George Will Says Something Useful, But Blink And You'll Miss It
03/07/2014
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It seems obvious that veteran Washington Post pundit George Will is enormously impressed with himself, and that nobody else has anything to tell him.  Unfortunately, regarding immigration-in-the-national-interest, he happens to be stuck on bad, so that's the way it's going to be.

For example, in a recent column, (Why immigration reform matters, February 13,2014) he came up with this trifecta of cluelessness:

- A variant on the "deportations are at record rates" flim-flam: "[T]he Obama administration’s deportations are, if anything, excessive ..."  (Nope.)

- Immigration grows the economy.  (Not in a way useful to us average citizens.)

- Assimilation is proceeding just swimmingly.  (Nope.)

He finished with a flourish, somehow linking immigration expansionism with conservatism:

Opposition to immigration because the economy supposedly cannot generate sufficient jobs is ... defeatism. Zero-sum reasoning about a fixed quantity of American opportunity is for a United States in a defensive crouch, which is not for conservatives.

(It's heartening to read the readers' comments for that piece by Will.  A large fraction of them weren't buying what he was peddling.)

Nevertheless, in his current offering (Misreading Putin, and history, March 3, 2014), Will recognizes a big truth, and since he's a good wordsmith, he says it eloquently:

For many centuries, European peace has been regularly broken because national borders do not tidily coincide with ethnic, linguistic and religious patterns. 

But Will apparently doesn't see the obvious connection between that observation and the destructiveness of mass, incompatible immigration.

And it's just that one sentence near the beginning of a ~750-word op-ed.  If he'd centered an entire piece on that thought, fleshing it out, heads would be exploding all around the country.

At VDARE.com, Will's observation can be considered a commonplace.  For example, way back in October, 2000, Steve Sailer launched an article with

In a lifetime of being boggled by the American press, I don't believe I've ever seen anything as baffling as their rote insistence that the last ten years of war in the Balkans were caused by "dictatorship," for which the solutions were "democracy" and "multiculturalism."

Folks, democracy is what caused the mess. Multiculturalism works fine ... under a real dictator, like Tito. He had multiethnic Yugoslavia locked down tight, nice and peaceful. But when the inhabitants got more say in their lives, they started killing each other. They wanted democracy. But they knew that to have it, they needed mono-ethnic states.

[Why Multiculturalism and Democracy don't mix (Balkans case study)]

Or as Brenda Walker periodically reminds us,

We all prefer to be around others who speak our language, share our values and understand our jokes. Human community is based upon similarities, not differences. Wouldn’t it be better to develop public policy on the basis of human nature as it really is? 

Humans are tribal!  And much that's important follows from this fact.

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