Thank God the Mexicans I Know Aren't Like This

On Friday, Robert Rodriguez’s “grindhouse” movie, Machete, will hit the theaters.

[snip]

It is not difficult to get Machete‘s message. It is right on the surface, although the critics either miss or ignore it — there is a race war in the works between Mexicans and racist gringos. Central to this conflict is the divisive border issue. “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” Jessica Alba’s character declares in the film. Machete is not simply a forgettable Mexploitation film. It is anti-American propaganda funded in part by Texas tax payers. It is designed to create animosity between Americans and Mexicans.

In a trailer released on Cinco de Mayo — a holiday commemorating the Mexican army’s victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla — Danny Trejo proclaims the film is an angry response to Arizona’s attempt to prevent a huge influx of not only illegal immigrants but Mexican cartel drug traffickers targeting the state’s police officers.

Rodriguez’s message is clear — if the racist gringos in Arizona (and Texas and California) prevent this illegal influx — the border crossing Mexicans, not Mexicans crossing the border — the reaction will be bloody carnage by way of machete, the preferred execution tool of drug cartel thugs fond of cutting off the heads of their victims.

It's not like my pool of Mexican acquaintances is exhaustive, but out of the Mexicans I do know and meet, I don't know anybody like this.

But you know there will be some out there.

Precisely

The reason the United States, and every nation on Earth, restricts immigration, however, is precisely because we recognize that what is in the individual interest of a would-be immigrant is not necessarily in the interest of everyone else in the receiving country.

Look, I actually like immigrants a lot. Always have. During my brief time at Oklahoma State University--lo! those many moons ago--I was, as far as I knew, the only American member of the International Student Union. When I was in fast-food management, I hired a lot of immigrants. The ESL (English as a Second Language) class I teach is gearing up for the Fall semester, and of course, all the students are immigrants. I like immigrants. You gotta keep that in mind when I say that we must bear in mind that the purpose of immigration is not so much to better the lives of immigrants, but to improve the situation in our country! Any country, any government, must first look to the lives and prosperity of its own citizens. That is not to say that we should be unconcerned with the rest of the world, but to express the perfectly normal concept that there are priorities, and one's own country should come ahead of others, one's own citizens should come ahead of other countries' citizens.

That's how you shape and evaluate immigration policy, my friends...

Uncle Ted on Arizona's Immigration Law

Found this via a link from a Facebook friend. There is an extremely mild vulgarity--hmmm, I need to do a "position post" on cussin' sometime soon--you have been warned.

"Uncle Ted," for those who don't already know, is, of course, Ted Nugent, aka "The Nuge," "The Rev. Theodocius Atrocius," etc.

When someone gets pulled over by a police officer or gets arrested, it is proper police procedure to ask for identification. No one of goodwill can possibly dispute that common-sense police procedure. And that's all Arizona's new law basically states.

So let me try to understand what the opponents of Arizona's law want: If a cop pulls someone over for speeding, the cops are not to ask for identification? Or if they do ask for identification and the speeder cannot produce identification or has identification from another country, the cop should turn a blind eye and send the speeder on his merry way? This, of course, is Three Stooges logic.

[snip]

Alinsky would be proud. The Founding Fathers would weep. Davy Crockett would shoot somebody.

I support basic human rights. If an illegal person is here and is apprehended, he or she should be treated with basic human rights. But there is a big difference between being treated humanely and being given the same legal status as a U.S. citizen when you are not.

People in the United States illegally are not U.S. citizens and therefore are not due protection under the same laws as legal citizens. U.S. laws are passed for U.S. citizens, not people who are here illegally. This is Common Sense 101 and is why the overwhelming majority of Americans support Arizona's immigration law.

That this needs to be stated is an indictment of the increasing mindlessness of an increasing population of weird, illogical people. It's a damn shame, really.

Found Whilst Surfin'

... the party is going to be awesome! I need to figure out a way to get in.

Well, I decide to sneak in through the kitchen. Got lucky, no one noticed me. This is GREAT! I can't believe I am actually in this crazy fun party now. This place is amazing! The lights & sound are killer, the women are gorgeous... is this Heaven?

The best part is, people seem to be assuming I belong. They are saying "hello". The waiter offered me a glass of champagne. Hors d'oeuvres are offered from a silver tray. I accept, graciously.

I am loving this! Oh, here comes my favorite recording artist. I actually get to chat for a minute and get a photo taken! Awesome!

Whew, a few more glasses of the bubbly, and I'm a little tipsy. I guess I had a bit too much, and as this beautiful lady walks past, I grab her butt. Just a little. No harm, no foul. But NooOOooo. She turns around, glares at me, slaps me in the face, and yells for security.

Oh great. Now three thick-necked, earpiece-wearing goons are grabbing me and asking to see my invitation. What the...? How DARE they! I'm IN THE PARTY, YOU IDIOTS! You have SOME nerve asking for my invitation! I'm HERE, am I not? Of course I had an invitation. I just... err... misplaced it. What's that? How much did I contribute to the cause? Umm... err... well NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!! Hey, LET GO OF ME! You can't throw me out! I have a glass of champagne to finish! OW! Stop dragging me! JEEZ, you guys are out of line. All I did was come in for some food and fun! I'm not hurting anything!! OUCH! Thanks for opening the door with my head, you fascist pigs! UGH (thump). (Slam). Great. In the alley looking like a loser.

Who do those snobs think they are? I've got as much a right to be in that party as any of those so-called donors!

...and that, my friends, is the illegal immigration problem faced by Arizona in a nutshell.

Dan Phillips Saith...

We keep hearing about the bad economy, we know the government needs to cut spending, yet President Obama manages to find the money to try to intimidate a state for trying to do something about his refusal to do his job.

Very pithy observation, that...

Take the Time to Take a Peek

Well, first take a look at what the ever-estimable Mr. Buchanan has to say. But then spend some time with the incomparable Diana West:

..."there was a part of me that was hoping (the Times Square bomber) was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country," said MSNBC host Contessa Brewer. Of course, she inadvertently revealed there was a part of her that strongly suspected otherwise.

But that tiny voice of reason, Brewer and her peers seem to believe, is from the dark side. Brewer explains: "There are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent" -- jihad! -- "to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way" -- people who believe in jihad! -- "or come from certain countries" -- that is, countries that practice Sharia and promote jihad! -- "or whose skin color is a certain way." This last bit, a non-applicable race card, works like a last-ditch sympathy-trigger. "I mean," she said, "they use it for justification for really outdated bigotry."

Welcome to your world, where self-defense is bigotry, and thus worse than death by fireball, axe or vaporizing over the Atlantic.

This is as ridiculous as it is obscene. There is no "bigotry" in understanding jihad as the engine of Islamic supremacism driven by the imperative to spread Islamic law (Sharia). Our leading lights shrink from this basic truth lest its clean logic wither the fuzzy, cultural-relativism-based universalism that orders our society.

I really hesitate to identify anyone as stupid. I truly believe that there are very few truly stupid people in the world. On the other hand, it never ceases to amaze me how many people have allowed their unexamined ideologies to turn them into people almost impossible to distinguish from the truly stupid.

Some Noonan Worth Reading

God knows I don't agree with Peggy Noonan about everything. The human being doesn't exist with whom I agree about everything. But I really got a kick out of her column on the Arizona illegal immigration situation, and would recommend reading it. In particular, I got a chuckle out of this:

In the past four years, I have argued in this space that nothing can or should be done, no new federal law passed, until the border itself is secure. That is the predicate, the common sense first step. Once existing laws are enforced and the border made peaceful, everyone in the country will be able to breathe easier and consider, without an air of clamor and crisis, what should be done next. What might that be? How about relax, see where we are, and absorb. Pass a small, clear law—say, one granting citizenship to all who serve two years in the armed forces—and then go have a Coke. Not everything has to be settled right away. Only controlling the border has to be settled right away.

This made me chuckle because, although I'm not wild about amnesty and think it is absolutely an abdication of the responsibilities of the federal government to the American people, I'm not unaware of the sausage-making aspect of how government actually works. I have often tried to puzzle out in my head exactly what sort of "deal" I would have to be offered before I would accept amnesty for most of the illegal aliens already residing in this country. Certainly, securing the border first would be one element of that hypothetical deal. Until the border is secured--actually secured, not merely promised to be secured--as far as I'm concerned, no promise can be trusted. But after that? I might be open to negotiation. Let's see what you got.

But that border's gotta be closed first, y'know?

Pat and Bay Buchanan on Arizona and Illegal Immigration

Pat and Bay, are, I believe, brother and sister. They each had a column the other day on the same subject. Here are some of the choice bits. From Pat:

With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has ordered sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal aliens, half a million of whom now reside there.

Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to enforce America's immigration laws.

[snip]

What is the response of Barack Obama, who took an oath to see to it that federal laws are faithfully executed?

He is siding with the law-breakers. He is pandering to the ethnic lobbies. He is not berating a Mexican regime that aids and abets this invasion of the country of which he is commander in chief. Instead, he attacks the government of Arizona for trying to fill a gaping hole in law enforcement left by his own dereliction of duty.

He has denounced Arizona as "misguided." He has called on the Justice Department to ensure that Arizona's sheriffs and police do not violate anyone's civil rights. But he has said nothing about the rights of the people of Arizona who must deal with the costs of having hundreds of thousands of lawbreakers in their midst.

How's that for Andrew Jackson-style leadership?

Obama has done everything but his duty to enforce the law.

[snip]

The tasks that Arizonans are themselves undertaking are ones that belong by right, the Constitution and federal law to the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Homeland Security.

Arizona has been compelled to assume the feds' role because the feds won't do their job. And for that dereliction of duty the buck stops on the desk of the president of the United States.

[snip]

Last year, while Americans were losing a net of 5 million jobs, the U.S. government -- Bush and Obama both -- issued 1,131,000 green cards to legal immigrants to come and take the jobs that did open up, a flood of immigrants equaled in only four other years in our history.

What are we doing to our own people?

Whose country is this, anyway?

From Bay:

President Obama had the audacity to call Arizona legislators “irresponsible” for passing the law, claiming it will lead to racial profiling. What about the massive invasion along our border that exposes Americans to ever-increasing levels of violence against Americans, including murder and kidnapping? What about their civil rights? Not so much as a footnote for them.

[snip]

A lot of well-meaning Americans who are sympathetic to people who want to come to this country in search for a better life and who follow the rules are tempted to fall for this trap.

What they don’t know, and what open border fanatics try to hide, is that America is letting in more legal immigrants than ever before. Currently one out of every six workers in the country is foreign born.

The Department of Homeland Security recently released its legal immigration figures for Fiscal Year 2009 (October 2008 through September 2009). During this period, over five million people lost their jobs. Amazingly, we increased the number of green cards from 2008 to a staggering level of 1,130,818, over 800,000 of whom can compete against American workers. Outside of the 1986 amnesty, which led to millions of illegal aliens taking green cards, this is the second highest number of green cards we’ve issued since 1914.

Now, I just know there are going to be readers that think I'm raaaaaacist for even bringing this subject up, let alone quoting the Buchanans. Tell you what, before you play that card, consider that my wife is half Mexican, my children (obviously) are a quarter Mexican, that there's Indian blood (Choctaw, to be specific) in my family, that I teach Mexican immigrants, and so forth, and take the time to read my thoughts on racism. Do at least that much, okay?

Paul's Valley, OK, the Broken Arrow of my Childhood, and the Culture War

---

The notes for this post were written a few months ago, just before the end of October, I think. Almost forgot about them.

---

I was in Paul's Valley, Oklahoma today, and found myself, as I went through their downtown, which is very attractively paved with brick, wishing that I had allowed enough time to take pictures. It is really quite a picturesque little downtown, very much like so many of the small-town downtowns I've seen all over Oklahoma, filled with buildings, many nicely maintained, that are clearly eighty, ninety, even a hundred years old.

As I drove through the town and gradually became aware that it was somewhat larger than I had first thought, something began to tug at my memory. A little while later, as I passed Stevenson's BBQ and got a good whiff of one of God's finest gifts, hickory smoke, I realized what it was.

"This," I thought, "is about what Broken Arrow was like when I was a kid."

And then I immediately thought of A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and then I felt a little sad.

I will explain.

I am 47 years old, born in 1962. I was born, to my everlasting regret and embarrassment, in an Arkansas military hospital, and then spent about the first year of my life in Paris, France. We spent a short time in Wisconsin, then came back to Oklahoma, where my family--on both sides--has lived since before The War of Northern Aggression. First, in a little green house, then in a red brick one, the address of which, believe it or not, I can still remember. Both were in Broken Arrow. I have memories of going to school in Broken Arrow, and of playing there, from the time I was about five 'til I was about eleven or twelve. I have a few vague memories of going to a Baptist church.

This was all 35-40 years ago, one biblical generation.

I remember playing all over the neighborhood, quite unsupervised, for hours on end. My mother sometimes wouldn't see me for hours. Everyone did that. Nobody thought anything of it. There was no fear.

I remember trick-or-treating. Yes, my parents checked the candy, but I don't think they really expected to find anything wrong.

I remember that you might see an occasional schoolyard fight, but nobody worried about weapons being used.

Everyone spoke English. You never heard anything else.

Most people--or at least a lot more people than now--went to church.

This was before LBJ's Great Society programs had time to create a permanent--and apparently permanently resentful--underclass, before our government managed to effectively destroy the black family as an institution.

This was before the Supreme Court manufactured a right to murder the unborn out of the "emanations and penumbras" of the Constitution.

This was before a radically changed immigration policy, a wide-open border, multiculturalist propaganda, and an almost continual assault on the idea of American exceptionalism combined to so erode and denigrate the country's common cultural basis as to bring it to the brink of balkanization and fill it with millions of illegal aliens, many of whom have no interest in assimilating into the dominant American culture.

This was before judges decided that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." actually meant that high-school valedictorians couldn't offer up graduation prayers in the name of Jesus.

This was when a TV Christmas special could actually quote Scripture saying that Christ is "Lord," and climax with a hymn that decares that through Him, God and sinners are reconciled.

This was before policies of "free trade" and profligate spending stagnated working Americans' real wages.

In short, the Broken Arrow of my childhood looked much like the America portrayed in those two Charlie Brown TV specials. No, it wasn't perfect. Yes, it needed to change some things. Overall, though, it was a pretty good place.

Some of you disparage the idea of a "culture war."' Perhaps that's because you don't quite get or are too young to remember just how massively different this country was only a generation ago (A biblical generation, that is, generally held to be about forty years). I think there is a culture war. I don't see how anyone could doubt it, not when they've witnessed, over three or four decades, their culture gradually becoming a casualty. I still don't see what the dickens was so bad about it, that some people felt the need to do their best to bust it all to pieces.

---

Just as an aside, I can't help but repeat a few of Ted Kennedy's quotes vis-a-vis that now long-ago immigration act:

First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same.... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.... It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.

Sure, Ted. Sure.

And now that I've noted that, I have to include my standard disclaimer: No, I do not have anything against immigrants, not from anywhere in the world, as long as they come here legally and desire to become Americans.

---

Buchanan's Diagnosis and the MOTW Prescription

Pat Buchanan saith this morning:

Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993 and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.

In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.

They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on – then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.

They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.

They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.

America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.

To which rather a lot of people are saying, "Amen, and amen."

As I have noted repeatedly, I do not have a particularly big axe to grind when it comes to race (see my thoughts on the subject here); I am far more interested in what a person thinks than in his quantity of melanin. But I am old enough to know that Buchanan is right; this country has undergone an enormous demographic change since I was a child. I was born in 1962. Immigration law was changed, courtesy of "The Swimmer," in the mid-60s. When I was a child, the country was about ten percent black, and everyone else that you saw in Oklahoma was either white or Native American or a mixture of the two (as am I, at least a wee bit). You rarely saw Latinos.

Now, to reiterate, since I know beyond any shadow ever cast by any doubt, that some will take what I am saying here and try to make it out as though I hate brown people, there's not a darn thing in the world wrong with Latinos. I served with many in the USMC Reserve; my wife is half-Mexican by heritage, etc. All I am trying to point out is that prior to those immigration reforms and the flood of immigration, both legal and illegal, but especially illegal, there was a greater degree of cultural homogeneity than there is today. The most graphic illustration of the point is the presence of bilingual labels on darn near everything you buy. When I was a child and a teenager, no one even thought of such a thing. It was completely unnecessary. By the time I had become a young adult, you occasionally saw a bilingual label, and it was the object of mockery. Now--it is de rigeur.

We have carried a desire for diversity and tolerance to the point where we are being threatened with balkanization and civil strife. We have, out of a desire for "fairness," (you can make Americans absolutely hose themselves by accusing them of being "unfair," so highly do they prize the concept of fairness), allowed what is, historically, overwhelmingly the dominant faith of the land, the faith whose precepts and concepts undergird our conception of man's rights and our system of government, to be marginalized and sometimes even ostracized. A misplaced faith in "free trade" (again, not the same thing at all as "free markets") has resulted in the mass exportation of our manufacturing capacity (and this is actually cheered by fools who have never so much as operated a lathe and have no idea how much mental and physical labor is involved, and how impossible it would be to rebuild our manufacturing base on short notice, should war, for example, ever make it necessary). The brainless idea that we can spend poverty out of existence has created only more poverty and a wave of seriously bad attitudes on the part of people we are allegedly trying to help.

Now, what to do?

Knowing perfectly well that there is not a snowball's chance of this ever actually happening, this is what I suggest needs to happen. Here, for what it's worth, is the MOTW prescription:

1) America's Christians need to quit excusing themselves from talking about their faith on the grounds that they're afraid they might "screw it up" or "drive somebody away," which is the excuse I am continually hearing. All you have to do is read your Bible consistently, go to church and serve in church consistently, and talk about your spiritual life as consistently as you talk about your interest in NASCAR. Not that hard. I am constantly amazed at our situation. I just got the latest CBD catalog in the mail yesterday, and this country is awash in Bibles, study Bibles, Bible studies, commentaries, and the like, and yet nobody feels confident enough about what they believe to speak up and talk about it. What rubbish. Quit making excuses and open your mouths. I say again: America's fundamental political precepts are drawn from a Christian heritage. You will not see a renaissance of constitutional government in this country without first seeing Christianity again becoming the overwhelmingly dominant faith in the land. It matters not whether your Christian brothers and sisters are White, Black, Latino, Mestizo, Indian, or Asian--not as long as you preach and teach the Gospel. It is the Gospel, and the ideas it carries along with it, that are important. Those ideas underly what it means to be an American.

2) Trim or eliminate income taxes and replace them with consumption taxes, that is, with tariffs or--better yet--the Fair Tax. The bottom line is that you must create a tax advantage to manufacturing in this country and quit punishing success.

3) One of those tariffs needs to be on imported oil. It must be cheaper to drill here than to import oil. We have plenty of oil and coal. We have the technology to burn coal cleanly. Every year I read of more discoveries of oil locked up somewhere in this country. It may be in oil shale or oil sands (sometimes not) or offshore, but we have plenty of dadgum oil. We can be energy independent, and energy independence, in turn, will greatly diminish the capacity of jihadis to wage war, since waging war takes money, and, sad to say, it is our payments for foreign oil that indirectly supply the jihadis with money!

Need I add the obvious, that the Federal government needs to get out of the way of the drilling?

4) Congress must execute or get off the pot, so to speak. They either need to declare war in the places our troops are committed, or they need to cut off funding. That is Congress's job.

5) We have to give up the idea of nation-building in Islamic countries. Islam and totalitarianism go together, as I have said repeatedly, like peanut butter and jelly. You will never succeed in remaking Dar al Islam into a series of representative governments. Our objective, vis-a-vis the War on Terror, has to be to keep jihadis off-balance, on the defensive, on the run, deprived of leaders and of resources (see point no. 3).

6) We have to secure our borders. The much-discussed fence is a must. We have to end all the things that make this country attractive to illegal aliens. No more public money spent on illegals. Employers must be required to verify that their employees are in the country legally. Illegals, once caught, must be deported. Congress must clarify, in law, not subject to judicial review (they have this power), that babies born in this country to illegal aliens are not citizens. People that have immigrated legally must be encouraged and assisted to fully assimilate. There must be an end to "chain immigration," as well. We should allow, or not allow, immigration on the basis of whether or not the citizens of this country benefit from it.

7) Federal spending must be drawn back to objects allowed to it in the Constitution--which will immediately result in an end to entitlement spending, obviously. This should not be a problem if point 2 is enacted; the projection is that the first year the Fair Tax is in place, the economy will grow by about ten percent, so jobs should be plentiful and if point 1 is carried out, America's churches can fulfill their historic role of helping the genuinely needy, starting with those in their own congregations.

8) We must drop any military commitments overseas that have outlived their usefulness to us. Last time I read anything on the subject, the United States has multiple treaty commitments to go to war on behalf of other nations should they be attacked, whether our interests are at stake or not. We have, I believe, troops or military obligations in some seven-hundred-plus places around the world. This is madness. US troops should be used for defending the United States.

9) Missile defense, aka "Star Wars," has to be a priority. If points 2, 7, and 8 are carried out, there should be more than enough money to make this work even better than it has so far.

Hmmmm. I guess that's enough for one day. I've probably already offended half the known universe. And you can see why I don't bother running for office.

A Moratorium on Immigration?

Pat Buchanan saith:

If jobs are available in the United States, Americans should go to the front of the line to get them, ahead of illegal aliens. And as there are six Americans out of work for every job opening, it is time to call a moratorium on immigration. Why are we bringing into the United States over a million legal immigrants a year to compete for jobs against 15 million to 25 million Americans who can't find work or full-time jobs to take care of their families?

Who is America for -- if not for Americans first?

Earlier in the column, Mr. Buchanan notes how, post-immigration-raids, jobs that illegal aliens were doing because Americans allegedly won't do them have, in fact, been filled quite handily by Americans.

I'm not going to talk extensively about illegal immigration today, save to say that I wish to high heaven our government would do what is indisputably part of its job and control our borders. I hardly ever meet anyone who favors unchecked illegal immigration. The only people who seem to support it are those on the left who see illegal immigrants as a huge source of Democratic voters (they're right; immigrants typically vote Democrat for two generations, last time I read anything about it) and those in big business (often putatively on the right) who realize that the presence of huge numbers of illegals results in a net drag on wages, thereby fattening their own bottom lines. The thinking on both sides is short-sighted, to say the least, and completely ignores what, as far as I can tell, are the views of of most Americans on the subject, and results in a situation wherein most of the country hates illegal immigration, yet seems unable to organize itself sufficiently to put a stop to it.

But Mr. Buchanan goes further than just calling for controlling the borders, to a call for an outright moratorium on immigration. And personally, I think he is right. A government's first responsibility is to its own country, to its existing citizens. The criterion for allowing, or not allowing, immigration should not be whether people just want to come, but whether or not their arrival will benefit the country. This has nothing to do with charity or the lack thereof to the oppressed or the economically desperate. It is merely the logical consequence of the idea that a government's first responsibility is to the people of its own country.

You should not get the idea that I dislike immigrants or oppose immigration per se, although I'm sure some will, since, as Pat Buchanan is regularly and falsely tarred as a xenophobe, agreeing with him on the subject will certainly get me tarred in similar fashion. The reality is that I rather like foreigners who come here. I take an almost childish delight in them. I find it flattering that they prefer to come to my country rather than stay in the land of their ancestors. There are few things I find more moving than when, in effect, a foreigner says, like Ruth:

Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

I never had a problem hiring legal immigrants when I was in the restaurant business. If they were the most qualified applicants I could get for the price I was allowed to pay, I would hire them. My life would certainly be the poorer were it not for certain immigrants, especially considering my fascination with martial arts. America certainly has benefited enormously from the contributions of immigrants--but even to recognize that is also to recognize that that is why we have allowed immigration at some times and discouraged it at other times: because America benefits--or does not benefit.

Like I say, I love immigrants, always have. I don't care whether they're the almost blue-black of folks from Senegal, or the deep Mestizo brown of people from the south of Mexico, or the olive of folks from the Middle East, the lily white of people from Northern Europe, or the various brown shades of people from all over Asia. I have never asked but two things of them: first, that they come here in accordance with our laws, and second, that they come here with the aim of becoming Americans. That last is not to say that I am asking them to discard their cultural heritage altogether, just that they embrace the fundamentally American idea that government exists to protect man's legitimate, God-given rights, and learn how to function in and respect our dominant culture. Every Sunday night, I teach an ESL--English as a Second Language--class to a bunch of Mexican immigrants in an effort to help them do that very thing. I have enormous respect for the effort those people are making.

But none of that means that immigration should be allowed from every country at any time. There are times when it is wise to call a halt to it for a while, and it seems to me that this is one such time.