Lowry and J. Podhoretz on Bush and immigration

Reader N. tells us how the NRO people are responding to President Bush’s speech:

Rich Lowry has developed what can only be called contempt for Bush. He also has become more realistic about what is going on. Excerpt:

“President Bush has a bold new approach to immigration enforcement: He wants to police the Mexican border with symbolism.

“That’s the point of his proposal to send the National Guard to our border with Mexico. This represents Bush’s final, desperate descent into Clintonian sleight of hand. He wants to distract enough of his supporters with the razzle-dazzle of “National Guard to the Border!” headlines that they won’t notice he is pushing through Congress a proposal that essentially legalizes all the population influx from Latin America that has occurred in the past 10 years and any that might occur in the future.”

John Podhoretz, on the other hand, clings to his emotional connection with immigrants, while bashing strawmen.

“The immigration debate is a very heated and passionate one, and the heat and passion on the part of those on the restrictionist side have been useful tools for pushing the conversation in your direction. But there’s a difference between heated disagreement and the insistence on lock-step uniformity. Suddenly, immigration restriction has become one of those issues about which one is not permitted to disagree, because to disagree is to join with the forces of Evil.”

Comment: The irony of the above paragraph, and those that follow, is huge because Podhoretz has for some time now excoriated those that wish to control the border as bigoted, implied that they are animated by racism and (drumroll) anti-Semitism. One cannot have a conversation with him on the topic without the issue of Jews in the 1930s arising; he never once has discussed the fact that the vast majority of illegals will be eligible for affirmative action, for example, nor can he bring himself to admit that the great wave of immigration in the 19th and early 20th century was into a different country, a country without a welfare state.

To his credit, after he’d been chided by some, he wrote this last week. Whle I do not agree with some premises, it is intelligently written and does not descend into the name calling that is so common from open-borders advocates. It also is, to the best of my recollection, the very first time I have EVER read the word “assimilation” in ANY posting or article by John Podhoretz. Perhaps he has written in favor of assimilation elsewhere, and I have missed it, but I’ve never seen it before. This is a step forward for him, IMO.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 16, 2006 12:17 PM | Send