undermine Trump.
The public isn’t as fond of boundless immigration as the Democrats are betting they are https://hotair.com/archives/2018/01/23/public-isnt-fond-boundless-immigration-democrats-betting/
Dems are playing a dangerous game at worst or just failing to put a good strategy together at best for their daca supporters. Team Trump smacked down Schumer and now the budget/cr issue gets revisited one month closer to the daca expiration date when everyone is broken into a sweat about it ending. It was thoroughly discussed here that if the dems do not get a daca deal that the Hispanics and their supporters will turn on them and want to know why they did not just give trump whatever the frig he needed as long as it meant they or their family member can could stay. Of course the Tard Twins totally dismissed it so you know it's right. Let's just check in for a minute to see how that is coming along, shall we? Let me know if you hear any desperation in Luis' voice, keeping in mind that he is the lead buffalo for the Hispanic coalition in congress. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/v...ild_the_wall_myself_if_it_helps_dreamers.html
charity begins at home... we should help them in their country. keeping the wages of our citizens up so their can be charity. when our standard a living approaches early 90s levels maybe we can have immigration again.