Establishment conservative leaders call for “enforcement only”

A bunch of conservative and neoconservative activists, intellectuals, politicians, and journalists have signed an open letter to President Bush and the leaders of Congress on the immigration issue. The letter’s central point is:

First border and interior enforcement must be funded, operational, implemented, and proven successful—and only then can we debate the status of current illegal immigrants, or the need for new guest worker programs.

As a sign of how things have changed on the immigration front, there are several names among the signers who have never (to my knowledge) spoken out on this issue before, or who, alternatively, have been active proponents of the “optimist” view that there is no limit to the number and type of people American can absorb (I apologize to anyone on this list who has had a strong position on illegal immigration in the past and I didn’t remember it): William J. Bennett; Robert H. Bork; Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.; Newt Gingrich; David Keene; Roger Kimball; Daniel Pipes; Thomas Sowell; Shelby Steele. Let us note in particular the presence of Bennett, who in 1994 spoke in tones of utter contempt for the supporters of Proposition 187.

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Russell W. writes:

It’s nice to see those conservatives signing on to an enforcement-only bill idea. Folks like Bennett are still stuck in a rather propositionalist worldview in significant ways, though. For instance, Bennett, speaking about immigration on his radio show, responded to a caller who expressed alarm at the rapidly changing composition of the country, and asserted that “America could get more brown or less brown—I don’t care either way.” This brand of insouciance is a shibboleth of respectable conservatism these days. These people believe you have to choose to either wholly dismiss the idea of the West’s ethnic and cultural distinctiveness or else join the Klan.

However, at least this enforcement-only idea seems to allow us to have some kind of common ground with them in the short term.

They are to be contrasted with people like, say, Michael Medved, who bizarrely continue to insist that we aboslutely need “comprehensive” immigration reform and a “guest worker program” to go along with any enforcement. I say “bizarrely” because such claims always come as bare assertions with no logical explanation as to why. I don’t like to impute bad motives to people whom I otherwise respect, but such lockstep thinking really does make me wonder where those “comprehensive reform” pushers really stand on basic issues of American identity and sovereignty.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 19, 2006 11:27 AM | Send