PrintMay 25, 2007
The realities of Muslim Immigration
The time for taboos is over. We have to talk about the way in which immigration will change the United States and the world.
In particular, much of the world has never understood why the United States gives such warm support to besieged democracies --- like Israel, Taiwan, Poland during the Cold War, a near-dead Britain during the Nazi Blitz, the Free French, and many other democracies under assault. Today Europeans pretend not to understand why we overthrew the Nazi-clone Saddam Hussein --- even though they continue to benefit from our actions against the Nazis and Soviets, every single minute of their self-indulgent lives.
Many Muslims come from utterly indoctrinated countries in the Middle East, where Jew-hatred and anti-democratic ideology are daily fare, pervading radio, TV, newspapers, and the educational system. Wall-to-wall propaganda works. Single individuals cannot withstand total saturation of their lives by ideologies of hatred. All Arab countries, Iran and Turkey, have shown the TV soap opera version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on their state-sponsored television channels, to wild applause. http://www.memri.org
Yet millions of Muslims are eager to move to the United States, in good part to make America more like the societies they are leaving.
The crucial question is: Will immigrants become Americans? Or will they turn this country into Europe or the Third World? Because that is their clearly stated intention --- ranging from Mexican Azatlan nationalists, to Muslims, and to European socialists. They have all been taught that America is evil, but they still want to come here to make us enlightened --- by their standards. Liberal legislation is designed to do exactly that.
Steven A. Camarota is the director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies. His 2003 essay, The Muslim Wave: Dealing with Immigration from the Middle East is required reading in the crucial time of debate on the Senate immigration bill.
"... continued Mideast immigration appears likely to lead to changes in U.S. policy, as elected officials respond to Muslim Americans' growing electoral importance. Their increasing political influence was evident earlier this year when three Democratic House members from Michigan, whose districts contain fast-growing Arab immigrant communities, were among only 21 members voting against a resolution expressing solidarity with Israel against terrorism."
This is four years later, and we need to think and act clearly about the coming decades for America.
As Camarota pointed out:
Reducing legal immigration from the Mideast is a sensible policy, but the only way this could ever happen would be the enactment of an immigration cap that would apply across the board - to all immigrants, wherever they might hail from. The same holds for efforts to deal with illegal immigration: Given limited resources, in a time of war, it makes sense - over the short term - to pursue with special vigor those immigration-law violators who are Middle Easterners. But over the long term, such a policy would be unfair and politically unsustainable. Reducing the overall immigration level is the wisest plan, for the decades to come.
But we have not succeeded in regulating immigration in any sensible fashion. Current legislation may triple legal immigration. The Senate bill proponents are now trying to silence and twist rational opposition.
Don't accept any taboos on free speech when it concerns the vital future of this country --- which is still, as Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, the "last, best hope of mankind."
Please let it remain that.
James Lewis blogs at http://www.dangeroustimes.wordpress.com
