How come the phrase "undocumented immigrants" is supposed to provoke furrowed brows, ruminations on complex issues and a bit of quiet moral preening over against baboons who call these poor desperate people "illegals", ("No human being is illegal" scream the bumper stickers on the Priuses), yet the phrase "unlicensed driver" makes us nervous and we look for someone to fix that obviously scary and dangerous person? How about "unlicensed gun owner?"
Liberals used to, and many still do, get into the Bush Derangement Syndrome over, well, the very existence of the former President. I used to put on a fairly good facsimile when W started talking immigration, a subject on which he was worse than useless. And hardly alone there. It's an issue that pushes my buttons fast and hard.
I lived for almost two decades in a bilingual bicultural country. It's a bad idea, to be avoided whenever possible. An institutionalized division and competition that caused a lot of problems without any discernible benefit which balanced those problems. Lovely people in both French and English Canada...except that the French Canadians of Quebec by and large held the rest of Canada in contempt (their provincial legislature is called The National Assembly!) and used their victim status in Trudeaupia to wring concessions out of the majority which the majority heartily resented.
Bilingualism, biculturalism. It's a bad idea. Ask the Belgians. Or the Rwandans. The list is very long.
And now that the bi stuff has fallen away into the even worse multi stuff. Disintegration, internal Balkanization. Bad. A national that embraces the ideology of multiculturalism --and only Western nations are required to do it or actually try it-- basically says that it has no culture at all and that it is just a blank space. How long does a group like that survive, especially when the other groups are all deeply colored, not blank at all? That's why Canadians identify so strongly with the National Health Care and their highminded and impactless pacifist foreign policy. What else is there to call your own once who have given away the store?
My deep dislike of our current immigration situation, which I judge to be nothing less than a slow-motion invasion, comes from the following brief points.
1. Massive numbers of these folks are ILLEGAL. Their first contact with America is to break our laws. And our lack of response, indeed, our compliance, sends a profound message: we are weak and we are contemptible. That by itself is a major red flag.Anyway, Victor's money quote:
If I get caught driving without a license, or even without my friggin front plate on, I get pulled over and fined. If I arrive here illegally, the State of California pays for my college and forbids the cops from questioning me about my status.
2. They overwhelmingly come from a single language group and within the group, Mexicans dominate. This leads to the "Press 1 for English" and the spreading English-Spanish signage, etc.
English is one of the crucial non-creedal forces that has kept America --always and from day one an ongoing project of unifying groups who were naturally disparate-- intact and feeling like a single entity. You have the ludicrous situation of liberal Americans apologizing because they can't speak Spanish to their maids and yardmen. I speak Spanish very well but I will be damned if I will accomodate a illegal alien who is in my country by enable him like that.
3. The dominant Mexicans come from a neighboring country, making coming and going pretty easy. And easy travel promotes this phenomenon among almost all immigrant groups. This means that when you arrive in America, you don't have to stay here and find yourself becoming American. You can straddle the cultural fence easily and be sorta kinda Americanish, thinking of yourself as mostly a resident rather than a citizen. And Mexican/Latino culture becomes more normalized here. Much of that culture is dysfunctional.
If you think the first-generation illegals are bad, their kids will be worse. They will feel at home neither here nor there, and if trends continue, Hispanics will mimic the worst behaviors of American Blacks: bad school performance and unwedmothering.
They will take for granted what seemed to their parents a huge step forward and when they don't find themselves moving up, resentment and entitlement and alienation will be the order of the day. Of course, the Democrats will blame America.
It will not be pretty.
4. The dominant Mexicans, along with a lot of other Hispanics, have a historical grudge against the Yanqui gringo imperialists. For many in the Southwest and California, they feel a historic right to be here. So not only are many of them illegal, there is a significant stream in their culture which makes us, the Americans, their enemies. The American flag booed in LA. La Raza and Aztlan.
5. And this is a time when American self-confidence and cohesion has been badly damaged by the ideology of multiculturalism and the concomitant narrative of our national shame. No longer do we demand that immigrants become Americans but are anxious to protect ourselves from being labeled racists and so allow the internal Balkanization of multiculturalism to metastasize. Our own sense of national self is fractured. And remember, in a multicultural world, the only group banned from celebrating and asserting itself is White.
I come up here to Stanford two or three days per week from rural central California. And I’m amazed at the de facto segregation of elite Obama country in Menlo Park and Palo Alto versus the barrio in nearby Redwood City. I think I have finally figured out the modus operandi. Everyone here is “progressive”. That means, you hire Hilda to watch your kid, Juanito to mow your lawn, or Hillario to wash your dishes at the local restaurant.
You deplore racism, or even the mere suggestion that cultures are not all inherently equal. But under no circumstances do you buy a home in Redwood City (far cheaper in fact). Nor do you put your child in any school district that draws in the Redwood City children of illegal aliens. So it is a sort of alternate universe here. From 8Am to 8PM we have an integrated world where service workers attend to the mundane needs of the Silicon Valley and Stanford elite-before going home to Redwood City and San Jose where they live and school their children out of sight, out of mind.
The whole thing is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment