Liberal Two-Step

NRO: Dems Only Pay Lip Service On Border Control

(National Review Online)  The black establishment has followed the same pattern. Until a generation ago, all important black political figures were critical of mass immigration, including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey (an immigrant himself), and A. Philip Randolph. Today's black "leaders," on the other hand, have embraced their own people's dispossession. Take affirmative action; whatever its actual merits, the black elite obviously think the policy is important for black advancement. But as immigration has swelled, the non-black groups that had been tacked on to the list of minority beneficiaries, just for show, have come to outnumber blacks. One would think that the black leadership would be fighting to limit affirmative action for immigrants; one would be wrong: As the late Hugh Davis Graham wrote in Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America, the EEOC, chaired by Eleanor Holmes Norton, briefly tried in 1980 to protect black workers from immigrant use of affirmative action, but it failed, and never tried again. Perhaps even more outrageous, Rep. John Lewis and other prominent black politicians gave their blessing to the "freedom rides" staged in 2003 by advocates of amnesty for illegal aliens by equating enforcement of immigration laws to Jim Crow. It's gotten so bad that Kwesi Mfume, while head of the NAACP, said, "We're changing because we see America is changing," and made clear that the group was no longer concerned just about blacks, because "colored people come in all colors."

This pattern is true even for self-styled defenders of immigrants' rights. It would seem obvious that the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Council of La Raza speak for the interests of immigrants in the United States, or at least those who belong to The Race. Instead, they too have jettisoned the interests of their supposed constituents when they conflict with continued mass immigration. A milestone came in 1996, when La Raza rejected the suggestion that it trade support for the modest immigration cuts proposed by Barbara Jordan's bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform in exchange for restrictionist groups' commitment to fight the sweeping welfare bans against legal immigrants and new retroactive deportation rules then before Congress. Instead of working for such a pro-immigrant policy of lower immigration, these "pro-immigrant" groups dumped the interests of the people they claimed to speak for in order to maintain high levels of immigration in the future. La Raza in 1997 even gave then-Senator Spencer Abraham, architect of congressional libertarians' anti-immigrant policy of mass immigration, its "Defender of the Melting Pot" award.

Talk is cheap, especially when it comes to immigration control. But the immutable value of open immigration means the Democratic establishment is literally incapable of following through on rhetoric about tightening the border. This is obviously bad for Democrats, given public sentiment. It's also bad for Republicans, since they face no real competition on the issue. And that's bad for the republic.


NRO contributor Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.