Before I address these responses (and dude, seriously, how many comments do you need to reply to one post?), we have to clear up several things, since the Constructivist displays many of the misconceptions about conservatives and conservatism that most liberals display.
First, conservatism is not monolithic. There is no conservative equivalent of PC. There is no conservative party line. Conservatism is a big tent, an often uneasy allliance among several different groups. Just a cursory trip through the conservative blososphere is enough to demonstrate that we disagree almost as often as we agree.
Second, it’s a bad idea to throw statistics at a conservative, because many of us tend to be quantitatively literate, if not empiricists, and are familiar with the statistics.
Third, liberals’ number one downfall when debating conservatives is their elitism that results in their assuming that conservatives are simple-minded, and conservatism is simplistic. This is what usually results in liberals’ throwing out labels like, “racist,” “misogynist,” or “xenophobic,” rather than addressing the substance of the argument.
Fourth, many conservatives used to be liberals, and are intimately familiar with liberalism and the ways in which liberals discuss topics. Few liberals used to be conservatives — in fact, most liberals avoid conservatives like the plague and know nothing about them. After all, liberals always assume that everybody in the room is also a liberal, whereas conservatives rarely, if ever, make that assumption.
Finally, I think “accusing” and “beef” and so forth are overstating, or perhaps overinterpreting, what I said. So when these pop up, I will ignore them, having dealt with that here.
Now for the responses to the Constructivist:
A few responses to RWP (O’s out of town, so expect his in a few days):
1) Border Security: Of course this is important. Deportations will never work until the borders are secure, for one thing. My opposition to the wall idea is that it’s a) dumb,
I can see certain objections to a security wall, but I fail to see why it might be dumb. Elaborate, please.
b) both expensive and inefficient,
The issue isn’t whether it would be expensive, but whether it would be less expensive than securing the borders (and note that plural noun there). Inefficient? How so?
and c) builds an image of America
Oops, you lost me there. I have zero concern about our “image,” particularly with western Europeans. Zero.
At least RWP recognizes part of this when he hedges with his “or heightened security”
I was addressing an issue I have not entirely thought out. You can call it hedging, though I prefer to call it caution.
There would be no surer sign that we’re a great power in decline than if we keep expanding the security fences already in place.
Hardly in decline. Our economy is booming, unemployment is way down, and we’re way ahead of Europe. And I fail to see how a fence would have anything to do with decline, unless you’re speaking about perception. Conservatives are usually more concerned with reality.
Moreover, by expanding them we’d be sending a message to all immigrants that we’re embracing the kind of European attitudes toward immigration and immigrants
Do you mean those “come here and feel free not to assimilate” attitudes that have resulted in the disaster in Europe right now?
I’d love to be able to say that Europe is not our problem, but they are, for security reasons.
which would make it less likely we’d get the highly-skilled, highly-educated, highly-capitalized immigrants The Objectivist claims we should give preference to.
Hello. You’re responding to me, remember? I’m over here.
2) Deportation: I’m not opposed to RWP’s notion of selective deportation for violent crimes, particularly if we could work out a way with the criminals’ country of origin to have them serve their time over there
I can predict exactly what would happen if we did that. All the squealing leftist organizations like the ACLU, AI, and the Red Cross would howl that we were sending immigrants to be “tortured” and take it to the SCOTUS — and then we’d have them all back here on the streets, right back where we started. No, if they do the crime here, they do the time here.
the Bush administration has been deporting and detaining massive numbers of immigrants on quite minor violations
I’d love to see actual evidence of this. It seems that every weekend, another foreign student is arrested for DUI, yet they’re not being deported. Then there’s that Taliban at Yale. I don’t see him being deported either.
I don’t quite see why the right is attacking him so harshly.
See that first point at the very top of this post, you know, the one about conservatism not being monolithic.
Or why RWP isn’t decrying the use of notions of “group responsibility” to justify the expulsion of “good” immigrants in these massive dragnets.
Because I’ve seen no evidence of this. Point me to the evidence, and I’ll respond. How’s that?
But deportation for going on welfare is another thing, particularly for legal immigrants. Despite what most conservatives think, it’s well-documented that the typical recipient is on welfare temporarily; there’s a lot of turnover on the welfare rolls. Being deported for having to use social services for the first time makes about as much sense as exiling the mostly white female citizens who make up the majority of welfare recipients in this country.
That’s misleading. Yes, if you look at the raw data, there are more white women on welfare. However, the number of non-white women on welfare is far out of proportion to the demographics. So you have scored no point here (and see that second point at the top, about throwing statistics at conservatives).
Especially post-Clinton’s welfare “reform”
Oops, there you go again. That wasn’t Clinton’s welfare reform. Clinton campaigned on it, then the minute he was elected, dropped it. Full credit goes to the Gingrich Congress for welfare reform — which resulted in the sharpest drop in unemployment in US history.
Clinton signed it into law only after vetoing it. Twice. The same goes for the balanced budget — which Clinton campaigned on, and immediately dropped as soon as he was in office.
and post-9/11, the INS (or BCIS of whatever they call themselves now) is paying a lot more attention to sponsors’ responsibilities.
I have no special fondness for the INS, or any government bureaucracy for that matter, but considering that the INS will give a student visa to anyone with an I-20, and considering that universities will give anyone who can pay tuition an I-20, you can’t lay all the blame with the INS.
3) Legal immigration: If heightening border security means hiring more guards and paying them enough to resist bribes, it makes sense to me for us to also hire more bureaucrats to allow us to increase the number of legal immigrants we allow in annually and process their applications more efficiently
How many examples do you need before you realize that bureaucracy and efficiency are mutually exclusive? Was Katrina, FEMA, the state and NO governments not enough?
RWP is right that we should make it easier for “those who want to come and work [to] do so.”
Thank you.
4) Worker protections/empowerment
Oh no, if we get into the five thousand reasons unions are not beneficial to anyone, I’ll be here all day. Put this in the fridge for later discussion.
RWP’s big beef with The Objectivist is that he fails to emphasize cultural arguments against immigration enough and with me is that I fail to understand the distinction between desirable and undesirable cultures, between good immigrants who want to come here to work and assimilate to classic American values and bad ones who want to go on welfare and advance a cultural nationalist agenda that amounts to a “reconquista” strategy.
That’s a fair assessment.
So RWP’s bringing up the failures and costs of the war on poverty seems to me a classic waving of the proverbial red herring
Indeed it was — in response to your own red herring (which was the point).
taking attention away from the relatively small numbers of immigrants on welfare and their relatively small impacts on taxpayers.
Here is my position: If by “immigrant” you mean non-citizen, the one on welfare is one too many.
To hide this
No.
We need to go back to the days when immigrants knew their place and knew it was their job to work hard, keep their mouths shut until they learned English, assimilate to Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture
And here we have a classic example of the simplistic nature of liberalism — ironic, since liberals believe that they and their ideals are so much more intellectually superior.
Assimilation is not Boolean. Every immigrant group until the last twenty years has assimilated. Germans from Bavaria settling along the Ohio River Valley and assimilated, yet many still speak German, and have Strassenfests and Oktoberfests every year. The vast majority of Arab immigrants are Christians, who are one of the quickest to assimilate historically; they form communities around their churches and social clubs. Ethnic, yes. Assimilated, yes.
Keep going, RWP, and you’ll prove my point about the right’s racism for me.
When in doubt, play the race card. Or whatever-ist. Utter drivel, of course, but common.
Perhaps this explains why The Objectivist downplayed cultural arguments in his column.
I have no idea. I haven’t met him, so I wouldn’t care to speculate one way or another.
My point in bringing up the literally racial doubts about Celts’, Slavs’, and Alpines’ ability to live up to RWP’s exact cultural principles during 1840-1925 was not just to critique past racialization of immigrant groups from southern and eastern Europe but to pose some simple questions, as well: 1) did their presence here turn out to be so bad for the nation? how have Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, and other immigrants and their descendants done here?
Of course not. Many of their descendants are conservatives today. Was there racial tension? Certainly. Did it work out for the best for everyone concerned? Certainly.
why is waving a Mexican flag equivalent to “proclaim[ing] primary allegiance to Mexico” but waving an Irish or Italian one equivalent to expressing unproblematic pride in one’s heritage?
Waving an Irish or Italian flag at an immigration protest whose (ostensible) point is that you want to be an American would be equivalent.
Please answer these questions without resorting to a version of the answer, ‘but the earlier immigrants were “really white”–it just took a shamefully long time for the country to recognize that–while the new immigrants are not.’
I would never have used such a silly argument. Are you, perhaps, projecting here?
This is where RWP’s assumption that all multiculturalism celebrates ingrained cultural differences, endorses every kind of separatism, and amounts to a leftist attempt to undermine America from within reveals how little he has read about the varieties of multiculturalism in the US
Please, I need no lecture. I deal with multiculturalism on a daily basis. Multiculturalists are disingenuous, and dangerous. On the left, multiculturalism trumps all, even those anti-sexist principles liberals hold so dear.
Moral equivalence is neither.
With respect to immigration, the notion that there are aspects of Mexican or Hispanic culture that make assimilation to classic American ideals and values more difficult
I don’t make this assumption. I lay the blame firmly at the door of multiculturalists, who enable the anti-assimilationism of these groups.
As you’ll see in late April, RWP, The Objectivist does believe that racial differences matter.
They don’t. That is the whole point of Martin Luther King’s color-blind society.
Finally, if RWP is so confident in classic American values/principles and truly sees them as universal, I don’t see why he’s ducking an engagement with my “21st C world-wide welcome” proposal by suggesting it’s irrelevant to debates over immigration policy. If we don’t regularly propose to build walls between US states or send those who go on welfare in one state back to the state of their birth–if we have figured out how to manage and regulate “internal migrations” and see them as essential to our national identity–if the mobility of people within national borders is no problem–then what’s wrong with extending this model to those nations that want to become US states?
How, exactly, did you leap from immigration to whole nations wanting to become part of the United States?
My question to RWP is whether he wants to try to deny that some on the right are making racist arguments against immigration.
Why would I deny it? Certainly, some are. Then, there is just as much, if not more, racism in identity politics, referring to Condi Rice, Ken Blackwell, Thomas Sowell, Michael Steele, or any minority conservative as an oreo or Uncle Tom, not to mention the violent anti-Semitism of Cindy Sheehan, Noam Chomsky, or the Moveon/Daily Kos left wing.
I’ll kindly ask him to retract his accusation that I issued a scatter-shot condemnation of all anti-immigration talk as racist.
That’s a retraction you won’t get.
In case he needs a reminder, what I actually wrote was:
“Many of today’s most influential conservatives want to repeat this history [leading up to the 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration act]–with new targets. The core assumptions and arguments of nativist best-sellers from the 1920s like Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy are recycled and repackaged in polemics like Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West (2002) and Samuel Huntington’s Who We Are (2004).”
Which is nothing more than an attempt to tar those who are worried about unfettered immigration as racists.
If RWP is as active in condemning current-day racism/nativism/xenophobia on the right as he is in claiming the irrelevance of “past sins” to today’s debates, I’ll give him a lot of credit.
Like I said, when you first see the racism in liberalism, dentity politics, multiculturalism, and the so-called “anti-war” movement, we’ll talk.
