Immigration Conundrum

I love living in South Florida for many reasons: warm weather, playing volleyball at the beach, scuba diving, and an unrivaled nightlife. South Florida also gives me plenty of opportunities to speak my second language, Spanish, with the people from all over Latin America who flock here.

At the same time, I’m mature enough to acknowledge that a majority of my countrymen don’t share my enthusiasm for learning a second language, much less being forced to do so in order to survive daily life in what is ostensibly part of their homeland. And with the immigration debacle in full bloom, my countrymen can finally bear witness to the fact that the ruling class cares nothing about what they want. Republicans and their soulless minions in the Chamber Of Commerce want to hang onto their wage slaves, while Democrats and their overaged misfits crave the steady stream of votes that will surely flow their way upon extending the franchise to the sons of bankrupt civilizations. This dynamic is so impervious to the people’s will that the mere defeat of an amnesty plan is portrayed as a “major setback” for the advocates of open borders – even though the laws already on the books go routinely ignored as illegal aliens continue to waltz into our midst and presume to make demands on us.

Nowhere is this betrayal more apparent than with “birthright citizenship,” the notion that a child born to illegal aliens in the United States is automatically a citizen. With an anchor baby like this in place, the chances of deporting an invader family drop from unlikely to impossible. Lest anyone suspect that we must amend the Fourteenth Amendment to avoid this fate, guess again. The Fourteenth Amendment as drafted withholds birthright citizenship from the spawn of foreigners. Section I of the Amendment reads as follows:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. . . .”

The key portion is “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which the drafters of the amendment emphasized as excluding citizenship from foreigners’ children born on our soil. (I could shamelessly plug my book at this juncture for those who want more details, but I will refrain from doing so.) To this day, even the prodigal Supreme Court has avoided ruling that the children of illegals are citizens at birth, although in a moment of weakness the Court did repeal the Fourteenth Amendment as to the children of legal immigrants. So even though the children of illegals clearly do not warrant automatic citizenship, the Tumor nevertheless insists upon granting it to them, and the Tumor also smacks down any State or locality that treats these aliens in a manner consistent with the Constitution.

This immigration conundrum serves up a valuable lesson: don’t go thinking that we have to amend the Constitution in order to save America. The Tumor disobeys the Constitution as it is, and the Tumor will continue to disobey the Constitution as it might be upon amendment.

The Electoral Delusion

Presidential politics are in the air, or at least on the air, if the radio programs I hear during my daily commute resemble the general broadcast media. Reporters busily inform us of what the 2008 candidates are doing on any given day, while pundits jabber on and on about voter demographics or the latest “bold” campaign promise to re-order our lives. It’s enough to make me ditch news radio and endure the lascivious morning chatter that dapples the music stations – the latter is at least honestly depraved, while the former masquerades as respectable discourse.

Now, I can understand why listeners of the news might find presidential politics informative or interesting, since most people harbor no deep misgivings about America’s institutions and believe that the act of voting will make a real difference for our future. Besides, most people lack the desire to reflect on anything for an appreciable period of time, so they’re happy to receive their opinions from their media interlocutors: if a candidate presents well and sends the punditry aflutter, then that’s good enough for them.

However, the people I cannot bring myself to understand are the perceptive ones who indeed grasp that America is circling around the toilet bowl, but who nevertheless fall under the same electoral delusion as their less earnest countrymen. For example, thoughtful and provocative web columnist Vox Day recently issued an open letter to Republican shill Rush Limbaugh, pleading with him to use his considerable influence to rally the masses to Ron Paul’s candidacy. Introspective souls haunting online forums such as digg.com also urge people to get out and vote in order to save America from certain doom. So the otherwise intelligent remnant has proved most disappointing, as it has not come to grips with the utter impossibility of reversing the Tumor’s transgressions even if a “dream” candidate somehow prevailed.

Do the intelligent among us truly believe that if, say, Ron Paul won the election, he could dismantle the military-industrial complex? Could Ron Paul persuade the Pentagon and the plutocratic defense contractors that their salad days are over? Could Ron Paul counteract the institutional inertia of thousands of bureaucrats entrenched in the alphabet soup of administrative agencies? Could Ron Paul brush off the millions of private citizens who demand their federal gravy?

To hold out hope for such things transcends delusion and enters the realm of schizophrenia. Intelligent people should be able to grasp that the lawlessness, corruption, and bloodlust of the Tumor are now endemic rather than incidental. If they truly want to save America, they must ignore the presidential hoopla along with everything else that Washington purveys.

Go, Green Mountain Boys

Vermont secessionists – whose praiseworthy efforts to uproot the Tumor from their lives are linked on this very blog – have received some mainstream attention. A recent headline on the Drudge Report blares incredulously that “VERMONT GROUP WANTS STATE TO SECEDE FROM USA!” – as if the mere mention of secession bespoke lunacy.

A peek into the story confirmed my suspicion that a lickspittle “constitutional law expert” would spring forth to dismiss secession as resolved by the War For Southern Independence (routinely mislabeled as a “civil war,” which any good dictionary will help illustrate that the war was not). Mr. Russell Wheeler of the reliably statist Brookings Institution utters this trite incantation, but he goes even further by opining that the only way secession could be legal is if Vermont defeated the Tumor’s forces in bloody combat. Since the Tumor would prevail in any such confrontation, reasons Wheeler, secession must be considered illegal. What Mr. Wheeler is saying, in effect, is that any right that the Tumor prevents us from exercising is a right that we do not even possess. If the Tumor represses our right to speak, then we have no right to speak. If the Tumor takes our property away from us, then the property never belonged to us anyway. And if the Tumor manages to kill us, then we do not deserve to live. This is nothing short of “might makes right,” the law of the jungle.

The right to secession gives us a path out of our nightmare, and like any other inherent right, it cannot be extinguished by physical violence. Secession occupies a proud place in American history, but perhaps it’s too much to ask our undereducated and overmedicated populace to recall that the United States was born of secession from the British Empire; or that the Constitution was born of secession from the Articles Of Confederation; or that Vermont itself was once an independent Republic born of secession from New York.