Mass, Third-World Immigration: Critical Voices

By An Old Friend

John Hawkins: Compassion is about what you do personally, not what government programs you advocate funding with other people’s money.

Richard Lamm, former governor of Colorado (Democrat): We are the only country in history that ever deliberately changed its ethnic makeup, and history has few examples of “diversity” creating a stable society.

Lee Kwan Yue (benevolent founding authoritarian leader of independent Singapore): In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.

Barbara Kay: A civilized culture, which takes centuries of painstaking collaborative work to create, can be easily destroyed, and quickly. This is a reality conservatives understand, but liberals, consumed by guilt for past collective sins, and morally disarmed before the Other, choose to ignore.

Evelyn Waugh’s words on Kipling: He was a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.

Thomas Sowell: Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed almost entirely in terms of what can be done to help those who have broken the law.

John Fonte: Illegal immigrants have come here against the consent of the American people (democratic consent is expressed by the American people as a whole through our body politic, not by individual outlaw employers who want cheap labor). [Those] who are aiding and abetting illegal immigration are showing open contempt for a core concept of our constitutional morality: government by consent of the governed.

Sam Francis: If the only problem with illegal immigration is that it’s illegal, if you’re not willing to say mass immigration by itself is a problem, then why should we have any laws against it at all?

Mark Krikorian: If they were actually fleeing for their lives, or fleeing imprisonment, they would have applied for asylum in the first safe country they got to, and every single one of those people has passed through multiple countries where they were not being persecuted.

John Hinderaker: [T]aking in refugees is arguably immoral, apart from public safety concerns. The cost of each refugee resettled in America, in welfare programs and otherwise, is immense. For the same expenditure, we could protect many more refugees near where they live, and also spare them immersion in an alien culture. Our current refugee policy makes no sense from any perspective.

Martin Witkerk: Unlike Christians and Jews, Muslims have a religious duty to impose their faith upon the entire world through a combination of force and fraud.

Michael Walsh: The backlash – Wilders in Holland, Marine le Pen in France, perhaps even Frauke Petry in Germany – has finally begun, as politicians now openly wonder how many Europeans will have to die in order to accommodate a dysfunctional, alien, and largely hostile culture’s desire for “a better life.”

Mark Krikorian: People imagine that we have “Einstein immigration,” the best and the brightest, the cream of the crop, yada, yada, yada. Well, there’s some of that, but it’s mostly “a bunch of B students from Calcutta Community College.”

Mark Steyn: [B]etween 1971 and 2000, the number of foreign residents in Germany rose from three million to about 7.5 million. Yet the number of foreigners in work stayed more or less exactly the same at about two million. Four decades ago, two-thirds of [immigrants to Germany] were in the workforce. By the turn of the century, barely a quarter were.


Jared Taylor: Whites certainly used to throw their weight around, but they made a big dent in history because of their technology, not because of their nature. Over the course of about 100 days in 1994, Tutsi and Hutu killed about 800,000 of each other—800,000—mostly with machetes. Just think what they could have done with a few Panzer divisions. … And what about the Mongols, or the Arab conquerors of North Africa and Spain, or the Turks before the gates of Vienna? With a little mustard gas they could have gone all the way to Spitsbergen.

Thomas Sowell: There is the second-generation phenomenon. You have people who move in from some poor country – the Middle East, Mexico, whatever. Those people may be very glad to be in the United States or Britain or wherever they may be. But then they have children. And their children have never seen those other places; they’ve never lived that poorer life. All they know is that the population around them is a hell of a lot more prosperous than they are. And there are all sorts of ideologues and hustlers ready to tell them that it’s society’s fault that they don’t have what other people have. This then gives you the people who hate the country in which they live.

Thomas Sowell: Let’s go back to square one. The purpose of American immigration laws and policies is not to be either humane or inhumane to illegal immigrants. The purpose of immigration laws and policies is to serve the national interest of this country. There is no inherent right to come live in the United States, in disregard of whether the American people want you here. Nor does the passage of time confer any such right retroactively.

Thomas Sowell: Among other facts of life utterly ignored by many advocates of de facto amnesty is that the free international movement of people is different from free international trade in goods.
Buying cars or cameras from other countries is not the same as admitting people from those countries or any other countries. Unlike inanimate objects, people have cultures and not all cultures are compatible with the culture in this country that has produced such benefits for the American people for so long.

John Derbyshire: In the present age vast numbers of the world’s people don’t want to dwell in their native culture. Their native culture sucks, and they know it. They want to dwell in some other guy’s culture, with a strong preference for the other guy being white and English-speaking.

That’s the revealed preference on display in those boats heading north across the Mediterranean, in those squatter camps in northern France near the English Channel, on our own southern border, and in the battalions of bogus “refugees” deplaning daily at our airports, courtesy of the United Nations, Barack Obama’s State Department, and the “Voluntary Agency” rackets [ker-ching].

Even that’s not quite right, though. Most of those boat people, squatters, border-jumpers, and fake “refugees” actually do want to dwell in their native cultures. They want to continue in their native cultural practices — wife-beating, tax-dodging, political corruption, and so on — but they want to do so in a country that’s fit to live in.

Could it be that the fact of their own countries not being fit to live in has something to do with those cultural practices?

Mark Steyn: On the one hand, mass immigration is the price posterity levies on old-school imperialists: “They are here because we were there,” as they say in the Netherlands. But, if like Sweden you never had an imperialist bone in your body, they’re still here: “They are poor because we are rich.” And, if you’re a small urbanized nation like the Netherlands, the “challenge” of immigration is just the usual frictions that occur when people from the countryside—in this case, the Moroccan countryside—move to the cities.

John Fonte: [Fuller quote] Illegal immigrants have come here against the consent of the American people (democratic consent is expressed by the American people as a whole through our body politic, not by individual outlaw employers who want cheap labor). The clergy who are aiding and abetting illegal immigration are showing open contempt for a core concept of our constitutional morality: government by consent of the governed.

Also, in terms of religious morality, these pastors, by supporting a vast increase in cheap labor, are undermining the economic status of our poorest and most vulnerable American citizens, many of them, of course, African-American and Latino. In this regard, Big Religion (clerical elites rather than most parishioners) has joined forces with Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Media. In addition, all of them support multiculturalism, bilingualism, and dual citizenship, which erect barriers to the patriotic assimilation of immigrants. So, I’m not impressed by the alleged “compassion” of any of these elites.

Louie Gohmert: You’ve got to follow the law. You cannot bring hundreds of thousands of people in this country without destroying the country. Then there’s no place that people can dream about coming.

It’s always been such an irony that people would flee a country that’s got … drug cartels, people that ignore the law, or bribe people to look the other way. So they don’t have jobs there so they come to the United States because we’ve mostly been a nation of laws where the rule of law matters. But then once they are here, they say now we want you to ignore the rule of law, which ironically is like the country they came from.

Fred Siegel: [A]s the writers of The Federalist clearly understood, self-interest so overwhelms evidence that no program will be deemed an unambiguous failure as long as it provides employment for those who work in it. That last category—those who work in government—has proved crucial for the Progressive project.

Kevin Williamson: It is worth noting that under the status quo ante, the poor were largely dependent upon family members, churches, and other institutions that had nothing to gain from their dependency. Under the Great Society and its later permutations, they became dependent upon a professional class whose highly paid members were themselves dependent upon the dependency of their clients. Dependency became a valuable commodity. At the apex of the dependency food chain are the highest-ranking members of a political machine ultimately dependent upon dependency and highly invested in its spread.

Dan Cadman: For vetting to work, there has to be information to vet against. Where there is none, a blank slate is not necessarily evidence that an individual is a bona fide refugee, and yet that is the presumption that results from current processes. Refugee officers are instructed not to interrogate or otherwise engage in hostile questioning; they are limited in the outside resources they are permitted to use in forming judgments on the outcome of a case; and, increasingly, they are recruited solely from a pool of individuals whose careers prior to entering government were dedicated to the resettlement of refugees, thus giving them a predisposition toward approving, rather than denying, claimants.

Ian Smith: [I]njecting empathy into policy decisions can be disastrous. In his new book, “Against Empathy,” Yale psychologist Paul Bloom argues that it acts like a spotlight focusing our attention on individual cases and “causes us to lose sight of larger tragedies.”

Its “spotlight nature,” he writes, “renders it innumerate and myopic,” disallowing people to see the “effects of our actions on groups of people” and encouraging insensitivity to statistical data and estimated costs and benefits. As Mother Teresa herself admitted, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Immigration-control advocates know the spotlight problem well. How to communicate the broad effects of unregulated immigration to non-systemic thinkers, i.e., excessive immigration acts like a weight on working-class wages, makes the rich richer, expands income inequality, puts pressure on public assets, contributes to urban sprawl, increases real estate prices, etc.

Mark Krikorian: The mainstream media always looks for sob stories to undermine the legitimacy of immigration enforcement. They almost never like to tell comparable stories … of people killed by illegal immigrants, of the small contractor put out of business by those employing immigrant labor. Reporters themselves internalize this.

George Will: “It is human to hate,” the late Samuel Huntington wrote. Communities, like individuals, crave clear identities, which sometimes are built on foundations of shared dislikes.

John O’Sullivan: If some people are contented living in a society made in their own image, then others—namely, minorities of one kind or another—are likely to feel out of place. A sentimental reluctance to make minorities feel like outsiders, even if that means discomfiting the American majority, is one of the major factors driving the critical hostility to [Samuel] Huntington. Huntington himself has the courage to say straightforwardly that if people have minority opinions or minority tastes, then they will to that extent be outsiders—and cannot reasonably expect the majority to conceal or suppress its loyalties in order to make them feel at home. He makes this argument both in relation to atheists who want American Christians to surrender all public expression of their religion and in relation to immigrants who want society to be re-ordered to make the English language and American institutions merely one set of cultural options. And he does so because, in the end, he thinks that solidarity—or “societal security”—is essential to the wellbeing of American society as a whole, including in time the wellbeing of the minorities.

Brendan O’Neill [Spectator, UK]: There’s a tradition of pushing victimised or dead kids to the front of news reporting. And more recently they’ve been given a starring role in the Twitterati’s handwringing over global calamities. From those famous images of half-starved children in Ethiopia in the 1980s to the ugly fashion for sharing photos of dead children from Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip last year, the sad or hungry or dead child has become a substitute for serious analysis or rational commentary. It shuts down discussion. ‘You don’t think Israel is evil? Well, look at this photo of this blown-up Palestinian kid.’ It’s cheap moralism, emotionalism taking the place of thoughtfulness.

The desire to circumvent serious debate in favour of eliciting the visceral but ultimately pointless ‘Oh Jesus Christ’ response is clear from the fact that these photos are often cynically cropped to exclude adults, in order to accentuate the vulnerability of the kid. Rather than focus on drowned adults, the Guardian and the Independent have instead focussed only on Aylan’s tiny, pathetic body.

The photography expert Patricia Holland wrote about this in the 1990s. She said the focus on kids in disaster or war zones was, weirdly, about making Westerners feel good: “As the children in the image reveal their vulnerability, we long to protect them and provide for their needs. Paradoxically, while we are moved by the image of the sorrowful child, we also welcome it, for it can arouse pleasurable emotions of tenderness.”

This narcissistic search for outlets for our tenderness has increased a million-fold with the dawn of the internet, when not only can we gawp at more images of destitute, destroyed kids, but we can republish them too, signalling our virtue and emotional sensitivity. But showing dead kids is, in my mind, emotionally insensitive. It can be cruel and unnecessary. It’s the victory of the visceral over the rational. And we really need a rational debate about the migrant crisis, rather than people holding up a dead-child snuff photo and saying: “I cried, therefore I’m good.”