If I had a hammer …
The true test of what we believe in politically is, what would we do if we had power to do what we wanted?
A reader writes:
Recently, I’ve been reading your site quite a bit, and you’ve had a sizable effect on my thinking.
I was wondering, if you had absolute power to create an immigration policy in the US, what would it be (excluding enforcement provisions—just assume that you have the ability to enact whichever enforcement actions are needed, such as a border fence and penalizing employers, in order to give your substantive policies real effect)?
I’m guessing, though I’m not sure, that it would something along the lines of 1) merit-based immigration 2) from primarily European cultures. Would you allow for some proportion of competent, non-Western immigrants who were able some sort of true ability to assimilate to our European-derived cultural traditions?
LA reply:
Absolute power? With the Congress and courts and the state governments and city governments and the media and the people all supporting me, or unable to stop me?
I would do the things you would expect:
Enforcing all our existing immigration laws, resulting in the slow but steady (not quick and sudden) movement of illegal Mexicans and others out of the U.S. As for Muslims, new laws would be needed establishing that Islam is not only a religion but is a political movement aimed at the destruction of our form of government, and therefore the practice of the Islamic religion should be restricted, and Muslim legal residents and even naturalized citizens should start to be moved back to the Muslim lands. If the Islamic religion were essentially outlawed, even native-born Muslims may want to leave the U.S., without our having to force them out.
Beyond the specific issues of illegal aliens and Muslims, I would of course repeal the ‘65 Immigration Act, returning to national quotas that reflect the cultural similarity between the source nations and the U.S. I would reduce total annual numbers to a fraction of what they are now, for a long time to come. I would bring back the ability to exclude people from the US who have beliefs and allegiances obnoxious or dangerous to us, a theme Rocco diPippo developed in an article at FrontPage Magazine.
On third-worlders legally here, I would strongly state the traditional Anglo-European identity of America, and say that those who identify with it can stay, but that America is not a multicultural society, and in order to save itself it must cease all special accommodations to non-Westerners. We can’t make all recent non-Western immigrants and their children leave, but by asserting the primacy of the majority culture, we would permanently reverse the current direction of things, so that the majority culture starts getting steadily stronger relative to other cultures, instead of steadily weaker, as is the case now.
The return of hope and a sense of control over our future, replacing the current sense of impending and hopeless doom, would lead to a renewal of confidence among white Americans, perhaps reflected in an increased birth rate, thus solving another problem that faces us.
I would get rid of free trade and have a trade policy based on strengthening our country, not on increasing world trade as such.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 05, 2006 02:08 AM | Send