https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/02/america-is-not-the-common-
Sometimes fate tosses you a softball.
Recently, I drafted an op-ed asking whether the United States actually needs more people. Is 320 million—give or take, given the birthrates of those already here—enough? If not, why not? If we need more people, why? What do we need them to do? The editorial process being what it is, it took a few days for the piece to appear.
And it just so happens that, when it did, Bret Stephens published a column in the New York Times purporting to answer precisely the question I had asked. The United States needs more immigrants, he claims. A lot more.
Much of what Stephens wrote, I had already “pre-butted,” as it were. Open borders arguments are all so old and stale that they’re easy to anticipate. Still, to give Stephens some credit, he did come up with some new ones. Or rather, he stated more openly than I am used to seeing certain implicit arguments that the open borders crowd until recently used to be more cagey about expressing.
I don’t know what explains their greater boldness now. It could be that they think they are on the cusp of victory, so caution is no longer necessary. I doubt this, however, given the 2016 election and moving of the Overton Window on the topic. A more likely explanation is that the open borders crowd is panicking. Before Trump’s stunning victory, mass amnesty coupled with even laxer border enforcement (if such were even possible) seemed likely to tip the country blue permanently. Now they sense that may be slipping away—or, at a minimum, may be delayed.
The populace is roused. For the first time in a generation, it actually has political leaders trying to act in their interest. That is intolerable to the open borders crowd, which is reacting with fury and hysteria. Witness the disgraceful Red Guard heckling of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen out of a public restaurant—and the restaurant’s management doing nothing about it. Another restaurant’s owner kicked out the president’s press secretary. And there is the far more disgraceful—downright evil—doxing of federal immigration agents by a university professor, to encourage left-wing brownshirts to harm civil servants and their families.
Who Should Go?
It is fair to ask what role the increasingly extreme rhetoric of Bret Stephens (and of others who share his views) has contributed to this. For instance, one of Stephens’ previous columns recommended expelling native-born American citizens to make room for more immigrants. He declined to say exactly which American citizens need to go; presumably not himself nor any of his friends and associates.
Who then? In a grotesque-yet-clever bit of sophistry, Stephens unfavorably compares the native-born to immigrants across a range of pathologies and finds us wanting. For instance, the native-born “are incarcerated at nearly twice the rate of illegal immigrants.” What accounts for that? Stephens doesn’t specify, but surely knows, that crime rates vary widely by race. The rate among blacks, for instance, is eight or nine times the rate among whites, depending on the offense. The white rate is much lower than the illegal immigrant rate (and the Asian rate is lower still). Hence that “nearly twice the rate” that Stephens cites is very largely driven by black Americans. Who, whatever one may say about the tragic problems afflicting their communities, are unquestionably Americans, whose roots in this land stretch back to 1619 and whose experience includes, in Lincoln’s poignant phrase, “two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.”
