Peggy Noonan Against Senate Bill

It’s one thing for your normal right-wing knuckle-dragging yahoos like you and me to be against the Senate Immigration Bill.  But Peggy Noonan?

Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it’s being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill’s Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay’s pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you’re not, you cur, you gun-totin’ truckdriver’s-hat-wearin’ yahoo. It’s all so complex, and you’d understand this if you weren’t sort of dumb.

Yes.  Nice Peggy Noonan wrote that, including the italics.

Yeah.  Well.  Americans don’t go for that popinjay attitude.  And I’d say that for some time the American people have been looking for a way to blow their political popinjays a raspberry.  We can’t do it on Social Security; we can’t do it on the war.  But we can do it on immigration.

What would Peggy have us do?

We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we’ve eaten.

Close the borders, she says, and have a conversation. That may not be as easy as she thinks, if you read what Alan Reynolds had to say recently. 

While we are having our conversation we should go to work on our existing immigrants.

As we end illegal immigration, we should set ourselves to the Americanization of the immigrants we have. They haven’t only joined a place of riches, it’s a place of meaning. We must teach them what it is they’ve joined and why it is good and what is expected of them and what is owed.

And we know who has been stopping the Americanization process in recent decades.

Peggy insists that the solution should not lead to scenes of sobbing families being torn apart and sent away on buses.

But one commentator pointed out that you probably don’t have to do that to call a halt to illegal immigration.  All you have to do is get a bit tougher:  Tougher on apprehending illegals and tougher on employers who hire them.  It really is a dollars and cents thing.  If it costs too much to hire the coyote to get you across the border, then fewer people will come.  If it is too hard to avoid arrest by local law enforcement, fewer people will come.

It’s a control issue. America needs immigration.  It just doesn’t need immigration that swamps the existing culture.  The United States of America is a remarkable society.  Why it should be so favored with staggering prosperity and good government is a question that many people have asked and few have really answered, even the great Tocqueville.

If we wanted to guess how to keep our prosperity and our good government the best answer would probably be: Change things, but don’t change things too fast.

That, of course, has been the conservative prescription ever since Edmund Burke.

Evangelicals Enter Establishment

Lberal religion reporter Hanna Rosin is one of our favorites here at Road to the Middle Class.  Not because she is a liberal but because she gets out and reports on conservative Christians in America.  She doesn’t really like them but she does a professional reporting job on them.

Now she’s taking a look at evangelical lawyers like Laura Goodling, the former Justice Department official who testified on Capitol Hill this week about the US Attorney firings.

Don’t think these are all just hayseeds, warns Rosin.

Goodling is part of a new generation of evangelicals ushered in by Falwell, who insisted that Christians get involved in politics. They are graduates of the exploding number of evangelical colleges, which no longer aim to create a parallel subculture but instead to train "Christian leaders to change the world," as the Regent mission statement reads.

Goodling is a graduate of the law school at Regent University, founded by Pat Robertson.  And she got her bachelor’s degree at Messiah College.  There are 150 graduates of the Regent law school in the White House.

Exactly.  Liberals be afraid; be very afraid. 

These people are all over the place and when the next Democratic administration comes to Washington they will be scattering to Congressional staffs and to conservative think tanks.  Writes Rosin

It took the conservative political movement 30 years to become a fixture in American politics, and it’s taken evangelicals about the same. Like conservatives, evangelicals may remain chronically ambivalent, afflicted with a persecution complex despite their obvious successes. But they are embedded firmly enough into Washington to provide jobs for smart young Christians for generations to come.

Think about that for a moment.  It means that there are now two right-of-center movements that have penetrated into the governing establishment in the last generation: the philosophically-oriented conservative movement; and the spiritually-oriented evangelical movement.

What’s not to like?

Immigration Numbers

Supply-sider Alan Reynolds has had it with all the rhetoric on immigration.  Says he: 

Rational discussion of the Senate immigration bill is being stifled and befuddled by a few misused words and phrases that generate irrational anger and very little understanding.

So he comes up with the numbers.  And they are pretty impressive.

• 175 million foreign visitors per year
• 4.7 million business visitors per year
• 1.25 million new permanent residents per year
• 0.9 million temporary workers per year
• 0.6 million new citizens per year
• 0.5 million illegals per year 
• 56 percent of illegals from Mexico
• 30 percent of illegals from Asia
• 40-50 percent of illegals arrived legally

That is pretty interesting stuff.

"Hook-up" Culture: Girls Still Confused

You can see what a job that feminists have done on our young college women.  When it comes to the hook-up culture they can barely articulate the idea that it is tearing them to bits, as Ashley Herzog illustrates in this quote from an Ohio University co-ed freshman:

I think for guys, it’s a lot about hooking up; for girls it’s more of an emotional thing. Maybe the guy will call you; maybe he’ll just say ‘hi’ on the street. But he sees you as an object, while you’re upset. The guys are over-empowered.

No kidding!  But as a well-indoctrinated young women she can’t bear to be judgmental.

Even at the basic level, the sexual revolution was bad news for women:

While women bear the unwanted pregnancies, abortions, and emotional pain wrought by casual sex, men are free to move on to the next bedmate.

It’s enough to make you realize what the old rules about courting and commitment and marriage were all about.

It wasn’t really about the patriarchy or male power.  It was just about protecting women from male predation.

And, as the co-ed says, the hook-up culture makes the guys “over-empowered.”

Unfortunately, modern woman has to learn this the hard way, individually, in every female life.

And unfortunately, it takes her about half a life to realize that she’s been taken for a ride.

So which is worse: the old patriarchy in which women were chattels or the new hook-archy in which the guys are “over-empowered?”

The Unenforced Immigration Laws

No doubt, as our political leaders insist, there is a major immigration problem that requires an immigration amnesty law to be rushed through Congress.  It’s a pity that we don’t care to enforce the laws already on the books, writes Mark Krikorian:

Let’s look at a few of the initiatives already on the books that have languished in bureaucratic or political purgatory rather than getting done:

First of all, of course, there’s the fence. Only two miles have been built on the southern border yet, and there are 370 miles scheduled to be built before the end of 2008.

There’s the issue of state and local police forces helping to arrest illegals.  In 2002, the Justice Department issued an opinion that clarified the right of state and local law enforcement authorities to detain illegals, but the Bush Administration put it on ice, “keeping in effect a Clinton-era policy directive discouraging state and local use of immigration law.”

There’s the policy of the Treasury Department that has told banks that it’s ok to offer bank accounts to people with Mexican “matricula consular.”  And the IRS allows illegals to use a Tax Identification Number (i.e., a Social Security number in all but name).

Obviously, when the government makes it difficult to arrest illegals and makes it easy to live as an illegal in the United States, then people will come.

That’s fine, as long as it is the official policy of the United States.

Last time I looked, it wasn’t.

Committing Politics in Britain

Here in the United States our leaders are busy rushing a immigration amnesty bill to the president’s desk before the voters notice and get mobilized against it.  The last thing they want is an open discussion of the issues.

But in Britain Conservative Party leader David Cameron is having an open discussion of education policy with his Tory Party rank-and-file.  In an op-ed in the London Times he writes:

This is the week when the Conservative Party got serious about education reform. Our approach rests on two things. First, an instinctive Conservative belief in rigour, parental choice and competition as the best way of raising standards. Secondly, on the evidence of what works — both in Britain and around the world.

That’s a polite way of saying that his spokesman’s speech the previous week about “grammar schools” set off a firestorm of criticism.  Many Tories want a return to academic, selective grammar schools and away from the current system of “bog-standard” comprehensive secondary schools.

But you have to give Cameron a tip of the hat.  He didn’t hide from his critics.  He came right out and confronted them.

First thing he cite in his article is the success of school choice in Sweden, the Netherlands, and “some states in the US.” 

Oh?  You didn’t know that they have school choice in socialist Sweden and liberal Netherlands?  No doubt you get your information from the mainstream media.  But here at Road to the Middle Class we are right on top of it.

Like conservatives in the United States, Cameron wants to avoid “selection” and wants students choosing schools not schools choosing students.

Notice how he gives Tony Blair a half-hearted pat on the back:

David Willetts and I are applying Conservative principles and best-practice education reform from around the world to our schools in England. This is what Tony Blair came to realise was necessary and has been moving towards in the latter stages of his premiership. His education Act last year was a step in the right direction, which is why we backed it.

That issues from his strategic decision to avoid opposition for the sake of opposition.  He wants to support good ideas even if they come from the other party.

Of course, he goes on to say that Blair’s party has since given up on reform.  Only Conservatives can be trusted to have their hearts in the job.  And it doesn’t hurt to talk about discipline in schools.

There’s a word for Cameron’s open advocacy and willingness to debate his party’s critics in public.  Politics.

What a concept.

The Immigration Bill and the Big Picture

 It is, as  writes, an outrage when the governing classes try to rush a major revision of the nation’s immigration law past the voters and past their legislators without what our liberal friends call “a national conversation.”

He has thoughtfully provided a critique of the Senate bill as it became available over the weekend.

Today he has listed a number of proposed amendments to the bill.  One of them is to establish a special category of aliens from jihadist countries.  No quick Z-visa for them!

 In the frenzy of day-to-day political combat, let us not forget the big picture.  It was one of President Eisenhower’s maxims that if he couldn’t see the solution to a problem he tried to make it bigger.

The big picture is that we are in the middle of a great human migration, perhaps the greatest ever since modern humans first crossed the Straits of Hormuz 50,000 years ago and spread across the whole world.

Today’s great migration is from the country to the city.  In China at this moment, about 25 million people are moving to the city each year. 

Not surprisingly, people are migrating to the best city they know about.  For many Mexicans the best place to go is not Mexico City or Monterrey.  As one Mexican immigrant said to me from the driver’s seat of his mammoth Chevy Suburban SUV: “In Mexico you have to pay someone to get a job.”

So they come to the great job-creating cities of the United States.

For us, this is all very well.  Just don’t all come at once.

It is the job of of our government, legislators, executive, and judges, to control the flow of immigration so that it does not create hardships for the American people.  We care about the Mexican people, of course.  But first we must take care of our own.

So the job of the government is to control, channel, and limit the flow.  That is something that the government has clearly not been doing very well at all.

That is why folks like Hugh Hewitt are right when they insist that before we start handing out amnesty to illegal immigrants the government must demonstrate that it has gotten control of the borders.