We must stop lying to ourselves or we will die

The level of lying that has become common in the illegal alien debate is truly frightening and bespeaks an America that has passed some new threshold on the road to self-destruction. One of these lies is intrinsic to the Senate bill and its variants: that these bills combine “enforcement” with amnesty. Given our current systematic failure to enforce the law and protect our borders, and given the president’s own palpable lack of interest in enforcing the law, and given the nonchalant or celebratory statements about illegal immigration by many of the president’s supporters, such as William Kristol and Michael Bloomberg, no intellectually honest person could believe that the enforcement side of the bill would be seriously acted upon. Therefore the only way to establish the president’s and the government’s bona fides in this area is to pass an enforcement-only bill first and see if it is enforced. Otherwise we will inevitably end up with a vastly worse repetition of what happened in 1986, an amnesty of millions of illegal aliens, with no improvement in enforcement, leading to continued mass illegal immigration, followed by further calls for yet another amnesty.

Another big lie is the establishment’s denial that their various proposals are, in fact, amnesty proposals. Starting with the stinking head of our body politic, President Bush, down to every liberal newspaper reporter, it is now simply taken for granted that a bill is only an amnesty bill if it involves giving the illegal alien instant citizenship. Anything short of that, such as giving him legal status in the United States with the option to pursue citizenship, is not, the establishment insists, amnesty. Thus Jonathan Weisman writes in the Washington Post about a compromise bill that is now being floated:

The compromise could satisfy some conservatives opposed to any program that offers illegal immigrants a way to stay in the country and work toward citizenship, which they term “amnesty.”

See? A bill to allow illegal aliens to stay in the country legally and work toward citizenship is not amnesty. It is only falsely described as “amnesty”—by conservatives. See Weisman’s scare quotes. Thanks for straightening us out on that, Mr. Weisman.

In reality, amnesty means removing the penalty or the due consequence for a wrongful act. Under our law, the due consequence for a person who has illegally entered the United States is to be removed from the United States. Therefore to give illegal aliens legal residency in this country is amnesty, period. All the bills that are on the table to give illegals some kind of legal status in the U.S., however that legal status is defined, are amnesty bills, period.

- end of initial entry -

An Indian living in the West writes:

Everything we have noted as self-destructive in contemporary Europe seems to pale into comparison with what America (or its elite) is currently doing to it and its future.

Even though Europe is in bad shape, there is nothing here to equal the vast and incredible abandonment of duty to enforce the law that you witness with your Mexican illegal immigration crisis. None of France, Germany, Britain or Italy have illegal immigration problems that come anywhere near what America has (and there seems to be no hope of ever fixing it).

Do Americans simply not care or they don’t care strongly enough? Or it because there is so much space to run that people think they can keep running from it forever?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 04, 2006 01:28 PM | Send