Sunday, June 17, 2007

The Wisdom of Mark Steyn

The immigration bill is a fraud. According to Mark Steyn:

On Fox News the other night, I was told by NPR's Juan Williams, ''You're anti-immigrant!'' Er, actually, I am an immigrant -- one of the members of the very very teensy-weensy barely statistically detectable category of ''legal immigrant.'' But perhaps that doesn't count anymore. Perhaps, like Colin Powell's blackness, it's insufficiently ''authentic.'' By filing the relevant paperwork with the United States government, I'm not ''keepin' it real.''

...

The people who are truly ''anti-immigrant'' are the folks who want to send that immigrant from Slovenia or Fiji who applied in May 2005 back to the end of the line. But then ''comprehensive immigration reform'' is about everything but immigration, including subverting sovereignty and national security. Remember the 1986 amnesty? Mahmoud abu Halima applied for it and went on to bomb the World Trade Center seven years later. His colleague, the aforementioned Mohammad Salameh, was rejected but carried on living here anyway. John Lee Malvo was detained and released by U.S. immigration in breach of its own procedures and re-emerged as the Washington sniper. The young Muslim men who availed themselves of the U.S. government's ''visa express'' system for Saudi Arabia filled in joke applications -- ''Address in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA'' -- that octogenarian snowbirds from Toronto who've been wintering at their Florida condos since 1953 wouldn't try to get away with. The late Mohammed Atta received his flight-school student visa on March 11, 2002, six months to the day after famously flying his first and last commercial airliner.

The government does not have all the answers, and shouldn't be your nanny. According to Mr. Steyn:

That's it? Anglicans need to fast-track a liturgy for gay couples so they can free up time to deal with the real issues like global warming? Half that catalogue of horrors seems to be different ways of saying the same thing ("child poverty… economic injustice… growing disparity") in order to give a bit of pro forma padding to the totally cool cause du jour of global warming. Which is so cool that, if an Anglican archbishop shows up at a climate-change conference, he'll be lucky to get in the room, and if he does he'll be stuck at the table with the wonky leg next to the toilet, barely able to see the Most Reverend Almer Gortry up on stage doing his power-point presentation and warning that rising sea levels will send tidal waves crashing through every gay wedding reception in Provincetown by Saturday afternoon.

...

Go back to those Canadian archbishops who want to worry about "child poverty." Poor children are the children of poor grown-ups. If the state assumes responsibility for those children from their parents, what kind of adults are you likely to end up with? And if you can't trust free-born citizens to reach their own judgments on cheeseburgers, what can you trust them with?

No comments: