Never missing an opportunity to demonstrate their compassion for the wretched of the earth, the Democrats have moved briskly on from “the-border-is-a-manufactured-crisis” mantra to the usual government-shutdown threnodies about laid-off workers pining to return to the Jerusalem on the Potomac, while languishing in exile by the waters of Babylon.
Alas, furloughed federal bureaucrats are living pay check to pay check, and can’t meet their next mortgage payment. Really? Were that the case, it would be hard to sympathize with them, since they earn $80,000 a year on average, and if they can’t make ends meet on that, they need to stop taking lessons in deficit spending from their government employer.
I’m waiting for someone in either party to point out that it is the lower-paid (and harder-working) deplorables in the heartland, whose taxes pay the salaries of government bureaucrats, for whom we ought, for once, to feel compassion. According to the CBO, wages for federal workers with a high school education are 34% higher than those of equivalent workers in the private sector, while the disparity in benefits is 94%. But the Democrats (once the party of the downtrodden middle and working class, but also the party of the State apparatus—a circle they might someday exert themselves to square) will never inveigh against the inordinate wealth and privilege enjoyed by the public sector, as they reflexively inveigh against private entrepreneurs; and the Republicans are too incurably pusillanimous to do anything but go along with them. In any case, every furloughed federal employee knows that he will receive his wages as soon as the partial shut-down ends, and that his soi-disant “suffering” is a paid vacation. (May Lady Fortune soon afflict me with such “suffering”.)
Meanwhile, less than three months after the Kavanaugh hearing, Democrat Party hypocrisy has ascended again to record heights in their refusal to negotiate with the President over the funding of a border wall. Trump has requested a paltry 5.7 billion dollars, one tenth of one percent of the annual federal budget, and about 3 per cent of what federal, state, and municipal governments spend on social services for the 12 to 18 million (nobody knows precisely) illegal aliens currently living in the U.S. A negotiated compromise between the two positions ought, by my calculations, to land on a figure of ca. 3 billion, a sum that Trump has already hinted he would accept. But the Democrats (though compromise is their middle name) are immutable at zero.
As recently as 2013, the Democrats approved 46 billion dollars for border security, including 8 billion for the building of 700 miles of fence, and since 2006, Chuck, Nancy, Hillary, and Barack himself have made repeated public appeals in which they have solemnly declaimed against illegal border crossings, described the U.S. immigration system as broken and in crisis, and advocated for border fences and other barriers. My best advice to the Trump administration is to shut up about illegal immigration, and let these erstwhile advocates for a wall make the case for it themselves. (If the Republicans can’t find the video clips of the Democrats’ pre-Trump, pro-Trump racism and xenophobia, they need only Google Fox News.)
But as Chuck and Nancy would have you believe, the barriers that they so recently funded are now, suddenly, not only “ineffective”, but “an immorality”. (Note to Nancy: “immorality” is an abstraction, and therefore innumerable. Violate borders if you must, but please don’t transgress against the language.)
On the ineffectiveness of walls, CNN’s Jim Acosta signed off on a deft piece of investigative journalism from a Mexican border town recently, in which he assured his viewers that all thereabouts was peaceful and calm. Look around you, he said. Do you see any migrants camping in the main square, any violent mobs threatening to burst illegally into the U.S.? No “crisis” here; only more Trumpian lies. Unfortunately, just over Acosta’s shoulder in the camera shot was a large planar object (what shall we call it–a fence/a barrier/a wall?). Could that have something to do with the absence of Guatemalans rushing the border? Are illegal aliens not perhaps intelligent enough to know that if they intend to break into the United States, an unprotected stretch of the border just down the road might offer better prospects? On the effectiveness of borders, Acosta could have saved himself a trip and consulted the statistics that reveal that since the construction of a fence along the border south of San Diego, illegal crossings have been reduced by 95%.
One might be prepared to credit progressives when they abominate walls as “an immorality” if so many of them didn’t live in gated communities far from the squalid Mexican frontier. Why, besides, do all Democrat legislators place locks on their doors? So what if a few undesirables steal a few things and sexually assault their daughters. Isn’t it “immoral” and “un-American” to turn away those of their less fortunate neighbours, who merely want a better life for themselves and their families; unceremoniously lock them out of their homes; deny them accommodation in their bedrooms; cut off access to their overflowing larders; and refuse them all the other benefits they insist American taxpayers must extend to those who surge through the undefended portals of their country? Besides, if the Democrats consider walls immoral, why haven’t they torn down the ones they erected under Obama?
For Democrats and progressives in general, the real immorality of borders (as of any legal constraints on immigration) is that the benignant victim-groups who are the children of light in their grand sacred narrative—the poor, the non-white, non-European, non-Christian–are “discriminated against”, thereby preserving in fortress Amerikkka the dark remnants of racism, sexism, homophobia, and capitalist privilege. Why people “of colour” from every corner of the globe would risk life and limb for the opportunity to live in this racist dystopia is a question progressives never ask.
They know, of course, that the post-modernist project of retiring the old bourgeois social, moral, and religious fabric of America and replacing it with their paradise of equality, diversity, and inclusion–pursued in the schools, the courts, and the media–is advanced with rather more alacrity by the simple expedient of changing the population.
It need hardly be pointed out that the inevitable consequence of open borders and unrestricted immigration is that the poor and oppressed of the world will no longer yearn to migrate to America, as she becomes indistinguishable from the dysfunctional states they once fled. But in the meantime, the Democrat Party can recruit ever more unskilled and under-educated dependents to the welfare rolls, and thereby assure itself of electoral beatitude in saecula saeculorum.