Celebrity Selena Gomez recently posted, and then quickly deleted, a video of herself sobbing uncontrollably over the treatment of illegal immigrants being expelled by the Trump administration.
Gomez was, of course, mercilessly mocked by conservatives across social media. There’s nothing really wrong with sympathizing with those trying to escape the deprivation and tyranny of the Third World. Most of us, I assume, would do the same for our families. The frustration, though, is misplaced.
For one thing, Gomez, as far as I know, has never posted a video lamenting the fate of women swept up in the exploitation and violence on the southern border. Nor has she ever publicly shed tears over the victims of the violence perpetrated by illegal immigrants. And that’s a problem.
While I’m also a fan of immigration for economic and patriotic reasons, dismissing the negative cultural externalities that can accompany chaotic mass immigration, illegal or not, does the cause no favors.
The fact is we could build a giant bubble around the entire country right now, and the United States would still reign as the most welcoming place for foreigners that’s ever existed. And if we want that title to remain, championing legal avenues and decrying mass criminality and anarchy is the way to go. Because what’s happening now is only going to turn decent people against legal immigration.
In recent years, American citizenship has been transformed from a sacred privilege bestowed on the lucky gracious newcomer into a right that’s demanded of us by people who break the law and their champions.
The left will point out that illegal immigrants rarely engage in criminal behavior, which is certainly true if you ignore their very presence in the United States. What Democrats mean, of course, is that most illegal immigrants and refugees aren’t gangbangers or rapists or burglars. Fair enough. But people have the right to expect the number to be around zero. One of the few jobs of the federal government is protecting its citizens from foreigners.
Illegal immigration is also inhumane. Democrats talk about people living in the shadows. It’s true. Those here illegally will never be integrated into society. Even if they don’t benefit from welfare programs, inevitably end up relying on taxpayers. This, too, causes resentment.
People often like to virtue-signal, insisting that the United States is a “nation of immigrants” or a nation of “ideas” rather than one of blood and soil. Those are both true statements to some extent. One of the “ideas” we had, though, was to be a sovereign nation that houses a set of norms, traditions, civic institutions, culture, laws, rights, and virtues. We’ve been astoundingly successful at absorbing immigrants on a massive scale because the expectation was everyone would embrace our values.
Does anyone think we’re getting better at assimilating immigrants?
Newcomers don’t internalize our values by osmosis alone. How can illegal immigrants or refugees embrace our founding values if the contemporary left, which runs many institutions, doesn’t believe in celebrating or teaching them? Indeed, rather than telling immigrants, illegal and otherwise, that they’ve won the lottery, they are immediately slotted into victim classes and praised for ignoring laws that other foreigners wait years to obey.
It’s getting difficult to dismiss the notion that Democrats want the nation to be overrun by illegals and refugees. And not just their discernible resistance to upholding the law. Until recently, we have effectively allowed any refugee who can figure out how to slip through the border a chance to remain indefinitely — and then automatically confer citizenship on their newborns. This is destabilizing whether it comports with the 14th Amendment or not.
The left acts as if we have a sacred oath to accept every refugee, but have done virtually everything possible to destroy the public’s trust in the system. In 2020, Democrats scrapped the “Remain in Mexico” policy that impelled migrants to wait in that country while their claims were being adjudicated in court (until finally, the administration was forced by a court to reinstate the policy).
That same year, Democrats canceled the Migrant Protection Protocols agreement, in which Mexican officials promised to keep Central American migrants inside their country while refugee status was being decided, easing border pressure.
Allowing Third-World dictators, oligarchs, and corrupt socialists who keep their people in perpetual destitution relieve political domestic pressures by allowing their poorest to stream into another country is an attack on America, as well. Yet, Democrats canceled an agreement with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras that allowed us to send back asylum-claiming if they passed through those nations.
As Europe has shown us, accepting unlimited amounts of refugees from the same area at the same time with the same ideas and the same problems leads to ethnic enclaves, poor integration, and reactionary nativist politics.
We’re not supposed to talk about this, but it’s exceedingly obvious that not every culture is equally conducive to living in liberal democracy. As British writer Kenan Malik wrote in 2015, adopting “multiculturalism” while opening your borders has created a fraught reality of “fragmented societies, alienated minorities, and resentful citizenries.” This is why assimilation is vital.
Though it’s not just refugees or illegal immigrants who can give immigrants a bad name.
Take the student visa problem. Just because your Gulf State petro-daddy or Chicom apparatchik parents can pay your way doesn’t mean we have any responsibility to host you. Colleges love foreign students because they pay cash for the whole ride, but too many of them are flying terrorist flags and creating havoc on our campuses. The spectacle almost surely makes normies less inclined to see immigration as a societal positive. Understandably so.
Leftists and civil libertarians had a breakdown when President Donald Trump signed an executive order to revoke student visas from noncitizen college students who participate in pro-Hamas protests. Listen, I’m a staunch supporter of unfettered speech rights of pro-terrorist noncitizens in their own countries. Everyone has an inalienable right to speak freely, but foreigners do not have an inalienable right to gin up hatred against Americans on the Upper West Side. Protest in Tiananmen Square or in front of the royal residence in Riyadh. A nation has the right to dictate the parameters visitors must follow, then expel those who engage in civil unrest.
When my parents defected from Hungary and came here, they were asked if they were members of the Communist Party because its ideology conflicts with American values. We can’t bore into the souls of would-be citizens or visa seekers. But we chuck them out if they don’t behave.
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That goes for work visas, as well. If you’re bright and work hard you’re probably going to get rich here. But I’d rather have low-skill workers who genuinely want to embrace our values in the country than another Ph.D who has a disdain for our system.
In the end, there are tons of laws we dislike, but the government upholds them anyway. Democrats say we’re a nation of laws, and yet when it comes to illegal aliens, they’re horrified that anyone might uphold them. If they truly cared about the future of immigration, they’d demand order, not feed chaos.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
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