ICE-Obstructing Democrats Have Lost Their Minds
By all means, continue spending all your time and energy on keeping illegal immigrants here at all costs.
The big story this week was Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis, with various reputable doctors pointing out how unlikely it is that the cancer was discovered last week—all but confirming that yes, our now former president was indeed being used as a stalking horse to get Kamala Harris her first term without the inconvenience of having to win an election.
But over on Bluesky, the progressive forward operating base that has long since become a self-congratulatory reality denial echo chamber, the big story has been…ICE.
Note well, however, that this sort of unhinged rhetoric is hardly unique to the Blue asylum. Just the other day, speaking at the University of Minnesota Law School graduation, Tim Walz referred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.” Various other Democratic politicians, talking heads, and resistance “journalists” are doing their part to whip up a psychotic level of animus for ICE, encouraging Americans to undermine deportation operations by analogizing such efforts to antebellum resistors of the Federal Slave Act. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel made this point explicitly following the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan. It compared Dugan’s decision to help an illegal immigrant (facing three charges of domestic battery) escape arrest to the abolitionist crowd that saved an escaped slave living in Racine, Wisconsin, from federal marshals seeking to return him to bondage.
As if fugitive slaves or their forebears came here of their own volition to get better jobs than the ones they had in their native lands. Illegally entering the United States to earn more money in better conditions than back home obviously bears no relation to the transatlantic slave trade or chattel slavery. But the comparison speaks of the worldview that informs progressive support for open-border policies: slaves had a moral right to be free, so illegal aliens have a moral right to be in the United States. We have no business excluding unfortunates. Don’t you know about the Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty, you xenophobic bigot?
The modern Left is essentially built on the premise that Westerners and Americans (read: white people) must always prioritize non-Westerners and non-Americans. This telescopic, cost-free concern for the downtrodden, especially racial minorities, is intrinsic to performative antiracism, a bizarro noblesse oblige used to signal identitarian enlightenment. Just as casual anti-white racism is a core part of the radical chic jargon fashion sense of contemporary Democrats, so too is the need to sacralize minorities.
Unbounded kindness toward the marginalized necessitates hostility toward their supposed oppressors—and because excess of zeal in progressive lala land is widely seen as a badge of merit and token of sincerity, hostility often gives way to extremism.
Never mind that an overwhelming majority of the voting public wants a secure border and supports mass deportations. Never mind that the annual cost of the crisis ushered in by the Biden administration is $150.7 billion and will easily exceed $1 trillion in our lifetime,1 or that illegal immigrants have accounted for nearly 60% of the increase in sheltered homelessness over the past two years, or that the influx of illegals during a period of intense economic stagnation has crushed wages for native-born workers, particularly in industries like construction and agriculture.
The people with “All Are Welcome” yard signs have no qualms about imposing onto others the consequences of their pious virtue signaling. Over and over and over again we’ve seen how our noble betters support absurd policies with all sorts of major negative externalities, only changing their minds when they personally pay a price. Progressives in general think “I’m totally fine, it doesn’t bother me” is a genius, irrefutable heuristic that signals their moral superiority and capacity for tolerance when what it’s really indicative of is terminal narcissism, self-involvement, and an incapacity to consider the needs of others. It’s easy to demonstrate how progressive and open-minded you are when it costs you nothing.
The Left’s near-theological commitment to illegal immigration and open borders isn’t going to wane any time soon.
This is a moral issue that’s central to who they are and what they believe in, and their stance is entirely predicated on a pathetic desire for hollow, confected drama that allows them to cultivate a sense of sophisticated preeminence and exclusivity by play-acting as righteous heroes standing against tyranny, all in compensation for the utter lack of meaning and purpose in their ordinary lives.
But these media mind-whipped morons and their over-the-top displays of effrontery and indignation at the very suggestion that we enforce our immigration laws puts them on the wrong side of the public. The idea that it’s inherently xenophobic to have anything but an open border is ridiculous. America is the least xenophobic nation on the planet. Every year since the millennium, between 703,000, and 1.2 million immigrants have been granted legal permanent residence here. No other country comes close to welcoming this many legal immigrants annually. The United States now has roughly 50 million immigrants, or foreign-born residents (legal and illegal). The next-highest is Germany at about 15 million. In other words, we’ve welcomed 35 million more people from other countries than any other country on Earth.
The bottom line is that the American public didn’t sign on for a policy that would welcome and care for anybody and everybody, regardless of circumstance and without background checks. We have limited resources, and we have the right — and obligation — to prioritize our own people and preserve the dignity of our own citizenship.
It’s time we start doing so.
The lifetime cost to American taxpayers of each illegal immigrant is about $80,000, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Keep in mind also that the cost of supporting and subsidizing vast cadres of illegal immigrants is largely borne by state and local governments, which are unable to print money like the federal government, so they have to balance their budgets by either absorbing this cost through raising taxes or cutting services to citizens.
I try to imagine the mental gymnastics the libs have to go through to convince themselves that what they are doing is morally in line with the whole of society. All I can think is that they've literally lost their minds.
Let's grant that there's a sincere concern among the vocal critics of ICE for the downtrodden, a concern we surmise is accompanied by the human condition of status seeking and performative moral superiority in supporting those seen as subject to the matrix of oppressions.
That "unbounded kindness toward the marginalized" doesn't have an analog in sympathy toward those rationally concerned about social cohesion, financial resources, public safety, or just the ability to decide who gets to enter the country. Such concerns get labeled and dismissed as white nationalism, as gratuitously cruel.
And there are some on that side that I think are gratuitiously cruel, combined with a misapprehension of brown and black foreigners as being "less than." It's a flawed metric, but with its own internal logic and distorted moral compass. But the progressive empathy doesn't extend to them, who I guess are seen as in league with bigots, xenophobes, the Gestapo. As being willfully immoral.
I think that progressives, in their zeal to signal their piety, their place among the moral elite, and yes, to, with good intentions, defend those they see as oppressed, miss that arriving in a country where one would have *once* been oppressed or would currently be a statistical minority does not wave away the validity of wanting to enforce law relevant to those who enter the country. And it doesn't mean that those who recognize that validity are moral monsters.