Because Democrats regard the millions of people who have entered, are entering, and (they hope) will continue to enter the United States illegally as a prospective bloc of captive voters, they demand we give illegal aliens “a path to citizenship.” And President Trump now seems inclined to give in to that demand.
Citizenship is what the 1965 immigration law has conferred to more than 40 million people from what we used to call the Third World, a majority of whom have in fact become the Democratic Party’s reliable supporters. So as we decide what the status of various categories of illegals should be and whether to continue or to reform our current system of legal immigration, there should be no doubt that the balance of political power in America is at stake—never mind its cultural character.
Who shall be admitted to citizenship is the question. Next to that, who we let in to do what looms small. Citizenship determines who shall rule, to what ends, and what life among us will be. Such decisions are quintessential to popular sovereignty.
We obfuscate reality if we pretend that today’s influx is a mere continuation of the hallowed heritage of American immigration; if we ignore that people who want to come to America differ in their motivation, character, and above all in relevance to our constitutional republic. What follows distinguishes the categories of people involved and asks what status we should grant to whom and for what reason.
Is It All Just Racism?
The 1924 immigration law had established small quotas for immigration from foreign countries, proportionate to the percentage of U.S citizens from those counties. Today, calling that law “racist” is commonplace. By what criterion is it “racist” for a country to decide to remain the way it is?
By the 1924 law, Americans decided to admit people like themselves, including habits of the heart and mind regarding honesty, work, women, and America itself. And if taking origin into account is racist, why was the 1965 law not racist for prioritizing and turbocharging with unlimited “family reunification immigration” by Third World people with characteristics very much different from those of Americans? What had been wrong with America that it had to be righted by injecting people as different as these have been? What change, precisely, was this injection supposed to produce?
In short, the contrast between the pre- and post-1965 approaches to immigration has to do with the different political and cultural agendas of Americans.
