Peggy Noonan Against Senate Bill

Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it’s being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill’s Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay’s pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you’re not, you cur, you gun-totin’ truckdriver’s-hat-wearin’ yahoo. It’s all so complex, and you’d understand this if you weren’t sort of dumb.

Yes. Nice Peggy Noonan wrote that, including the italics.

Yeah. Well. Americans don’t go for that popinjay attitude. And I’d say that for some time the American people have been looking for a way to blow their political popinjays a raspberry. We can’t do it on Social Security; we can’t do it on the war. But we can do it on immigration.

What would Peggy have us do?

We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we’ve eaten.

Close the borders, she says, and have a conversation. That may not be as easy as she thinks, if you read what Alan Reynolds had to say recently.

While we are having our conversation we should go to work on our existing immigrants.

As we end illegal immigration, we should set ourselves to the Americanization of the immigrants we have. They haven’t only joined a place of riches, it’s a place of meaning. We must teach them what it is they’ve joined and why it is good and what is expected of them and what is owed.

And we know who has been stopping the Americanization process in recent decades.

Peggy insists that the solution should not lead to scenes of sobbing families being torn apart and sent away on buses.

But one commentator pointed out that you probably don’t have to do that to call a halt to illegal immigration. All you have to do is get a bit tougher: Tougher on apprehending illegals and tougher on employers who hire them. It really is a dollars and cents thing. If it costs too much to hire the coyote to get you across the border, then fewer people will come. If it is too hard to avoid arrest by local law enforcement, fewer people will come.

It’s a control issue. America needs immigration. It just doesn’t need immigration that swamps the existing culture. The United States of America is a remarkable society. Why it should be so favored with staggering prosperity and good government is a question that many people have asked and few have really answered, even the great Tocqueville.

If we wanted to guess how to keep our prosperity and our good government the best answer would probably be: Change things, but don’t change things too fast.

That, of course, has been the conservative prescription ever since Edmund Burke.

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

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

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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Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

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Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

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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

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[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

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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