January 20, 2009

Mandela’s Example For Obama

As immigrationist propaganda goes, W. M. Spellman’s The Global Community is certainly sincere.

First published in 2002, it was reviewed in all the right places; yet now you can buy it on Amazon for a penny. Spellman, sometime Professor of Humanities at the University of North Carolina Asheville, digs very deep into the history of human migration. If the author hadn’t packed and peppered his book with the cliches of “diversity”, it would be a scholarly work of considerable merit.

It’s full of interesting factoids. The Japanese word "sakkoku" means "keeping the country closed". Chinese migrants to California in the 19^th Century labelled San Francisco "Jinshan"; "the mountain of gold". In some respects, the similarity between indentured servants, no doubt the ancestors of many VDare.com readers, and beneficiaries of the H-1B visa scheme is quite striking, although there are major differences; the indentured servants worked for fixed periods, they didn’t displace anyone else and they weren’t encouraged to bring their families along for the ride.

Yet the book’s most interesting aspect is its insight into possibly the thorniest aspect of what is now every major country’s "National Question"; the removal of illegal aliens.

On June 30, 1964, National Review wrote of Nelson Mandela’s conviction that “[t] he South African courts have sentenced a batch of admitted terrorists to life in the penitentiary, and you would think the court had just finished barbecuing St. Joan, to hear the howls from the liberal press.''[Oh, Shut Up, By William F Buckley, PDF]

Of course, much has changed at National Review since then—and once in office, Mandela would prove himself to have no truck with Open Borders. His track record proves he sat firmly on the muscular wing of restrictionist thought.

On Page 177, Spellman writes:

“Even post-apartheid South Africa has wrestled, in large measure unsuccessfully, with the problem of unwanted labor migrants. The white minority government had vigorously expelled undocumented residents during its long ascendancy; in 1993 alone some 50,000 migrant workers were required to leave the country. But in the first year of democratic majority rule, Nelson Mandela’s government expelled almost 60,000 undocumented migrants, most of whom were from neighbouring Mozambique. The primacy of the nation-state ideal remains secure even in areas of the world where the detrimental influence of Western colonialism had its greatest impact” [yadda, yadda, yadda...]

Even Mandela’s subsequent marriage to Graca Machel, the widow of Mozambique’s former president, did not give a free pass to Mozambicans living in South Africa. According to Human Rights Watch (scroll to page 2), the South African police have been known to arrest people for "walking like a Mozambican". Not even the most hysterical critics of immigration enforcement could reasonably suggest that such abuses of power would be tolerated in the English-speaking West.

Yet it is perfectly reasonable for South Africa to be concerned about the negative impact of immigration—in 2001, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, possibly the only immigration minister to have acted in a movie alongside Michael Caine, told the South African Parliament that the “presence of illegal aliens impacts on housing, health services, education, crime, drugs, transmittable diseases — need I go on?”

South Africa has shown that a country determined to put its own citizens’ interests first will deport illegal aliens in numbers. Yet its example is ignored by those who say "it can't be done". The answer is: "Yes it can". It can even be done creatively.

What the South African government has been seen to possess is the political will to take simple, not easy, measures—a will which the American and British governments lack. It is not an issue of administrative competence; it is a matter of guts and spirit. The South Africans have shown that in some respects, they’ve got it and our leaders don’t.

Instead, our own leaders’ unmandated adoption of foggy, soggy, unhistorical, anti-Western, "One World" policies rooted in ideological nonsense has rotted their capacity to analyse the almost ludicrously simple problem in front of them.

Many are so addled that they probably either like what they see, or just don’t care.

I believe that some liberals really do think that the USA is as desperate and corrupt as many countries in the Third World, and therefore view Barack Obama as the charismatic leader of a Third World liberation movement.

Only history will show us whether Obama himself believes it. Immigration enforcement is an area of policy in which a Third World country has shown itself to be streets ahead of the two greatest nation-states in the First.

If Barack Obama’s ego is big enough to make him want to be compared to Nelson Mandela, then his first task in office should be to order the root and branch reform of a broken immigration system, including systematic deportation of those caught in the USA in violation of its immigration laws.

If his record shows nothing else, at least in the area of immigration policy, Mandela proved himself to be a patriot.

Immigration reform patriots are allowed to hope too, aren’t they?

Martin Kelly (email him) is a Glasgow, Scotland-based blogger.