George Will and America

Starting from the premise that we cannot deport 11 million illegals in one fell swoop, George Will proceeds to the conclusion that we must give the illegals amnesty; otherwise they will turn into a permanent simmering sub-culture like the Muslims in France. But of course his premise is false. Immigration restrictionists are not proposing the instant deportation of all illegals in America, but rather a sustained process of real law enforcement resulting in a steady decline of the illegal population.

Will supports border enforcement, but only with amnesty. Enforcement without amnesty he calls “punitive” and “scowling.” But how can America defend itself at all, if any serious attempt at self-defense (that is, any self-defense not combined with appeasement and surrender) is seen as morally ugly?

Someone please send Will my article, “The Second Mexican War.” Maybe if he understood that Mexico is using immigrants as part of a concerted campaign of nationalist expansion and vengeance aimed at gaining power over this country, he might feel differently about the immigrants, whom he now describes as people looking for a job.

But of course I am kidding myself. Will, like President Bush, is terminally detached from and contemptuous of this country. Nowhere in his column is there the slightest sense of America as a country, a people, and a culture that he cares about and that are under threat from the unassimilable immigrant wave from the south. Short of an outright military or terrorist assault on America, he would not lift a finger to defend her. Such is “conservatism.”

A reader writes:

Someone thrust upon me the George Will column over at Townhall. What a rotting mass of clichés he has offered up. He could have written the same column, with perhaps four or eight words changed, in 1985—before the “one time” amnesty of 1986—and in fact, maybe he did. He trots out the same asinine clichés—“Jobs Americans won’t do”—and even has the temerity to claim that sub-minimum wage workers will somehow bail out Social Security for the rest of us, which defies basic arithmetic. If George Will cannot run a calculator, performing the trivial multiplication and addition required to determine just how many $5.00/hour employees contributing to Social Security are required to bail out a system that soon will be inundated with tens of thousands of much higher paid workers, then he should just have the humility to shut up on the issue.

Certainly it is obvious that Will has learned nothing, nothing at all, about the social, cultural and economic issues of immigration since the 1986 bill. Think of it, a so-called public intellectual who hasn’t learned a single thing about a critical issue in twenty (20!) years. His brain seems to have been in a time capsule since Reagan’s second term on this topic.

George Will should consider retiring, preferably to a country with immigration policies more to his liking, he has just shown himself to be completely irrelevant. He should move somewhere he will fit in better. George Will should retire to France.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 30, 2006 02:22 PM | Send