EDWARD CLINE: FRIGHTENED TURTLES- PART TWO
http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/09/frightened-turtles-ii.html
Americans must first extricate themselves from the claws of statism before they can begin to credibly address peripheral issues such as immigration.
The debate over immigration and open borders or open immigration continues.
A British correspondent argued with a reader of Andrew Bernstein’s “Immigration and the Welfare State” about the pros and cons of open borders or open immigration, vis-à-vis Muslims and Mexicans.
The reader’s position on the matter is confusing, as he seems to want it both ways: a total ban on all Muslim immigration into Western countries, and a selective or discriminating ban on Muslims who advocate violence to impose Islam on others or a whole country (in conformance with the official Ayn Rand Institute position).
So he isn’t clear on his own position at all. He also contradicts himself when he says that Islam is both a criminal organization and a religion. But a genuine criminal organization, such as the Mafia or a drug cartel, is not moved by an ideology of any kind; these organizations are merely opportunistic gangs taking advantage of irrational laws. Islam, however, is a totalitarian ideology moved by the agenda of supremacy over all other religions and political systems, even though it has little ideational content, and little such content in its “jurisprudence,” Sharia law, other than the “prophet’s” say-so or the pretzel-like logic of its judges.
The only thing he’s right about is that the Koran is a prescription for conquest and committing criminal acts, criminal per Western concepts of individual and civil rights, which Islamic spokesmen deny the validity of, because Islam doesn’t recognize individual rights or the civil liberties of Western nations. However, Muslims do avail themselves of them to advance Islam; they have adopted Lenin’s assertion that capitalists will hang themselves with the rope they sell to the Reds; it’s much the same thing.
Frankly, I think the open borders “faction” on this issue is guilty of a severe dropping of context. This is not the early 20th century when hundreds of thousands of Jews and Italians and other ethnic/religious groups immigrated to this country. The overwhelming majority of them were not trying to impose Judaism or Catholicism or the Mafia on everyone else. Their personal religious convictions were not a threat to anyone else. True, some Jews and Italians who came here were gangsters, or became gangsters. In many instances, when they were identified and apprehended, they were either deported or imprisoned after a trial for their crimes.
But Islam isn’t the same thing. Jews and Italians did not pose a peril to everyone else, native-born or not. Whether or not your average Friday-go-to-prayers Muslim is active in propagating or proselytizing Islamic doctrine or engages in criminal actions based on Islamic scripture, such as terrorism, they’re still culpable and indirectly responsible for the actions of their more consistent brethren, who engage in violence per the diktats of the Koran. On that point, I agree with Leonard Peikoff 100%. My policy would be: Either repudiate Islam altogether, or leave for and/or return to a country where your ideology is implemented, but you’re not implementing it here.
I dismiss the assertions of those Muslims who claim that Islam can be reformed in the same way Catholicism and Protestantism were reformed, that is, by removing religion from a country’s politics. As I’ve written many times before, Islam can’t be reformed without killing it; Islam is based on the initiation of force and once that imperative is removed from the religion (or the violent verses in the Koran “reinterpreted” beyond recognition), there’s not much left to it except perhaps a Masonic-like ritual or something resembling a fraternity of the Knights of Pythias. (Or Ralph Kramden’s Bensonhurst chapter of the International Brotherhood of the Loyal Raccoons.)
All in all, one is still left in puzzlement over Writeby’s and the Brook faction’s position on not banning or not removing Muslims from the U.S. (or from Britain). And the context being dropped by them and Writeby is that we are all living in countries that are far more statist than they were in the early 20th century.
Moreover, I think it’s somewhat futile to be arguing over immigration rights when we’re losing or have lost rights wholesale in terms of personal income and consumer products and behavioral policies imposed by the government and other non-immigration issues. Others deny it, such as Bernstein, but our welfare state is a draw to Mexicans and Muslims (as is Britain’s). When the Jews and Italians and other European groups came here in the early 20th century, there was no welfare state. When Cubans risked their lives coming to this country, they weren’t drawn to the welfare state which by then actually existed, but by the chance to live their lives independently of the state (Communist or not). One can’t say that now about Muslim or Mexican (or Central American) immigrants.
As for the Mexicans and other Latinos, I think most of them come here for semi-ideological motives; our welfare state is more generous and more efficient than the ones they left behind. They will naturally vote Democratic out of gratitude or compulsion or manipulation (if they vote at all), and, as I noted in my original column, help to perpetuate the death grip the Democrats and other statists have on this country.
Granting that large numbers of Mexicans may come here for employment; where, in an economy deliberately tanked by Barack Obama, are they going to find it? In landscaping?
One correspondent wondered whether or not there is a political correctness angle to all this. As in not wanting to address the issue that the people who are causing all the problems with immigration in the US and UK are those with brown skins coming into a country with mainly white skins. Mr. Brook and other ARI spokesmen don’t usually pull their punches in regards to racial issues, like affirmative action, reparations etc. But immigration itself is a different matter; it’s controversial. So our enemies could have fine old time, if ARI argued for immigration controls, painting it as white men wanting to keep out “darkies.”
But even if this were the case, there should be no capitulation to political correctness at all. As I remarked elsewhere, we’re in this mess because people have played our enemies game by being cowards and not addressing issues for fear of being seen as “racist” or “Islamophobic.” And the end result of this spinelessness is, say, Rotherham and the Pakistani rape gangs in Britain, and, over here, honor killings of girls and women, beheadings, “lone Muslim wolf” shootings at Jews and other infidels, the Boston Marathon bombing, and “workplace violence” committed by the likes of Major Nidal Hasan.
So if the unrestricted immigration by Mexicans or “Chicanos” and Muslims is not going to be in the national interest and is downright dangerous, then it needs to be acknowledged and said. And the Objectivist credentials of anyone who is deliberately pulling back on the issue or obfuscates it are at the very least questionable.
Further, none of the open immigration advocates regard the Muslim and Mexican settlement in the U.S. or in the UK or the Continent as an invasion and conquest by demographics; for the Muslims, this is prescribed by the Muslim Brotherhood. There isn’t a European country whose Muslim population is less than ten percent of the overall population. But I doubt that any of them have bothered to read the Brotherhood memorandum, dated 1991, which I’ve often cited or linked in my past columns, or bother to read the manifestos of the Mexican supremacists’ La Raza or the Aztlán movement.
They seem to treat these phenomena as just loopy outfits on the fringe the political spectrum. The Mexicans here in the U.S. (or their spokesmen) are also on a “reconquest” effort, wanting to “take back” all of California and much of the Southwest. The racist element in the effort is pretty blatant, as strong and as virulent as it is in Islam. As the ISIS jihadists want to erase the blue-eyed Yazidis as a race (by raping their women), Mexican nationalists want to subjugate blue-eyed gringos. But these facts are never addressed by Brook et al. They have their magic wands, you see.
My British correspondent noted:
Objectivism is NOT some mystical, utopianist cure-all where there will be no evil or wrong-doing in the world. Objectivism is not the magic wand of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which, waved over an issue, solves it automatically, irrespective of context.
The open borders advocates seem to think: Well, there’s Objectivism, which runs along the lines of Adam Smith, that there is an “invisible hand” of Objectivism that will somehow make Islam not the murderous religion that it is when its adherents move to foreign countries. They obviously know how murderous Islam is because the very same people who are arguing for open borders and also arguing for a total war, and possible nuclear war, with Islam! So why are they contradicting themselves?
This is why I won’t engage the advocates of open borders or open immigration in argument. Their terms are so vague and their public positions so untenable with regard to their professed fealty to Objectivism it isn’t worth my time to engage them. They keep flip-flopping or just won’t come out and say what they really mean. There is a unfortunate strain of evasion in their positions. I don’t think any of them, including their legions of open borders supporters, have delved into Islam, the Mexican issue, and Europe as deeply as I think they should. They seem to think that Objectivism is that magic wand, which, once it’s waved over the issue, presto! There’s the answer!
John Stossel’s article, “Immigration is American,” like some open border arguments, dwells on some important points and also on irrelevancies. He does, however, point out the chief culprit in the issue: the time it takes for prospective immigrants to be granted the right to apply for citizenship, political asylum, and also for work visas and residency, which is arbitrarily daunting and onerous. The requirements imposed on prospective immigrants were once a product of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, established in 1933 (another FDR legacy), and governed by two things: politics, and the convenience of the INS bureaucracy.
The functions of the INS, after 9/11, came under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security and its functions were divided between three new bureaucracies: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Further, while restrictions on Chinese immigration have lapsed, for example, the INS and its successor bureaucracies have instituted other racial and ethnic quotas.
Stossel argues for less restrictive and less onerous legal applications for citizenship and residency, and that’s fine. But, again, he argues from the standpoint of ideal circumstances, in which we lived in an ideally free country and not in the trough of statist controls and in a continuous state of crisis, situations created by political pragmatism and multiculturalism. As with other open border positions, this is surely another argument of gossamer. To ignore these aspects is to indulge in wishful thinking.
Americans must first extricate themselves from the claws of statism before they can begin to credibly address peripheral issues such as immigration. Otherwise, it’s a matter of the dog chasing its own tail.
* * 30 * *
Edward Cline
Williamsburg, VA
September 2014
Links:
Clarion Project, replacing U.S. Constitution with Sharia
http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/popular-us-imam-replace-constitution-sharia
Discover Networks Muslims in Obama administration:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=844
U.S. Muslim population
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/155384
U.S. population census bureau
https://www.census.gov/popclock/
Coalition of the Willing vs. Coalition of the Reluctant:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2862343.stm
Bernstein Welfare State CapMag:
http://capitalismmagazine.com/2014/09/immigration-welfare-state/
Washington Post Stop and Seize article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/stop-and-seize/
ISIS and Mexican border:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/texas-isis-terrorists-interested-in-obamas-open-border-wmexico/
Dream Act specifics:
http://www.dreamact2009.org/
Job growth stats:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/sectors/item/17137-private-sector-shrinking-public-sector-growing-in-most-states
Raccoon Lodge link:
https://www.freemasonry.bcy.ca/fiction/fraternities/raccoons.html
Muslims Brotherhood Explanatory Memo via IPT:
http://www.investigativeproject.org/document/id/20
And Daniel PIpes’ MEF article on Brotherhood Memo:
http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/208761
Stossel on Immigration:
http://capitalismmagazine.com/2014/09/immigration-american/
Wikipedia on INS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Naturalization_Service
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