“Comprehensive Immigration Reform”—And The Myth Of “Getting It Behind Us”
05/06/2013
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[See also Coolness Under Fire: Six Points To Remember About The 2013 “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” a.k.a. Amnesty War and The Boston Bombers, “Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” And The National Question]

Congress is back in town and the mark-up on the Obama-Rubio Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill is scheduled for Thursday, May 9. But this legislative Titanic continues to spring amusing leaks, for example news that the most recent version (up from 844 to 867 pages, changes shown here) quietly increases the slush fund to pay for implementation from $100 million to $1 billion. [With one click, key part of immigration bill becomes ten times more costly, by Byron York, washingtonexaminer.com, May 4 2013].

I was particularly struck by this acid comment from Mickey Kaus, one of the very few Main Stream Media figures to risk the Curse of Stein by criticizing current manic immigration enthusiasm, on a recent network Sunday talk show lineup:

Has there ever been an issue on which the big national media were so one-sided and so untroubled by how one-sided they are?

You’d think they’d at least find the kookiest anti-amnesty crackpot they could find and put them on. But they don’t even do that.

If the national debate is so unanimous, why is it so hard for amnesty to get passed? Who are these mystery opponents, never seen, who wield vast under-the-radar influence? …

TV chat: All pro-amnesty, all the time, April 8 2013

(Needless to say, the networks Sunday talk shows have continued their shameless pimping—see here and here and here and here).

Well, as we all know, Diversity Is Strength. And as a British immigrant I am able to answer Kaus’ question: yes, a similarly one-sided debate was the central feature of the British elite’s bipartisan, equally nation-breaking 1960-1975 campaign to get the U.K. into what was then called the “Common Market” (rapidly changed to the “European Economic Community” and subsequently, casting aside the mask, the “European Union”—an aspiring unitary polity without even a pretense of U.S. style federalism, dramatically negating 1500 years of British history).

In those days, we didn’t even have internet guerillas. We did have Enoch Powell, in my opinion the most significant British politician of the twentieth century. But he was shunned and suppressed by the Establishment—very like Pat Buchanan, in many ways his American equivalent, twenty years later.

I don’t like to bore my American readers with these remote tribal tragedies. But I will note that the Eurofanatic Economist Magazine, recently whooping up immigration in general and the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge Bill in particular, has just casually observed of the EU “debate” in retrospect that

the economics of entry seemed weak or even negative: it was the politics of gaining global influence through Europe that drove successive governments.

Forty years on: Lessons of compromise and influence, January 19, 2013

Now they tell us! Of course, this economic reality was always obvious to anyone who looked into the question, and eerily echoes the never-reported current consensus among U.S. labor economists that immigration confers no significant advantage to native-born Americans in aggregate (specific Americans benefit, but their fellow-citizens do not).

No doubt in forty years’ time, the Economist will, equally casually, acknowledge that the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge was never really about economics, but instead about sweeping the U.S. into a post-national globalist nirvana.

And no doubt it will do so in Spanish.

However, there is one critical point about Britain’s accession to the EU that does bear directly on the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge debate: you don’t “get it behind” you.

As in:

As Ed Gillespie, a prominent Republican leader said: “There’s no instinct like a survival instinct.” If Republicans don’t change their ways, and with states like Arizona and Texas destined to go from red to blue in the coming years, the GOP could head over the demographic cliff.  That’s why there is a growing chorus of conservative and influential voices inside and outside of Congress – from the Republican National Committee, John Boehner, and Rand Paul to Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer – arguing that the time has come to get immigration reform behind them.[Some Links added by VDARE.com]

Emphases added. This comes from a Treason Lobby website, www.citizenship_now.org, but you can find similar sentiments, in very similar words, all over the web.

And they are all wrong. Almost unique in public policy, increased immigration contains within itself what Marxists used to call a "fundamental contradiction." The reason goes to the point that Enoch Powell made in his prophetic 1968 immigration speech: "Numbers are of the essence." By increasing the number of immigrants, immigration enthusiasts increase the number of problems—their problems.

At VDARE.COM, we exist to provide journalism on these problems because the MSM won't. But in case anyone has forgotten, the problems include: crime; disease; destroyed schools; destroyed neighborhoods; congestion; racial friction; linguistic displacement; wage depression; welfare costs; political displacement; and, last but of course not least, the abolition of America.

Intense pollaganda efforts can sometimes appear to sway public opinion—temporarily. In Britain, the political Establishment was actually able to manipulate its way to a referendum victory (on remaining in the EU) in 1975.

But, on an issue like this, it doesn’t matter. You don’t “get it behind you.” The problems simply reassert themselves. Thus, whichever way you slice it, the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge is suicide for the GOP. And it will also enormously exacerbate social stress within America.

This is exactly what happened with Britain’s entry into the European Union. Forty years after Britain joined in 1973, and nearly forty years the British Establishment thought its referendum victory meant the debate was definitively “over”—to adapt the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot’s arrogant 1997 (!) assertion about the American immigration debate—Britain’s relationship with the European Union continues to convulse its politics.

Indeed, as we anticipated last week, the anti-EU (and anti-immigration) United Kingdom Independence Party is widely considered to have achieved a decisive breakthrough in the May 2 local (= midterm) elections.

I don’t know what the future holds for UKIP—I’ve come to regard Britain’s entanglement with the EU as the New Class equivalent of the dynastic quarrels that perpetuated the Hundred Years’ War and I no longer expect it to be resolved in my lifetime.

But I do know that no political elite willingly inflicts this type of upheaval upon itself, let alone the country it purports to represent.

And yet, for some bizarre reason(s), the cause of which we can only guess, this is precisely the path upon which America’s elite is now embarked.

Peter Brimelow [Email him] is the editor of VDARE.com. He is the author of Alien Nation, now available on Kindle.

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