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Thread: Open Borders Romantics

  1. #1

    Open Borders Romantics

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...-reihan-salam/

    September 25, 2018


    Immigration will only benefit our country if we’re committed to assimilating new arrivals.

    Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is adapted from Reihan Salam’s new book, Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case against Open Borders. It appears here with permission.

    Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger,” said President Barack Obama, “for we know the heart of a stranger — for we were strangers once too. . . . And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal — that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.”

    One of Obama’s great talents was his unsurpassed ability to stack the rhetorical deck. Here he was announcing his executive order for deportation relief in 2014. To disagree with him was not just to reject his take on the costs and benefits of a particular policy, it was to oppress a stranger, which no less an authority than Scripture tells us is a very bad thing to do. Yet there was a small wrinkle in the former president’s remarks. While calling on his fellow citizens to welcome the millions of strangers who make their way to our country to better their lives, he also insisted that his executive action would shield only those who’d been in the country unlawfully for five years or more. Moreover, it did not extend to those who might settle in the United States unlawfully in the future.

    But surely those who’ve been in the country for, say, four years are strangers who deserve our compassion, too. Having praised unauthorized immigrants who work hard in low-paying jobs and who worship in our churches, the president must understand that there are tens of millions of people around the world who would gladly do the same, even if it meant risking their lives. According to one survey, there are roughly 700 million people around the world who would like to move permanently to another country, and 165 million of them say that their first choice would be to move to the United States. My guess is that the vast majority of these aspiring immigrants are decent people who mean us no harm. If the Biblical injunction against oppressing a stranger is to serve as the lodestar of our immigration policy, why on Earth would we set any limits at all?

    Obama’s expansive language gave succor to open-borders romantics— and to the most demagogic voices on the other side of the debate, up to and including the man who succeeded him in the White House. Together, these forces are making it all but impossible to craft a durable immigration compromise. The irony is that Obama had a different and more potent argument at his disposal, namely, that the young people to whom he was offering deportation relief weren’t strangers at all. Because of our decades-long failure to enforce our immigration laws, an arrangement that suited unscrupulous low-wage employers just fine, they had become part of our communities. There was a perfectly good case for doing right by them while also embracing resolute enforcement, a case Obama gestured toward early in his presidency, yet which open-borders activists came to angrily reject in its waning days. The result is that immigration polices championed by liberals and centrists as recently as the 2000s are now routinely denounced as unacceptably extreme.

    Immigration policy is not about whether to be welcoming or hard-headed. Short of absolutely open borders, which most advocates of more-open borders at least claim to reject, it is about compromise. Like it or not, we need to weigh competing interests and moral goods, and to adjust our approach over time. An immigration policy that might have made sense in years past, when the labor-market prospects of low-skill workers were much brighter, and when the number of working-class immigrants struggling to get by was much smaller, has entirely different implications today.

    In the chapters that follow, I will offer a series of choices that go beyond open or closed. I’ll begin by explaining the danger America faces if we don’t find a way to return to the melting pot. I will then argue that we need to see immigration through a multi-generational lens. Policies that might make sense if we were indifferent to the fact of children of immigrants won’t make sense when we recognize that our future hinges on those later generations’ well-being.

    The prescriptions I lay out are, frankly, pretty demanding, not just of government, but of all of us as citizens. We should admit immigrants only if we are fully committed to their integration and assimilation. Our number-one priority should be ensuring that new arrivals and their loved ones can flourish as part of the American mainstream, not turning a blind eye as millions languish in poverty-stricken ghettos. That means fostering economic opportunity and a more inclusive American cultural identity. It means resisting class stratification and ethnic balkanization. The overall rate of immigration, the cultural and social capital immigrants bring with them, and the skills composition of the immigrant influx as a whole all contribute to our chances of achieving this ambitious goal.

    Ultimately, I want a country that does right by all of its citizens. America has been through challenging periods before, when it seemed as though the discontent of masses of urban immigrants might overturn the established order, and when older natives and younger newcomers were locked in cultural combat. Yet in earlier generations, at least some of our leaders had the wisdom to make the sacrifices necessary to knit a divided country back together. Just as the New Dealers found a way to unite the children of immigrants in smokestack cities with the descendants of settlers and the enslaved, we need to connect the fortunes of immigrant-rich communities, like the ones where I was raised, and the heartland, where coastal diversity is often looked on with suspicion.

    From Melting Pot or Civil War by Reihan Salam, published by Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2018 RMS Media Consulting Inc.





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  3. #2
    Still doesn't explain how immigration isn't a 10th Amendment issue.

    Also, I'm immediately disinclined to take advice on immigration policy from a man named "Reihan Salam". If there is any one group of people I would build strong fences to keep out, it's the ones that forced his ancestors to start using names like that.
    There are no crimes against people.
    There are only crimes against the state.
    And the state will never, ever choose to hold accountable its agents, because a thing can not commit a crime against itself.

  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by fisharmor View Post
    Still doesn't explain how immigration isn't a 10th Amendment issue.

    Also, I'm immediately disinclined to take advice on immigration policy from a man named "Reihan Salam". If there is any one group of people I would build strong fences to keep out, it's the ones that forced his ancestors to start using names like that.
    Originally Posted by Sonny Tufts

    Here's an article that argues that the federal government's power over immigration is based on the Law of Nations Clause in Article I, Section 8, Clause 10:

    https://i2i.org/where-congresss-powe...on-comes-from/
    https://www.constitution.org/cmt/law_of_nations.htm

    The meaning of "Offenses against the Law of Nations"

    Art. I Sec. 8 Cl. 10 of the Constitution for the United States delegates the power to Congress to "define and punish ... Offenses against the Law of Nations". It is important to understand what is and is not included in the term of art "law of nations", and not confuse it with "international law". They are not the same thing. The phrase "law of nations" is a direct translation of the Latin jus gentium, which means the underlying principles of right and justice among nations, and during the founding era was not considered the same as the "laws", that is, the body of treaties and conventions between nations, the jus inter gentes, which, combined with jus gentium, comprise the field of "international law". The distinction goes back to ancient Roman Law.

    Briefly, the Law of Nations at the point of ratification in 1788 included the following general elements, taken from Blackstone's Commentaries, and prosecution of those who might violate them:

    (1) No attacks on foreign nations, their citizens, or shipping, without either a declaration of war or letters of marque and reprisal.

    (2) Honoring of the flag of truce, peace treaties, and boundary treaties. No entry across national borders without permission of national authorities.

    (3) Protection of wrecked ships, their passengers and crew, and their cargo, from depredation by those who might find them.

    (4) Prosecution of piracy by whomever might be able to capture the pirates, even if those making the capture or their nations had not been victims.

    (5) Care and decent treatment of prisoners of war.

    (6) Protection of foreign embassies, ambassadors, and diplomats, and of foreign ships and their passengers, crew, and cargo while in domestic waters or in port.

    (7) Honoring of extradition treaties for criminals who committed crimes in a nation with whom one has such a treaty who escape to one's territory or are found on the high seas established with all nations in 1788,

    (8) Prohibition of enslavement of foreign nationals and international trading in slaves.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  5. #4
    That must be why for almost a century the federal government did pretty much nothing to control immigration.

    The founders must really have been wise to grant a power that nobody even knew about for almost a century.
    There are no crimes against people.
    There are only crimes against the state.
    And the state will never, ever choose to hold accountable its agents, because a thing can not commit a crime against itself.

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by fisharmor View Post
    That must be why for almost a century the federal government did pretty much nothing to control immigration.

    The founders must really have been wise to grant a power that nobody even knew about for almost a century.
    They knew about it, they just didn't use it because they didn't think they needed to at that time, there are other powers in the Constitution that they didn't use either.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  7. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by fisharmor View Post
    Still doesn't explain how immigration isn't a 10th Amendment issue.

    Also, I'm immediately disinclined to take advice on immigration policy from a man named "Reihan Salam". If there is any one group of people I would build strong fences to keep out, it's the ones that forced his ancestors to start using names like that.
    You can read the Constitution and see that immigration is explicitly enumerated in the powers of Congress ("uniform rule of Naturalization"), and confirmed by implication.

    While one may argue at length as to whether naturalization was then considered to cover immigration also, the next section leaves no room for reasonable doubt that that is the case:

    The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight
    No reason for this clause to exist unless post-1808 immigration could be prohibited by Congress afterwards, which in turn means that the enumerated power of naturalization also covers legal immigration (while the duty to protect against invasion covers the illegal kind).

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by thoughtomator View Post
    You can read the Constitution and see that immigration is explicitly enumerated in the powers of Congress ("uniform rule of Naturalization"), and confirmed by implication.

    While one may argue at length as to whether naturalization was then considered to cover immigration also, the next section leaves no room for reasonable doubt that that is the case:



    No reason for this clause to exist unless post-1808 immigration could be prohibited by Congress afterwards, which in turn means that the enumerated power of naturalization also covers legal immigration (while the duty to protect against invasion covers the illegal kind).
    Are you on crack? That 1808 clause is clearly about the importation of new slaves and there has never been an alternate explanation of it prior to you closet racists pulling 10 th amendment violtion apologetics out of your asses.
    There are no crimes against people.
    There are only crimes against the state.
    And the state will never, ever choose to hold accountable its agents, because a thing can not commit a crime against itself.

  9. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by fisharmor View Post
    Are you on crack? That 1808 clause is clearly about the importation of new slaves and there has never been an alternate explanation of it prior to you closet racists pulling 10 th amendment violtion apologetics out of your asses.
    Are you always this comfortable calling people names and throwing baseless accusations?



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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by fisharmor View Post
    Are you on crack? That 1808 clause is clearly about the importation of new slaves and there has never been an alternate explanation of it prior to you closet racists pulling 10 th amendment violtion apologetics out of your asses.
    It clearly refers to a power that the federal government would have, I have shown you that it is based in the "law of nations" power.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    They knew about it, they just didn't use it because they didn't think they needed to at that time, there are other powers in the Constitution that they didn't use either.
    It took a while, about almost 80 years, for a POTUS to get even close to being as impeachable as DJT is now...
    From John Adams to the Senate Trial of 1868 there is 68 years. 131 years seperate A.J from Comrade Bill...

  13. #11
    Logically, a border with Mexico , an undeveloped piece of _____ hole of a country cannot remain open to civilized Arizona.
    Here is why:
    cartels operating businesses
    cartels human trafficking
    cartels recruiting
    cartels sending coyotes into close proximities of our cities, in hiking trails that once were safe to use
    criminals moving here to escape their country all the way from south america (yes this is real, since the 1990s.my dad knows spanish and english,and has spoken to them directly, and these day laborers have told him stories that most of you wont hear).
    Open border is an incentive for enemies of the people to exploit.
    did I mention that Mexico is a shiiit hole? Who wouldn't want to escape it...but incentivizing a trek across the desert in which cartels now exploit? NO.

    Its common sense. I also have come to learn that if your USPS or UPS delivery courier leaves a shipment on your doorstep...that you better expect the criminals to start checking your doorstep every day, and that you will become a target of crime. THAT is exactly the logic behind why open borders is stupid...it invites crimes of the highest degree.



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