by
Victor Davis Hanson
 |
| Shot and chaser: Democrat activist Jorge Ramos of Univison badgers
Donald Trump; is (temporarily) deported from presser by Trump’s
security. (AP Photos/Charlie Neibergall) |
Why did the illegal-immigration issue launch Donald Trump’s campaign?
Why did his recent tense press conference exchange with Univision’s
Jorge Ramos please even some of Trump’s liberal critics? What is it
about illegal immigration that has finally turned off so many Americans?
1. Race
Over the years immigration activists successfully deconstructed the
complex issue of illegal immigration into a race and class morality tale
of privileged whites picking on poor brown people. The operative
buzzwords were “racism,” “nativism,” and “xenophobia.” That theme is now
mostly bankrupt given that every great lie eventually falls from its
own weight.
It was rarely the host, but more often the activists on behalf of the
guests, who framed illegal immigration in racial terms. Activists
foolishly fabricated the controversy as “we noble Latinos” against “you
prejudiced non-Latinos.” They forgot apparently two obvious truths: one,
thirty percent of Americans are
not so-called white; and, two,
most people resent ethnic chauvinism. Is an unemployed African-American
sympathetic to the argument that someone has a birthright to illegally
cross into the United States and find instant employment? Is a
Punjabi-American, waiting patiently for his engineer cousin to get a
green card, eager to be told the United States must make special
concessions to the Latino lobby? Does a third-generation
Mexican-American prefer that his neighborhood school and emergency room
be flooded with indigent illegal Mexican nationals?
Sometime in the last five years, the public woke up and grasped that
Latino elite activists were not so much interested in illegal
immigration per se, but only to the degree that the issue affected other
Latinos. Were 3,000 Chinese illegally entering California per day by
ship on the Northern California coast, Latino activists and politicians
would probably be the first to call for enforcement of federal
immigration law.
It is difficult for the National Council of La Raza to attempt to
airbrush away vocabulary like “anchor baby” and “illegal immigration,”
while insisting that its own nomenclature “La Raza” has nothing to do
with race. The public knows that La Raza means “The Race,” and that
those who founded that organization chose that racially charged noun for
the precise purpose of ethnic triumphalism — in the way that every
infamous 20
th-century Latinate racist demagogue from
Mussolini to Franco found a use for Raza/Razza, a mostly taboo term in
Mediterranean Europe today. In an age when the Washington Redskins earn a
presidential rebuke, it is inconceivable that the chief
illegal-immigration advocate is a federally subsidized group known as
the National Council of La Raza. No other organization would dare use
such a term. In the public mind illegal immigration has gone from the
old narrative that racists were enforcing the law to keep out mostly
brown people to a new generation of racists who are trying to subvert
the law to bring in mostly brown people.
2. The Law
The old canard that without law there is nothing did not resonate
with voters in connection with illegal immigration until the 21st
century. As long as there were only one or two million illegal
immigrants apparently the public turned a blind eye. No longer.
Extremists took legal noncompliance to an entirely new level of
Orwellian arrogance. Suddenly, as if by fiat, the illegal-immigration
lobby banned the term “illegal alien” — as if they had never read a word
of
1984 or
Animal Farm. They dreamed up “sanctuary city,”
a reactionary, neo-Confederate idea of legal nullification, whose
logical trajectory is the implosion of the entire idea of federal laws
constitutionally supreme to state and local statutes. They lied by
insisting that entering the United States illegally was simply a minor
misdemeanor, when most Americans knew such unlawful entry was the
beginning, not the end, of negating the law — inaugurating years of fake
IDs, false Social Security numbers, second and third identities, and
deliberate filing of untruthful federal and state documents.
Then the myth arose that criminality among illegal aliens was in fact
lower that found in the general population, as if it mattered not at
all that a quarter of all federal prisoners were in the United States
illegally, or that some states reported that more than a fourth of their
felonies were attributable to illegal aliens, or that around 20,000
illegal aliens from south of the border were routinely incarcerated in
California prisons alone. Completely lost in the back and forth was the
old notion that an immigrant, legal or illegal, was supposed to be a
guest, whose behavior should be the model, rather than defended as no
worse than those whom he joined.
The public tired of the unfairness in the applicability of the law.
How had it come to pass that illegal aliens were not subject to
enforcement of federal laws in the manner that all citizens most surely
were? All Americans file through passport control when flying home; they
are met by stern uniformed bureaucrats who are not an especially
forgiving bunch for missing or lost documents. How could it be that
millions by virtue of their ethnic
fides were not subject to
the same scrutiny? And if one law were to be waived, why, the public
wonders, not others equally inconvenient?
People finally tired of the postmodern notion that to stop endemic
illegality we were supposed to change the language rather than the
reality. Americans are not quite yet ready to be Soviet subjects who are
to embrace Newspeak, and apparently resented the assumption that they
were.
3. Mexico
Mexico itself has become quite unpopular. Accordingly to recent
polls, never have Americans had more negative views of Mexico than
during the era of Obama. Americans tired of being told that Mexico did
not like the U.S., when the real truth was increasingly the opposite. It
is not just the daily news of cartels, beheadings, and corruption that
made Mexico unattractive, but the cynicism of the Mexican government
itself.
Mexico and Central American nations receive $50 billion a year in
remittances from their expatriate citizens in the United States. But if
illegal aliens were impoverished and exploited as their home countries
alleged, how could they transfer such monumental sums back home — and
why would not their mother countries worry about the ensuing burdens
placed upon their low-wage-earning citizens abroad?
Hypocrisy became synonymous with the idea of Mexico. Its constitution
defines illegal immigration in racialist and chauvinist terms — barring
those it finds unhealthy or an economic burden or even prone to upset
“the equilibrium of the national demographics.” If American emulated
Mexican law, almost all illegal aliens would face immediate deportation
if not prison sentences. When Mexico deliberately has exported ten
percent of its population and lectures the U.S. on their ensuing
welfare, then the vocabulary of hypocrisy fails.
During the last two-decade influx of illegal aliens, a huge number
was from the Mexican hinterlands, often indigenous peoples from Oaxaca
or Chiapas who have long suffered racial discrimination inside Mexico.
That Mexico for the first time champions their cause when they leave
Mexican soil is the sort of racism of which Mexico habitually accuses
the U.S. In some sick sense, Mexico has been ethnically cleansing its
own country and then seeking moral cover for its human rights violations
by slurring as racist the only refuge for its own unwanted who often
were fleeing endemic racist attitudes.
4. Politics
The Obama-age progressive political narrative was that an old,
too-white America was changing largely due to immigration and that this
was a much-needed antidote to oppressive white privilege. Activists
proudly pointed to California and New Mexico’s suddenly solidly blue
politics and promised that Texas, Colorado and Nevada were soon to
follow. In 2008 and 2012 the so-called “Latino vote” went nationally at
about 70% for Democratic candidates. This was deemed a noble thing — but
in a way 70% of the white vote not voting for a Democratic candidate
would have been seen as proof of “racism” and “backlash.” Conservative
cynics alleged a cruel cycle: welcome in millions of indigenous people
driven from their racist homelands, offer them public assistance by
virtue of the Democratic-sponsored welfare state, and teach them that
only liberals care for their welfare while insisting that their families
remember who were their patrons at the polls. Yet what was surreal
about the charge was not Republican crassness in making it, but the
shameless acknowledgment by Democrats that they were not only using
illegal immigration as a political tool, but should be praised for doing
so. They even warned that their success would doom Republicans unless
the latter emulated their strategies!
5. Illegal Immigrants
The illegal-immigration movement only recently has sought to finesse
its public relations. For a decade illegal immigration was oversold as
an arrival of “dreamers,” various future brain surgeons and physicists
whose innate talent could now be tapped if only the U.S. would wave the
cruel legal details. But illegal aliens are not all dreamers any more
than they are all criminals. They are what they are — good, bad, and
neither: poor oppressed people who flee racist Third World governments
in hopes of jobs and/or U.S. government support, with the further
assumption that their illegality, lack of English, absence of education,
and dearth of skills and capital will not only not matter, but earn
them coveted victim status in the U.S. So far they have been proven
prescient.
It is still common to find at immigration rallies thousands of
Mexican flags, with far fewer — if any — American flags. Illegal aliens
do not just root for visiting Mexican sports teams, but go the extra
mile of booing the American opposition.
The message is incoherent: “I will salute the country that drove me
out but less so the one that welcomed me in.” In fact, the entire
narrative of illegal immigration has become unhinged. The vocabulary of
protest is never aimed against the nation that forced them out, only
against the one that most generously welcomed them in.
Nowhere is this disconnect more evident than in the university, where
two antitheses are promulgated. Even as the various Chicano and Ethnic
Studies departments indoctrinate students with the supposedly sinister
history of the United States, they simultaneously champion the rights of
the illegal aliens to enter, reside, and stay in the odious country
they have just damned. The message makes little sense. Millions of
Americans have finally caught on to the incoherence, and feel that
ingratitude is among the worst of all sins.
It is alleged that Donald Trump is a demagogue who whips the ignorant
up. Perhaps. But on matters of immigration he came late and often in
antithesis to his own former positions. The truth is that the
illegal-immigration lobby was its own worst enemy, its message couched
in racism, illegality, untruth — and finally incoherence. People are
tired of being called racists by racial chauvinists, of being dubbed
insensitive by unfeeling opportunists, and of being called politically
naive by political manipulators.
If there were not a Donald Trump, he would likely have had to have been invented.
PJ Media
