How immigration leads to open borders

A Jewish member of the Pennsylvania National Guard, Brian Kresge, has publicly stated he will refuse to obey any order to guard the Mexican-U.S. border. “I cannot point a gun at folks crossing a border when I am a scion of the same thing,” he wrote at his blog and then elaborated in an interview with the Forward. [Of course the Guardsmen would not be holding guns and would not even be at the border, but would only be doing meaningless support services for the Border Patrol.] “Life was hard in the Pale of Settlement, and though today’s illegals aren’t necessarily fleeing pogroms, they likely have the same fears…. The president’s speech [last week on immigration] got me thinking about my own ancestry. My family came to this country in the bottom of a ship—without papers, without records. I can’t conscience being a hypocrite.”

Folks, I ask again the question that I first asked in Huddled Clichés in 1997, and more recently at VFR, in response to the extraordinary statements coming from Jews and Jewish organizations that Jews are required by their Jewishness and their immigration history to believe in open borders:

If America had known when admitting Jewish immigrants between 1880 and 1920 that the descendants of those immigrants would oppose America’s right to have any future control over immigration, would America have admitted those immigrants in the first place?

As a descendant of Eastern Europe Jews, I never would have imagined that to be descended from immigrants requires a person to have more allegiance to future prospective immigrants than to America; nor would most European-Americans who are descended from 19th and early 20th century immigrants imagine such a thing. But many Jews, as well as many Catholics, think otherwise. They think that because they come from immigrants, their sacred mission in the universe is to crusade for open borders and deny any ability on America’s part to have any say about who comes into this country.

I say that this is a legitimate point to make to the open-borders Jews and Catholics. “Was this part of the deal when your grandparents were admitted into America? That the fact that America let your grandparents into this country requires you to subvert America’s national existence? In that case, your grandparents shouldn’t have been admitted in the first place.” If people started saying these things to the open-borders Jews and Catholics, it would shock at least some of them into realizing how offensive their position is to other Americans, and they would shut up.

- end of initial entry -

Paul T. writes:

You wrote: “If America had known when admitting Jewish immigrants between 1880 and 1920 that the descendants of those immigrants would oppose America’s right to have any future control over immigration, would America have admitted those immigrants in the first place?”

Beautifully put. My grandparents were Russian and Polish Jews who came here (i.e., to Toronto, Canada) between 1908-1923, and I’ve often found myself asking the same thing. In fact, awkward as this is to confess, I’ve increasingly asked myself whether Jewish immigration was on the whole a good or bad thing for Canada and the U.S., and I am coming around to the view that the negatives have outweighed the positives. Is there really any other way of seeing it? Another question which might appeal to alternate-history buffs is: if we hadn’t been allowed in, would North America be a liberal society today?

LA repies:

Thanks. However, the way I’ve put it is not that America would have been better off without the 1880-1920 immigration, but that the 1921 and 1924 legislation cutting back the immigration was beneficial. this is a statement that there is such a thing as too many. (I’ve also said that while I’m happy that my parents were born and that I was born, America did not require our existence; unlike many Jewish open-borders proponents, I don’t act as though America revolves around myself or is defined by Ellis Island.) But for the open-borders Jews, any statement implying that there is any negative (or even less than great) aspect of Jewish immigration is tantamount to saying that they themselves don’t belong here. So there’s just no middle ground with these people. And that fact has really risen to the fore in the last couple of months with the debate on the Senate immigration bill. It turns out, and I gave examples, that many Jews are not just in favor of very large-scale immigration; they’re literally in favor of open borders. Their belief in a generous immigration policy has no internal limiting principle.

Paul T. replies:

I don’t doubt that, but it doesn’t deal with the problem of those who were already here. Folks like my cousin J.B. Salsberg, the only Communist member of the Ontario legislature, elected time and again in the (overwhelmingly Jewish) Spadina riding. As late as 1955 (not a typo) J.B. was openly praising Stalin in his speeches. I was brought up to believe that the mostly genteel anti-Semitism of non-Jews in Toronto was nothing more than pure, spontaneous malice. Some of it undoubtedly was, but I can see the other side of it now.

LA continues:

Also, at his blog, Kresge writes:

“ … my issue wasn’t the status of illegal immigrants, but rather acting in a capacity to detain them, something abhorrent to me as a descendent of illegal immigrants. My refusal would have been a personal choice based solely on that.”

So, it’s not just that he disproportionality identifies with his immigrant ancestors and insists that any restriction on immigration must be rejected. It’s that he identifies with his illegal immigrant ancestor, and so he cannot in good conscience enforce America’s laws or defend America’s borders against illegal aliens.

This leads to grave reflections. The Senate has just voted to legalize 12 million illegal aliens. What kind of loyalty to American law will such people and their descendants have? Like Kresge, they will be emotionally and spiritually committed to despising U.S. immigration law, because it was by breaking that law that they got here. The Senate wants to create an entire population with an ancestral allegiance to illegal immigration.

I remind the reader of the recently deceased A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times, whose father came her illegally, and who once wrote that there should be a ticker tape parade for illegals on Broadway. Well, we had the equivalent of such a parade recently with the massive illegal alien marches all across the country and the political and media establishment’s approval of same. So I guess Abe Rosenthal died a fulfilled man.

KE, a secular, pro-Western Turk, writes:

I’m reading your comment “How immigration leads to open borders,” and I’m going through a painful moment again regarding my mixed sentiments about Jews.

I just have to confess that I don’t get this. It is entirely contradictory. Jews have been a diaspora for millennia now, and had to live as “strangers in strange lands.” One would expect that they’d have learnt the hardships associated with living among peoples lacking long and deeply-rooted traditions that make life easier for them. And yet, what do we get? They are inviting the whole ____ world, the vast majority of which wouldn’t give a toss about high-achieving groups like Jews—in fact, they’d resent them most. This is plain suicidal.

I honestly don’t get it, man. You’re good, brave, open-hearted, and you’re pouring your heart out with absolutely undiluted truth on these pages. If you can’t tell me, I know of no one who can. Just what the heck are these people doing?

It matters what Jews do for the simple reason that their mental endowments allow them to—as anyone familiar with the cognitive psychology literature should know. The Ashkenazim have an IQ average one full standard deviation above that of the North European Caucasians. This means, if we take the smart fraction (see here), despite their overall percentage being 2-3 percent in the population, they are something like 30-35 percent of the elite percentiles. They have an influence way disproportionate to their demographic presence. Given their objective status, how can they be so self-negating, so irresponsible, so naively blind to the fact that they are among the first to be targeted by all those unassimilable masses entirely hostile to the West and its native ethnics?

Any sensible reasons you can come up with?

I don’t buy the religious beliefs argument for the simple reason that as we both know they are largely liberal and don’t much follow the faith.

LA replies:

Well, I wouldn’t put the Jews in a separate class from the rest of the population. Liberal (and “conservative”) Americans across the board are rooting for their own destruction, as well as Europeans, in countries such as Sweden that have no Jews to speak of. Is that any less of a mystery than the attitudes of Jews? In this context it’s useful to remember the saying, “Jews are just like everyone else, only more so.” So, yes, Jews are even more suicidal and anti-national than others, but it’s a difference in degree, not in kind.

Beyond that, at the moment I don’t have any answers to this mystery beyond the things I’ve said before.

Gintas writes:

My parents’ families came over, quite legally. They had relatives here in the States who could sponsor them. The alternative was repatriation to Lithuania—rather, the Gulag. As a result, my grandmother loved America. She said I was American, and should marry an American girl. So, it’s my homeland, and I want it defended. But there are too many deracinated people in America in general. The jew’s unwillingness to defend America is true of so many people born and raised here, whose blood runs back for many generations.

Shrewsbury writes:

Shrewsbury is in despair over the brain-dead and apparently all-but unanimous Jewish response to the Mexican invasion. So, because Hengist and Horsa landed on the shores of Britain with their bands of Anglo-Saxons in the fifth century, thus in the eleventh century their descendants were morally obligated to welcome William the Conqueror with open arms? Because Australia began as a penal colony, are the Aussies obliged to solicit shipments of criminals from all nations of the earth? (I refrain from considering the touchy question of immigration to Israel and certain obvious contradictions.)

It’s difficult to decide whether the treason or the utter brainlessness is the more aggravating. I think there is something about Jewish communities (and I have known them from the inside) which can lead to a near-complete disconnect from reality, and the replacement of thought with shibboleths. Of course, this is true of any closed-off community, such as “African-Americans,” or academia, or, indeed, most of the upper classes these days. It is however especially unfortunate that Jews should set themselves with such vociferous zeal against the survival of the American people. Are they all so lost in the narcissistic ecstasy of moral superiority that they are utterly blind to the consequences of filling up America with Jew-hating third-world masses, while, yes, stabbing in the back the only people in the world who were ever really on the side of the Jews?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 27, 2006 12:08 PM | Send