MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-08-22 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] bastions of Conservative Immergants...
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Opinion | Democrats Make This Nonnative Restless
Tunku Varadarajan
5-6 minutes
Updated Aug. 21, 2020 5:51 pm ET
A candidate for citizenship holds a U.S. flag ahead of a naturalization
ceremony in Miami, Aug. 16, 2019,.
Photo: Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press
I watched all four nights of the Democratic National Convention. Huddled
in front of my TV set, I was, by the end, yearning to breathe free. As
an immigrant to the U.S., I found the Democrats’ obsession with
immigrants grating. I’d like to tell Americans why.
Scarcely a speech or segment went by in which a fetish wasn’t made of
immigrants. They were portrayed, almost uniformly, as victims—hapless
people thwarted by “systemic racism” and American injustice, moored
forever in a netherworld of murk and fear by President Trump’s refusal
to be humane.
The Democrats are guilty of conflating the people who live in this
country without authorization with those—a significant majority of
immigrants—who are here legally. According to the Pew Research Center,
77% of America’s foreign-born immigrants are lawful permanent residents
(like me) or naturalized citizens of the U.S.
With their relentless focus on the undocumented margins, the Democrats
do an enormous disservice to the 35.2 million lawful immigrants who go
about their dignified business away from the spotlight, getting on with
such concerns as work, school and family, grateful for the opportunity
to be in America—grateful, in fact, for the opportunity to be Americans.
Many immigrants have come to America from countries where the state
interferes in people’s lives while pretending to help. What many of them
really want—Democrats, please note—is for the state to step aside and
let them carve out their own destinies. Which is why they came to
America in the first place. Whether the left likes it or not, this is
the primordial truth to which almost every immigrant subscribes.
No one suggests that the plight of the undocumented people in this
country should be ignored. Yet the Democratic obsession with indigent
illegal residents plays into the hands of racists and nativists, who,
ironically, share the progressive caricature of immigrants as a brooding
throng of people in perpetual limbo. (Nativists regard the foreign-born
as inherently unassimilable, while progressives, for their own reasons,
scoff at the very notion of “assimilation.”)
The Democrats’ compulsion to create ever more categories of victimized
minorities by adding “immigrants” to the list of the maltreated serves
neither immigrants nor the country. You can see the short-term advantage
to the Democrats of an ever-expanding pool of voters from abroad. But
I—and millions like me—did not regard the U.S. as a country where you
can never acquire a mainstream identity, and where political forces tell
you that the surest way to become accepted is to nurse your grievances
forever. Every immigrant reaches a point where he feels—or wants to
feel—that he’s overcome obstacles and has earned his pride (without
having it handed to him in the guise of victimhood).
Perpetuating the category of “immigrant” involves the making permanent
of an identity that is by definition temporary. It’s a condition in a
bureaucratic process that every immigrant seeks to transform into a
state of full belonging. The Democrats would like many of us to embrace
a transitory state as an aspiration in itself. “E pluribus unum”—one out
of many—is less attractive to them than a creed of “Many out of one.”
Mr. Varadarajan is executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution.
Potomac Watch: Last year the media and Democrats were skewering Kamala
Harris for a disastrous presidential bid that never found a clear
message. Today she's lauded in the press as a masterful politician.
Images: Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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