Michelle Malkin: Moron

I see that Mizz Malkin, who does not look as if she had any ancestors on the Mayflower, has continued her jihad against illegal immigrants by arguing that Senators opposed to replacing the Statue of Liberty with barbed wire as the enduring symbol of America are in favor of "open borders." Well, not quite. There is a serious argument to be made that those who come to America to work make the U.S. better off in the aggregate, although some groups lose; that is true for the importation of, say, inexpensive shoes as well. Clearly we cannot have unlimited immigration ("open borders"), and no one advocates it; this is just one of many of Malkin's dishonesties. But just as Malkin clearly wants to expel the estimated twelve million illegals---should we use cattle cars, Michelle?---without telling us precisely how that is to be done in ways both humane and consistent with the preservation of political support in the U.S., so has she failed to tell us how, politically, border security can be separated from a gradual legalization process for those here without discarding the latter. And so the approach of some House Republicans---"secure the border," whatever that means, and we'll worry about the other details later---is just as much a nonstarter as an open border proposal.

Apart from the potential terrorism problem, which conceptually is distinct from the immigration problem, the real issue is assimilation. We cannot have a welfare state, bilingual education, bilingual ballots, and all the other disincentives for assimilation in the context of massive migration from Mexico; it really is that simple, because multicultural societies do not work. The leftist approach---identity politics and multicultural separatism---yields ethnic strife and civil wars. (The bigotry of La Raza and similar groups is no accident.) Immigrants are and always have been hard-working, productive, and largely law-abiding; those are conditions necessary but not sufficient to allow large amounts of immigration. And so reform must begin with measures designed to force assimilation, an approach promoted in part by El Presidente W last evening.

For all the talk about how the immigration issue has split Republicans, it seems to me that the Democrats have their own fault lines on this issue: neither black workers nor the unions can be very happy about a large influx of lower-skilled workers. Since both parties are split, for different reasons, it is hard for me to see a bill emerging from Congress before the election this fall. More generally, it never hurts to ask "What would Reagan say?" And I am sure that he would refer yet again to that shining city on a hill, the view of which remains unobscured by a wall. More sensible policies---such as requiring work permits, allowing those holding them to go back and forth across the border, eliminating automatic citizenship for the children of illegals born here, etc.---would work wonders. More later as time permits.