The Immigration Bill And The Big Picture

IT is, as writes, an outrage when the governing classes try to rush a major revision of the nation’s immigration law past the voters and past their legislators without what our liberal friends call “a national conversation.”

He has thoughtfully provided a critique of the Senate bill as it became available over the weekend.

Today he has listed a number of proposed amendments to the bill. One of them is to establish a special category of aliens from jihadist countries. No quick Z-visa for them!

In the frenzy of day-to-day political combat, let us not forget the big picture. It was one of President Eisenhower’s maxims that if he couldn’t see the solution to a problem he tried to make it bigger.

The big picture is that we are in the middle of a great human migration, perhaps the greatest ever since modern humans first crossed the Straits of Hormuz 50,000 years ago and spread across the whole world.

Today’s great migration is from the country to the city. In China at this moment, about 25 million people are moving to the city each year.

Not surprisingly, people are migrating to the best city they know about. For many Mexicans the best place to go is not Mexico City or Monterrey. As one Mexican immigrant said to me from the driver’s seat of his mammoth Chevy Suburban SUV: “In Mexico you have to pay someone to get a job.”

So they come to the great job-creating cities of the United States.

For us, this is all very well. Just don’t all come at once.

It is the job of of our government, legislators, executive, and judges, to control the flow of immigration so that it does not create hardships for the American people. We care about the Mexican people, of course. But first we must take care of our own.

So the job of the government is to control, channel, and limit the flow. That is something that the government has clearly not been doing very well at all.

That is why folks like Hugh Hewitt are right when they insist that before we start handing out amnesty to illegal immigrants the government must demonstrate that it has gotten control of the borders.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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