America’s Camp of the Saints

The illegal alien manifestations across the country, combined with the stunning support shown for them by the American political and media establishment, is America’s “Camp of the Saints” moment. It is the moment when a country is truly and decisively violated and threatened in its integrity and existence, and its leadership, instead of resisting the violation, accepts it and rushes to welcome it. Fortunately, there is something else going on in America that was not happening in The Camp of the Saints, a large-scale backlash against this surrender of nationhood.

Part of the surrender is the notion we now hear everywhere—that illegals are “immigrants,” and that they are “Americans.” Mark Krikorian writes about this at The Corner:

“WE ARE ALL AMERICANS“? [Mark Krikorian]

As one illegal-alien spokesman after another claims that they’re actually Americans, and we just need to recognize that fact (a couple examples in this Post preview story on today’s marches), it’s hard not to conclude that the problem is that they really believe it’s true. In other words, our elite has so completely erased the distinction between citizens and foreigners, devaluing the meaning of Americanness to merely working and paying taxes on American territory, that the illegals (and legal non-citizens) actually have come to believe it—and are simply demanding the fulfillment of what they consider to already have been promised. Obviously, the point is not to excuse the foreigners’ will to power, but rather that you teach people how to treat you—and we’ve taught foreigners to make these aggressive demands against us.

The phenomenon Krikorian describes is the culmination of the reductive way of talking about America that has been commonplace for many years. Every time some immigration advocate or reporter or U.S. president has said, “They’re just coming for jobs,” “They want to put food on the table,” “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande,” and every time that false statement was not immediately refuted, the notion that American nationality is defined by nothing more than having a job in America was legitimized. Words, phrases, ideas, have consequences—if they are not contested. And for many years, those phrases have not been adequately contested, or even contested at all.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 12, 2006 02:26 AM | Send