Katie’s Dad 2.0

Every so often, I run across a blogger or columnist who has figured out most of what is necessary for us to end this nightmare invasion of the illegal aliens. I find myself nodding in agreement as I read through their analysis of the situation, but then, usually near the end of the piece, my hopes are dashed. Sigh, it’s just another misguided, overly-optimistic Libertarian.

Tonight I have found another example:

The Cranky Insomniac: Illegal immigrants song

I don’t mean to go off on a rant here, but look: I’m all for as close to open immigration as possible. The day we decide we’ve had enough new blood in this country is the day we give up on America’s promise. And I don’t understand how you can have a statue that proclaims “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses who won’t stop with the yearning” on the one hand and then erect a giant wall that says “keep out” on the other. If you build the wall, the statue must fall.

The post I linked to here is an old one, and it appears that the blog has gone inactive. But, it never hurts to re-debunk some of this nonsense.

The day we decide we had enough new blood in this country is the day we give up on America’s promise.

Aside from it being no more than flowery platitude, there’s tremendous ignorance in a statement. When I speak with people who think like this, Time and again they are shocked to learn that this nation has had large periods of time in which there wasn’t much net immigration at all.

They don’t realize that none of our growth the first 40 years we were a nation came from immigration. They never learned that wars and economics conveniently shut off the immigrant flow and facilitated assimilation. The looks I get when I tell them about the Johnson-Reed Act are telling. There are shocked as I walk them through how the assimilation it encouraged was vital to our being united enough to actually go and wage war in Germany and Italy, the homelands of large numbers of immigrants who came during the Great Wave.

It doesn’t always happen, but usually I can see a flash of recognition in someone’s eyes when they realize that their belief in our being a “nation of immigrants” is about as rational as belief in the tooth fairy.

I don’t understand how you can have a statue that proclaims “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses who won’t stop with the yearning” on one hand and then eraect a giant wall that says “keep out” on the other.

I don’t understand how someone so obviously intelligent as this “Cranky Insomniac” fellow appears to be can go through life ignorant to the fact that the actual name of the statue is “Liberty Enlightening the World” and, rather than being a statement about immigration, is a statement that runs corollary to Winthrop’s “City on a Hill.”

It proclaims America as an example, not a bug lamp.

The poem affixed to the statue’s base is a travesty. It is the result of a PR stunt gone horribly wrong and it’s absurd that we have been endumbed into believing that it is somehow more than that. It isn’t. It’s about as relevant to who we are as that little lizard is to car insurance.

If you build the wall, the statue must fall.

If that’s what it’s going to take, it’s a trade-off I’m willing to accept. Considering that the green lady’s original symbolism has been lost and replaced by smarmy compassionate fallacy, I can’t say that I’d miss it.

Now, I understand that’s such words are going to offend a lot of people. There are millions of good Americans whose parents and grandparents have fond attachments to it because it’s the first thing they saw when they came to America, and I do not desire begrudging them that. Katie’s great-grandmother was one of them. Still, the fact of the matter is that the statue’s intent was misappropriated and in a sense it’s false meaning has usurped far more important ideals expressed by our founding fathers during their generation.

Libertarians be damned, everything that runs contrary to the Puritan hope that we can build a shining example for the rest of the world to follow, if they so choose, is a bastardization.

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American History, american tradition, Assimilation, Fisking, Immigration, immigration reform