Gone Nativist

James Taranto of Best of the Web OpinionJournal is toeing the Wall Street Journal party line with respect to the immigration debate. Not that we suspect or believe that he has to do so to remain employed, he just agrees with the editors and the folks who tend to equate public welfare with the welfare of business and market freedom.

I won't use this space to go into the whole "what's good for business is good for America" fallacy.  It's a corrupt argument that lends truth to the Left's portrayal of George Bush as a pawn of Big Business.

But Mr. Taranto has begun to call people like me, who want secure borders, "Nativists."  The objections to this are so numerous, I hardly know where to begin, but I'll take a plunge with the obvious.  I think I speak for about 200 million people when I say, I don't care what your country of origin is, obey the law.  And an even greater number of people would say that it is the government's duty, specifically the executive branch, to enforce the law.  Second, Mr. Taranto indulges in what he so deftly skewers when it's done by our friends on the Left: pick a couple of extreme examples of rhetoric (or one extreme example and one that is merely characterized as such) and tar everyone on this side of the immigration debate with the same brush.  He uses the column written by Vox Day that compares the logistics of deportation with the Final Solution as an example of how those of us who want to stem the tide of unassimilated millions are basically just like the actual Nazis.  Then he throws in a slam at Michelle Malkin.

"Vox Day," a pseudonymous commentator who has been playing electronic games since 1978, weighs in on the immigration debate in his WorldNetDaily column:

[President Bush] lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic--it's just not going to work."

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

The bio at the end of the column describes "Day" as a "Christian libertarian." It seems a conservative nativist is one who celebrates America's wartime excesses, whereas a libertarian nativist is one who thinks our totalitarian enemies had something to offer too.

I don't know, Jimmy. I think that I can want security and a lawful society and not be a Fascist and, for the record, I found Vox Day's comparison repulsive.  I also  think that revisiting the question of internment in the context of World War II is a worthwhile object lesson for those of us who would like to purge political correctness and white guilt from the American psyche as a first step toward real security. 

Comments

[Ohbloodyhell]

I dunno, Vox's point is that the base argument, that the mechanisms to do it are impractical, is fairly accurate. If the Nazis could do something in the 40s with 40s technology, we ought to be able to accomplish something similar 40 years later. The *purposes* are utterly different, which is why one should be reprehensible and the other is rational and sensible.

[Ohbloodyhell]

Dang. Shoulda previewed it.
Let's restate that:

I dunno, Vox's point that the base argument, "the mechanisms to do it are impractical", is ridiculous. If the Nazis could do something in the 40s with 40s technology, we ought to be able to accomplish something similar 60 years later.

The *purposes* are utterly different, which is why one should be reprehensible and the other is rational and sensible.

I read Vox in spurts, and don't always agree with him, but he does generally make logical sense -- I simply don't always agree with his initial starting points -- usually on the Xtian, not the libertarian, end.

[Michaewl adams]

I have to agree with you about Vox Day. If he's been palying video games since '78, he couldn't be that much younger than I am, and WWII and the Holocaust are certainly seared into my conciousness. Hasn't he even seen Schindler's List? Doesn't he realize that the deportation could go so fast because the Nazis didn't care how many people were alive at the end of the train ride? Build the fences, raid a few employers to demonstrate our seriiousness about enforcement, and they stop coming. Even with amnesty, if there is a fence and people watching it, we can slow the flow to a manageable velocity. And, after all, we want fewer entrants because we cannot maintain standards at the present volume. We don't, or at least most of us don't, hate Mexicans. We just want to continue as a bourgeois republic. This has been the principle underlying our immigration policy, and even our civil rights policy, for most of the past century and a half. (OK We took a detour for sixty one years on Civil Rights, but not on immigration.) I am not sure why we can't be rational about this.

[Michael Adams]

's OK OhBloodyHell. I proofread my post but not my NAME!

[aelfheld]

The deportation argument is a red herring - dry up the jobs and benefits for illegal aliens, and they'll leave on their own.

[Tom the Redhunter]

Taranto is generally a good guy, and I'm disappointed to see him throw around terms like "nativist" against people who simply want to enforce the
law. They also use red herrings like this Vox Day... ugh.

What the open-borders crown want is truely Orwellian; ask them if they want to take immigration laws off the books and they demur, but ask them to enforce the law and you're a "nativist" or worse.

The GOP is tearing itself apart over this issue. Actually, it's only the latest example of how the president and the Republican leadership in congress are totally out of touch with the base of their party. Uggg...