The big government shutdown, as people know by now, happened over the failure by the U.S. Senate to fund a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Here on Long Island, the House of Representatives vote, as elsewhere, went down along party lines, with Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D—Glen Cove) voting no on the wall.
America has thrown in the towel on the immigration issue for a variety of reasons. The Democrats want the immigrant vote to grow and grow until it punches out the GOP’s traditional white working-class and white middle-class vote. Meanwhile, the GOP’s donors want the cheap labor that mass immigration affords. Such immigration decreases wages and fattens corporate profits for those same executives. Plus, there is ideology. The United States, unlike say, China or Japan, is a nation of immigrants. Mexico can build a wall along its border with Honduras. Israel can build its own wall to keep terrorists out of that country. No one complains. The United States can do no such thing. It is a nation of immigrants and in this case, not even a nation of laws.
Since 1945, the story of Western history has been the mass migrations, legal and illegal, from the global South to the global North. Since the global North labors under the guilty conscience of World War II, it can do nothing about the problem, lest it be guilty of the crimes of its vanquished enemy in that great conflict. Consider only the name-calling directed at any politician who broaches the subject. The difference between the U.S. and Europe is that the old continent is home to numerous anti-immigration parties, some of whom who are part of ruling coalitions and others who have a solid grip on power. The United States has no such parties. Our erstwhile New Yorker in the White House does take a moderately hard line on immigration, but he doesn’t have enough allies in his own party, let alone among Democrats.
America’s 40 year-history of open borders reminds us of a captain who sails his vessel to the edge of Niagara Falls—and then decides to press the pedal to the floor. Open borders is leaving the U.S. as a nation with no control—none!—over its destiny.
