Tamar Jacoby Urging Open Borders Lobby To Disaster
No sooner had the ballots begun to
settle in the Republican primary race in
Utah`s Third District last week than the Open
Borders battalions began flapping and crowing about
their smashing victory over the forces of
nativism and
bigotry.
The facts, when disentangled from
Open Borders fabrications and fantasies, are quite
different.
In the fabrications and fantasies
department, no one scores bigger than
Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the neo-con
Manhattan Institute and author of a learned tome called
Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigration and
What It Means to be an American.
When she wrote a piece on the
Wall Street Journal opinion page last week about the
Utah race, it was clear the
Melting Pot was not all she had reinvented. [About Those Huddled Masses Americans aren`t
anti-immigrant—far from it, OpinionJournal.com, June
26, 2004]
The primary pitted veteran
Republican Representative Chris Cannon, a strong
conservative on
most issues but
very pro-immigration, against challenger Matt
Throckmorton, also a strong conservative and very much
for controlling illegal immigration.
Mr. Cannon supports the Bush
amnesty and legislation to let more illegal aliens take
American farming jobs, and during the campaign his aides
solicited contributions from illegals.
Mr. Cannon has held his seat since
1996. He won the primary 58 percent to Mr.
Throckmorton`s 42 percent, and Miss Jacoby is convinced
this shows he "won decisively."
More importantly, she uses the
victory to argue that voters really aren`t so
"anti-immigrant" as the immigration control
advocates who backed Mr. Throckmorton want us to think.
Well, now, but the brute fact is
that Mr. Cannon, an incumbent of five terms, had to run
and run hard to meet the challenge Mr. Throckmorton
offered.
Miss Jacoby whimpers that the
challenger spent "an estimated $100,000" to
unseat Mr. Cannon ("big money in that part of the
world," she explains, "that part of the world"
presumably being
Utah, a planet as strange as the moons of
Neptune to Manhattanites like Miss Jacoby).
What she doesn`t say is that Mr.
Cannon spent nearly ten times that much to keep the
seat.
Declining in the polls throughout
the race, Mr. Cannon almost certainly would have sunk
beneath the 50 percent margin had the campaign lasted a
bit longer.
If this race is representative of
what voters think of the
Open Borders lobby and its policies, they should be
worried.
As for what voters do think about
immigration, Miss Jacoby`s article is a masterpiece in
distorting not only what happened in Utah`s Third
but also what she acknowledges is the overwhelming
evidence of opinion polls.
"No survey in 40 years has shown
anything like a majority in favor of easing quotas"
for admitting aliens for work visas, and that`s putting
it mildly.
She later quotes
Rep. Tom Tancredo, now the nation`s
leading advocate of immigration control: "Every
poll shows that over 75 percent of citizens support
border security and strict enforcement of our
immigration laws."
Well, they certainly do in "that
part of the world," but not in the more wonderful
world of
Miss Jacoby and her Open Borders Lobby comrades.
Miss Jacoby never dares to use the
word, but it`s clear that like her hero Mr. Cannon she
favors amnesty for illegals.
The people she calls "strong
proponents of immigration reform" are in fact
proponents of amnesty. President`s Bush`s immigration
plan of last January offered a "plan to bring illegal
laborers out of the
shadows." She means (but won`t say)
amnesty.
And she winds up with the claim
that enforcing the laws against illegal immigration and
returning illegals to their own countries just won`t
work any more:
"Only a
policy that recognizes the
reality of the flow and seeks to manage it with a
combination of credible limits and better enforcement
can hope to restore the order that the public so
desperately craves."
What that means is also amnesty—"recognizing
the reality of the flow" translates into giving up
serious efforts to stop illegal immigration and
send the illegals here back home.
Another brute fact is that the
border with Mexico, the principal avenue for illegal
immigration into this country, is a little more than
1,900 miles long.
Not all of it can be
crossed at all, and if we took 10,000 U.S. troops
out of
Iraq or other exotic locales, retrained them for a
few weeks and
put them on the border, illegal immigration would
cease.
Period.
Recall what I said about Miss
Jacoby`s fabrications and fantasies.
As for what voters really think and
the future of pro-amnesty incumbents like Mr. Cannon, I
hope they read Miss Jacoby`s article and believe every
word.
The more they ignore
political as well as social and cultural reality and
believe the voters really favor
amnesty, the
immigration invasion, and the
reinvention of America the Open Borders Lobby
demands, the sooner they are likely to leave office
and find themselves a real job.
COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
[Sam Francis [email
him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection
of his columns,
America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The
Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available
from
Americans For Immigration Control.
Click here
for Sam Francis` website. Click
here to orderhis monograph,
Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American
Political Future and
here for
Glynn Custred`s review.]