Victor Davis Hanson
Next, who of the long-residing illegal aliens would be eligible for legal-resident status, and from there choose or not choose to apply on their own for U.S. citizenship?
Most would agree that this third category should include spouses of U.S. citizens; those with lengthy U.S. residence from childhood; and others with lengthy employment without criminal records. There would be neither mass amnesties nor mass deportations for these groups, but the granting of temporary residence permits while their individual cases were adjudicated.
Once the border was secure, future legal immigration should be adjusted on meritocratic and diverse criteria in numbers (100,000–250,000? per year) that could be successfully assimilated and integrated.
In other words, future immigration would not be illegal, primarily from south of the border, non-meritocratic, and in vast numbers. We should cease preferences for extended-family members but again seek out those with skill sets, crime-free backgrounds, a history of employment, proof of self-sufficiency, and diverse nationalities.
Assimilation works best when small groups arrive from many nations, not large groups arriving from a small number of nations who inevitably create ethnic enclaves analogous to Dearborn, Michigan or East Los Angeles, and thus make matters of Americanization far more difficult (if not considered a betrayal of tribal loyalties).
We wish to avoid soccer matches in which thousands of U.S. residents cheer for the foreign team and boo the American side, or communities that fund terrorist groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, or large student visa holders that brazenly spout anti-Semitic hate speech.
And the attitude of the Left toward such massive reform?
A President Trump would have support, if he acted quickly and decisively, for closing the border and deporting the first two categories, regardless of the ensuing Leftwing hysteria.
If he transmogrified the third category into a case-by-case rather than en masse, the leftist lawfare, Confederate-like sanctuary-city legal nullifications, and media hysteria would likely persuade few. The key would be to remind Americans that we are $35 trillion in debt, with the poor and middle classes struggling with high inflation and high taxes and fees, and whose key social services in large cities are inundated with illegal aliens. The problem with the Biden illegal alien agenda, inter alia, is that it privileged the illegal alien over the poor American citizen.
Remember, the Left sees open borders and illegal aliens as essential to their otherwise unpopular agenda that is failing to win 50 percent support from citizens.
The Left has no confidence in winning the people over. It sees survival only by bringing in millions of future constituencies—the poorer the better, ensuring the growth of entitlement agencies to address millions of imported poor people, higher taxes, more redistributive government, and fuel for their obsessions with tribal chauvinism and oppressed/oppressor Marxist binaries.
American assimilation and integration work, but only when immigrants are legal, diverse, and aware of why they are leaving their home nations and choosing America. Otherwise, illegal immigration can become an ungodly disaster as we have seen in the Biden nihilism of the last four years.
The leftist meltdown is not due to Trump derangement alone, but more to a realization that leftwing-inspired illegal immigration is unpopular worldwide. The Left’s no-borders agenda is failing globally and threatens to destroy the entire notion of doctrinaire pan-EU leftism.
Even neo-socialist leaders in Europe are realizing they are destroying millennia of nationhood by allowing in illegal aliens with antithetical values crashing their borders and forming enclaves, often violently so, that actively resent the traditions and ethos of their magnanimous but naive hosts.
A final thought: can we at least have a travel ban prohibiting entry from North Korea, China, Iran, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Venezuela, and Cuba—until such countries cease their support for anti-American groups and terrorists? And can we deport all those on student visas who break our laws, deface our monuments, disrupt our traffic, shut town commuter traffic, assault Jews, storm our campuses, and loudly declare they hate our guts—and on the 4th of July no less?
The post <span class="ultra-flag"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>What Should a President Trump Do? Part Two: The Border (Continued) appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.