MARK STEYN ON CANTOR
http://www.steynonline.com/6412/cantor-buried
Last night, I talked to Dana Perino on Fox News about the supposedly inevitable next President. Barely had I left the studio when news broke of the defeat in a primary of the supposedly inevitable next Speaker of the House. The magnitude of what happened to the House Majority Leader at the hands of some wossname who wasn’t supposed to break 40 per cent is nicely summed up in this headline:
Eric Cantor Blew $168K at Steak Houses; Brat Spent $122K Overall
“Brat” is the name of the obscure economics professor who whupped him, not the Cantor campaign’s characterization thereof. Nevertheless, they made the mistake of condescending to the prof. Like so many other ingrate rubes in the despised “base”, he didn’t get it. The Chamber of Commerce wants an endless supply of cheap unskilled foreign labor, so the job of “mainstream” Republicans is to find a way of facilitating this without using provocative words like “amnesty”. Eric Cantor was the master of this, talking up coy cotton-candy maneuvers like the “ENLIST” Act.
Here’s what he said in his famous let’s-do-it-for-the-kids speech:
A good place to start is with the kids. One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents. It is time to provide an opportunity for legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children and who know no other home.
It’s news to me that not punishing children for their parents’ mistakes is a “founding principle” of America. But no matter. Washington bigwigs have many attentive readers in the human-shipping industry south of the border, and so Cantor’s primary campaign coincided with the bizarre Bugsy Malone’s Camp of the Saints scenario currently playing out on America’s southern border.
Here is how the media report the pint-sized invasion:
President Obama on Monday described a surge in unaccompanied immigrant children caught trying to cross the Mexican border as an “urgent humanitarian situation,” as the White House asked Congress for an extra $1.4 billion in federal money to cope. Obama said the U.S. will temporarily house the children at two military bases.
Obama appointed the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Craig Fugate, to be in charge of the situation.
In its new estimates, the government said as many as 60,000 children, mostly from Central America, could be caught this year trying to cross the Mexican border illegally, costing the U.S. more than $2.28 billion to house, feed and transport the children to shelters or reunite them with relatives already living in the United States. The new estimate is about $1.4 billion more than the government asked for in Obama’s budget request sent to Congress earlier this year.
Obama described the growing humanitarian issue at the border in a presidential memorandum Monday that outlined a government-wide response led by Fugate.
There is no suggestion by anyone – Obama, Republicans, media – that this “government-wide response” might ever include enforcing US sovereignty at the border for which the government is nominally responsible. No, that’s just crazy talk. Instead, the comprehensive “government-wide response” to the invading forces is to house them, feed them, clothe them, school them, and Obamacare them. All at your expense. Which is why under Eric Cantor’s let’s-do-it-for-the-kids plan, the life of your kids and grandkids will be worse. Under the bipartisan “immigration” conspiracy, millions of Americans are downwardly mobile. And Cantor’s only proposal was to accelerate them down the chute.
In my book After America (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc) I write:
For the corporate right, undocumented immigrants mean cheap labor. For the statist left, they mean dependents – and cheap votes. For sentimentalists in between, it’s an act of ethnocultural penance: hence, the Cinco de Mayo observances in schoolhouses up and down the land. The left are right. Big Government centralists don’t mind about the costs Undocumented America imposes, because in the main it imposes them on states, cities and school districts – and thus makes previously self-sufficient branches of government ever more dependent on central authority. And just as Big Government doesn’t care about the impact on local government, Big Business doesn’t care about the impact of illegal labor on small business. This is a recipe for civil strife, if not, ultimately, civil war.
The corporate right wanted open borders for cheap workers in part because the statist left has made American workers too expensive: you can ship manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor overseas, but it’s not so easy with hotel chambermaids and seasonal agricultural workers. Meanwhile, the statist left favored open borders as a way of importing voters: Untold millions of poor, ill-educated people with little English would need government services, and untold hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats would need to be hired to service them…
The left was smarter than the right: The business class told itself it was importing hardworking families who just want a shot at the American Dream. But welfare mocks the Ellis Island virtues, upending them as easily as the shattered Statue of Liberty Charlton Heston stumbled across in the sands of a ruined planet. In an America with ever bigger government and ever poorer people, the dependency rationale for illegal immigration will win out over the business rationale. Seventy per cent of births at the San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton, California are the so-called “anchor babies” born to illegals. In related news, by 2010 Stockton had a deficit of $25 million. Same thing at Dallas General: Seventy per cent of newborns are “anchor babies”. Seven out of ten isn’t any kind of “minority”; it’s the dominant culture of America’s tomorrow.
This is an existential issue: If you don’t have a border, you won’t have a country. And Professor Brat and his $122,000 made Eric Cantor the anchor babe for the Chamber of Commerce conspiracy against the American people.
I have been in the same room as him only once – a couple of years ago, at a private speech to a roomful of conservative activists. He left them profoundly dissatisfied. He offered a few genuflections in their direction – if we’re not careful, we’ll end up like Greece – but gave no serious indication of any determination to change the direction we’re headed, only the speed at which we get there. His downfall is a cautionary tale in the limits of bipartisan crony capitalism in a still just about functioning system of representative government. But don’t weep for him; he’s got a cozy lobbying future ahead of him. Maybe for the Chamber of Commerce.
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