My Say :High Noon to Midnight: Why Current Immigration Policy Dooms American Jewry By Stephen M. Steinlight
FROM MIDEAST OUTPOST FEBRUARY 2016
Editor’s note: This prescient article was written in 2004, long before the current Muslim invasion which is overwhelming Europe and, thanks to Obama’s policies, will have a major impact here. While Steinlight believed American Jewish organizations were waking up to the dangers of Muslim immigration, this has turned out to be wildly over-optimistic. This is an edited version of a much longer essay—well worth reading in its entirely—at www.cis.org/articles/2004/steinlight2.html
Dr. Stephen M. Steinlight is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. For more than six years he was the Director of National Affairs at the American Jewish Committee.
Among the articles of faith in the waning culture of secular liberalism that has served as an ersatz religion for many mainstream American Jews, the most vulnerable tenet is belief in “generous legal immigration,” the euphemism for open-borders immigration in the lexicon of American-Jewish public affairs agencies. This is not to accuse them of crude hypocrisy and double-talk so much as engaging in intellectual and moral trimming, self-deception, and denial.
Promulgating self-deception isn’t merely bad ethics; it’s untenable as a matter of policy: it conflicts with the interests, security and values of American Jewry. Survey research, plus mountains of anecdotal evidence, reveals a profound change in attitude among American Jews. Opinion polls in the three years following the attacks of September 11, 2001 show a plurality favoring lowered immigration, 70 percent the introduction of a secure national identity card, and 55 percent believing Muslims are the most anti-Semitic group in the United States. It may not require another domestic terrorist enormity for respondents to discern simple cause-and-effect relationships; more ambitious efforts to persuade might suffice.
My experience at the grassroots suggests Jews know little about the history of their own immigration, immigration policy, the scale of immigration, or the engines that drive it. Frequently, all that’s required to effect attitudinal change is apprising them. When I began my efforts, the Jewish media spoke of Jewish attitudes in favor of open-borders immigration as “monolithic;” now it’s commonplace to speak of “a raging debate.” If this could be accomplished essentially by one person, what might a concerted, well-funded effort achieve? Among the community’s organizational leadership, enthusiasm for this dangerous anachronism is a mile wide and an inch deep.
The collision between old allegiances and urgent new realities had begun among Jewish leadership, if sotto voce, before 9/11. That tremendum accelerated the process by revealing the connection between our anarchic immigration policy and the savage assault on the innocent lives and national security of the American people. In its wake, with the war against Islamic terror that began in earnest in Afghanistan, with major news stories concerning the prevalence of virulent anti-Semitism throughout the Muslim world or its upsurge within the European Union, as well as media coverage of the “New Anti-Semitism,” it has become difficult to remain simultaneously credible and in a state of denial. In choosing between a sentimental archaism and confronting existential horror, only those willing to be perceived as purblind or suicidal don’t eventually adjust to facts.
Thus, behind closed doors, Jewish leaders speak a different language. Privately they express grave concern that unregulated immigration will prove ruinous to American Jewry, as it has for French Jewry, and will for Jews throughout Western Europe. There’s particular fear about the impact on Jewish security, as well as American support for Israel, of the rapid growth of the Muslim population. At the conclusion of meetings with national leaders, several told me, “You’re 1000 percent right, but I can’t go out and say it yet.” While they have yet to find the civic courage to break with the traditional consensus they can see the Rubicon glinting in the distance, and many recognize that eventually they will have to cross it.
I’ve spoken about immigration with more grassroots Jews than any other person in America, and I know that change won’t come painlessly. Segments of the leadership remain true believers in the dying faith of open immigration, and will not give up without a fight. But that change is inevitable is clear enough. The question, ultimately, is whether it will come too late to make a difference to the future of America and its Jewish community.
The prospect of breaking with the old consensus is so wrenching many are effectively paralyzed by it, but it must concentrate their minds wonderfully to know that upholding it endangers the viability of the community whose protection is their raison d’être. American-Jewish leadership is experiencing profound vertigo as it seeks to chart a course through circumstances that appear logical only to a schizophrenic.
On one hand, they’re leaders of a community that feels a sense of belonging unknown in the history of Diaspora Jewry. America’s Jews have attained success and acceptance beyond their forebear’s fondest dreams.
Among the best-known indices of its success, 10 percent of the U.S. Senate is Jewish, as is a majority of the presidents at Ivy League universities. Faculties and student bodies at elite colleges and universities are typically 30 to 40 percent Jewish. Jews form a high percentage within the learned professions and among writers, nationally syndicated journalists, and publishers of some of the nation’s leading newspapers and periodicals, and as creators and disseminators of high and popular culture. They play the predominant role in Hollywood, and thus shape much of our self-definition as Americans. Jews also hold key positions within many leading financial institutions, especially within investment banking and the brokerage industry.
Once a significant factor in American life, anti-Semitism has become a peripheral phenomenon. A recent ADL study found only some 12 percent of white Christian Americans hold anti-Semitic attitudes. Indeed, a key factor contributing to the crisis in Jewish continuity is that our neighbors like us and often wish to marry us and have children with us.
Historical consciousness and political acuity notwithstanding, American Jews, like everyone, believe in myths, which die slowly because they represent values and ideals, not realities, and the myth of Jewish immigrant experience will atrophy only gradually. Of all the pieces of Americana that American Jews know by heart, among the most-cherished is that verse inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
No group has exemplified, revered and clung to this idealized conception as much as the Jews who arrived in the Great Waves and their descendants. Given the horror that engulfed those that remained behind, including tens of thousands that might have been saved had the United States not closed its doors in 1924 and slammed them shut on Jews fleeing Nazism and the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s, no group has appreciated the blessings of immigrating to America more than Jews. Against this backdrop they must confront one of the most anguishing questions they’ve had to face in the entirety of their history in the United States: whether to support a continuation of mass immigration that’s reached a historically unprecedented level or exercise their still-considerable political and economic clout to try to curtail it.
With approximately 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants entering annually — equivalent to the population of Philadelphia — the United States has the highest number of foreign-born residents ever. As a percentage of the population, these 33 million, strengthened continuously, will soon surpass a level not seen since the first decade of the 20th century. Within a few years they will constitute the largest percentage of foreign-born in U.S. history.
For Jews, the immigration debate pits the heart against the head. In their gut, many feel that substantially reducing immigration betrays the legacy of their parents and grandparents. But a growing number believes that maintaining this policy betrays their children and grandchildren. The danger arises because mass immigration means importing mass anti-Semitism. The upsurge of violent anti-Semitism in Western Europe tracks perfectly with mass immigration, especially of Muslims. Mass immigration is also the generator of Balkanizing notions of extreme multiculturalism. Having worked for nearly a century through communal organizations, the courts, and interfaith dialogue to achieve a tolerant and cohesive society largely free of anti-Semitism, it’s anguishing for American Jews to watch current immigration erase this outcome. However uncomfortable, American Jews must grapple with the issue: they have a greater stake than other Americans in how this policy plays out.
Of the manifold concerns about immigration felt by all Americans and American Jews in particular, the way it fuels Muslim immigration is most worrying. The May 14, 2003, Globe & Mail announced that Muslims outnumber Jews in Canada, noting this demographic shift “could ultimately affect [Canada’s] position toward the protracted Middle East conflict.”
Muslim ascendancy in Canada is a harbinger of things to come in America, with potentially enormous impact for both American Jewry and American foreign policy. According to the 1991 Canadian census, there were 25 percent more Jews in Canada than Muslims. Within a single decade that demographic advantage was erased. According to the 2001 census, the Muslim population of Canada exceeded the Jewish population by 75 percent.
CNN and ABC News recently reported a doubling of the Arab population in the United States in just two decades. The number of Arabs alone (not Muslims in general) is already nearly 1.3 million. For virtually its entire history, Arab immigration was primarily Christian and lopsidedly Lebanese; now it’s virtually all Muslim, with the immigrants’ lands of origin mainly Egypt, the West Bank, and Yemen.
Muslim immigration has fundamentally altered demography, culture, and the political landscape of Western Europe. Its impact on Jewish life is disastrous, and it has turned European foreign policy on the Middle East from even-handedness to one that is overtly anti-Israel, if not outright anti-Semitic. In today’s Islamized Europe, Jews live under physical threat, something unknown since the rise of fascism. Nor is hostility to Israel confined to political leadership, media elites, or Muslims: a survey conducted by the European Commission, “Iraq and Peace in the World,” revealed that more ordinary Europeans consider Israel a threat to world peace than any other country.
Large-scale immigration places the United States on the threshold of a similar shift. Some 5.3 million Jews live in the United States compared to approximately 4 million Muslims. The shift’s a certainty because the exponential growth of the Muslim population is paralleled by a sharp decline in the number of American Jews, in absolute terms and as a percentage of the population; further, there’s no reason to believe this will be reversed. Jewish fertility is flat; Jews are an aging population; nearly half intermarry, and efforts to promote “Jewish Continuity” have yielded zero results. The United States is not only the world’s sole superpower; it’s also Israel’s only ally. Without discounting the sincerity of many American Christians in their support for Israel, it would be naïve to believe politicians wouldn’t respond to an ever-growing Islamic voting bloc, one that will eventually far outnumber Jewish voters.
Whatever their shortcomings, American politicians can count votes and campaign contributions. As Muslim Americans become politically organized — they’re well on their way — politicians won’t ignore this growing segment of the electorate. Muslims naturalize and vote at higher than average percentages — 65 percent in the last Presidential race. Like Jews, they’re concentrated in states with high Electoral College votes.
As demography shifts, America’s Jews will experience a rising threat to their physical security. The violent anti-Semitism sweeping Europe is the work of young, poor, alienated Muslims. The great majority of synagogue burnings, desecrations of cemeteries, and assaults on Jews in religious attire are perpetrated by young Muslims indoctrinated to hate Jews by Islamist imams in the radical mosques that dominate European Islamic life. Virtually every major city in Western Europe has a central mosque, funded by the Saudis, that preaches extremist Wahabbi doctrine.
In the banlieues — the lawless slums that ring Paris and other French cities — Jews and Jewish institutions are repeatedly attacked by marauding gangs of Muslim hoodlums. CNN recently reported that violent attacks on Jews in Paris average 12 a day. Living amidst a Muslim population that outnumbers it 10 to one and a political establishment indifferent to anti-Semitism, beleaguered French Jews endure conditions not seen for more than half a century.
Drawing comparisons between countries is admittedly risky — the United States is not France, or Germany, or even Canada — but it would be foolhardy to ignore what’s happening abroad. Unless changes are made in U.S. immigration policy, a similar transformation will likely occur here. It will also happen much more quickly than most might imagine. Current U.S. immigration law ensures an exponential growth in the Islamic population. Having established a foothold over the past 30 years and attained citizenship, these new Americans may petition to bring in large numbers of extended family members. Current policy entitles U.S. citizens to bring not only their nuclear families but parents, adult children and their spouses and children, and adult siblings and their spouses and children. Over time, these extended family members can bring a similar range of relatives in an unbreakable chain. What begins with a single immigrant can result in the immigration of an entire village, and in some West Bank towns as much as half the population now lives in the United States or has American citizenship.
There’s a sad, if comic irony associated with the fact that employees at organizations like ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Presidents’ Conference must pass through a gauntlet of concrete barriers, armed guards, metal detectors, and double bulletproof anterooms as they come to work each morning to protect them from radical Islamic terrorists, in order to spend their days studying and disseminating reports on the “threat” posed by Evangelical Christians. Meanwhile, the legislative affairs staffs of these organizations are directed to lobby against immigration reforms that could minimize the danger.
Political and economic realities within the Islamic world guarantee a tidal wave of immigration—unless a cut-off mechanism is enacted. Most of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims live in poverty-stricken, politically oppressive countries; two-thirds of the poorest people on Earth live in socially, politically, and economically fossilized Muslim societies. Given the chance to immigrate to the United States, countless millions would—at the same time harboring hatred and contempt for American culture and political institutions.
Jews stand to lose far more than any other group of Americans from a policy that brings in millions of immigrants from cultures that range from antipathetic to antithetic to Jews and Israel. Muslim immigrants feel enormous hostility toward Jews and are intent on nullifying Jewish political power in the United States as a step towards destroying Israel.
Within the Islamic universe is a fast-spreading totalitarian ideology whose name is Islamism, though it’s called many things—Jihadism, Salafism, Wahhabism, or simply Fundamentalism. Its goal is world domination and the imposition of literalist, inhumane, unchangeable Islamic law on all nations and peoples.
It’s ascendant everywhere. It threatens to turn the largely moderate Islam of India increasingly militant; it may well overthrow the comparatively moderate Muslim society and regime in Bangladesh. It’s produced a body count of slaughtered innocents that runs into the tens of thousands in Algeria, and is a constant threat to stability in Egypt. It’s gaining ground in the Caucasus; and there are Islamist insurgencies from Southern Thailand to the Philippines. And its adherents number in the millions in the heart of Europe.
It will not conquer the world militarily, though a stealth strategy of demographic transformation through immigration is working in Western Europe.
Even if the powerful assimilative forces of American culture prevail, it will take several generations, and it is arguable that they will never fully succeed with Muslims unless an Islamic
Reformation comes about — an unlikely scenario because its proponents will be branded as infidels by traditional religious authorities and targeted for murder.
Perhaps the chief distinction between today’s immigration and that of yesteryear is the absence of the tacit and overt pressures that assimilated even the most recalcitrant. These forces have been weakened by multiculturalist ideology that legitimizes and reinforces identity politics; the demise of Americanization programs; the death of civic education; the rise of bilingualism; and the elimination of obligatory national service.
It is highly unlikely today’s immigrants will be as rapidly or fully absorbed into the mainstream as were our parents and grandparents. To believe the outcome will be the same under a wholly distinct set of conditions and socio-political constructs is not merely willful thinking: it is absurd.
Notwithstanding their emotional stake in Israel, America’s Jews have a more immediate concern with anti-Semitism at home. The resurgence of anti-Semitism manifests itself most strongly, sometimes thinly disguised as anti-Zionism, on college campuses. The campus is the most inhospitable place for Jews and supporters of Israel in the United States, something that Hillel, the traditional institutional Jewish presence on America’s campuses, is now addressing by developing talking-points for Jewish students to defend themselves against assaults on Israel and Judaism by Arab and Islamist students, fellow-travelers among other “aggrieved” minorities, and the legion of politically-correct kids of all backgrounds.
American Jews already live in a state of heightened threat. A visit to New York, home to America’s largest Jewish population, provides striking evidence that Jews no longer live in safety. Virtually every high-profile Jewish institution in New York is surrounded by concrete barriers to prevent car bombs exploding too close to the building, while being checked by security guards and passing through metal detectors are now a routine a part of attending religious services. Such vigilance is not confined to New York. Throughout the country, in communities with a substantial Muslim presence, security is a critical part of planning any sort of Jewish political or communal event — especially those intended to demonstrate support for Israel.
Reality is dawning on many American Jews that something is amiss, although it seems lost on some of the country’s most venerable Jewish organizations. There’s a sad, if comic irony associated with the fact that employees at organizations like ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Presidents’ Conference must pass through a gauntlet of concrete barriers, armed guards, metal detectors, and double bulletproof anterooms as they come to work each morning to protect them from radical Islamic terrorists, in order to spend their days studying and disseminating reports on the “threat” posed by Evangelical Christians. Meanwhile, the legislative affairs staffs of these organizations are directed to lobby against immigration reforms that could minimize the danger.
After 9/11, Jewish organizations began devoting more attention to the activities of Islamic radicals in the United States. Their web sites document the ties many of these groups have to terrorists. Amazingly, however, these watchdogs fail to employ the most basic logic and ask the most obvious question: How did they get here? Not one has been willing to examine the impact of mass immigration, including mass Muslim and Islamist immigration, on American Jewry, much less take a position calling for changes in U.S. immigration policy.
Among the most troubling phenomena, widely reported by Steven Emerson, Daniel Pipes, and courageous Muslim dissidents: many of the key “American” Islamic civic and charitable institutions that have sprung up in the United States in recent years are no more than domestic incarnations of foreign Islamist political parties. Among their primary objectives are undermining Jewish political influence in the United States, propagating anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, and destroying Israel.
Masquerading as anti-discrimination organizations, entities like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the American Muslim Council (AMC), the Muslim Student Association (MSA), and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) are either offshoots of or maintain close ties to some of the most radical terrorist groups round the globe. The character of most Islamic organizations is reflected by the fact that more than half their “charities” operating in the United States have been closed down as a result of investigations launched after 9/11, with the remainder under continuing scrutiny.
It must be stressed, as many friends who grew up as orthodox Muslims across the Islamic patrimony have told me in agonizing personal confessions — friends that attended madrassah and then Islamic institutions of higher learning in countries ranging from Morocco to Egypt, Bosnia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — that it is virtually impossible to be reared in classical Islam and not be educated to hate Jews — based on a literalist reading the Koran, where many of the verses concerning Jews (and Christians) are hateful incitements to murder.
Painful to say and hard to hear, barring an Islamic Enlightenment, at this juncture the only way to be a Muslim and not a Jew-hater is to be a lapsed Muslim or — if one continues to call oneself a Muslim and practice Islam — is to conduct what is, in essence, a private, personal “reformation.”
Living at the high noon of Jewish political power, it will strike many as alarmist to suggest the sky may be about to fall. Yet that may well happen within the next 20 years. The Jewish population will be eclipsed by an ethnic group whose interests directly conflict with theirs and many of whose leaders and members are openly hostile to Jews. The Constitution, the basic integrity of the vast majority of Americans, and the professionalism of American law enforcement will militate against the kind of anti-Semitic violence taking place in France and elsewhere; at least they will slow its progress. What these will not be able to prevent is the loss of political support for Israel that would doom the Jewish state to total political isolation.
Without minimizing the effectiveness of organizations like AIPAC and others in steering U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction, it must be acknowledged that for many years they’ve been pushing on an open door. What’s been missing was a counter-vailing force. There’s never been a significant constituency as strongly opposed to Israel as American Jews have felt in favor of Israel; there’s never been an anti-Israel constituency motivated enough to form political PACs and vote for or against candidates based on their stance on Middle East policy. Now there is, and it’s growing rapidly as a result of immigration policy.
Even after Muslims outnumber Jews, Jews will maintain a political advantage for a time by virtue of the fact that they are well entrenched in the “old boys” network in Washington and other centers of power. Israel will also continue to enjoy strong support from millions of Evangelical Christians who see the Jews’ return to the Holy Land — and their continuance there — as part of the biblical prophecy that presages the Second Coming.
The clock will eventually run out on these advantages. The fastest growing religious group in America, Muslims are organizing to promote their interests. Demography plus money equals political power. Muslim and Arab political PACs are springing up across the country.
There’s something akin to religious faith among American Jews in the Constitution as the ultimate protector of their rights. Though it’s surely the most enlightened governing treatise ever devised, it’s finally just words on paper. Many nations have had enlightened constitutions expressing lofty ideals and, nevertheless, turned on the Jews and other minorities.
What sets the United States apart is the nexus between the principles in the Constitution and the American people. The protections of the Constitution would mean little were it not for a population that has believed in it, bled for it, and struggled with itself to see that its principles are applied to all who live in the United States.
But change is underway. Large-scale immigration, unprecedented in magnitude and ceaseless in duration, is reshaping America. By the middle of this century the United States will cease to have a majority ethnic population. Not necessarily problematic by itself, it will present a challenge to social cohesion. Infinitely more worrying, strong multicultural forces are deconstructing in theory and in fact the ideal and reality of a dominant common culture, one that links Americans of all racial, ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds. During this volatile transformative period, the balance between group identity and a broader sense of national belonging has swung in the direction of tribal identity among many new immigrants. Many of the new cultures being introduced to the multicultural “salad bowl” harbor long traditions of anti-Semitism, and in the case of Muslims, are in direct conflict with Jews over issues that command the deepest emotional allegiances of both.
Should the day come when Jews find themselves disempowered, vulnerable, and threatened 20 to 30 years from now in a very different America, one thing Jewish leaders as well as ordinary American Jews must never be allowed to say is, “We didn’t see it coming.” The historical record of America’s major Jewish organizations in confronting the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust is cause for shame. At the very least, it’s cause for humility and a greater willingness to re-evaluate long-held positions in the face of new realities. One story from those terrible years is indicative: in the summer of 1939, when the ship St. Louis stood offshore with its desperate cargo of German-Jewish refugees, symbolizing for all the world the plight of Jews seeking to escape the devouring maw of Nazism, the American Jewish Committee was unable to assemble its Executive Board because the members could not be troubled to interrupt their summer vacations. Today’s leaders of those organizations should recall this vast historic catastrophe — as well as the failure of their predecessors as guardians of the Jewish people — as they look at this issue, consider the future, and ponder choices they can evade no longer.
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