Perhaps Charles Krauthammer has lunched one too many times with Linda Chavez, but he’s starting to sound more like Harry Reid than the conservative standard bearer he’s reputed to be. On the O’Reilly Factor this on May 4, he supported a “path to citizenship” for illegals, otherwise known as amnesty.
To be fair, Krauthammer did stipulate that immigration enforcement must come first, that amnesty could only be offered to illegal immigrants once the border is 95 percent secure. So I suppose that the good news here is that there is bad news: Since our border won’t be secure anytime soon, we won’t have to worry about Krauthammer lining up with La Raza in the near future.
And Krauthammer is not alone. Two days later on On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, Newt Gingrich addressed Invasion USA and said that he would “accept some path not to citizenship but to legality” for illegals as an element of immigration reform. I take this to mean that the illegals would be given work visas, but this much reminds me of how people will say they oppose faux marriage but will accept “civil unions.” What’s really being said is, “We haven’t moved far enough left to leap into the abyss, so we’ll give you half a loaf.” And, then, in a whisper, “But we can talk about the other half in seven years.” It’s silly to think that a path to “legality” would be anything but a stop on the road to citizenship.
As for Krauthammer, one could wonder how he can be considered “conservative” in anything but the European sense of the word. He is pro-abortion and favors embryonic stem-cell research, yet he manages to combine these beliefs with an anti-death-penalty stance. He harshly criticized Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, calling it “Blood Libel.” Now he believes that a talent for breaching borders warrants citizenship papers. And here is part of the columnist’s commentary on the O’Reilly Factor:
Once you secure the border — I think this a humane country, we understand that these are not evil people, but they broke our laws, but they jumped the line unfairly. There are others all around the world who have waited years and years and years to enter legally, so they are going to have to go through a process…. The reason that everybody resists legalization is not just that it is unfair, it’s that as long as the border is open, it’s an invitation to another 10 or 20 million.
There are many flaws in this thinking. First, Krauthammer is correct to say that “as long as the border is open, it’s an invitation to another 10 or 20 million”; the point he misses is that if you legalize 10 or 20 million, the border will always be open. That is to say, the carrot of amnesty would serve as an incentive for trespassers to be even more aggressive in trying to break into our nation, making border control virtually impossible. Remember that the Southern border is crossed because it is currently the path of least resistance, but there are other points of entry as well (e.g., boat passage in the Gulf of Mexico). This isn’t to say we shouldn’t secure the border, but this must be part of comprehensive enforcement. It won’t work if we say, “Hey, amigo, run the gauntlet successfully and stay under the radar long enough, and you pass the citizenship test.”
It’s also mystifying how deportation is considered not “humane.” No one is saying that we should beat and kill illegals, as the Mexican police sometimes do. They are simply to be sent back home, to where their hearts (these folks almost invariably don’t view themselves as American) and families often are. There is no “right” to become a U.S. citizen.
Yet, the more important point here is that if the desire to go soft on illegals is driven by compassion, it’s the misguided variety. Is it compassionate to allow an invasion of the nation that drains the public coffers, strains services, shuts down hospitals, and leads to crime that causes injury and death to countless citizens? Even more significantly, is it compassionate to allow the destruction of American culture?
To paraphrase columnist Frosty Wooldridge, the rate of immigration long ago exceeded the rate of assimilation. While the average number of immigrants admitted to the United States prior to 1965 was only about 250,000 annually, it now hovers at around one million. Additionally, with so many hailing from just one country, Mexico, there is less of a desire and need to assimilate. This is because we are not experiencing the migration of individuals — it is the transplantation of a foreign nation into the body of our nation.
And the proof is in the pudding. We have seen protests in which foreigners have waved signs stating “Gringo Go Home.” When in Rome, push the Romans into the sea? And this mentality was reflected in a recent event at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, California. On “Cinco de Mayo” — a holiday that is not celebrated in most of Mexico and is unknown to many Mexicans — students were displaying national colors. Many were sporting Mexican flags, while five other students wore American-flag clothing.
Which ones do you think were sent home and warned of disciplinary action?
You guessed it. It appears that Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez had a problem with the red, white, and blue and punished the boys, calling the clothing “incendiary.” And his mentality extends to many of his charges, it seems. For example, KTVU.com reports on how student Lizbeth Ruiz felt “disrespected.” The station writes, “There is no right for them to be putting us down,” she said of the t-shirt wearers. “All that proves that America isn’t what it should be.” Well, I guess it certainly isn’t. Then, NBC tells us that another student, Annicia Nunez, opined, “I think they [the t-shirt wearers] should apologize cause it is a Mexican Heritage Day. We don’t deserve to be get disrespected like that. We wouldn’t do that on Fourth of July.”
Now, perhaps California’s residents might like to know that the state is no longer part of the United States so they can stop paying taxes to the feds.
But what is a greater testimonial as to the failure to assimilate foreigners? These youths actually draw an equivalence between Cinco de Mayo and America’s Independence Day — in America.
And now Charles Krauthammer wants to add to the 37 million immigrants already in the United States another 10 to 20 million, largely unassimilable, foreigners. Now that’s what I call dropping a hammer on American culture.
Photo: AP Images
