By Mike Gray

The combination of intended and unintended consequences, and legal and illegal immigration, is transforming American society.

— Mark R. Levin

American laborers stand to be the biggest losers when “immigration” is allowed to proceed unchecked, but in a bitterly ironic development labor unions stand to win big from it.

Mark Levin explains:

The unions view the large influx of both legal and illegal immigrants as a new source of political clout that favors their allies in the Democratic Party and potentially adds membership to their own dwindling numbers. They came to the same realization as historian Samuel Lubell, who noted that the voting-age children of the first great migration [in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries] constituted “the big-city masses [who] furnished the votes which re-elected [Franklin] Roosevelt again and again—and, in the process, ended the traditional Republican majority in this country.” And there can be no doubt, as a practical matter, that the Statist’s benefits-for-votes promises is an attractive albeit destructive enticement.

Thus, like so many other non-political things in American culture, the mere act of admitting new citizens has become politicized beyond all reason:

The Statist tolerates the illegal alien’s violations of working, wage, and environmental standards, because the aliens’ babies born in America are, under the current interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, treated as United States citizens. And under the Hart-Cellar Act, upon turning twenty-one years of age, the child can sponsor additional family members for citizenship. From the Statist’s perspective, the pool of future administrative state constituents and sympathetic voters is potentially bottomless.

The Fourteenth Amendment? What does an act meant to confer meaningful citizenship on newly-freed slaves have to do with this? Nothing, unless you’re of a mind to deliberately misinterpret it:

The relevant part of the amendment reads that “all persons, born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” This language requires more than birth within the United States. The amendment’s purpose was to grant citizenship to the emancipated slaves, who were born in the United States and owed sole allegiance to it. Native Americans who were also subject to tribal jurisdiction were excluded from citizenship. There is no legislative history supporting the absurd proposition that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to empower illegal alien parents to confer American citizenship on their own babies merely as a result of their birth in the United States. Foreign visitors and diplomats are not subject to American jurisdiction. Illegal aliens are subject to the jurisdiction of their home country, as are their children, whether they are born in their home country or the United States.

But aren’t we all immigrants or the children of immigrants (yes, even the Indians crossed a land bridge somewhere back there)? Levin punctures that sentimental and too-often-invoked excuse for unimpeded “immigration”:

. . . . to say that America is a nation of immigrants and no more is to conflate society with immigration and treat them as equivalents. They are not. Immigration can contribute to the well-being of society, but it can also contribute to its demise. The social contract is a compact between and among Americans, not Americans and the world’s citizens. The American government governs by the consent of its citizens, not the consent of aliens and their governments. Moreover, American citizens are not interchangeable with all other citizens, American culture is not interchangeable with all other cultures, and the American government is not interchangeable with all other governments. The purpose of immigration policies must be to preserve and improve the American society.

Unfortunately, not everyone shares Levin’s vision of preserving and improving American society, often employing “immigration” as another weapon in their arsenal to transform culture into something more to their liking (and personal benefit):

As is his practice, the Statist engages in tactics intended to proscribe debate. Those who dissent from his immigration policies are often characterized as exclusionists, nativists, xenophobes, or even racists. The neo-Statist [e.g., RINOs and Neo-cons] offers no alternative to the status quo and condemns the Conservative for not going along. He not only accomodates Balkanization but panders to it. But the good citizen contributes to the social cohesion of the civil society—for his own benefit and the benefit of that society. And he expects his government to do the same.

You can buy Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny, from which these quotations have been extracted, at Amazon.com here. For some thoughts critical of multiculturalism, go here.

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Tags: 'Liberty and Tyranny' (book), Fourteenth Amendment, immigration policy, labor unions, Mark Levin, Politics, Economics, History, Etc., Samuel Lubell