Peggy Noonan Against Senate Bill

Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it’s being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill’s Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay’s pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you’re not, you cur, you gun-totin’ truckdriver’s-hat-wearin’ yahoo. It’s all so complex, and you’d understand this if you weren’t sort of dumb.

Yes. Nice Peggy Noonan wrote that, including the italics.

Yeah. Well. Americans don’t go for that popinjay attitude. And I’d say that for some time the American people have been looking for a way to blow their political popinjays a raspberry. We can’t do it on Social Security; we can’t do it on the war. But we can do it on immigration.

What would Peggy have us do?

We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we’ve eaten.

Close the borders, she says, and have a conversation. That may not be as easy as she thinks, if you read what Alan Reynolds had to say recently.

While we are having our conversation we should go to work on our existing immigrants.

As we end illegal immigration, we should set ourselves to the Americanization of the immigrants we have. They haven’t only joined a place of riches, it’s a place of meaning. We must teach them what it is they’ve joined and why it is good and what is expected of them and what is owed.

And we know who has been stopping the Americanization process in recent decades.

Peggy insists that the solution should not lead to scenes of sobbing families being torn apart and sent away on buses.

But one commentator pointed out that you probably don’t have to do that to call a halt to illegal immigration. All you have to do is get a bit tougher: Tougher on apprehending illegals and tougher on employers who hire them. It really is a dollars and cents thing. If it costs too much to hire the coyote to get you across the border, then fewer people will come. If it is too hard to avoid arrest by local law enforcement, fewer people will come.

It’s a control issue. America needs immigration. It just doesn’t need immigration that swamps the existing culture. The United States of America is a remarkable society. Why it should be so favored with staggering prosperity and good government is a question that many people have asked and few have really answered, even the great Tocqueville.

If we wanted to guess how to keep our prosperity and our good government the best answer would probably be: Change things, but don’t change things too fast.

That, of course, has been the conservative prescription ever since Edmund Burke.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.