Ever heard someone once accused of being homophobic reply by saying, “why, some of my best friends are gay?”
Or a White person accused of being a racist respond by saying, “I’ve had Black friends all my life?”
Something similar happens to those defending the policy to secure the nation’s border and to deport those in the country illegally. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin recently tripped on this one.
Biden’s administration supported open borders and eventual citizenship for illegals. President Donald Trump shut the border and now actively deports illegals. To backheel Trump supporters, the open border crowd accuses deportation supporters of hating immigrants.
To be clear, I support modest immigration levels of properly vetted individuals, not because it is good for the immigrants, but because it is good for America. Immigration stirs the genetic pot. It adds a beneficial new energy to society. Immigrants with the training and skills American industry needs fill gaps in the workforce. Sensible immigration is a classic win-win situation.
Progressives have something else in mind. Sure, they allude to those issues, but that is just window dressing, cheap chrome bolted onto a poorly built jalopy.
The open borders crowd are motivated by political power, seeking to grow the Democrat Party base with illegals. They’ll deny it, of course, but they also pretend they didn’t know of President Joe Biden’s collapsing capacities even while insisting he be re-elected.
To deflect accusations of immigrant-hating, in a recent interview Mullin lapsed into immigrant virtue signaling when he repeated the trope that, “We are a nation of immigrants.”
No, Mr. Secretary, we are not.
I am not an immigrant, nor was my father nor my father’s father. My family on my father’s side traces back to American settlers from the early 1700s. My mother’s family goes back nearly as far. My wife’s family has been in this country just as long. We are not immigrants.
Not that there’d be anything wrong with being legal immigrants as the old Seinfeld episode played it, nor does it make me any more of an American than a person legally naturalized last week, but as it happens, we are not immigrants.
True, our families came to America many years ago, but everybody immigrated to America from somewhere yesterday or hundreds of years ago.
We honor those who were in North America before Europeans arrived by calling them “Native Americans.” I have no problem with that, but as Secretary Mullin used the expression, every Native American is an immigrant. Those we call Native Americans descended from peoples who emigrated from Asia a few tens of thousands of years ago.
Heck, even native Europeans descend from immigrants long ago, mostly from the east.
According to anthropologists, homo sapiens originated in East Africa a few hundreds of thousands of years ago, eventually migrating to populate the planet. So in a sense only some living in East Africa can plausibly claim to be truly native to their land.
So, in an utterly meaningless sense of the word, Secretary Mullin’s virtue signaling is correct — we are all immigrants — but it remains a sop devoid of meaningful content.
If it’s so meaningless, why use the expression? Answer: To forfend further discussion about controlling immigration and removing those living in the United States illegally.
But we cannot and must not avoid those discussions or cut them short. Why? Because the left will never stop advancing their phony arguments for why the illegals should stay or why the borders should be open.
If you want to be intellectually lazy, that’s your prerogative if you’re just grousing over a Waffle House cup of Joe. But the secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), of whom I generally think very highly, cannot indulge in such virtue signaling sloth.
Nor can we hesitate to push back by citing the real reason the left favors open borders — rank political power gain by artificially bolstering their voting base.
The hypocrisy of these people is breathtaking. They say they’re for women’s rights, yet favor letting men compete in women’s sports and look the other way when one of their rising stars turns out to be a miserable letch.
They claim to oppose Republican efforts to require a valid ID before voting, a measure overwhelmingly supported by the American people, because they’re afraid some voters might be disenfranchised. Reality check: Every illegal who votes disenfranchises an American voter, yet Democrats don’t care.
The immigration argument must not be dodged with virtue signaling.
We are not a nation of immigrants.
We are a nation of citizens whose franchise is under threat from the left and its opposition to secure borders and deportation of illegals. Sounds like a job for the DHS secretary.
JD Foster is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.
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