So is America a "nation of immigrants" or not?

Here's a succinct argument for us being a nation of immigrants, posted by Steve in response to an earlier piece of my mind:

>>America is a nation of immigrants. In many more ways than one. It is such a nation in the sense that immigration is an important factor of its history. America was built to its current glory by the back-breaking hard work of immigrants seeking to make a new, better life for themselves. Immigration ties in with American values - the basis of the American dream, the promise of the possibility of success and prosperity stems from the efforts of America's immigrants.

>>Even now, 10% of America's population are immigrants - that's an astounding amount. Around another 10% have been raised by immigrants and as such are influenced by the phenomenon of immigration. That's 1/5 Americans that are drastically affected by immigration.

>>Whether you like it or not, America is a nation of immigrants.

>>The Mental Tome <<









Let's look at each argument here, because this does pretty well sum up the liberal argument, I think.

1. "immigration is an important factor of its history."

Well, more than Iceland, to be sure. But really, since the human race originated somewhere in SubSaharan Africa, most nations are "nations of immigrants." The only difference is how far back you have to go.
But today, with native-born population growth declining rapidly in the rich nations, the level of immigration in many other nations is catching up with us.

That's true even if you just look at multicultural/multracial immigration. Australia used to have an English speaking Whites-only policy, but that's long gone. Now Sydney and other cities there are getting to look like American cities.

Right now European nations are in a tizzy about immigration, because they've belatedly realized that there's no such thing as guest workers. Mainly they stay, and if they're left unassimilated, trouble follows soon after.

Even Japan is having trouble with 100% Japanese-blooded immigrants from Brazil--because culturally they're loud, rowdy, funloving, somewhat felonious Brazilians.

Libya's in an even tougher spot because Qaddafi encouraged immigration of black Africans to Libya from surrounding countries so he could form a mercenary army loyal only to him. You should see what actual Libyans think of this.

Very few nations in 2011 can state that they aren't a "nation of immigrants."

2. "Immigration ties in with American values - the basis of the American dream, the promise of the possibility of success and prosperity stems from the efforts of America's immigrants."
Success and prosperity for whom? Even liberal economist Paul Krugman admits that massive immigration of uneducated people drives down wages for our blue-collar workforce--and has brought it down from "barely getting by" to "starvation wages."

So as we middle class Americans enjoy the American dream, and middle class immigrants do too where they're needed, the vast mass of unskilled immigrants are achieving their dream at the cost of killing the dreams of America's own unskilled workforce. I find it monumentally patronizing of educated American leftists to blithely overlook this fact, which they can only afford to do because they aren't unskilled laborers.

3. "Even now, 10% of America's population are immigrants"
This means the 90% of America's population isn't. Even if you add in second-generation immigrants--which I'll revisit in a sec--that still makes this 80% a nation of natives--not immigrants.

So using this stat, even if true, as the basis for saying "this is a nation of immigrants" makes as much sense as saying "this is a nation of atheists" because 10% of the population lacks a firm belief in God. And as one of that 10% I can assure you from a lifetime of experience that this is no such nation. Instead we're the most overtly religious rich country on Earth.

4. "Whether you like it or not, America is a nation of immigrants."
I don't know when America's liberal movement morphed into the Borg, but this trope sounds an awful lot like "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."

In 1940 America was .5% Hispanic--one half of one percent. Today it's 14%. This didn't just happen. It came about as the result of policies adopted by the American government and the Mexican government--neither with any public referendum, even a nonbinding one.

If not for American government policies encouraging this vast change, America would today still be .5% Hispanic. We aren't talking about laws of nature here. We have a border. We have immigration laws. It's just that, over the last several decades, we haven't chosen to guard the former or enforce the latter effectively.

Today it's within our technical capability to make it impossible for an illegal immigrant to collect a paycheck or use any social services. We don't because of an unholy alliance of Right and Left wing politicians and partisans.

The Left wants unchecked immigration because it believes that anything else would be racism, and they'd rather see this nation destroyed or morphed into something unrecognizable by our grandparents than be accused of that.

The Right doesn't want unchecked immigration but it keeps voting for pols who do, regardless of the speeches they make, because corporate America loves illegals--they keep profits high by keeping wages down and destroying unions.

Look what the Right did about illegal immigration during its economically disastrous eight years in power: pretty much nothing, except for an abortive amnesty bill that the Republican Party's paymasters wanted but which so many Republican voters hated that they stopped it. Apart from that, mostly they've diverted funds away from border enforcement, universalizing e-Verify, and doing nothing whatsoever about a nationwide biometric ID database.

Meanwhile the Left has been captured by Mexicanist demagogues like "The Race" and similar organizations, while Republicans are terrified of Mexicans voting against them as well.

Yet every poll says what I'm saying here--by a whopping majority of most Republicans and over a third of Democrats. Even a quarter of Americans of Hispanic heritage oppose illegal immigration but they don't dare say anything except at the ballot box.

Meanwhile Republicans refuse to discuss the fact that they want America to stay as Anglo as it was in 1940, and Democrats refuse to discuss why they believe we should have to aborb Mexico's excess population--a population that boomed from 20 million in 1940 to over 100 million today. Somehow liberals believe that, I guess, American agents burglarized every Mexican home's bedroom and stole their condom and forced them to have unprotected sex at gunpoint, then bombed all their abortion clinics.

But no, the plain fact is that Mexico has five times as many people as its economy can employ and feed due to Mexican policies conceived and executed by Mexicans. This happened long before NAFTA. American policies and laws and statecraft had zero impact on the fact of Mexico's overpopulation. Yet liberals continue to believe that this overpopulation is somehow our fault.

We. Didn't. Do. It.

There is no rational reason for us import unskilled labor--not with Amercian citizen unskilled labor unemployment above 20%.

If 20% of Americans being immigrants/kids of immigrants makes us a "nation of immigrants" then why not say that 10-20% unemployment (depending on job skills and age) makes us a "nation of out of work folks?"

The ONLY reason illegal immigration--especially of unskilled laborers and their families--especially from Mexico and parts south--is not stopped, and those here forced out by denying them illegal work--is that our government refuses to respect the will of the people, plainly expressed in poll after poll.

California will be majority Mexican by 2040. The school already are. This isn't some people from various cultures coming here. The is the large-scale replacement of multicultural American society with Mexican society across large swaths of the Southwest. I speak Spanish and understand Mexican culture, so this is no skin off my nose. But I find it outrageous that both parties believe they can get away with ignoring the lawful, Constitutional wishes of most Americans, year after year after year, until people who see themselves as Mexicans comprise a voting majority and Americans become a minority in their own country.

And it's not even the sophisticated Mexican doctors, lawyers, businessmen and artists I knew in Mexico city. We just get Mexico's peasants, and the Mexican culture that's replacing American culture is Mexican peasant culture.

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New religion being promoted on the downlow by the GOP

GOP pols and pundits proudly declare that "America is a Christian nation" frequently. Great message for Jewish Republicans there BTW.

But this obscures the fact that the GOP has actually created a new religion on the sly--one that dare not speak its name, but which GOP leaders promote in every speech.

Since they won't name it, I will: it's "Billionairism."

It's a religion because its tenets are presented as unchallenge-able (which is why Communism was the Soviet Union's state religion). But because it's a shadow religion, none of its tenets are ever stated explicitly. You have to infer them from the actions and coded statements of its adherents.

If it were stated baldly, here's what you'd get once you sweep away the camouflage:

Tenet #1: Billionaires are the pinnacles of virtue. This is why the GOP invariably refers to them as "job creators" (I assume that's counting all the jobs they've created in China, Malaysia, the Marshall Islands etc. after destroying those jobs here in America), and refers to their wealth as money they've "earned."

This is like referring to John Dillenger's loot from his bank robberies as "earnings."

Tenet #2: Because Billionaires are pinnacles of virtue, all government efforts to regulate their economic activities is evil--the code word is "socialist." Socialism used to mean the government owning the country's major businesses. Now it means, thanks to the GOP, all regulation of business.

Tenet #3: Because Billionaires are pinnacles of virtue, all efforts by employees to organize so those with vast wealth don't exploit them is evil--the word "union" is now synonymous with "parasite."

Tenet #4: Because Billionaires don't need the services taxes pay for, taxation is inherently evil, and even if you as an ordinary citizen benefit greatly from those services, you should vote for pols who want to abolish them, because you want to be like Billionaires--and if you favor reasonable taxes that makes you a Socialist and you'd rather lose all those social services you use than be labeled a Socialist.

Tenet #5: America is a tribe comprising about half of the people who reside here. It's a white tribe. An Anglo tribe. A Republican tribe.

Democrats are not Americans. They belong to an enemy tribe that has occupied a small part of the American landscape (mainly in large cities and the coasts) with large concentrations of semi-humans who are not white Anglos, along with intellectual white Anglos, who are tribal traitors. These Democrats comprise, therefore, Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, any pretty much anyone with a foreign accent and/or garb. The handful of Black Republicans and Mexicans are Honorary Whites, revered for enabling white Anglos Republicans to claim that racism has no part in their ideology.

Tenet #6: Government exists to take money and property and rights from white Anglos and give it to Blacks and Mexicans and other foreigners, and to impose Socialism on American businesses.

Therefore government is part of the enemy tribe. GOP politicians take office in order to restore government to a handful of functions--mainly to defend its borders (except for illegal immigrants, needed to keep blue collar wages low and to bust unions), and wage war abroad to justify spending tax dollars on Cold War-appropriate weapons system that are highly profitable for Billionaires.

Tenet #7: If a Billionaire does something bad, he's the exception that proves the rule; likewise a GOP politician. If a Democrat does something wrong, he's the proof of the rule. And if someone who works for a Billionaire does something wrong because the Billionaire told him to do it, it's that worker's fault, because Billionaires are the pinnacles of virtue, and the job creators, and it we fail to propitiate them properly they will take their billions to a country that appreciates them.

Tenet #8: The Judicial system should be totally blind, based on the belief that everyone is equal. If you want to sell your house to finance suing a giant corporation, you're free to, and if a giant corporation wants to use its team of dozens of staff lawyers to sue you, it's free to do that. See? Everyone's free and equal.

Tenet #9: Corporations are people, with the same rights as the rest of us but none of the responsibilities.

Tenet #10: Public opinion expresses the intelligent conclusions of The American People if it agrees with what the Billionaires want--even if most people with that opinion have rarely if ever heard an opposing view, due to the Billionaires' giant marketing bullhorns, applied 24xc7 across their corporate-owned media, fake "thnk tanks" and sock puppet politicians.

Tenet #11: Only Republicans honor the most sacred document apart from the Bible, namely the Constitution, and anything not named explicitly by politicians living in the 18th century in the rural frontier colonies that America then was....is Unconstitutional (and probably Socialistic).

This despite the fact that our Constitution is one of the shortest Constitutions on Earth, and its framers stated explicitly that it should be used as a general framework, adapted to current needs, not as a rigid set of rules.

Tenet #12: America is a Billionarian nation, but in public we'll call it a Christian nation. Christ was/is a Republican. God is a Republican. Mary Mother of Christ was/is a Republican. St. Peter, St. Paul, and all the rest were/are Republicans. Thus when Christ is quoted as saying "feed my sheep" he didn't mean Blacks and Mexicans and people so un-virtuous as to have chosen to be poor because they're lazy. "My sheep" only means "your own family."

Tenet #13: Billionaires are rich because they work harder than others, create companies, create jobs--in fact the heads of major corporates and the major stockholders deserve all gains in that company's productivity. The employees should be grateful for what they get and never complain. Thus the shift in income from CEOs making 20 times what ordinary workers get to over 400 times what ordinary workers get is a good thing, reflecting the fact that Billionaires (and some Millionaires) are worth more to a company than 400 of its worker bees, also know as BPUs (biological productivity units), who are totally interchangeable. All the company's great ideas come from the executive suite and board of directors.

Thus poor people are poor because they're lazy and immoral. They don't need a handout--they need the rod applied to their backsides.

Tenet #14: The drugs Billionaires use are OK (primarily liquor); the drugs Others use (primarily marijuana) are evil.

Tenet #15: Science is a Socialist plot because it upsets Fundamentalists and Polluters.Therefore global warming is a hoax put forth by a vast conspiracy of 98% of the world's climate scientists; the dissent of the other 2% are actually valid, and the 98% wrong, because scientists once thought the Earth was flat.

Of course the Democrats have their own set of unstated, unchallenge-able beliefs, but they aren't promoted with so much funding, over so much time.

Nobody who isn't Indian can understand Indians

This kind of logical claptrap is claimed repeatedly by practically every slice of humanity you can imagine.

Women say it to men, blacks to whites, Chinese to Westerners, Indians to Westerners.

It's a form of exceptionalism--my category is so exceptional you can't possibly understand it, you with your pathetic tiny experience of life.

But in order to claim that a member of group B can't understand a member of group A, that group B person is assuming that he understands group B well enough to know what they can and cannot know--exactly the crime he's accusing group B of when they speak about group A. Unless he feels that his group--group B--is superior to group A, such that group B understands both groups but group A only understands itself.

Either way it's a local trap. You can't tell someone else they can't understand you without assuming that you do understand them--so well that you can read their minds and know exactly what they do and don't understand.

It's arrogance pretending to be humility.

It's also splitterism. That is, people tend to be splitters or lumpers--splitters focus on differences, lumpers on similarities. So splitters see every culture, both genders, all races, as each being totally unique--lumpers, the opposite. Of course both extremes mask the confused muddle that's the truth.

Here's a physical analogy.

All of our organs are homologous with the other gender's organs. Homology means coming from the same source. Thus men's testicles and women's ovaries are homologous, coming from the same place in the embryo. Likewise bat wings, our arms and hands, whale's flippers, and fishes' pectoral fins are homologous.

And likewise every unique feature of every culture almost certainly has something like it in other cultures.

For example, in rice farming village cultures harmony is more important than justice, because it takes a whole village to cultivate rice. Whereas in wheat farming regions justice is more important than harmony because I don't need your help to farm wheat for the most part. But rice farmers certainly understand the concept of justice, and wheat farmers certainly understand the concept of harmony. They just prioritize them differently.

Every flame in my hearth is at least a glowing ember in yours.

President Obama appears not to have read Von Clausewitz

Von Clausewitz was a 19th Prussian officer whose treatise "On War" is still used in war colleges. And one of his key principles is when you get the enemy on his back foot that's the absolutely worst time to back off. Yet just as President Bush I pulled back from the road to Baghdad in the first Gulf War, now our president appears to be duplicating that folly in Libya. Never give the enemy a chance to regroup.

I'm not advocating rashness here, or committing troops to combat in Libya. Just that we shouldn't have pulled back our side's best tactical weapons.

At the same time, none of us should assume the President's doing nothing just because he isn't stating our intentions clearly, or because we aren't seeing bullets flying out in the open. The Fog of War can be a good thing. 

I have a friend who's dead set against our going in there; he says we don't know who the rebels are, or whether we won't cause, inadvertently, more people to be killed in the long run than if we'd just stayed out of it altogether.

Of course nothing is certain. We have to make decisions before all the facts are in, all the time. But waiting for certainty is just as much a choice in the dark as acting. Most critical is to stay flexible and keep our options open, and be ready to turn on a dime as we find out new information.

The composition of the rebels includes everything from secular Libyans to Islamist radicals, to be sure. If we stay involved and help them we give the secularists spritual ammunition; if we stay aloof or help Gaddafi we just reinforce what Al Qaeda says about us.

New York Times sez bring back the A10s and AC130s to Libya

The New York Times' Friday editorial duplicates what I said a week ago: that no one else has these specialized craft, which would be uniquely useful and cost-effective in the Libyan engagement. President Obama's making a big mistake by keeping these out of the fray, though his seeking consensus about Libya was a great idea overall.

Debt!

The GOP, 2000-2008: "Deficits don't matter."
The GOP, during the House campaign, 2010: "Only Jobs matter."
The GOP, after the election to the present: "Jobs don't matter. Only deficits matter. And abortion." 

Isn't that interesting?

At least it has a precedent: it's what Hoover preached. Lessee, what was the outcome of that?

The Great Depression.

And then again in 1938, when FDR drank the Kool-Aid, and the nation sagged back into it.

Of course in the Republicans' Looking Glass World Hoover was defeating the Great Depression and FDR created it. Orwell would have loved these guys.

pulling back in Libya

The US has two weapon systems no one else does: A10s and AC130s. These machines specialize in tactical support, firing machine guns instead of missiles (though the A10 can carry missiles and bombs in addition to its tank-killer cannon).

And no other NATO nation has anything like these. We should already have the UAV equivalent of the A10, but, failing that, these are precisely the tools most appropriate to the Libyan conflict.

So I'm dismayed that we're pulling them out now, crying poor. Instead we should have pulled back the weapons systems that are duplicated by NATO's other nations but keep these two systems in the fray--especially now that Qaddafi's mercenary army is decimated rebel ranks.

The GOP criticizes Obama daily, and more often as not, for false or frivolous reasons. The tragedy is that when it does have a legitimate objection--as it does here--it's too easy for liberals and moderates to dismiss this objections because they're cried wolf--and lied about it--nonstop.