The revolution eats its children, cont.

(Note: A bunch of readers’ comments have been added to this entry.)

The people posting at the Corner today are justifiably steamed and appalled at Linda Chavez’s beyond-amazing column in which she said that all critics of the Bush-Kennedy immigration bill are motivated by racism. As I’ve been saying over and over since early 2006, the kind of irrational extremism Chavez exhibited in this piece is an index of the fact that many proponents of non-discriminatory mass immigration see this bill as the decisive breakthrough to what they have really wanted all along, the end of white America. Because their driving desire is the end of white America, they see any opposition to this bill, no matter how reasonable it may be, and even if the opposition is coming from non-whites, as an expression of white racism.

I’ve also said many times that because the real motivating impulse for open borders is the desire to end white America, our open-borders policies cannot be successfully opposed without opposing the agenda to end white America, which, ahem, inevitably involves defending white America. I predict that over time, as the gravity of the mortal threat we face becomes more and more manifest, many of the conservatives who loathe and despise the commonsense racial argument about immigration that I’ve been making since 1990 will be making the same racial argument themselves.

But getting back to Chavez, here, as an example of the clefts the open-borders passion has opened among the establi-cons, is a response to Chavez by the normally mild-spoken Ramesh Ponnuru (whom, by the way, I strongly criticized just the other day for the cheap way he played the racism-and-anti-Semitism card against Ron Paul):

Linda Chavez [Ramesh Ponnuru]
When I read Mark Levin’s post about her column, I thought that he was surely exaggerating. I have always found Chavez to be thoughtful, civil, and intelligent. Her column, sadly, is none of the above. Her thesis is that people who object to amnesty just don’t like Mexicans, and any arguments they make about national security or the rule of law are just coming up with more politic ways to express their racism.

It would be one thing if Chavez were saying that some critics of the Senate bill hold racist views. But she is clearly going way beyond that. (” Stripped bare, this is what the current debate on immigration reform is all about.”) She slams the Center for Immigration Studies by name and a majority of the people who have supported her work in the past by implication.

That anyone who disagrees with her about immigration policy is a racist is all that Chavez seems to have learned from her years of work on the issue. I will never trust her judgment again.
05/29 12:31 PM

- end of initial entry -

RG writes:

I’m been pleasantly surprised by several mainstream conservatives (some neo-cons, neo-liberals?) making public statements and writing columns in opposition to this “No Latino Left Behind” bill currently in the Senate. Are we witnessing an epiphany? Could there possibly be some hope in not only defeating this terrible bill but more importantly, returning to the notion that a nation has to have borders and the rule of law, at a very minimum, not to mention a common language, culture, history, customs, etc.

Mexico will not seriously reform itself until the USA enforces its sovereignty and stops the flow of their peasants at such alarming rates.

Dimitri K. writes:

You write: “Once you get on the liberal train you can’t get off alive”

Excellent point. The same can be said about Islam. The same could be said about the Communist Party: you could live quietly as a second-class citizen under communist rule, but if you decided to join the Nomenclatura, you would not be allowed to hesitate. The same was the rule for Russian criminals; they had their own law and if you joined them once, you could not exit. Actually, the same can be said about any society which puts itself above the law.

John D. writes:

I listened to a short portion of O’Reilly’s Radio Factor today on which he had a university professor as his guest. I didn’t catch his name. The discussion was regarding immigration. This professor stated that there were several types of dissenters of the current immigration legislation. There were those who objected to the legislation out of concern for rewarding those who have broken the law, those who object out of fear of losing jobs Americans will do, and those who were prejudiced because of difference in race. He said that the latter of those people were racist and their objections should be discounted on those racist grounds.

Why is it that there are no legitimate grounds on which to protest while considering the race factor, whose grounds are free from the label of “racist”? Those of us that consider the race factor are labeled as being prejudice or bias. Why are we not allowed simply to prefer and protect our own race? Why must we be called “haters” for being discriminatory in selecting to be around those amongst us who better understand the language, culture and traditions with which we share and are most comfortable?

Discrimination is a funny word indeed. It allows one to:

1. Be unfair, prejudiced or intolerant

2. Have good taste, judgment, insight or perception

3. See contrast, distinction

And all at the same time, according to some.

A reader writes:

If you vote for the Kyl-Kennedy immigration bill, we’re going to teach you a lesson that you’re never going to forget: Payback Project

Larry G. writes:

They have defined “racism” down to such an extent that it is very easy to apply the term. Basically any expression of white racial interests by whites is considered racism, while expressions of racial interest by non-whites are not. The playing field is skewed. But that said, would your response to this bill be different if the people at issue were 12-30 million Eastern European Christians? If that were the case then I would look twice at the issues, because the idea of adding that many to the white Christian population is attractive to me at first glance. On further examination the legitimate objections that have been raised to the bill might still weigh against it. But I know that I would not have the same “Hell NO!” reaction that I do to the idea of legalizing 12-30 million Mexicans. I felt the same way in 1986 when that amnesty was proposed, and I felt the same way when hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese boat people were being allowed to come to the U.S. By the current definition that makes me a racist. So be it.

Alex K. writes:

It’s encouraging to see so many of the, let’s say, more circumspect immigration restrictionists like Ponnuru coming around to seeing how serious and uncrossable is the divide between the real reformers and the open borders fanatics, even when the latter group otherwise call themselves conservatives. You may be right that even the more race-allergic among them will be forced to come around to seeing the racial warfare aspect of this.

But Ramesh’s remarks on Chavez reminded me of how slow the mainstream right have been to see the scale of this battle for what it is—and therefore understand why they should have been prioritizing it, rather than taking the timid and muddled route on it that they did.

“That anyone who disagrees with her about immigration policy is a racist is all that Chavez seems to have learned from her years of work on the issue. I will never trust her judgment again.”

Quite right. That Chavez’s bigotry toward the restrictionist side even at this late date proves her complete lack of seriousness as an immigration analyst is well spotted on Ramesh’s part. But I wrote Chavez off years ago (and I’m one who only noticed the importance of the immigration issue about four years ago) because her fanatic support for open borders made it clear that she was never going to be reasonable about it and could only resort to the charge that all open borders fanatics must resort to—that immigration restriction is automatically racist.

The mainstream right, even the ones with apparently sound views on immigration, didn’t want this fight, possibly because they could feel how fratricidal it would be … but they didn’t realize how inevitable the fratricide was so they are now posting many shocked, hurt comments about how their friends and allies are disappointing them. The unparalleled and unavoidable division this issue can’t help but cause, and the fervor with which the open border side pushes their nation-destruction, is why this issue should have been every conservative’s priority going back many years. It was always going to have the highest stakes, the bitterest emotions, and no real middle ground, so it was no kind of fight to wander into like just another issue in just another political cycle.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 29, 2007 02:09 PM | Send