They may be forever sleepless in Seattle, but the Republicans masquerade on mass immigration suggests the makeover of America will continue apace and should have the Democrats California dreamin’ on such a winter’s day
By Mark Cromer
When it comes to mass immigration and America, 2017 is destined to be remembered as the Year of Needless Worry among tens of millions of illegal immigrants, their employers and the networks of their advocates long established to support an endless migrant flow into the United States.
It was the year when empty talk for the cameras sparked faux panic for the cameras that produced epic grandstanding for the cameras and ultimately resulted in nothing but more of the same for the nation’s citizens.
It was the year when DACA ‘dreamers’ met Wall Street schemers and foreshadowed another American nightmare to come.
One only need to consider what hasn’t happened over the past year to understand what is going to happen in the months and years to come: E-Verify has not been made mandatory for all employers, not one mile of an actual border wall has been built, there’s been no substantial or sustained enforcement actions at major worksites across the country, there’s been no action by America’s political leadership for serious criminal charges and civil penalties against employers of illegal workers and there’s been no truly dramatic escalation of enforcement measures taken against the self-declared ‘sanctuary cities.’
And there still hasn’t been any effort by the federal government to actually quantify the population of foreigners illegally present in the United States. For more than a decade a figure of 11 million illegal immigrants living and working in America has essentially fossilized and been codified in newsrooms even as its waved about the halls of Congress like a cheap prop imbued with some Biblical truth, but even in 2006 that number was deeply deflated for purely political purposes as then President George W. Bush saddled up with Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy in what became a failed effort to secure another mass amnesty. Just the year prior to that, in 2005, the global investment bank Bear Stearns released an exhaustive study by Robert Justich and Betty Ng that concluded the number of illegal immigrants then in the United States could be as high as 20 million people or more.
Whatever the actual number is today, one thing is abundantly clear: the governing political class does not want that figure known. And the fact that the federal government has never tried to reliably quantify the population of illegal immigrants living in the United States clearly suggests the true number is vastly larger than the 11 million people that has been presented as the known universe on this issue.
The bipartisan consensus inside the Beltway correctly holds that if the American people—meaning actual citizens—were informed that there are in fact 25 million or more foreigners living and working illegally in the United States, the resulting political ‘fallout’ might well lead to the disintegration of the current social construct amid violent civil unrest and would not just extinguish any hope for another mass amnesty but would likely unravel the profit centers, both political and financial, that mass immigration has delivered both parties and their business benefactors.
So instead of addressing the issue by first establishing an accurate accounting of the size of the population in question, the leadership of both parties have effectively agreed to retreat into their respective tropes, with the Democrats preaching in one-dimensional terms of an invigorating human tide that is the engine of enrichment that keeps America bright, young and vital; while the Republicans recite their double-talk of securing the borders (and just the borders) while simultaneously granting an amnesty that would benefit their owners and shareholders.
It’s the same old song and dance.
Thus it seems like a particularly odd time for Ann Coulter to profess confusion about the leadership of the Republican Party’s negotiating position as the efforts to settle the contentious issue of illegal immigrants and especially those covered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—the politically sugar-frosted ‘Dreamers’—remains stuck in high-gear.
While it may appear that the Democrats capitulation to restart the government without any deal on DACA is a loss for the Left, it only appears that way for now.
Yes, Sen. Chuck Schumer’s drastic miscalculation as to how the shutdown would play across the country was an epic blunder that he walked into in slow-motion and it highlighted once more just how utterly detached the liberal leadership remains from working Americans of every stripe, but he recovered in time to likely avert any lasting damage and instead will allow the Republicans to carry the ball of a mass amnesty into the end zone for him and his team, where the Democrats will then dance the Ickey Shuffle and spike the progressive pigskin in their victory strut.
As well they should, because when it happens—when, not if—they’ve won.
If the Republican Party’s leadership has their way the GOP will not only be the proud signatories of their own party’s political death warrant, but also will bear beaming witness to the end of America as a sovereign nation-state as its final transition into a balkanized, chaotic and violent land teeming with favelas and all that cheap labor that toils under a corrupt one-party system as the continued resettlement of tens of millions of people from foreign shores across the globe continues without even a pause let alone an end.
This is not a dystopian projection of a grim American future, rather it is the stark reality of California today as the state actually does break off from the rest of the country as it slides into a sea of people and disappears as anything recognizable from its once storied and not-so-distant past.
And just as the Republican Party committed the political equivalent of Jonestown in California by drinking the Kool-Aid of open borders and amnesty that in but a generation remade the Golden State from a moderate GOP bastion to the deep blue anchor that has delivered 55 electoral votes to the Democrats in every single election since 1992—seven elections straight now—it will continue to almost certainly do so even as the state implodes or until the country’s unraveling is so complete that national elections no longer matter.
Framed more succinctly: Republicans have been unable to win a single statewide office in California for more than a decade and now routinely no longer qualify for the senatorial or gubernatorial run-offs in which the two highest vote-getters of any party face each other. The GOP can no longer expect to advance past the primaries into the fall elections and this June will likely see Democrats Antonio Villaraigosa and Gavin Newsom move into the fall final for the governor’s seat. It will be a Los Angeles versus San Francisco contest, but not a Republican in sight.
And as California goes, so goes the nation, in this case just a little later.
At the present pace of immigration, Virginia, North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona and Florida will slide irreversibly into the Democrats reliable electoral line-up between 2024 and 2028, depending on variables that range from voter registration laws to in-country migration patterns and the withdrawal of the working class white turnout, and as that happens the loss of the ‘Blue Wall’ that was Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin becomes increasingly irrelevant to the Democratic Party.
While Coulter understands the cold reality of this and she relentlessly employs her rapier wit and keen intellect as she writes and talks about mass immigration on the pundit circle, she still professes to be shocked, saddened and confused at times that the Republicans are playing ‘good cop’ to the Democrats ‘bad cop’ on mass immigration as the parties seek to cajole another sweeping amnesty out of an American people that Washington has long considered suspect.
Just weeks ago, as GOP senatorial stalwarts huddled with President Trump at the White House and then at Camp David and then back again at the White House amid negotiations over how to best extend another mass amnesty, it became abundantly clear that the Republicans believe they are now tantalizingly close to closing a deal that will ensure the Nike-like marketing slogan ‘Just Get Here’ continues to blare across the globe.
Coming on the heels of their frantic production of It’s A Wall Street Christmas where they danced a chorus line and sang and slapped their backs while slashing the corporate tax rate while preserving the so-called ‘carried interest’ loophole as demanded by their hedge fund and private equity house owners, the Republicans’ move to ensure that the vast tide of cheap ‘labor capital’ (to use the approved vernacular of their corporate sponsor the U.S. Chamber Commerce) continues to pour into America seems like a logical choice for their next show.
Yet somehow Coulter seems bizarrely befuddled by it all.
“What I can’t understand is the Republicans,” Coulter told Lou Dobbs on his Fox Business Network cable news show as the showdown over DACA loomed. “It’s the strangest thing. Why is the first thing that we have to concentrate on is granting amnesty?” The venerable business reporter Dobbs, who had reinvented his own career as an immigration restrictionist toward the end of his long career at CNN before joining Fox, also seemed slightly perplexed by the GOP’s alleged bargaining stance on the issue.
“We’ve got a lot of Republicans who are dirt dumb and don’t understand,” Dobbs said, opining that the GOP seemed to not grasp what has been at stake for more than the past decade since President George W. Bush teamed with Sen. John McCain’s ‘Gang of Eight’ and sought to pass the largest immigration amnesty in the history of nation-states.
The Republican position on mass immigration is neither confusing nor dumb nor is it new, at least through the lens of the GOP’s leadership or anyone else that has been paying attention to them for longer than an election cycle.
It’s simply a matter of cold calculus.
The corporate comptrollers of the Republican Party love markets and worship profits, they have neither the time nor the inclination to consider let alone respect such things as cultural cohesiveness and national identities and interests. The corporatists do not believe in e pluribus unum, they only believe in from many come many more and more after that to feed their vast ranchland of consumers. They are ranchers counting their heads of cattle—opiated and instant media-addicted cattle, chewing cud and reliably buying things as they live to work to buy.
This is the corporatists dream, this is their Xanadu, and they’re counting on their GOP cowboys to continue to herd that cattle drive all the way to their paradise.
Where the Democratic Party’s leadership has realized since 1965 that the road to its future and its enduring power lay ultimately in completely reconfiguring the lay of the American demographic landscape and it has remained on that trail like a hound on the hunt ever since, the Republican Party has played a double-game for almost as long, cynically evoking the sovereignty of the nation to win elections while simultaneously locking arms and standing cheek to jowl with corporate interests for whom a competitive labor pool that reliably elevates wages for the average working stiff beyond the so-called ‘cost of living’—and even that bar is too high for them—is about as appealing as Ricin martinis at Happy Hour.
Whatever one may say about the Democratic Party’s leadership’s steady abandonment of the working class and the working middle class over the decades, subsuming them into an agenda forged around mass immigration from developing nations (or Trump’s Port-a-Potties), they have at least been candidly honest of late about their ultimate intent: America must be remade. It must be recast. And in particular, working white Americans must go en masse. They no longer care to disguise their utter contempt for the people that once constituted the bedrock base as well as the heart and soul of their party. The Democratic Party’s leadership wants America to be re-booted to USA v.2.5, fully loaded with all the chaotic software of an overcrowded, impoverished developing world country but without any of the annoying bugs of a dominant culture they define by sunscreen and a relative command of the English language.
Make no mistake, the Democratic Party’s leadership cares not a wit more for the vast herd of electoral cattle they intend to run into America than the Republican leadership does—one only need to consider the future of legal immigrants already here to understand that—but again, at least Schumer, Pelosi & Co. have finally dispensed with all but the most passing pleasantries about it, even as their ilk fire their conveniently dubbed ‘undocumented’ maid/nanny/gardener for daring to request a raise or a day off.
So as America teeters on the precipice, Coulter should have no illusion whatsoever now as to whether the Republicans will try to prevent her from going over the edge. As the Democrats are pushing her, the GOP is shouting ‘Jump!’
Trump used his first State of The Union address to answer the call of the Republicans’ masters and announced that he’s willing to give a cherry of a mulligan to two million immigrants illegally in the country, ostensibly under the auspices of DACA even though roughly 800,000 people registered for the protected status granted under the program. When President Obama first announced his intent to shield this subset of illegal immigrants in 2012, the American people were told that his order would cover several hundred thousand migrants that had been brought here illegally as children. Nearly a million have signed up for it and more than a million are ostensibly eligible but have yet to seek status under its provisions but the real rub will be seen if an actual DACA amnesty is passed.
For passage will surely trigger another vast surge across the southern frontier and, when coupled with the extensive fraud that is already endemic in the country’s immigration system, will combine to explode the actual population of an amnesty under DACA to closer to 4 million or more illegal immigrants. That would simply be a replay of 1986’s disastrous mass amnesty that was pitched as covering 800,000 illegal immigrants and ended up being applied to more than 3 million people—many of whom successfully crossed the border just for the occasion.
For all the alleged caveats with teeth that Trump has suggested are concrete conditions before he’ll sign a DACA amnesty, they are little more than more mercurial maneuverings that will be jettisoned as soon as his administration is or possibly sooner and thus, just like in 1986, Americans will once more get millions more immigrants than advertised and not even a fraction of the enforcement measures that were used to sell this lemon of a deal.
A fully paid ‘trust fund’ for a border wall/security fence/gizmo-gadgets? A ‘reduction’ in chain-migration? Spinning off the so-called ‘diversity lottery’ visa into the backlog of immigrants who had the courtesy of playing by the rules and waiting in line?
These aren’t even half-measures and the Republicans know it, as do the Democrats, who are playing their role by shrieking that Trump’s meaningless provisions are actually a modern incarnate of the Nuremberg Laws and so draconian that it will move Republican votes in both chambers in favor of a mass amnesty.
The punch line of Trump’s offer is a ‘trust fund’ for a border wall. Now that’s funny.
Washington. Immigration. Trust. Fund. Get it? Trust. Hah!
But in doing so, Trump is merely once more employing the old illusionist tool of suggestion, the Jedi trick of encouraging the target audience to see and hear what they want to see and hear even as something else altogether happens. As such, Trump will continue to bellow into wherever the microphone finds him, burping out Twitter friendly Special Olympic-like lines about a “see through wall” that Mexico is going to have to pay for, sooner or never. He’ll stand in arenas amid crowds that roar to every lie he offers them, desperate to believe in his fidelity if only because he said so and they seemingly have nowhere else to turn and despise the elitist Left as much as the coastal crème de la crème hate them.
And the Republican leadership, from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to Speaker of The House Paul Ryan, brothers in their contempt of Trump’s fake nationalism and both of whom almost certainly voted for Madame Secretary Hillary Clinton, will chuckle and nod and whisper to the president that they’re on board with his agenda if he’ll but do something for the ‘kids’ of DACA, even as the American kids in Detroit, Chicago, Seattle, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, to name a few, wonder when Washington will declare a crisis over their grim situation?
When will Washington not shut the government down for illegal immigrants but actually make it work effectively for working American people?
Don’t hold your breath.
And Trump is so enamored with himself that he’ll do what was witnessed on camera in the run up to his State of The Union, blabbering like an ‘I love you’ drunk on a late night dial to Congress informing them that if they just get him a bill on immigration—any bill at all—he’ll “take the heat” and sign it. But he was stone sober when he said it, which is another befuddling fact that Coulter just can’t seem to grasp.
During a recent broadcast of the PBS News Hour with Judy Woodruff, New York Times columnist David Brooks mused that while the current landscape puts Democrats in the heartland in a bit of a pinch, the GOP’s posturing on immigration would prove politically fatal if they are actually somehow serious about curtailing the global human flow to America’s shores.
“If you are a [Democratic] Red State senator trying to hold onto your seat this is a bad posture for you, it’s just not good,” Brooks said. “In the longer term, of course, if the Republicans not only maintain the party of Donald Trump but they turn into the party of Tom Cotton—who wants to cut legal immigration by 50-percent—then that to me is ruinous for the party.”
Veteran journalist Woodruff dutifully sat there without so much as even a simple question as to how reducing the number of immigrants legally coming to America every year from more than a million to half that number would somehow amount to a betrayal of the American ideal and politically disastrous for a Republican Party that has seen its fortunes disappear (along with Americans classrooms, emergency rooms and job opportunities) with every successive wave of migration that has filled the coffers of its corporate pimps?
“And one of the things that is fascinating, one of the reasons that I think there is so much confusion here, is this was a party that had a very strong Lindsey Graham, John McCain and George W. Bush wing, and so, that’s shifted,” Brooks continued. “How far has it shifted? Has it shifted all the way over to Tom Cotton? A lot further than a lot of us thought.”
As crestfallen as a confused Coulter surely is, to say nothing of the more than 63-million Americans that voted for Trump’s immigration play—or more aptly fell for it—in the mistaken belief it might finally produce a real change in the open border heart of the GOP and restore some sense of ethical obligation to citizens among its policymakers, Brooks need not fret.
Trump is a one, perhaps two act show, but the captains crowded into the Republicans’ wheelhouse; Brooks’ vaunted Graham/McCain/Bush ‘wing’ of the GOP, will indeed remain huddled on the bridge long enough to steer their ghost ship into oblivion, with what remains of the nation slumped into the lifeboats in its wake.
After all, they have orders.
