The “Hoover Vac” Immigration Policy
9th December 2015
Freeberg nails it again.
The snooty, snotty, condescending phrase “that’s not who we are” has overstayed its welcome by a good long stretch, much like the house guests reminding of the dictum that “guests, and fish, smell after three days” — and then continuing to squat for another year or two. It’s at the point where we all should start asking ourselves how it came to be that we tolerated it this long; it reflects poorly on the nation. Aren’t we supposed to have guts and conviction in this country? And can you claim to have them, if some gasbag at a podium can persuade you to engage, or even consider, a complete one-eighty-degree course correction by throwing out some paternalistic, hackneyed catchphrase? The solution makes more of the same problem, for that is not who — you know the rest.
To the phrase ‘that’s now who we are’, the only rational response is ‘what do you mean “we”, paleface?’ (Tonto was an undiscovered gem of a political philosopher).
That’s kind of, you know, the whole point. If we aspire to be anything definable, there are going to have to be some restrictions. That’s how any organism or construct declares what it is, by way of rejecting the unlike, not by way of embracing the like. It says “I’m absolutely incompatible with that thing, over there,” and the definition is made. Such things also protect themselves against threats this way, by forming policies, written and unwritten, essentially saying “I’m not going there, and if it comes here, I’m moving.”
Well said. The number of groups in which ‘we’ includes both me and Paul Ryan is shrinking as he speaks.
But he’s [Trump] opened a very worthwhile debate that his opposition, perhaps deliberately, has turned into a very silly one. The citizenry has been led down a primrose path here; a lot of people don’t understand how much precedent such a plan has, or how unprecedented our current “Hoover Vac” immigration policy is.
It is a worthwhile and very necessary debate, one in which the Democrats and quasi-Democrats in the Republican Party are avoiding as if it had cooties.
The American solution is to look at what sort of immigrant is trying to make a life here. What kind of life is to be made? And what nobody is discussing is, the democrat solution: Go ahead and look into it, and make sure that life is one of dependency. To get on the welfare systems, stay on them, and create whole new generations of second- and third-generation immigrants, also made dependent and embracing dependency, from the crib to the crypt. So that democrats can win more elections.
The shootings in San Bernardino underline in blood that even Muslims who were born in this country can go jihadist-mass-murderer, and there’s no way to tell who that will be before it happens. That’s why it’s a problem with Islam, just a problem with certain people who, oh, just by the way, happen to be Muslim. Buddhists don’t do this shit, Hindus don’t do this shit, Jains and Sikhs and Taoists don’t do this shit; only Muslims (and wackos, which we will have always with us) do this shit. So that’s where we need to focus our attention. And the Political Correctness twitch about NOT NOTICING does not do us any favors here.
As far as the theatrical outrage about crossing some uncrossable line of bigotry, or some such. I find it thoroughly revolting that anybody, anywhere, would reach up to take solutions off the table, before it’s been made clear in any way that there are still solutions on the table that might work. Or even, that anything will work. This is not a fight our country has won yet, so who are these people working so hard to eliminate possibilities? It’s become such a regular thing, nobody seems to question it anymore; it’s yet another primrose path down which we have been innocently toddling, for years, decades, generations — we approach a particularly vexing problem that has evaded any promising solution for some indeterminate length of time, and before anybody can shed some rays of hope upon it here comes some jackass trying to make himself sound more important with a lot of “No no, oh heavens no, win or lose we can NEVER do X.”