Sutherland to Frum

Howard Sutherland sent the below e-mail to David Frum earlier today concerning Frum’s evident surprise at the fact that President Bush revived his defeated open-borders proposal so soon after the GOP electoral defeat:

I am surprised by your surprise that President Bush might try to make his version of lemonade out of the sack of lemons American voters handed him yesterday. If George W. Bush has been consistent about anything it is his determination to keep the United States open to the mass migration of Mexicans and other Latin Americans. He was fulsomely pro-Mexican as governor of Texas; he gave campaign speeches in 2000 and 2004 celebrating the transformation of America into a bilingual Spanish-English speaking country. Mr. Bush has never been shy about his support for an illegal alien amnesty, proposing one explicitly in July 2001, despite all the evidence of fraud following the ill-fated Reagan amnesty of 1986 and overwhelming evidence that amnesties only encourage illegal entry. Even September 11th did not cool the president’s ardor for illegal alien amnesties and increased immigration—the numbers of “flight students” from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq and other such friendly countries actually continued to increase after the attacks—although it slowed him down a little. But only temporarily.

In January 2004, President Bush proposed his amnesty again (despite his dissembling over terms, it is unquestionably an amnesty), paired with a “guest” worker program that would flood the United States with indigent aliens who certainly would not be going home, as we would have no way to identify them, much less make them leave. The effect of such his program on lower-income Americans was effectively ignored. Practical objections like those have never deterred Mr. Bush, who boosts open borders with a missionary’s (not to say jihadist’s—that would be a cheap shot) zeal. The president celebrated the Senate’s passage of McCain/Kennedy, even though no-one could specify how many people might come here as a result, and excoriated his GOP colleagues in the House when they refused to join in the Senate’s implicit abandonment of American sovereignty. As I’m sure you remember, President Bush stood alongside Mexico’s Vicente Fox and labeled Americans who volunteered to augment—in completely non-violent fashion—our Border Patrol “vigilantes.”

George W. Bush is a true believer in amnesty for illegal aliens, at least for Mexicans, and perhaps in some sort of EU-style shotgun marriage of Canada, the United States and Mexico as well. For reasons that beg for psychoanalysis (although from knowing the Texas milieu that produced Mr. Bush I have some speculations), President Bush loves Mexicans. I think on balance he sees the average Mexican as in some moral sense superior to the average American, more genuine in some inchoate way. My impression is that, in his heart of hearts, he likes them better than he likes us. When he says “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande river,” he is speaking from his heart. That he is sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, not the welfare of Mexicans, does not faze him. The amnesty/guest worker program is President Bush’s lodestar, the legacy he sincerely wants to leave America. In the teeth of all the evidence, he believes that we would be better for it and it’s just the right thing to do. It is more important to him than Iraq, so important that he jettisoned the GOP’s best chance to hold on to the Congress rather than back away from it.

The ideal result for President Bush in this election—on his terms, not the Republican Party’s—would have been to hold the Senate for the GOP, while losing the House to the Democrats. The Republican leadership in the Senate had already signed up for the Bush/Kennedy/McCain national transformation plan, while the House GOP majority was the last line of defense against it. Losing the House gives him his dream (our nightmare, I would submit), while holding the Senate allows him not to appear a complete loser. If it happens, Mr. Bush probably will be disappointed by losing the Senate. I cannot believe that he is disappointed by losing the House. We will find, to our cost, that he and Speaker Pelosi are soul-mates about open borders.

President Bush’s seizing the opportunity that his party’s House defeat gives him should, at this juncture, surprise nobody. The question is whether House Republicans can convince enough populist Democrats to oppose a House version of Bush/Kennedy/McCain. A long shot, I’m afraid.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 08, 2006 05:03 PM | Send