Illiberal Immigration ‘Reform’

The last thing a liberal proponent of immigration reform wants is liberal immigration reform. Remember that paradox, and the insanity at the border makes some sense.

Each day a worried politician or pundit, with creased brow and pained expression, lectures us about the need for “comprehensive immigration reform” to avoid the sort of chaos we are witnessing on the border.

Then a funny thing happens. The speaker never defines the term. If on rare occasions advocates are asked, they fumble around, annoyed that anyone would press them to explain what they mean.

In truth, no one in the open-borders coalition wants anything approaching comprehensive immigration reform. Advocates are embarrassed about the present mess at the border not because thousands of foreign nationals, many of them unescorted children and teens, from Latin America, without skills or education, are flocking illegally across the border after largely taking the amnesty cue from Barack Obama, but because they are doing so in such dramatic fashion that the influx has aroused the ire and worry of the American people and exposed illegal immigration to be a callous and illiberal enterprise, promoted by a coalition of self-interested political operatives, commercial concerns, and ethnic chauvinists.

So why will we not see true comprehensive immigration reform?

Such legislation would first have to make border security the top priority. And that would entail three unpalatable requisites.

The first step would be the completion of the fence. Fences do work...

Second, the Border Patrol would have to turn back all who crossed illegally and then let that be known...

Third, until deterrence is established, more guards would have to patrol the border and its environs...

The second element of concrete comprehensive immigration reform — meritocratic legal immigration — is equally an anathema to those who call for it in the abstract. If legal immigration were to be ethnically blind, and predicated on merit rather than proximity to the southern border, the ethnic industry would rise in revolt.

La Raza [The Race] affiliates do not believe in true diversity, racial or otherwise. They do not want legal immigration to be predicated on skills or college degrees, which might result in a million Kenyan doctors, Czech engineers, Chilean nurses, Mexican architects, Punjabi programmers, or Korean dentists entering the United States...

The next time a politician drones on about “comprehensive immigration reform,” a few questions have to be asked: How is the border made secure first? Is it desirable that legal immigration be meritocratic and ethnically diverse? And does anyone get deported, and if so who exactly?...