Category Archives: Immigration

Immigration Agitation

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According to news reports, the Trump administration is preparing a big sweep of illegal immigrants. Trump was supposedly tweeting about it. According to the news, the plan is to “round up thousands of migrant parents and children in a blitz operation across major U.S. cities.” Most likely, the plan is to include lots of tips to local media in an effort to get maximum attention for the effort. Of course, when the problem involves tens of millions, using the term “mass arrests” when rounding up thousands is a bit of a stretch.

Those on the patriotic immigration beat will no doubt look at this with skepticism, as it is mostly a show. These people, once arrested, will have to go through the normal deportation process. Since that has been bogged down by corrupt judges and lawyers, that process will take years. Meanwhile, the people arrested will be set free, so the effect will have been to take these people to a field trip to a federal building. The illegal invaders themselves will lose whatever fear they have of being deported.

That’s the age old problem with bluffing. Once the bluff is called, all future bluffs are worthless. In fact, they become a tell, of sorts. The person prone to empty threats can be manipulated, as everyone knows what they won’t do once they start making threats about what they will do unless something happens. A threat is only useful if the person making it has credibility. In the minds of billions of people, the threat of deportation from America is no longer credible. They know it is a bluff.

Team Trump and maybe even Trump himself, thinks this is a great way to mollify the base on the immigration issue. The usual rage heads in conservative media will play along, calling this some great move by Trump to address the issue. No doubt, the types of people still wearing MAGA caps will fall for it. They are mostly older voters, conditioned to go along with whatever the television tells them. The more jaded, however, are likely to react the opposite way, seeing it as another Trump con.

That said, political theater is always aimed at the gullible. Most white people calling themselves Progressives don’t watch MSNBC, for example. They will read the NY Times and the Washington Post, but they look at the cable airheads the same way most dissidents look at the Fox News rage heads. Political theater is aimed at the dullards, because the dullards need it. Otherwise, they will stop paying attention and wander off somewhere. No doubt, Trump gets that, so he does a lot of political theater.

All that said, the skeptics should probably not get carried away. The main issue with immigration is ignorance. The people in charge and their media organs have done an amazing job of hiding the problem in plain sight. Most white people in America have noticed the invasion in their cities and towns. They notice the complexion of their kid’s school changing. Yet, the mass media has done an amazing job of keeping them from really noticing it. In fact, people have been conditioned to embrace it.

When Trump talks about immigration or when he stages one of these public relations ventures, it chips away at that conditioning. Immigration, not just the invaders, but all immigration, is one of those subjects that is best never discussed, if you are the people in charge. It is one of those topics that the more people understand, the angrier they get about it. There is no good way to sell open borders to normal people, so the media is instructed to cover it up, by preventing any debate about it.

Additionally, any discussion of immigration opens the door to other taboo subjects, like the guest worker scams. As much as people get mad about Trump bellowing about how we need unlimited guest workers, what he is doing, in effect, is the agree and amplify response popular with dissidents on-line. His exaggerated enthusiasm is so incongruous, it breaks the normal pattern of discourse. Whether this is intentional or not, his meandering on immigration keeps the issue front and center.

Probably the best thing about these public relations stunts, however, is it opens the door to some obvious questions patriots can ask their Trump loving friends. For example, why is it legal for landlords to rent to foreign invaders? Why is it legal for Americans to help foreign invaders come into the country? Why are churches so excited to help invaders, but can’t be bothered to help poor blacks? Immigration opens the door for lots of jimmy rustling questions you can spring on your normie friends.

The Civil Rights Movement created many more racists than it cured, because it brought many whites into contact with blacks for the first time. All those middle-class white people who had to flee their neighborhoods for the suburbs took with them a hard lesson, even if there was no way to turn back the clock. The same is true with open borders. There could be no such thing as white identity politics without mass immigration. It exists due to this demographic catastrophe inflicted upon us.

That’s probably the hardest part about this for dissidents, as well as the immigration patriots in the civic nationalist sphere. There’s no “winning” in the conventional sense when it comes to immigration. The die is cast, as far as the demographics of the North America. The future is majority-minority, with large swaths of the continent off-limits, for all practical purposes, to white people. Debating immigration is an entry point for discussing an ideology built for what comes next, not what has already happened.

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The New Narrative

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Spend time in a small business that has stood the test of time and you will learn the origin myths of the company and the founders. These myths will have plenty of truth content, but a lot will be fanciful or exaggerated. One reason is the story is inevitably told by the founder or his heirs, so it is self-serving. Another reason is the story is intended to give meaning and purpose to the people in the company. For an origin myth to work, it has to be inspirational and reflect well on the people in the organization.

People always have origin myths, of course. The most famous of which is the story of the Jews. The whole chosen people business is obvious nonsense. The flight from Egypt is at least plausible in some areas, but unless you’re willing to accept that God is an indiscriminate child killer, it’s a story that only Jews can believe. Still, the origin myth of the Jews has served them well for a very long time. These stories are central to Jewish identity and it is that strong identity that has allowed Jews to prosper.

If a strong set of origin myths correlates to a strong sense of identity and a strong people, then the reverse is probably true. The lack of origin myths, or a declining interest in the origin myths, probably suggests a weak identity. Perhaps the people have yet to come to identify themselves as a people or they are going through some sort of transition in terms of how they see themselves. The old myths no longer work, because they don’t fit the emerging narrative to explain how it is this people came to be.

This longish post in Foreign Affairs by popular historian Jill Lepore is an interesting read for a number of reason, not related to this post. The endless name dropping that torments writing in the humanities is a topic of its own. That’s mingled with self-promotion, in the form of references to the author’s books. Of course, anything to do with American history has to have a few paragraphs of the usual blather about slavery and Jim Crow. That said, it is worth the time to read it and the related posts on the site.

Lepore is one of those useful bellwethers in that she tends to write what the intellectual side of the ruling class is thinking. A big part of being a popular academic is to be in good standing with the ruling elite. They like being told about their wonderfulness from academics, so flattery is a big part of the game. That offers a window into the minds of the people who rule over us. What posts like this suggest is the people in charge are concerned with the fracturing they see from their position in the clouds.

That fracturing is predictable. Peter Brimelow predicted it two decades ago. Import tens of millions of strangers with strange customs into America and you’re going to get conflicts between the locals and the newcomers. The fact that these strangers were imported to replace the natives, who were not consuming and reproducing at levels satisfactory to the rulers, certainly did not help. Add in the rise of identity politics as a way to control the population and the result was predictable. Pat Buchanan predicted this.

Lepore is correct that people need a narrative that binds them together and explains why it is they are a people. America had an obvious one until the Civil War. When New England conquered the rest of the nation, the national story ended and was replaced by that new story that put New England at the top, as the ruler of the rest. That held together into the middle of last century, when Jews updated the tale to insinuate themselves into the story and explain their new dominance in the ruling class.

That American narrative worked until the people in charge decided they needed a new people and flung open the gates to unlimited immigration. A fascinating bit in that Lepore article is that she starts her essay in 1986 with the historian Carl Degler and his warning about the abandonment of nationalism. That talk would have happened around the time the ruling class was opening the borders. The implication that Mx. Lepore does not seem to grasp is that the hostility to nationalism preceded wholesale immigration.

On the other hand, she is a clever woman, so she could very well have done this on purpose, as a way of injecting the idea into the bloodstream of her peers. The academy is so narrow now, it is looking like a singularity from our perspective, but inside there is some room to maneuver. It requires a heavy dose of esoteric language and triple bank shot references to avoid detection. Perhaps that’s what she is up to by starting with that Degler speech and then ending with a piquant quote from that same talk.

That said, if the intellectual class in the West, but particularly in America, had not drawn all of the wrong lessons from the two great industrial wars of the 20th century, the ruling class would not have set about destroying the fabric of their countries. Perhaps the Frankfurt School notions were a bad idea after all. There’s no mention of this in the Lepore essay, but that an obvious implication once you read to the end. The finishing paragraph is a quote from Degler’s talk at that 19856 conference.

“The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don’t start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned. They’ll echo Calhoun and Douglas and Father Coughlin. They’ll lament “American carnage.” They’ll call immigrants “animals” and other states “shithole countries.” They’ll adopt the slogan “America first.” They’ll say they can “make America great again.” They’ll call themselves “nationalists.” Their history will be a fiction. They will say that they alone love this country. They will be wrong.

Again, there is no mention of open borders and the unprecedented levels of immigration in this essay, as those things cannot be discussed openly or rationally in the intellectual class. Still, the essay suggests that there is some interest by cloud people in what is happening among the dirt people. They can’t bring themselves to address the fact that you cannot have a common story when everyone is a stranger. Instead, they keep talking about Hitler and the other wrong lessons they drew from the events of last century.

There’s also the strange sense that these origin myths can simply be conjured and then imposed upon a people. The implication of this essay is that America needs a new one, so the people in charge better get busy creating one. The trouble is that white people are not allowed to have an identity and the non-white ascendancy does not have much to point to, as far as their contributions to the national story. Lepore offers something from Frederick Douglas as a starting point for this new national narrative.

A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family, is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.

That is no doubt inspiring to the cloud people, but it says more about how they see themselves than with the facts on the ground. It’s also a negative identity, based on victories over demons that exist only in the imaginations of the rulers. It also suggests she or her masters would like to see whites written out of this new national story. In case it is not clear, “bigoted people among ourselves” is you paleface. Perhaps that can be a useful cri de guerre in the war with the dirt people, but it is not binding narrative.

The fact is, the rise of nationalism, populism and white identity politics is a result of decisions made long ago. The radicals killed the national narrative, because they said nationalism is a dangerous construct. Their solution was to destroy the nations of the West, which has meant destroying the national identities of the West. That has now devolved into a war on the native stock of the West. There can be no unifying narrative that includes the both the destroyers and their victims.

That brings us back to the start. That small business that gets gobbled up by a multinational cannot maintain its origin myths. The people in that firm can no longer identify with that story, because that story has come an end. If they stick around, it is because of new reasons, less inspiring ones than those that bound them to that small business. That’s what we are seeing today in modern America. The old narrative has come to an end. It is time for a new one. The question is, who will do the writing.

Who And How Many

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The immigration debate in America, and maybe the West as a whole, is not much of a debate, at least as far as public policy. Instead, it is something of a meta-debate, in that the facts and important decisions are talked about indirectly. For example, in the US, everyone sort of thinks it is about Mexican immigration, but no one ever explicitly speaks to the facts about Mexican immigration. Details about who is actually coming over the border or gaming the anchor baby system remains a mystery.

As is always the case with big issues in America, immigration is debated on purely moral terms and even there, the morality is not explicit. No one ever bothers to explain why America is a “nation of immigrants” or whether that’s salient. For that matter, no one can seem to wrap their head around why immigration of any sort is morally good. Even immigration hawks go to great lengths to speak well of legal immigrants. Ours is a meta-debate about the morality of undefined policies stripped of facts and details.

Imagine a public debate over building a bridge across a local river. The salient facts would be the cost, where to put it and who benefits from the bridge. Instead, one side talks endlessly about the morality of building bridges. It’s who they are. By extension, those who oppose bridge building in the abstract are immoral in some way. The other side, in contrast, spends its time trying prove they are not opposed to bridge building, but simply have questions about where to put this bridge and how much to spend on it.

Even when someone tries to talk about the economics of immigration, putting aside cultural preferences and demographic reality, the debate soon veers into a weird sort of romanticism. It’s just assumed that jobs are going unfilled due to the lack of labor. There’s never any examination of the claims. Further, it is assumed that temporary labor shortages in one area of a continent sized country are immoral. Rising wages are treated like an insult to the economy, this vaguely understood thing we must worship.

The fact is though, the reality of all public policy is that it is and will be a debate over the facts of the issue. That reality can be wished away for a long time, but eventually the reality comes home. That’s what we are seeing with the stand-off between Trump and the Cult of Brown Ascendancy. We’re slowing creeping up on the fact that immigration is about who and how many. That is, who will we accept and how many of them will we accept. Immigration has always been about who and how many.

Those are not a questions most Americans are equipped to answer. The how many part is the easiest, especially if you start with zero as the default. No one is walking around thinking to themselves, “We really need more Eritreans around here.” If immigration was capped at zero, no one would notice. In fact, if there was a moratorium and the government started to aggressively deport people, even those in the system, most people would not care. In other words, the how many number is a small number.

The tougher question is what sorts of immigrants will we accept, even in limited numbers. In the Mid-Atlantic, where a large Korean community exists, most people would be fine with Korean immigration. Unlike the Chinese, Koreans are not fleeing political oppression or economic uncertainty. Koreans come here for lifestyle reasons, so they assimilate rapidly. They also take pride in being the model minority, despite what what some lefty advocates claim. Koreans came here to be Americans.

At the other end, no one would want any Muslims from the Middle East, as they simply don’t fit a modern Western country. Everywhere Muslim migration has been high, we see terrorist barriers, armed patrols and absurd security measures. In fact, most Americans could be convinced that we make an exception to the First Amendment and ban Islam, maybe even deport all Muslims. It has not worked and it can never work. The Western policy toward that part of the country should first be containment.

Similarly, sub-Saharan Africans are a no-go. America has a long history of trying to integrate Africans into a Europeans country. It does not work. Most people can accept the moral obligation to the descendants of former slaves, even if their ancestors were not slave holders. Bringing in a new population of unassimilable people, with a natural hostility to Europeans makes no sense. Again, no one is walking around wondering how things are going in Chad. That and American blacks don’t like African migrants.

One of the interesting things that happens when you start to think “from where and how many” is the how many becomes an easier question the more you think honestly about the “from where” part. For Americans, the real issue is how many South Americans we will accept. That quickly reduces to a much simpler question. Do we need any of them? For most people, the answer is no, we don’t need more people. Therefore, the only question left is are we morally bound to take anyone in for permanent settlement.

That, of course, is why the open borders crowd prefers to keep this a meta-debate about meta-morality. Once you start thinking about the facts, the default on immigration swings 180 degrees. The default becomes zero and building a massive barrier to entry makes complete sense. The debate is over the exceptions and more important, the conditions for those exceptions. The moral authority becomes the will of the people, rather than a self-selected cult of true believers divorced from daily reality.

No Easy Answers

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It is natural for people to embrace simple answers to complicated problems, even when it is obvious that those simple answers have no chance for success. One reason is complicated solutions imply a lot of hard work. Most people would prefer as little struggle as possible, so the option that offers the least amount of effort is always going to have the most appeal. Then there is the fact that hard solution mean hard problems, problems that change things. People don’t like change, so they avoid facing reality as much as they can.

This is the heart of the current crisis. White people in America are faced with a set of facts that are immutable. Demographics is a straight forward issue. As of 2011, about 60% of the population was non-Hispanic white. The percentage of the minor population that is non-Hispanic white fell below 50% for the first time. Given current immigration and fertility numbers, America will be a majority-minority country within a generation. The crisis of our age is not just how we respond to this reality, but how we come to accept it.

The civic nationalists will move heaven and earth in order to avoid facing demographic reality. In fact, they do everything they can to avoid thinking about it. The results of the NY-14 election are a great example. The civic nationalists latched onto the socialist angle, with the desperation of a drowning man. The fact that the district is over 60% Hispanic was lost on them. Even when presented with the facts, they preferred to prattle on about “muh socialism.” The simple answer asks the least of them, so they go with that.

On the other hand, we have the recently red-pilled. Like ex-smokers, they demand action now, believing all they have to do is explain what they have just learned to everyone else, and public opinion will turn on a dime. Paul Nehlen and Patrick Little are good examples of how this works. They read Culture of Critique, had a revelation and then found the nearest street corner on which they could preach the gospel. All of their efforts were based on the belief that the solution was simple. Just red-pill everyone and the problem is solved.

Of course, the very act of running for office is a denial of reality. It assumes the system is fine, but the people are defective. This has been the guiding star of conservatives for three generations. The simple solution to the culture war is to get the “right people” in office and they will solve the problem. The fact that this has proven impossible, and that the system has led us to this point, is never considered. The possibility that liberal democracy inevitably leads to cultural suicide is unpleasant, so even the red-pilled look the other way.

It used to be a popular line on social media to comment about something being the reddest of red pills. The JQ’ers loved using that line to pose as the most “woke” people in the movement. The truth is, the reddest of red pills is accepting that there is nothing to be done, with regards to our demographic destiny. The die is cast. Barring genocide or some weird plague, the land currently called America will be majority-minority. We can seal the borders tomorrow and the facts will not change. There’s no answer to that problem.

Further, liberal democracy assumes things about the citizenry that cannot be true in a majority-minority nation. The Founders saw this from the start and worried about factionalism ripping their new creation apart. Even in a completely white, English speaking country like early America, there was lots of diversity. People putting loyalty to their tribe ahead of loyalty to their nation was a legitimate concern. The American Civil War was not fought along regional and cultural lines by accident. It was tribal warfare.

The fact is, another bit of that dreaded demographic reality is that what comes next cannot include the current system of governance. In a multicultural society, everyone’s primary loyalty is to their group. Liberal democracy assumes people are loyal to their narrow economic interests. The black guy will vote for what works for him, not for what blacks ad a whole think is in their interest. In an all-white society, this works as whites are the least tribal humans. In a majority-minority society, this cannot possible work.

What comes next for us is what we see in the Middle East. In every country, one group dominates the rest, imposing their idea of order on the society. Saddam controlled Iraq for his people. The Persians run Iran. The Muslims run Lebanon, where every hill and valley may as well be its own country. The rule in multi-cultural, multi-tribal societies, is that one tribe rules the rest. That’s our future. The question is which groups will come to dominate the rest and what sort of system will they impose in order to remain in charge.

The Immorality of Immigration

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In all times and all places, the people in charge have certain primary duties, obligations that come before anything else they like to do. It does not matter what form of government is in place, the rulers, for example, have to maintain public order. Being the tribal chief is useless if your people and lands are in chaos. For that matter, having a tribal chief is useless if it means living in chaos. Therefore, one of the primary duties of all rulers in all times and all places is to maintain public order by enforcing laws and local customs.

There are other primary duties of the ruler, like organizing the common defense that are universal to all people and forms of government. Then there are primary duties that are peculiar to a people or to a form of government. If the ruler is understood to be a god, then the ruler and his people have a duty to maintain that myth. A central part of that social order is the transcendent nature of the order itself. In modern western countries, protecting property rights and enforcing contracts is counted as a primary duty of the state.

One of the more destructive things to happen to America over the last half century is the sacralizing of immigration by the followers of Emma Lazarus. The endless repetition of the nonsense phrase “nation of immigrants” has turned a temporary necessity a century ago into an essential element of the nation’s founding mythology. The fact that immigration is a violation of the state’s primary duty to the people is excused, because the immigrant now has a superior place in the moral order. The state is now in service to foreigners.

In a nation like America, one that allegedly is built on consensual government, citizenship has great value. In fact, the most valuable thing to a citizen of a representative democracy is his citizenship. The reason for this, is that citizenship is an ownership stake in the nation itself. In theory, the American government was voluntarily founded as an agreement among individuals, invested with the right to secure mutual protection and welfare and to regulate the relations among its members. In short, we are shareholders in America.

If you had the option of selling your citizenship, let’s say at some sort of auction, where you get money for your place as an American citizen, there would be no shortage of bidders. For example, there is no shortage of buyers for the EB-5 visa, which costs $500,000. That’s right, you can buy citizenship from the US government. Your citizenship is something of value and therefore, the state has a duty to protect it, just as they have a duty to protect your property rights. This is a primary duty of government.

When the American government willy-nilly hands out citizenship papers to millions of foreigners every year, it is, in effect, stealing the value of your citizenship and giving it to someone else. This is no different than a company diluting the value of its shares, by selling additional shares. It’s why open borders fanatics swear that immigration makes us all richer, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. They know it is essential that people believe this as even the sacred immigrant is not enough to justify theft.

Now, the argument from open borders people and libertarian loons is that immigration is not just holy and beneficial, but that the duly elected officials are passing these laws, so it is legitimate. The trouble is, we don’t live in a democracy. When 50% plus one vote to rob the 50% minus one, it is still theft, even if it comes after an election. This is why America is not a democracy and it is also why democracy was famously called two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch. The very nature of democracy makes it an immoral form of rule.

Additionally, a primary duty of the modern state is the maintenance of equality before the law. In fact, this is what makes the law legitimate. Not only do all citizens have a say in what laws are passed, but those laws apply to all citizens equally. The very nature of immigration violates this principle. Immigration steals from some citizens for the benefit of foreigners and the benefit of a small number of connected citizens. This is true for quasi-immigration schemes like guest workers, as well as for permanent settlement.

If the primary duty of the state is to safeguard the citizens, including the value of their citizenship and maintain equality before the law, then immigration by its very nature is a direct violation of the social compact. It makes a mockery of the very idea of consensual government and sows distrust among the people. It is why all mass immigration quickly leads to a breakdown of order, because it erodes the legitimacy of the ruling authority, as the people see they are no longer willing or able to fulfill their basic duties as rulers.

That does not preclude all immigration. It’s just that the bar is is extremely high. In order to justify that which is naturally and always immoral, the offset must exceed the cost of the deed. Since this is impossible in the modern age, the followers of Emma Lazarus have been forced to turn morality on its head, claiming the first duty of the state is to foreigners at the expense of its own citizens. It has turned America into a bust out where everything of value, including citizenship, is sold for the benefit of a few.

The Sacred Immigrant

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For a long time, I’ve made the point that the Republican Party is not really a political party, in the sense that it is a coalition held together by common interests. Instead, it is more like a dumping ground for politicians, who no longer fit in with the Democrats. About a third of Republican office holders would prefer to be huddling with the Democrats, but the voters of their home district or state have decided the Democrats are too crazy, so ambitious politicians run as Republicans. The result is a party held together by convenience.

You see that with the immigration disaster brewing in the House. As it stands the GOP could simply do nothing on immigration and ride the wave of popular support into the election. That would be the smart thing. Instead, they are trying to pass an immigration bill, that has no chance of making it through the Senate. Now, this could be good politics, if it is popular with their voters. Instead, they are about to pass a bill highly unpopular with their voters and sure to remind Trump supporters why they hate the GOP.

A leaked draft of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) amnesty deal could lead to the “biggest” amnesty for illegal aliens in United States history, experts tell Breitbart News.
Ryan’s immigration deal would go beyond giving amnesty to only the nearly 800,000 illegal aliens who are enrolled in the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

According to a leaked draft of the amnesty deal, obtained by Breitbart News, Ryan’s plan would allow the entire “DACA population” to be eligible for amnesty so long as they meet low educational, work and criminal requirements, prompting the amnesty to explode in size.

That DACA population could include the nearly 3.5 million DACA-enrolled and DACA-eligible illegal aliens, and even more illegal aliens who arrive in the U.S. to fraudulently obtain the amnesty.

NumbersUSA Governmental Affairs Director Rosemary Jenks told Breitbart News that Ryan’s amnesty will — at the least — allow 1.8 million illegal aliens to stay in the U.S.

“This has the potential to turn into the biggest amnesty we’ve ever had,” Jenks said.

The leaked amnesty deal reveals that Ryan and the Republican establishment may even be considering going beyond giving amnesty to DACA illegal aliens.

A second amnesty is included in the leaked draft, one that would allow the children of temporary foreign guest workers and “anyone who has a ‘contingent nonimmigrant status’” to apply for the amnesty.

This amnesty for the children of temporary foreign workers does not have a numerical cap, allowing for an endless amount of foreign nationals to obtain amnesty through this avenue known as “Pathway Concept B.”

“The winners are the DREAMers cause they get their amnesty, Democrats because they don’t have to concede much to get the amnesty and donor-class Republicans who are interested in perpetuating the current system,” Center for Immigration Studies Director of Policy Jessica Vaughan told Breitbart News of Ryan’s leaked amnesty deal.

It is tempting to blame this on the secret “donor party” that allegedly manipulates the inner party, like some sort of Turkish conspiracy. There’s no doubt that agriculture lobbies and the tech industry push hard for unlimited “guest worker” visas. No matter how many indentured servants they are granted, it is never enough. But, who is pushing for amnesty? In whose interests is it to hand a ballot to millions of foreigners? That actually hurts the cheap labor lobby, as it removes exploitable people from the labor pool.

This is an example of why so-called conservatives lost every fight over the last thirty years. They start with the assumption that the other team is working from facts and reason, motivated by a desire for some tangible goal. In this case, immigration patriots will demand everyone believe Paul Ryan is getting sacks of cash to push this ridiculous amnesty bill through the House. Sure, some of the provisions are bought by lobbyists, but the amnesty stuff has no obvious constituency in the Republican Party.

The fact is, people are more often motivated by a desire to be seen as on the side of angels, even if it brings personal risk. Just look at the number of pols who have driven a hole into their career opposing Trump. As they go under for the last time, they are smugly certain they are doing the Lord’s work. For many in our political class, open borders is entirely a moral issue now. They want to grant the blessing of your town to the world, because they feel righteous as they watch it play out from their guarded communities.

This suicidal altruism is not just confined to the political class. Any time the immigration question comes up, there are people who will blurt out “I’m not opposed to legal immigration. it is illegal immigration I oppose.” That’s why the political class is working to legalize every conceivable form of immigration. If there are literally no laws against coming here, then there can be no illegal immigration and everyone is happy. It’s the natural result of sacralizing the immigrant. The only question is about how best to worship him.

It’s why arguments from facts and reason about immigration have had no impact on the political class. Even as the public begins to get serious about the issue, the politicians are unresponsive, because they correctly see the immigrant remains a magical figure in the mind of the public. Until a large majority of the voters become hostile to immigration in the spiritual sense, the political class will continue to worship migrants. Yeah, the cheap labor lobbies play into this and exploit it, but the root problem here is immigrant worship.

The New Druze

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In the late 10th and early 11th century, a form of mysticism evolved that incorporated elements of Islam, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, bits from other esoteric faiths, that existed in eastern Mediterranean and what we now call the Middle East. The person credited with spreading this new faith was a guy named Muhammad bin Ismail Nashtakin ad-Darazi. He came to Egypt in 1017 and began preaching and attracting converts. He was branded a heretic and executed in 1018 by the sixth Fatimid caliph.

The Caliph, al-Hakim, was not hostile to the new faith, so much as hostile to ad-Darazi, who he thought was suffering from megalomania. His move against ad-Darazi was to put Hamza ibn ‘Ali ibn Ahmad in charge of this new religious sect, which would eventually be known as the Druze. The sixth caliph plays a central role in the Druze faith despite being outside the faith. His actions during his reign as caliph made it possible for the faith to spread and altered its course with the decision to execute ad-Darazi.

This is an interesting bit of serendipity, but it has a connection to our own age in a few important ways. The most obvious, if you are a fan of the period, is al-Hakim is often blamed for starting the crusades. His decision to persecute Christians sent ripples through Europe, eventually leading to the call to recapture the Holy Land. Of course, as with everything about history, that’s debatable. There were other forces at work, but it is generally accepted that al-Hakim played a crucial role in the clash with Christendom.

Eventually, of course, two main strains of Islam came to dominate the Arab world, while Christianity dominated Europe, but The Levant has remained a place with lots of religious diversity. The Druze live mostly in Lebanon. The Samaritans are in the Palestinian territories. Maronites, Eastern Orthodox and Melkite Catholics exist in Lebanon. Syriac Christians and Alawites exist in Syria. Of course, various flavors of Judaism dominate in Israel. It is not an accident that instability is the only constant in The Levant.

That’s an obvious lesson when examining this part of the world. If one wanted proof of the axiom, Diversity + Proximity  = Violence, The Levant has more than enough for any argument. The pathological zeal of Western leaders for inviting the world into Western lands, can only have one end. That’s the same we see in Lebanon, a country blessed with a great location, abundant natural resources and natural barriers to larger enemies. Yet, it is a land riven by sectarian violence and the lack of a unifying identity.

There is another lesson from the history of The Levant and that is the cauldrons of diversity tend to create more diversity. The reason this part of the world was popular with schismatics and holy men is it was where the action was in the Middle Ages. Cairo was a wealthy, cosmopolitan place compared to cities of Europe. There were scholars well versed in Greek philosophy, wealthy patrons willing to sponsor scholarship and a wide range of thought to draw from for the creative minded spiritual leader.

That’s something to keep in mind as Europe works to invite the world and all of its religions to settle in the West. Throw a bunch of people together with a wide range of beliefs and inevitably it spawns a bunch of new combinations. The flow of Muslims into Europe, a land that has abandoned Christianity for various secular passions, is going to spawn new spiritual movements. The recent conversion to Islam of an AfD leader is the sort of thing that is happening with increasing frequency. Islam is now a thing in Europe.

The other aspect to this is the West is now open country, when it comes to the religion business. Just as Catholicism faced a dying collection of pagan beliefs, Islam is now flowing into a world held together by habit and pointless social fads. The soul of Europe died a long time ago. To be a European today means to be a deracinated stranger in a land that is increasingly unfamiliar to you. That makes Europe fertile ground for a confident religion brought by people thinking they are on the winning side of history.

That does not mean Europe will be Islamic. Islam is all over the world, but it always adapts to the local environment. Islam in Asia is Islam with very Asian characteristics. Islam in the Caucasus is a mountain man version of Islam. Biology is the root of everything and that means cultural items like religion flow from it. The Islamification of Europe will inevitably result in something that is very European. The Germans will have their take, the Danes will have theirs and the French will do something French.

It also means all sorts of other permutation that result from mixing Western empiricism, Oriental mysticism and traditional Christianity. The Druze we started with in this post combine Ismailism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Pythagoreanism and Hinduism. It is an esoteric faith that is also an ethnicity. The Druze do not accept converts and they do not allow out-marriage. A person who marries outside the faith is no longer Druze and their children will not be Druze. Imagine something like that happening Bulgaria.

The point of this somewhat disjointed post is that Europe is dead. The West is dead. The civilization that was created by the culture born of the Enlightenment carries on, but the culture that is the West is dead. Something will come to replace it and that something will, in whole or part, be carried by the people now attempting to replace the Europeans. The resulting culture that rises next will be some combination of the ingredients being tossed into the cauldron, but it will look nothing like the ingredients.

Somewhere To Run

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One of the themes of this post at American Renaissance last week, was that there is no where for the race aware white person to go in America. The war on whiteness is happening at every point on the social structure and in every town in the country, even the rural areas where whites dominate. Wherever white people congregate, a cosmopolitan wrecker will be there to try and brown the place. Therefore, there is no running away from the slow moving white genocide being perpetrated on us by our rulers.

The generally accepted view of this process is it will play out in one of two ways. One version has Team Brown, which is the coalition of blacks, Hispanics, miscellaneous foreigners, Jews and white feminists, will become the new ruling class. The alternative, the Alt-Right version, holds that whites will become race aware and unite against the dusky hordes to form an ethno-state. In fairness, there is a CivNat version, that argues in favor of unicorn riding leprechauns, but no adult takes them seriously.

Looking at the current fight over immigration, it is not hard to argue with either vision of the future. Team Brown is unwilling to give an inch on their plans for unlimited non-white immigration. The only justification for this is they are seeking to replace whites in America via the miracle of open borders. Logic further dictates that even the dumbest tricorn hat wearing BoomerCon will eventually wake up to this reality. Think about how many people you know who were CivNat a decade ago, but are race realists today.

Neither of those scenarios sound appealing and that’s an important thing to keep in mind when looking down the road. Given enough time, human organizations faced with two bad choices will evolve alternatives. It’s a natural result of seeking to mitigate the costs of each choice by addressing the underlying premises. In the case of American racial conflict, the underlying premise is that the future is a transcendent, winner take all, fight that will be decided in Washington and imposed on the rest of us.

That’s not the only future and probably not the likely one. Look at what is happening in the states. The other day I wrote about one of the consequences of the marijuana legalization efforts at the state level. Here we have, for the first time in generations, the states forcing policy changes on the Federal government. In fact, the most likely result is the states will force the Feds to retreat from this area of civic life. The regulation of recreational drugs will be a local issue. Replace “marijuana” with “discrimination” and the enormity is clear.

Another thing going on in the states is the idea of disaggregation. When you look closely at the CalExit thing, what you see is not a secessionist movement, but a reductionist movement. California is too big to manage as a whole, so the culturally homogeneous areas will be broken off from the culturally Progressive zones, to form at least two states, but there is no reason the concept could not result in three or four states. California has 40 million people. Rhode Island has a little over one million people.

What’s going on in California is possible because of something that has been going on with Progressives for the past thirty years. They have been self-ghettoizing. The ethnic cleansing we see going on in coastal cities is so Progressives can have swanky urban centers in which they can live. When you look at the last electoral map, at the county level, you see the slow re-segregation of the country between Team Brown in urban areas and Team America everywhere else. The blues will get bluer while the reds get redder.

This cultural reorganization of America is undermining the premise of a unified national culture dictated by our coastal elites. Therefore, that winner take all fight is becoming less and less likely. Further, the Progressive instinct to leave, unless they can dominate all others, an instinct they inherited from their Puritan forebears, is one cause of this reorganization. It’s why Progressives are talking about abandoning the national model in favor of the smaller, local, more autonomous model. Peaceful separation, so to speak.

It’s important to keep in mind that Team Brown seized on open borders and mass immigration when they began to lose the support of white ethnics. Progressives controlled the national government from the Civil War forward, but had to rely on urban white ethnics for building a coalition. Once those voters started joining Team America, Team Brown needed new voters and we got the 1965 Immigration Act. Then twenty years later they built on it with the 1986 amnesty. Open borders is a defensive strategy.

If Trump is able to strong arm Republicans into ending wholesale immigration, Team Brown’s strategy for dominating the nation is foreclosed. When even minor setbacks, like the 2016 election, results in calls for retreat, it is not unreasonable to wonder if the Progressive pendulum is about to swing the other way, away from national dominance back toward local autonomy. It’s been a little over 200 years since the Hartford Convention. Perhaps this is the end of a long cycle and the return to normalcy.

The Answer Is Always More

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One of the more entertaining bits of black humor on Steve Sailer’s blog are the stories he posts about how every problem can be solved with more immigration. No matter the problem, someone will have a reason why the solution to it is more immigration. It’s as if our elites have a bizarre form of Tourette’s, where any stimulation causes them to blurt out lines from Emma Lazarus. When the lunacy of their claims is pointed out, the response is usually just a blank stare, suggesting their enthusiasm for open borders is involuntary.

The reason for this is the people championing open borders are not working from a set of facts, or arguments from those facts. Sure, the indentured servant lobbies are thinking in economic terms. The refugee lobbies want the money spigot to remain open, but these are relatively small influences on public debate. The vast majority of people championing open borders have no monetary incentives. They are doing it because they view the issue in purely moral terms. They are pro-immigrant in the same way normal people are pro-life.

Among the cognitive elites, there is a strong social incentive for embracing ever more extreme positions on the popular fads of the moment. It’s how we went so quickly from tolerating homosexuals to embracing mentally disturbed men in sundresses. Similarly, it is how miscegenation went from casual outlier to the only acceptable form of mating. When it comes to immigration, the furthest possible extreme is open borders, so the game is to come up with ever more creative ways of justifying it.

When looking at it in moral terms, it helps explain why both types of Progressive have gone berserk on the issue of immigration. Fundamentally, the so-called Left and the so-called Right share the same moral framework. Both sides of Progressivism embrace an intolerant, smothering set of universal principles rooted in the blank slate. All people everywhere are the same and interchangeable. As Senator Lindsey Graham would put it, people don’t exist as flesh and blood beings, but rather as ideals.

Anyway, it is good to keep that in mind when seeing so-called conservatives make their pitch for open borders. This piece in the hilariously misnamed American Conservative is a a rather bizarre attempt to justify redefining temporary to mean permanent.

That’s why this recent decision will be particularly advantageous for MS-13. Realistically, the federal government will be unable to enforce this immigration policy. Likewise, the vast majority of the 200,000 Salvadorans are unlikely to voluntarily leave. Instead, they’ll live in the shadows as prey for MS-13.

Trump has masterfully used MS-13 as a straw man in the immigration debate. The constant references to this glorified street gang leave the impression that most illegal immigrants are violent felons. It is a particularly artful tactic, given that 80 percent of voters believe that illegal immigrants convicted of a felony should be deported.

However, the vast majority of the 200,000 Salvadorans aren’t violent criminals. Although Hurricane Mitch is listed as their official reason for refugee status, the reality is that a high percentage of these people fled to the U.S. to escape violence in El Salvador.

Those who do return will be much more vulnerable back in El Salvador where MS-13 and their rival, Barrio 18, control large swaths of the country. In turn, assets these immigrants acquired while working in the U.S. will eventually be appropriated by these gangs.

There is a common misconception that a “weak immigration policy” led to the rise of MS-13. In fact, it was the aggressive deportation policy of the Clinton administration that transformed MS-13 into a transnational criminal organization.

You see how this works?

Enforcing the law creates more criminals. This sort of sophistry that has become common, because there is no rational argument in favor of open borders. As Americans have become familiar with the facts, the open borders people are left with mendacity as their only option. Coming up with the most extreme justifications inevitably leads to defending the indefensible, not on merit, but as a form of virtue signalling. Demanding easy access to Americans by bloodthirsty criminal gangs is extreme in the extreme.

This quest for the most virtuous position on the immigration topic answers the question posed in this post by Sailer. If all people are the same, that we’re just interchangeable meat sticks, there can be no moral justification for inequality and diversity. Our elites see diversity as the result of some evil force. Nothing can be too extreme when combating evil. More important, one cannot be seen by his coevals as beyond the pale when he is engaged in combating evil. The crazier the better when it comes fanatics.

It’s also why appeals to reason never work with these people. We are ruled over by fanatics, convinced that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. They are like addicts seeking a high more intense than the one before it. You don’t talk an addict out of his blind quest for the ultimate high. He has to find that limit on his own. That usually means dying in a pool of his own vomit. That’s most likely the fate of our rulers. They will realize they have gone too far just as the trap door snaps open and they begin the drop.

Fences Make Good Neighbors

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Way back during the election, when Trump was still just an annoyance in the Republican primary, the obvious way to cut him off at the pass was to co-opt his issues. This is a tried and true way for establishments to neutralize outside challengers in electoral politics. In the case of Republicans, they just needed their guys to take immigration and trade seriously. A guy like Kasich was perfect, as he had been pretty good on both issues in his career. He could have been the reasonable guy and stolen both issues.

That did not happen, of course. Instead, all of the candidates went the exact opposite direction, thinking that their ticket to the winner’s circle was to be the most over-the-top anti-Trump loon on the ballot. It was a crazy thing to watch. No matter the reason, the decision has turned out to be a big one. In the fullness of time, it will be looked upon as one of those small decisions that had world changing, downstream consequences, and not just for Americans. News brings word that Mexico is looking for a Trump of their own.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s campaign rhetoric can make him sound like a Mexican Donald Trump.

The left-leaning front-runner in Mexico’s presidential race is overtly nationalistic, pushes “Mexican people first” policies and peppers his speeches with anti-establishment slogans that thrill the working-class Mexicans who flock to his rallies.

But while his style might be distinctly Trumpian, his policy prescriptions could not be more different. Indeed, the election of the former mayor of Mexico City could be disastrous for Trump and his administration, creating an even more charged relationship between the two countries that could reduce cooperation on border security, trade and immigration.

That worries U.S. politicians and business leaders, including House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas), who was not shy about expressing his disdain for López Obrador at an event last fall hosted by the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce.

“I do not want to see President [López] Obrador take office next year,” McCaul said, adding he fears the Trump administration could increase those chances if it mishandles talks on revamping the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada.

We live in a time when every event will be cast as bad news for Trump, every Trump move will be bad news for us and all the good news will be pitched as bad news in the long run. This was the pattern in the Reagan years.The booming economy was always bracketed by stories about the homeless and stories about middle-aged men working at fast food joints. That’s what we see here. Mexico electing a nationalist may or may not be bad news for Mexico, but it is unquestionably good news for Trump and America.

The one card the globalists have to play against the nationalists is that globalism promotes peace and cooperation among national elites. The rulers of European countries meet over cocktails and wildly expensive appetizers, rather than on the battlefield. Cooperation, between Mexican elites and American elites, means cordial relations between the two countries on issues like trade, drugs and migration. If every country is going for nationalists leaders all of a sudden, the globalists no longer have that card to play.

In the case of Mexico, their elites are so corrupt they make our elites look like good government idealists by comparison. As Steve Sailer is fond of pointing out, Mexico has been run by an organized crime family for generations. The Bush family is monstrous, but they are nowhere near as toxic as the Salinas family. That said, populism in that part of the world tends to mean crazy Marxists and deranged academics, who also happen to be Marxists. Making Mexico Venezuela is the most likely result of populism.

Still, the right answer for Americans is for our rulers to put pressure on Mexican elites to stem the flow of drugs and migrants into America. The dirty little secret is that the migrants coming over the border are not Mexicans. These are Central Americans given safe passage and aid by the Mexican government. The same is true of the drug trade, which is a key source of revenue for the Mexican ruling class. It’s not an accident that Mexican Donald Trump is promising to amnesty drug war criminals.

The bigger issue though is a tough talking Mexican president would crystallize support in America for a hard line with Mexico. Americans may have doubts about Trump, but they will rally to his side in a dispute with a foreign leader. With a booming economy, fear of economic repercussions lose their bite. That and good times give American presidents more room to maneuver on the world stage. The last thing the Mexican ruling class needs right now is a head of state who is going to be a foil to Donald Trump.

The truth is, the Mexican ruling class needs to be on good terms with America. If the cost of doing that is reining in their criminal element, that’s good for the people of both countries. Mexico does not have to be Afghanistan, where warlords run the countryside, living off criminal enterprises. If Trump’s rhetoric helps put pressure on the Mexican political system, forcing a degree of responsible government on them, that’s good for Mexicans and Americans. if not, then we just need to build a big wall on the border.