http://www.steynonline.com/5376/who-are-we
In my last column, I argued that culture trumps politics, since when many readers have demanded to know what exactly I meant. Well, look no further than the very first post-election issue Republicans were told they needed to address: getting on the right side of Hispanics by neutralizing the illegal-immigrant issue. A population perhaps the size of Australia’s or four mid-sized EU nations’ strolled into America and decided to stay. In doing so, they broke the law. Literally. That’s to say, some of the most basic laws of the nation lie shattered and discarded. Municipally, we have “sanctuary cities.” At the state level, Illinois is merely the latest to consider issuing driver’s licenses and other legal ID to persons who are in the country illegally. Federally, the president himself has decreed by executive order that the laws of the nation not be enforced — and, indeed, anybody minded to try enforcing them (Arizona) gets hauled into court.
This is a highly legalistic society with laws against everything and most of them with stiff jail sentences attached. Yet a group of squatters has rendered the law irrelevant. Four of the September 11 terrorists obtained the picture ID they used to board the plane through the illegal-immigrant day-worker network in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven in Falls Church, Va. But 3,000 corpses wasn’t enough to persuade either the citizenry or their representatives to end their indulgence of such networks. Indeed, it’s estimated that half of the “undocumented” have come here since 9/11: That’s to say, they broke into a country on Code Orange alert. The culture frames the issue, starting with the appropriation of language: These are “hard-working families” willing to do “the jobs Americans won’t do,” notwithstanding the strains they place on hospitals and schools, the contributions they make to gang crime and drunk-driving statistics . . . Once upon a time they were “illegal,” then “undocumented,” now just “immigrants,” a word with longstanding emotional resonance in America but nevertheless one that used to mean guys who stood in line at consulates, filled in the paperwork, and paid the application fees, and whose redefinition into something entirely different has been accepted as a fait accompli.