Bizarro World: Steyn criticizes the 1965 Immigration Act

The more I look at Mark Steyn’s column in today’s Chicago Sun-Times the more the new things about it strike me, such as this:

At some point, it’s worth trying to climb over the rubble of the 2007 Z-1s and the 1986 amnesty and the 1965 immigration act, and going back to basics: What is immigration for?

Am I seeing this with my eyes? Steyn, mentioning the 1965 Immigration Act, the disastrous law that initiated our current—and for the last 40 years totally unquestionable—system of equal non-discriminatory admittance of immigrants from every country on earth, regardless of their cultural compatibility with the United States? And he’s not only mentioning it, but negatively mentioning it—“climb over the rubble.” Someone needs to do a search of Steyn’s archive and see if the phrase “1965 immigration act” has ever appeared before in his writings.

In any case, since Steyn is now broaching the subject of the 1965 Act and thus the question of what the purpose of U.S. immigration ought to be, perhaps he will also read my 1990 booklet, The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, which is available online in .pdf form at the Unofficial LA webpage. In Chapter One, which discusses the Senate deliberations on the 1965 Act, he will read the following passage, or, if he visits VFR, he can read it right here:

Beyond the obvious inequity, in a law advertised for its fairness, of favoring relatives to the virtual exclusion of all other applicants, the rhetoric of “individual worth” as applied to our immigration law is deceptive on a deeper level. “Worth,” understood as the value that an immigrant is adding to the U.S., has little or nothing to do with a person’s qualification for citizenship. People apply, and if they have the right relatives, or if they fit in the quota and have applied early enough, and if they have no diseases or other disqualifying factors, they are admitted. Where is “worth” in all this? “Worth,” in the Madisonian sense of an immigrant’s contribution to the wealth and strength of the United States, is simply beside the point in our immigration policy, or is at best left to chance, since there is no positive value for our country being sought in our choice of immigrants (except for the tiny number admitted with “urgently needed skills”), but only the avoidance of a negative value, i.e., discrimination. We prove our moral worth to ourselves and the world by demonstrating compassion and eschewing any trace of national or racial discrimination. That is our immigration policy, and the idea of what is good for the people of the United States plays a very small part in it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 20, 2007 06:35 PM | Send