Where the rubber meets the road on immigration

I almost never turn on network television, but was home the Sunday morning before Christmas and did so. On ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos played a segment in which Rep. Virgil Goode was speaking. Goode took the clear position of truth—which I’ve never heard a U.S. politician take before—that if we want to preserve our society and our way of life, we must reduce the number of Muslim immigrants. Man, was I impressed and happy to see that.

Not so the commentators on the panel. Melinda Henninger, after going on for some time with exquisite condescension about Goode, who with his broad Southern accent and gaunt features is an obvious target for liberals, finally concluded with a self-pleased smile on her face that Goode’s statement was “plain bigotry.” Let’s call that Mindless Pro-Immigration Cliché No. 1. Jonathan Karl said that America, unlike Europe, is assimilating its Muslims. That was Mindless Pro-Immigration Cliché No. 2. (No one asked Karl, if his observation was true, how is it that 81 percent of the Muslims in Detroit believe in sharia.) And George Will said that America is founded on John Locke, not Jesus Christ, meaning that America is not a Christian country, and therefore what Goode was saying was that “the five million Muslims that are already here are somehow contingent citizens.”

That is not exactly a Mindless Pro-Immigration Cliché. Rather, it is the thought that underlies all Mindless Pro-Immigration Clichés, it is the fundamental liberal fear that keeps the open-borders orthodoxy locked firmly in place and precludes any intelligent discussion about the subject. As Americans see it, if we say that we don’t want more members of group X pouring en masse into the country, that is tantamount to saying that the members of group X who are already in America don’t belong here. And how do we say to our fellow American citizens (though many of them are merely resident aliens with green cards) that they don’t belong here? This thought paralyzes all further thought on the subject (a dilemma I have coped with here).

However, the refusal to engage in thought about immigration doesn’t mean that the immigration situation simply stands still. If we cannot say that Muslims, or any other unassimilable foreign group, are problematic in American society, because that would imply that the Muslims already here don’t belong here, then it follows that we must keep our borders open forever to more and more Muslims, leading to the ever-increasing Islamization of our society. So there’s no neutral ground, there’s no getting away from the problem, and there’s no way of getting away from thinking about the problem. Either we start thinking and speaking the truth about Islam, and take appropriate political action in accord with that truth, or Islam will continue to gain power over us.

The gaunt Congressman from Virginia is right. The three Beltway narcissists are wrong.

Ray G. writes:

I’m a life-long resident of Dearborn, Michigan and I have observed over the past ten years or so a distinct increase in fundamentalist Muslims who have settled in Dearborn. This was not always the case. I believe this “fundamentalism” is a phenomenon that has been growing in the Middle East and now thanks to unrestricted immigration, it is in the West, the USA and my hometown of Dearborn. Thank you elites of both parties, thank you mainstream media, thank you all very much.

Sharia is coming, make no mistake. Just as Spanish language is all over our country, Sharia will grow too. Devout Muslims are not good candidates to become Americans (or for that matter, Canadians, Australians or British subjects). Their allegiance is first and foremost to Islam and the umma.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 28, 2006 09:55 AM | Send