As America debates the “comprehensive immigration reform” plan proposed last week by Marco Rubio and the Gang of Eight, every American must ask himself or herself a core question. The answer to this question ultimately determines how an individual feels about comprehensive immigration reform and about immigration in general. The core question is this:
Do you think the United States is your own home or not?
If your immediate answer is yes, than think about the implications of that answer. Although it is true that home and house are technically not synonymous, we use them as synonyms nonetheless. We commonly speak of homeownership, or the process of buying a home. Official government documents ask you for your home address. Ditto with job applications to private businesses. Everyone knows that in all this common speak, we are specifically referring to houses.
So I ask again: Do you think the United States is your own home or not? If most Americans were being honest with themselves, the answer to this question would be no. Let’s examine the ramifications of this core question.
By its very nature, a house is exclusive. The owner cannot and must not allow everyone from everywhere to live in it if he expects to maintain control of it and still call it his own. A house belongs to the homeowner. It does not belong to anyone else. No one has a “right” to it but the homeowner. He, and only he, may choose who is allowed to live in his home. And as the entirety of human history hath shown, the owner only allows his family to live in the home.
By contrast, strangers are not allowed in his home. If they are hungry or otherwise needy, the owner may provide a meal and a pair of clothes. Perhaps he will even allow them to stay for a day or two. But strangers cannot and must not live in his home indefinitely, and they certainly have no right to bring their own families into the house.
Moreover, strangers are not entitled to live in his house just because they are hungry or homeless. If there is any homeowner in America who would allow hungry and homeless strangers to live in his house indefinitely, let him sound off in the comment section below. The amount of homeowners who would allow strangers to live in their house indefinitely is the same amount as those who casted stones when Jesus told them to do so.
Furthermore, the will and well-being of the homeowner are the only things that matter in regards to who is allowed to live in the house. It is the homeowner, and only the homeowner, that gets to decide how to organize the house in a way that shall seem most likely to affect his safety and happiness. Thus it is that his family lives in the house with him – his wife and his kids. (Note: Regardless of whether the homeowner is the husband, the wife, or both, the aforementioned rules remain the same).
By contrast, the will and well-being of strangers are completely irrelevant compared to the homeowner. It doesn’t matter how many miles the strangers walked or how needy they are. The house belongs to the owner, not to the strangers. If it is inhumane to deny needy strangers the “right” to live in whatever house they so choose, than homeownership itself is inhumane. The way to remedy this problem is to make everyone the owner of the home. And if not everyone owns the home, than no one owns the home.
Likewise, if you think that it is inhumane, or in this case “racist,” to deny immigrants who seek to improve their lives the “right” to live in the United States, than why don’t you allow hungry and needy strangers to live in your house indefinitely? The only possible answer is that you don’t think the rules of homeownership apply to immigration policy.
In that case, you can’t seriously call the United States your home, at least not in the way it’s commonly understood. How can a country be your home if it’s not exclusive? It can’t. How can it be your home if it belongs to everybody? It can’t. How can it be your home if you don’t get to decide who lives in it? It can’t.
If, on the other hand, you insist that America is your home but that everyone else has a right to live there, than congratulations, you are a communist. The only difference is that whereas communists believe in common ownership of the means of production, you believe in common ownership of an entire country. What belongs to someone belongs to everyone, and what doesn’t belong to everyone belongs to no one.
I seriously doubt most Americans would process that last paragraph as an insult, or as morally problematic. Whether they’ve been browbeaten into believing America belongs to everyone, or whether they sincerely believe it in the depths of their souls, either way, they don’t view their own home as exclusive.
The logical follow up question, then, is this: If the United States is open to everybody, than what’s the point in having borders? Answer: Borders are nominal and symbolic. They’re also highly useful for the rhetorical purpose of appealing to everyone’s inherent sense of nationhood. Despite the meme of “there’s only one race, the human race,” most people don’t want a one-world government or a one-world nation. The European Union provides a case study in how this works:
For all intents and purposes, EU nations don’t have border security. Citizens of EU nations may come and go as they please. And yet, you can look up any EU nation on Wikipedia and find that they still maintain their ethnic majority. Poland, for example, is 91.6 percent Polish. Finland is 90 percent Finnish. Ireland is 87.4 percent Irish, and so on and so forth.
The EU is like a hotel, and its member nations are the hotel rooms. Those hotel rooms allow people who are like each other to congregate with each other. The Finns live with the Finns, the Poles with the Poles, the Irish with the Irish, etc. But the catch is that unlike an actual hotel room, where only the people who occupy the room have access to the keys, in the EU, everyone has access to the keys.
Is the EU a sustainable model? No and hell no. The world is not a hotel room, and insofar as it can be made to operate like one, the hotel rooms themselves must remain exclusive to the people who occupy them. Whether we liken a nation to a house or a hotel room, the fundamental rules are the same either way. No sane person would allow strangers to live in his house indefinitely or occupy his hotel room indefinitely.
Yet, America marches on with the utterly insane not to mention immoral belief that immigration policy should be based on the will and well-being of strangers instead of homeowners. Even most conservatives readily admit that they have no problems whatsoever with “legal” immigration. Indeed, the idea that the United States is a “nation of immigrants” has become a commonly accepted cultural meme.
But here’s what conservative Republican President Calvin Coolidge said in his first message to Congress on December 6, 1923:
American institutions rest solely on good citizenship. They were created by people who had a background of self-government. New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.
And here’s what Coolidge said when he accepted the Republican presidential nomination on August 14, 1924:
Restricted immigration is not an offensive but purely a defensive action. It is not adopted in criticism of others in the slightest degree, but solely for the purpose of protecting ourselves. We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America be kept American.
(HT for both quotes: VDARE)
If Americans don’t think that America is their own house, than they don’t deserve to keep it or maintain it as a first world nation. If they think it’s their own home but think it’s open to everybody, than it’s not really “their” home, and once again they don’t deserve to keep it or maintain it as a first world nation.
If they believe that the interests of immigrants should trump the interests of their fellow native-born Americans, than the United States cannot be called a “nation” in any real sense. Immigrants don’t have any more right to “make a better life for themselves” by living in the United States than strangers do to cloth and feed themselves by living in a house that doesn’t belong to them.
Ultimately, if Americans reject these aforementioned sentiments and refuse to declare who they are, than they will have fallen for the ancient trap: If you don’t stand for something, you stand for everything. And if you stand for everything, you stand for nothing.
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