Are Jews to blame For America's Unending Mass Immigration?
I've heard for decades that American Jews are primarily responsible for America's unending mass immigration. The allegation never made much sense to me. I know Jews who adamantly oppose mass immigration for legitimate reasons.
After all, why would a cohesive and fairly well educated demographic promote mass immigration from cultures that are at odds with American individualism and values - and their own? Why advocate for mass immigration of those who would be dependent on the welfare state, paid for by American citizens - including, of course, Jews.
It's highly unlikely that Jews want to deliberately destroy America, the nation in which they live, even though that is precisely the consequence of decades of unconstrained mass immigration.
First, some background. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act established immigration quotas that maintained the existing balance of nationalities in the total population. Jews were upset with this quite reasonable restriction - see Foundations of Holocaust: 1924, Congress decides No More Jews, by David Turner, Jerusalem Post, 25 January 2013. The 1965 Hart-Celler act instead favored family reunification and chain migration. Pushed through the Senate by Ted Kennedy, it paved the way for subsequent immigration amnesties which would substantially alter American demographics and lead to a permanently multicultural America.
In the letter: Jewish Organizations Had a Role in 1965 Act, Wall Street Journal, 10 April 2018, Em. Prof. Kevin MacDonald writes in response to a letter by Abraham Miller:
It was absolutely understood by both restrictionists and antirestrictionists in Congress that Jewish organizations spearheaded opposition against the 1924 law's national origins, despite little public support. Jewish organizations also organized, funded and performed most of the work of a variety of umbrella organizations aimed at combating the 1924 law. The 1965 reform was thus not the result of popular pressure but rather of a 40-year program of activism...
Why would many Jews - especially those in positions of power - embrace virtually unlimited mass immigration? Here are plausible reasons:
1. Unlimited immigration as an escape route.
Many American Jews appear to support unlimited immigration as an escape in the event of another Holocaust, the series of Arab (Islamic)-Israeli wars (most notably in 1948–49, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006), and the need to flee Israel because of Islamist attacks. An America without serious immigration impediments would be more likely to admit massive numbers of immigrants, including Jews. An already multicultural and diverse America would be even more welcoming of more diversity.
The article mentioned above, Foundations of Holocaust: 1924, Congress decides No More Jews, vividly presents this viewpoint.
Gideon Taylor expounds on this position in the 2014 Jewish Telegraphic Agency article, Why Immigration Is A Jewish Issue:
One hundred and fifty years ago there were about 200,000 Jews in America. Today there are over 6.5 million. The exponential growth in the American Jewish community is a result of the influx of immigrants and refugees during that period and the descendants of those new arrivals...
So, yes, immigration is a Jewish issue. Not just because it is something we should care about as Americans, not just because Jewish values call upon us to welcome the stranger but because immigration has made and strengthened this Jewish community. It has brought energy, passion and diversity to the Jewish community and to the country...
And we have seen the other side of immigration, too. The gates closed in 1939 to the passengers of the ship, the St. Louis, seeking to escape from Germany and the impending Holocaust and countless other Jews during the Holocaust effectively condemned them to death. How many could have escaped and what contribution could have been made to this country had Jews been allowed to come in significant numbers before the Holocaust and not just after the destruction?...
Yet Robert Locke effectively refutes Taylor's Holocaust premise in his 2003 VDare article, Immigration and The Holocaust: Debunking The Myth:
It's the standard canard against immigration reform: the last time this country had immigration under control (1924-65), it caused the exclusion of Jewish refugees-who ended up exterminated by the Nazis. Therefore (though this would not follow even if this premise were true) restrictions on immigration are immoral...
Before [the German invasions of 1940-1941], there was no way to know that the Germans would win and be able to start their horrors....
So the problem in World War II was a failure of refugee policy, not immigration policy. The attempt to make an issue of immigration is ex-ante politics... Bottom line: refugee policy should not be used as a humanitarian excuse to increase immigration...
2. Diversity dilutes the cultural and political cohesiveness of America.
The political will of America's dominant and formative class of people (White Americans) will be more diluted and less capable of implementing reasonable and limited levels of immigration for the long-term good of the nation.
MacDonald writes in his essay Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy: "More importantly, ethnic and religious pluralism serves external Jewish interests because Jews become just one of many ethnic groups... Historically, major anti-Semitic movements have tended to erupt in societies that have been, apart from the Jews, religiously and/or ethnically homogeneous..."
3. Jews have typically aligned with liberalism and the Democrat Party.
Charles Fain Lehman explains in his 15 November 2023 City Journal article, The Paradox of Jewish Liberalism:
American Jews, it should be emphasized, are remarkably liberal... Indeed, Jewish ethnogenesis - the process by which Jews became Jewish-Americans - has often entailed making Judaism synonymous with progressivism.
That was true among the first major wave of Jewish immigrants, who arrived from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. These new Americans brought with them the roots of modern reform Judaism, which emerged out of and was inspired by a move toward Enlightenment rationalism within German Jewry...
To reap the rewards America offered, many Jews rearticulated their values in universalistic terms; so that they might no longer dwell apart, American Jews made liberalism the universalizing substitute for particular, tribal identity...
But inhabiting that identity requires disregarding the anti-Semitic rot that has infested mainstream liberal institutions, and that threatens from both sides of the political spectrum...
4. Jews attempted to improve America.
In his insightful 19 November 2023 article, The Jewish American Dilemma, James Howard Kunstler explains that:
American Jews have also been major players in the political Left through the past hundred-odd years, and especially within the Democratic Party. Lately, it appears that the Democratic Party is bent on destroying the country, so one is naturally left to wonder how this happened and what is the role of American Jews in this...
Tikkun Olam means repair the world... American Jews... had a different agenda in the USA after World War Two. They endeavored to repair America...
Mostly this expressed itself in Jewish support and involvement in the Civil Rights movement, since the end of discrimination against anybody was considered a good thing for the Jews as well as humanity in general... But then something happened. Several things. One was that not all of black America necessarily regarded the Civil Rights movement as the great moral victory it was touted to be... it also slowly became obvious that the new Civil Rights laws did not raise up the black underclass out of poverty and misery...
This became a growing fiasco for American Jewish liberals, who, by the 1980s, then strove to impose another set of repairs (more tikkun olam) on American society: multiculturalism ...
But the worst byproduct of all this tragically misguided tikkun olam is that the main political vehicle for it, the Democratic Party, has gone so insane that it now devotes itself fanatically to the utter destruction of what remains of our country...
5. Jews are the archetypal minority who promote multilturalism.
Lawrence Auster included an entire chapter on Jewish influence in his 2019 book: Our Borders, Ourselves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism. In his comprehensive chapter, "Jews: The Archetypal Multiculturalists," Auster points out that:
The Jews are, and have always been, the archetypal minority. For their entire history since the expulsion of Jewish elites to Babylonia in the early sixth century BC (the time when the Israelites first began to be called "Jews"), the Jews have lived as a conspicuous, and intermittently persecuted, minority among non-Jewish majorities. For this reason, many contemporary Jews regard Jewishness as identification with the outsider... combined with hostility, or at least a deeply questioning attitude, toward the majority culture.
This mindset established the foundation for the unique influence of Jews on American society, namely:
Historian Naomi W. Cohen observed that until the late nineteenth century, the "United States was a Christian nation whose freedoms rested on Christian precepts." Yet, as Auster notes:
Far from being grateful for America's Christian spirit, the Jewish community resented and feared any manifestation of it - particularly the traditional Christmas observations in public schools...
... given the Jews' religious differences from Christians, and given their extraordinary activism and intelligence, the mass entry of Jews into America was destined to have the effect it ultimately had - of delegitimizing public expression of Christendom.
Auster explains how entry of Jews into the higher education system helped transform it into the most secularized institution in America, concluding that "America's transition from a Protestant culture whose public institutions, celebrations, and symbols reflected Christian belief, to a pluralist, secular society with no identity at all, was complete."
The American Jewish Committed worked for decades toward repealing the 1924 National Quota Act. Auster observes that:
... their purpose was to eliminate any sort of preferences for immigrants whom the restrictionists thought would be more assimilable to America's existing culture..."
[thus] The majority culture is deprived of its spiritual existence through cultural transformation, and of its physical existence through demographic diversification."
Auster writes that "For many Jews, white gentile society, in and of itself, is a threat." As Whites become a minority in their own country, a Nazi-Aryian party will be unable to prevail. Indeed, "For some Jews, the desire to destroy white society is not based on any perceived threat posed by that society but on pure animus."
Thus, "... the only way to procure real democracy is to turn the ethnic majority into a minority, which is to be accomplished (and since 1965 has largely been accomplished) by immigration."
Auster writes:
The Jews feel they have a right to homogeneity and collective survival. But, as we have seen, the Jews deny this same right to white gentiles... This pervasive double standard is the heart of the "Jewish problem," and there is nothing anti-Semitic - i.e. there is nothing immoral - about pointing it out.
Their main fear is that if America defines itself as a nation, and not just as a democratic or capitalist ideology, then Jews will be excluded from that nation..."
Yet all of this is beginning to backfire - as evidenced by the explosion of anti-Jewish sentiment after the 7 October 2023 Islamic attack on Israel. Auster observes that:
Auster concludes that:
What is needed, then, is not an attack on Jews but rather a counterforce to excessive Jewish influence.
If America is to be restored as a nation, we must put to end the pious fraud that we have practiced since the 1960s, of simultaneously granting ethnic minorities the right to assert their distinct identity and the right to speak for America as a whole...
Conclusion
It seems fairly evident that many Jews traditionally had identifiable reasons - some quite self-centered - to support mass immigration and multiculturalism. However, this doesn't mean that Jews are solely to blame for orchestrating America's unending mass immigration and multicultural morass which is destroying our nation. Ultimately Congress and the administration(s) are to blame.
Ironically, Jewish proclivity toward liberalism and unfettered mass immigration is beginning to backfire, as both Lehman and Kunstler note, above. Peter Beinart articulates this problem in his 2017 Daily Beast article, On Jews And Immigration, Here's What Gives:
Answering my question about Jews and immigrants, reader Ira Mehlman argues the central point may be brutally simple: "current mass immigration policies are harming the interests of American Jews."
At least over the past several decades, Jews in the United States have experienced a phenomenon that is unique in the history of the Diaspora: We have lived in a society that, on balance, can be described as philo-Semitic. Mass immigration is introducing large numbers of new people to American society who hold far less favorable opinions of Jews. As Raphael Magarik notes in his follow-up blog, Hispanics, the largest immigrant group in the U.S., are far less inclined to support Israel than the American population generally....
As the Democrat Party rapidly unravels from liberalism into radical leftism, Israel and Jews are increasingly objects of disdain. Jews who continue to identify with liberalism (which is not the same as leftism), progressivism, and the Democrat Party stand to suffer significant cognitive dissonance.
The way out of this dilemma is for Jews to disassociate from their blind allegiance to the Democrat party whose principles have shifted so dramatically over the past decade consistent with the "fundamental transformation of America" agenda. It also requires concurrently abandoning blind support for open borders and unconstrained mass immigration.
Related
Are Jews Also to Blame for the US Border Crisis? by Michael Laitman, The Times of Israel, 10 April 2021.
A brief history of US immigration policy and laws.
The Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 - Political figures and historic circumstances produced dramatic, unintended consequences, by Jerry Kammer, Center for Immigration Studies, 30 September 2015.
The Democrat party's lurid lurch to the socialist left
How and Why the Democrat Party Hates America
The desperate Democrat party cultivates American divisiveness
The following essay presents considerable information on the issue:
Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881-1965: A Historical Review, by Kevin MacDonald, Population and Environment, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Mar., 1998), pp. 295-356 (62 pages). Archived on Jstor. Excerpts:
The Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy in the United States is especially noteworthy as an aspect of ethnic conflict. Jewish involvement has had certain unique qualities that have distinguished Jewish interests from the interests of other groups favoring liberal immigration policies. Throughout much of this period, one Jewish interest in liberal immigration policies stemmed from a desire to provide a sanctuary for Jews fleeing from anti-Semitic persecutions in Europe and elsewhere. Anti-Semitic persecutions have been a recurrent phenomenon in the modern world beginning with the Czarist persecutions in 1881, and continuing into the post-World War II era in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As a result, liberal immigration has been a Jewish interest because "survival often dictated that Jews seek refuge in other lands"...
For a similar reason, Jews have consistently advocated an internationalist foreign policy for the United States because "an internationally-minded America was likely to be more sensitive to the problems of foreign Jewries"... However, in addition to a persistent concern that America be a safe haven for Jews fleeing outbreaks of anti-Semitism in foreign countries, there is evidence that Jews, much more than any other European-derived ethnic group in America, have viewed liberal immigration policies as a mechanism of ensuring that America would be a pluralistic rather than a unitary, homogeneous society...
Pluralism serves both internal (within-group) and external (between-group) Jewish interests. Pluralism serves internal Jewish interests because it legitimates the internal Jewish interest in rationalizing and openly advocating an interest in Jewish group commitment and non-assimilation, what Howard Sachar... terms its function in "legitimizing the preservation of a minority culture in the midst of a majority's host society."...
More importantly, ethnic and religious pluralism serves external Jewish interests because Jews become just one of many ethnic groups... Historically, major anti-Semitic movements have tended to erupt in societies that have been, apart from the Jews, religiously and/or ethnically homogeneous...
Charles Silberman... notes that "American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief - one firmly rooted in history - that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of American Jews to endorse 'gay rights' and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called 'social' issues."...
MacDonald discusses Jewish anti-restrictionist political activity during several important historical periods, stating: "Jewish opinion is not monolithic. Nevertheless, although there have been (and notably are) dissenters, Jews have been 'the single most persistent pressure group favoring a liberal immigration policy'"
MacDonald concludes in part:
The defeats of 1924 and 1952 did not prevent the ultimate victory of the Jewish interest in combating the cultural, political, and demographic dominance of the European-derived peoples of the United States. What is truly remarkable is the tenacity with which Jewish ethnic interests were pursued for a period of close to 100 years. Also remarkable was the ability to frame the argument of immigration-restrictionists in terms of racial superiority in the period from 1924-1965 rather than in such positive terms as the ethnic interests of the peoples of northern and western Europe in maintaining a status quo as of 1924.
At this point, it's fitting to reference the article: Critique of the Culture of Kevin MacDonald, by Takuan Seiyo, Gates of Vienna, 12 June 2009. As one of this lengthy article's commenters observed, "This is good... balanced treatment of history. And sane criticism of the insane positions of both Anti-Semites and Jewish Leftists."
