Even liberals can be people

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 22 June 2006 23:47.

The American feminist author and London-based journalist Lionel Shriver disappointed a few Guardian readers today with a classic rant against the Mexican invasion.

“I am obsessed with immigration,” she said. She obviously meant it. She railed against “the disappearing ink” of US immigration law, and ended:-

I was bemused to read this week that Mexico has an accelerating immigration problem. Many of the South and Central Americans teeming across its border with Guatemala are heading for the US. But a fair number are staying on in Mexico, where they take “the jobs Mexicans don’t want”. So many Mexicans have left for more lucrative jobs in el Norte that only the Guatemalans will pick mangoes in the baking sun for a few lousy pesos.

Furthermore, foreigners ploughing into Mexico are subject to the same fierce local resentment that brought outraged Mexicans out on America’s streets in April. The coordinator of the government-funded humanitarian organisation Grupo Beta declared, “This society does not see migrants as human beings, it sees them as criminals.” I was startled to learn that Mexico’s immigration law is far more stringent than America’s, even more stringent than the harsher laws now in limbo in the US Congress, over which Mexican president Vicente Fox has been so alarmed.

This is what I mean about double standards. The very same national populations that blithely regard the US as an extension of their own backyard get very stroppy indeed when foreigners start regarding their own countries with the same presumption.

Admittedly, this is a double standard in which American mythology has been complicit. Forever talking up the “melting pot” and our proud tradition as a “nation of immigrants”, US politicians can’t sabre-rattle over stricter immigration policies without sounding like hypocrites. The rest of the world doesn’t believe the US has the right to police its own borders; raised on all that “huddled masses yearning to be free” folderol, Americans don’t either. In short, the US has been helplessly victimised by its own bullshit.

Say what you like about the Guardian, it does have an editor who is more open to the unconventional than any other Brit newspaper chief. I admire that, as it happens. My opinion of Shriver is rising, too. She won’t win friends for saying any of this. But she said it anyway because it is true. That is brave journalism, especially for a woman.

She’s wrong, I hope, when she follows up her remarks about Mr Bush’s coming amnesty with this:-

Britain will have to do likewise, even with its comparatively negligible half million visitors-for-life. Sending them all back home became a logistical impossibility long ago. When you let a law slide, it evaporates. You can’t shove the undocumented genie back into the bottle.

As one of the Guardian’s few steadfast thread-dissidents - a fellow calling himself Mr PikeBishop - pointed out:-

I wish people would stop saying this - do you know how many people left the UK in just one 48 hour period this year? 2.3 million, before Easter. It’s perfectly possible to deport illegal residents - just takes political will, and there doesn’t appear to be *any*.

Quite so.

That aside, what impressed me about this perfectly straightforward piece was that nowhere in it - nowhere - was there the merest hint of justification for the invasion. No “they just want a better life.” No “it’s the age of global markets and global labour mobility.” No “it’s the future so get used to it.” Nothing like that. Freed of all that left-liberal-stoking, Pee-Cee b/s, Shriver just thinks and writes like any right-winger - as though that is the default setting for human beings deprived of excessive liberal stimulii. Which I think it might be.

For anyone who regularly wonders from whence right values and right thinking will come if they are to re-seed themselves in the public mind, that’s encouraging.

Tags: Journalism

Comments:

Posted by john rackell on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 00:58 | #

Britain will have to do likewise, even with its comparatively negligible half million visitors-for-life. Sending them all back home became a logistical impossibility long ago. When you let a law slide, it evaporates. You can’t shove the undocumented genie back into the bottle.

more like having to go in a bottle in your car because you skipped the last rest stop on the highway and there’s no where else to go. It’s embarrassing precisely when you hit the rim of the bottle. That’s the real analogy Lionel should make when she mentions bottles.

Look, the bottle’s full up and about to go over the top with more illegals pissing in. That’s what’s causing the acute embarrassment to the elites, not any concern over the rule of law. They’ll just decant the bottle at their earliest convenience and start all over again down the same old road.

Keep the bottle full - that’s what’s getting their attention.

Posted by john on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 06:43 | #

I’d agree that liberals can be people, but they are freaks - not fully human, detaching themselves from the part of humanity they come from, devoid of compassion and remorseless.

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 09:52 | #

Here is an American female journalist, Michelle Wucker (ethnicity unclear), who is much more typical.

She spices her pro-immigrant free trade argument with the usual exordia of bien pensant porn:-

Global economic and demographic changes, coupled with a changing geopolitical order, are as destabilising to the United States today as they were a century ago. Now as then, immigrants make an easy target to blame for increasing economic inequality, social and political insecurity, and the dissipation of common dreams. In this volatile, media-fuelled mix, history and culture have leapt out of the pages of elementary-school textbooks into an emotional maelstrom.

But the stakes are even higher today than they were in the early 20th century, now that the growth of the knowledge economy has given a clear advantage to those who can negotiate across cultural boundaries. If the United States repeats the mistakes of the earlier era and turns its back on the world once again, the country would lose the advantages that have come with its welcoming of all the world’s peoples.

The solution is not to emulate past closure, but to open the windows of the mind in order to create immigration policies that benefit America, immigrants to her shores, and the world.

The idiot (or shill, depending, as I say, on her ethnicity) sees those poor huddled masses from down Mexico way - and everywhere else, in fact - as an “easy target to blame”, even as they confer upon something called America mystical “advantages”.

Americans, meaning white Americans since they are the only ones Jews worry about, are urged to put away those backward-looking “common dreams” and open their minds blah blah and not turn their backs on the peoples of the blah and be welcoming of all the world’s blah blah blah.

Absolute garbage. Give me Ms Shriver any day.

Posted by Nick Tamiroff on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 10:03 | #

GW-I love when you speak the un-embellished truth,with a profanity thrown in for good measure!Makes you seem almost human-just joking-you are the BEST moderator on any web site I’ve visited.Keep on trucking,and Semper Fi !

Posted by Nick Tamiroff on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 10:32 | #

As i have said previously,in 1954,we managed to ship four million illegal Mexicans back home in a appropiately named “Operation Wetback”,under Eisenhower,and with a much smaller staff of immigration personell.A lousy[and I use the word definivitely]20 Million today should be a piece of cake.All it takes is will and commitment.—Backbone would also help! Until employers are heavily PROSECUTED,fined and jailed,nothing will change.We are on a slippery slope,and are not even aware of the obvious consequences.Christ,have we ALL turned into ELOI?

Posted by john on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 12:11 | #

She has German and French ancestors, and a reasonably good understanding of U.S. cultural and immigration history. I think she’s locked into a viewpoint of extreme enviromentailism (Boasism), which has restricted her ability to think clearly about immigraton, shown by
her fantasising about mexicans being good for the economy.

Posted by Kenelm Digby on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 12:28 | #

Gosh, how unlike The Guardian to publish this.
A paper that is usually to the left of The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and the NY Times on this particular issue!

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:22 | #

Nick, I am not, in fact, human. I am English.

Posted by Nick Tamiroff on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:38 | #

Damn GW-nor am I-I’m a former US Marine! Semper Fi !

Posted by Nick Tamiroff on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 15:11 | #

GW-You English bastard,represent all that is good and relevant in American social mores.I f not for your kindred,we would have never acquired the courage to be who we are[but sadly,maybe for not much longer] America will ALWAYS hold their English roots dear,regardless of ethnic background or religion. Anyway,I perfer English to “humans”,given the assortment of sub-cons,Bantus,Mestizos,ragheads,and other assorted turd-world refuse invading the White world.

Posted by Nick Tamiroff on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 18:30 | #

Steve-Boot camp Parris IslandÇamp leJuene-Great Lakes NTC [Electronics School] SanDiego Radar School Force Recon[all over the place] training,Okinawa[Camp Hague] and Nam-plus a little side trip onthe way home in Gitmo-thanks JFK.How I ás an ET got to be Recon is a story most wouldn’t believe-but I never shot less than a 238 on the range-grew up in post WWII Maine,and put meat on the table for most of our neighbors.Overall,the defining period of my life.Semper Fi,and thanks for asking. NST

Posted by Laban on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 20:42 | #

Shriver is quite a rare thing - a liberal feminist who’s quite clear-eyed. She wrote a superb Guardian piece a while back on the fact that educated Western women tend not to have children. It’s the demography, stupid, as Mark Steyn said.

GW covered it here.

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1505/

I covered it here

http://ukcommentators.blogspot.com/2005/10/were-not-having-kids.html

This Sunday Times item is also interesting

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1650559,00.html

and GW, take a look at this on Third World population

http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000991.php

Afghanistan: 12,000,000 (1939); 29,929,000 (2005)

Brazil: 44,460,000 (1943); 186,113,000 (2005)

Chad: 1,433,000 (1931); 9,826,000 (2005)

China: 457,835,000 (1936); 1,306,000,000 (2005)

Colombia: 9,523,000 (1942); 42,954,000 (2005)

Congo (ex-Zaire): 10,384,000 (1942); 60,085,000 (2005)

Ethiopia: 12,100,000 (1945); 73,053,000 (2005)

Honduras: 1,106,000 (1940); 6,975,000 (2005)

India - includes today’s India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka: 388,998,000 (1941); 1,407,000,000 (2005)

Iran: 15,055,000 (1935); 68,018,000 (2005)

South Africa: 10,709,000 (1942); 44,344,000 (2005)

These levels of increase are, of course, simply staggering. They are greater, both in absolute numbers and almost certainly in percentage terms, than anything known before in a relatively short period in human history. They have occurred despite losses in wars and civil wars, such as have occurred in India -Pakistan, the Congo, Ethiopia, and Iran-Iraq, among other places, despite totalitarian mass murders as in Communist China, despite immigration abroad, and despite losses through AIDS and other illnesses. In just over sixty years, Brazil’s population has increased by 318 per cent; Colombia’s by 352 per cent, and Ethiopia’s by 503 per cent - and so on, with, in general, the most impoverished of these nations showing the most unbelievable increases.

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:55 | #

Laban,

I’d forgotten Ms Shriver was the writer of that piece last September. Thanks for the reminder. She’s certainly an unusual woman.

I found the thread that followed her article yesterday quite interesting, too. The general tenor, of course, was anti-Shriver. But I felt there was a marked lack of vigour and originality about the comments. There was no evidential basis to which those guys referred, no powerful restatement of principle. Really nothing. It left me with the clear impression that the left is dessicating. Ideologically, it has only been corrupted by the power it has enjoyed, and will not be able to defend itself against a well-founded strike from the right.

Those population numbers speak eloquently of the absolute necessity of regaining control of our borders and our politics. The human reservoir of the Third World is truly bottomless, and there is no future for us unless we can overcome our decadence sufficiently to care for ourselves again.

Posted by john rackell on Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:29 | #

This statement is buried knee deep in Lionel’s liberalism. It’s almost too funny to read.

Furthermore, foreigners ploughing into Mexico are subject to the same fierce local resentment that brought outraged Mexicans out on America’s streets in April.

Regarding Lionel “cultural imperialist again the male namespace” Shriver extolling creativity, but raising children is probably the most creative act any of us who aren’t hobnobbing journalists will ever get to make - (I mean before Blogs and all that).

Children are our precious mark on the world - proof that we existed in the present because we left something in the future - much more than some crappy book by hers truly that no Moslem Briton and their descendants will ever read.