Frank Clarke poses an interesting thought experiment on immigration.
As much as I admire David Codrea, I retain the opinion that he is flat wrong when he worries about immigration. A hundred years ago and more our forebears came here seeking to build a new life unaided and unhindered, and they were the ones who made America great. They did not expect that the American system would protect them if they failed, but they did expect that the American system would not get in their way, either. Today we have a welfare system that steps in when people suffer from their own bad decisions, and a regulatory system that purports to prevent such bad decisions from being made. Naturally, both systems are abject failures where they aren’t merely counter-productive.
We don’t have an “immigration problem”; we have a “welfare state problem”, and the immigration problem is merely its symptom. You may choose to cure the symptom, but I’m 100% certain it will return next year in a slightly different guise.
Yes, it’s a far bigger job to undo the welfare state, but if we don’t do that, we will spend all our energies battling ghosts.
This requires a separate analysis and I had decided to grant some space to it. This should be seen as an amicable discussion between friends, not an internet throw-down battle to the death, and so I’d like the comments to reflect that.
It’s a disagreement between allies, but an important one nonetheless. To be sure, I have more than a little direct experience with the entitlement state and its appurtenant give-aways. To begin with, I strongly feel that, along with the author of the Holy Scriptures, “The good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.” This is no small matter, and I see forcible taxation as confiscatory and therefore wicked. Only wicked rulers do that.
I may be unable to provide for my children’s children as I’d like because of such government intrusion in my life’s work. Furthermore, my own daughter works as a health care provided in a hospital. Where do you think immigrants go for doctor visits as well as any pseudo-medical emergency? That’s right, the emergency room is the primary care physician for all of those immigrants, as well as dead weight we already have on the rolls in America.
How would you like to say no to providing more narcotics to feed a habit, only to have lice-infested, diseased, drug-addled ne’er-do-wells spit on you? But in the end, Frank is right, the welfare state creates this mess and the remedy for what we see in the hospitals is the same as with confiscatory taxes – repair the political system.
But that doesn’t even begin to touch the core issue with immigration. As I’ve pointed out before, the Hispanics and Latinos arriving on the Southern border have been taught and raised in a totally different world view and cultural paradigm.
Any force trying to work for a democratic, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist transition has to win a base among the rural poor. But for historical reasons to do with the nationalisation of the land under Lázaro Cárdenas and the predominant form of peasant land tenure, which was “village cooperative” rather than based on individual plots, the demand for “land to the tiller” in Mexico does not imply an individual plot for every peasant or rural worker or family. In Mexico, collectivism among the peasantry is a strong tradition: we are not dealing with the atavistic Russian peasants, but a country in which there has already been a bourgeois-democratic revolution led by the peasantry.
One consequence of these factors is that the radical political forces among the rural population are on the whole explicitly anti-capitalist and socialist in their ideology (leaving aside the EZLN, which is a slightly different case). Sometimes this outlook is expressed in support for guerilla organisations; but struggle movements of the rural population are widespread, and they spontaneously ally with the most militant city-based leftist organisations. A good example of this is the OCSS (Peasant Organisation of the Southern Sierra), which would have no difficulty in getting the dictatorship of the proletariat written into its program.
The general conclusion about strategy which needs to be emphasised is that, far from Mexico having ceased to be an oppressed country, today it is more oppressed than 20 or 30 years ago.
It’s not a difficult decision for them to support gun control. They are steeped in statist views. Time and space don’t permit a detailed and thoroughgoing explanation of liberation theology, so readers can do their own search and study of this abomination and bastardization of the gospel. But suffice it to say that liberation theology easily gained a following among the Catholic priests in Latin America. One former Soviet spy claims that the Soviet Union created liberation theology.
I learned the fine points of the KGB involvement with Liberation Theology from Soviet General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, communist Romania’s chief razvedka (foreign intelligence) adviser – and my de facto boss, until 1956, when he became head of the Soviet espionage service, the PGU, a position he held for an unprecedented record of 15 years.
On October 26, 1959, Sakharovsky and his new boss, Nikita Khrushchev, came to Romania for what would become known as “Khrushchev’s six-day vacation.” He had never taken such a long vacation abroad, nor was his stay in Romania really a vacation. Khrushchev wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who had exported communism to Central and South America. Romania was the only Latin country in the Soviet bloc, and Khrushchev wanted to enroll her “Latin leaders” in his new “liberation” war.
The movement was born in the KGB, and it had a KGB-invented name: Liberation Theology. During those years, the KGB had a penchant for “liberation” movements. The National Liberation Army of Columbia (FARC), created by the KGB with help from Fidel Castro; the “National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB with help from “Che” Guevara; and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), created by the KGB with help from Yasser Arafat are just a few additional “liberation” movements born at the Lubyanka — the headquarters of the KGB.
The birth of Liberation Theology was the intent of a 1960 super-secret “Party-State Dezinformatsiya Program” approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party’s international policies. This program demanded that the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool. The WCC was the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries.
In any case, it’s imperative that we understand the cultural proclivities and world and life views of those we allow to become citizens and vote. The constitution won’t protect us because it outlines a bill of rights or a form of government. It is a covenant between men, and that covenant no more protects malfeasance than the marriage covenant protects a woman whose husband is bent on adultery. The parties to the covenant matter.
We don’t just want to turn over a heritage of financial security to our children’s children, but as I have stated to my own children, I want to turn over a heritage of Christianity to them. Statism is opposed in all of its ways to Christianity, and Christianity denies the state the rights only belonging to God. The foundations of the American experiment are Christian.
We care about immigration for more reasons than having stuff. To reduce this debate to having stuff is an ungracious charge, and the reasons for control over our borders and approval of the men whom we would call our fellow countrymen run deep and wide.
7 years, 5 months ago
