ZGram - 11/11/2001 - "...but is it good for the Jews?" Part I

Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org
Mon, 12 Nov 2001 12:56:13 -0800


Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

November 11, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Here comes another five-part Zgram:

The article below is an extraordinary document of Jewish special pleading,
even in retreat.  It is a document laying bare amazing guilt and Angst of
the consequences of what this Jewish writer, and others, have caused to
happen by their incessant meddling in American immigration matters.

Its title is "The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography:
Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy".  It is written by Stephen
Steinlight, who "... was for more than five years Director of National
Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish Committee."

There is also a telling disclaimer at the end:  "The views expressed in
this essay do not reflect the current policy position of AJC with regard to
immigration."

Such a disclaimer is, of course, standard procedure.  We may safely assume
that the AJC wants to still milk its old alliances for every drop of
political leverage it can get out of them.  We may likewise divine that
Steinlight's public venting of all his (personal?) astonishing fears,
admissions of errors made, short term gain for long term pain, is what the
moneyed Jewish elite is thinking!

Let's not forget:  The AJC is the old, landed Jewish gentry, the Old Money
- not what the shrill, abrasive, in-your-face upstart Rabbi Hiers, Rabbi
Coopers or shake-down con artists and ambulance chasers of the World Jewish
Congress, the Simon Wiesenthal Center etc.  represent.

When the AJC speaks,  Power speaks!

This document was posted on the website of an organization called Center
for Immigration Studies, which explains itself as follows:

"The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan,
non-profit research organization founded in 1985. It is the nation's only
think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the
economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on
the United States.

"It is the Center's mission to expand the base of public knowledge and
understanding of the need for an immigration policy that gives first
concern to the broad national interest. The Center is animated by a
pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision which seeks fewer immigrants but a
warmer welcome for those admitted."

What you have in what I am chopping up into a delectable five-part ZGram is
a Jewish intellectual who is jumping ship, abandoning the old orthodoxy of
open-arm immigration for safer ground, while there is time - and who is
trying to ingratiate himself in the changing political mood and landscape
by trying to redirect a horridly destructive immigration policy,
devastating to Jewish power and influence in the USA, and attempting to
carve out a different niche for his tribal brethren threatened to be
overwhelmed by non-Jew immigration numbers.

Angst written all over this one!

Herewith Stephen Steinlight:

[START]

Preface: Challenging A Crumbling Consensus

This piece is the fruit of an authentic and deeply felt conversion
experience, but much as one hankers to grab the reader's   attention with a
dramatic retelling of a great and sudden epiphany, it didn't happen that
way. My change of heart, of thought,   came gradually, even reluctantly. It
was the product of a long evolution, one that occurred incrementally and
unevenly over the   years I spent as an advocate in the immigration debate
who came increasingly to doubt and now, finally, to disown his own case
and cause. The conversion is also the result of the consumption of many
books and monographs on many aspects of the issue,   as well as my own
reflections on the innumerable (and often interminable) coalition meetings
and conferences I attended on the   subject. Writing in the immediate wake
of the nightmare America has experienced (I live in Manhattan and watched
the second   plane strike the World Trade Center), it must be added that
the enormities committed by Islamist terrorists in my city,   Washington,
and Pennsylvania have given these thoughts greatly increased emotional
urgency. But they developed   unremarkably, slowly, steadily.

   Most of all, my conversion is the consequence of my contact over the
years with Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the   Center for
Immigration Studies, and the Center's work. We dialogued and formally
debated on several occasions, and I   moderated public forums in which Mark
took part. If dialogue has any meaning, if speakers actually listen to each
other rather   than close their ears and merely wait impatiently to say
their say, then the possibility that one can change as a result of what one
hears must be acknowledged. The Socratic method was alive and well in our
exchanges, and I did. But, as I've noted, the   change came slowly, the
process recalling not St. Paul on the road to Damascus but the Latin
proverb Stillicidi casus   lapidem cavat, "constant dripping hollows out a
stone." My thought was also significantly influenced by a superb
conference on immigration, "Thy People Shall Be My People: Immigration and
Citizenship in America," sponsored by the   Robert R. McCormick Tribune
=46oundation in July of 2000. Perhaps its principal contribution to
challenging my point of view   was having the opportunity to listen to my
own side's thesis articulated by those willing to take it to its extreme,
and their   reductio ad absurdum made plain the very great dangers within
it.

   In a rare experiment in candid public discourse about America's changing
demography, American Jewry needs to toss   reticence and evasion to the
winds, stop censoring ourselves for fear of offending the entirely
imaginary arbiters of civic virtue,   and bluntly and publicly pose the
same questions we anxiously ponder in private. The community should stop
letting the   thought police of the more extreme incarnations of
multiculturalism squelch it, feel compelled to genuflect in their
direction, or   unconsciously internalize or be guilt-tripped into
validating their identity politics that masquerade as pluralism. By
liberating   themselves from these inhibitions we will unavoidably profane
the altars of some of our own politically correct household   gods,
including the present liberal/ethnic/corporate orthodoxy on immigration. We
will also risk upsetting not a few old friends   and allies, and some of
the newer ones we're already cultivating.

   To whom, one and all, we will need to explain our concerns with patience
and empathy. But we should ask the hard questions   no matter what,
recognizing that only straight talk will get us anywhere. We cannot
consider the inevitable consequences of   current trends - not least among
them diminished Jewish political power - with detachment. Our present
privilege,   success, and power do not inure us from the effect of
historical processes, and history has not come to an end, even in America.
We have an enormous stake in the outcome of this process, and we should
start acting as if we understood that we do. A   people that lost one-third
of its world population within living memory due to its powerlessness
cannot contemplate the loss of   power with complacency. We rightly ask,
"If I am not for myself who will be for me?"

   It must be acknowledged from the start that for many decent, progressive
Jewish folk merely asking such fundamental   questions is tantamount to
heresy, and meddling with them is to conjure the devil. But if we hope to
persuade the organized   Jewish community to adopt a new stance of
enlightened self-interest with regard to the immigration debate, a debate
that will   surely become increasingly bitter, fractious, and politicized
in the crudest partisan ways in the days ahead we have little choice.   Of
equal urgency, and inextricably linked to that debate, is the mission of
finding ways to strengthen national unity and social   cohesion in America
by resuscitating patriotic assimilation under demanding, historically
unprecedented circumstances.

   This is emphatically not a time for expending much energy worrying about
political good manners and seeking to anticipate   each and every qualm of
our hypersensitive current political allies (I hope soon-to-be former
allies), not to mention the   reactions of some of our own flock. And we
can't afford to continue putting our heads in the sand, appealing as that
is. The   problem - and there is a problem - is not going to go away.
Unlike the case with earlier eras of immigration, there appears   to be no
hiatus in the offing. According to figures just pre-leased from the recent
Census, the number of Mexicans who have   come to the United States legally
and/or illegally has doubled in one decade.

   Leaving Inviolate the Historical Holy of Holies

   It is critically important to state at the outset that this is neither
to wax nostalgic (a culturally inconceivable stance) nor -   Heaven forbid
- to find redeeming features in the evil, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and Red
Menace-based Great Pause in the   1920s that trapped hundreds of thousands
of Jews in Europe. My then-teenage father and his brothers, escaping the
widespread bloody pogroms taking place throughout the Russian Empire during
the civil war that followed the Revolution,   were very nearly stranded by
it and left to the tender mercies of General "Pogromchik" Petlyura's
Russian and Ukrainian   Nationalist army. They managed to ship out of
Danzig, walking to that Baltic port all the way from a small village
outside Kiev,   and get in just under the wire before the door slammed
shut. Anyone familiar with the national/ethnic quotas that formed the
basis for U.S. immigration policy in the years that followed will note not
only their vilely discriminatory attitude toward   Eastern and Southern
Europeans (Jews most prominently), but also that even the tiny quotas
allotted these undesirables were   rarely met. So extreme was the
anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic restrictionist attitude.

   America's vast moral failure to offer refuge to Jews fleeing Nazi
persecution, a story told so powerfully by David S. Wyman   in his two
books and that of many subsequent historians, can never be forgotten. The
story is told in the permanent exhibition   of the United States Holocaust
Museum, but with less prominence than it deserves, no doubt out of concern
for appearing   overly critical of the nation on whose national mall the
museum stands. While the U.S. administration was fully informed how   and
where millions were being murdered in Europe, only a handful were
grudgingly granted safety here. The story of the ship   the St. Louis is
perhaps the most poignant and widely known instance of this monstrous
policy, but scores of Jews seeking   refuge could tell equally appalling
tales of grotesque treatment. Along with the trade in African slaves and
the institution of   slavery and the treatment of Native Americans,
America's abandonment of the Jews to Nazi annihilation is arguably the
greatest moral failure in its history. This shameful, frightening history
has formed, as it were, the sacred moral basis for   mainstream Jewish
support for generous legal immigration.

   But Jewish memories of the failure of U.S. refugee policy and a
national-origins immigration policy abandoned some 36 years   ago should no
longer, can no longer, serve as the basis for communal thinking on this
issue. We are, in the first instance, not   speaking here of refugees from
tyranny or oppressed minorities, but of vast numbers of immigrants seeking
economic   betterment, and, secondly, we are not advocating an
anti-immigration position - far from it - but rather a sensible one that is
consonant with the American dream. Put simply, what we are advocating is a
pro-immigrant policy of lower immigration.

   Also, let's confess it: It would be ridiculous to mistake the organized
Jewish community's hesitancy to address the subject of   the great cultural
transformation of America for genuine equanimity. We are, after all,
standing on the edge of what is arguably   the most profound social
transformation in the nation's history. It is a demographic transformation
that, most experts believe,   will result in a majority non-white
population sometime before the end of the new century. A new American
nation is coming   into being before our very eyes, and many in the Jewish
world are worried about it; some are even terrified.

   For the most part we continue to mouth the traditional policy line
affirming generous - really, unlimited - immigration and   open borders,
though our own constituency is deeply divided on the policy, supports it
with diminished enthusiasm, and even   our legislative advocates seem to do
so without conviction. Doubt has been growing for some years now. For those
familiar   with the behavior of mainstream Jewish organizations within the
landscape of Washington-based coalitions, or for anyone with   any mother
wit, it is a commonplace that Jews find themselves on the political right
with regard to almost any issue one might   name on cold days in hell. But
this has been regularly the case for at least nearly a decade at meetings
of the National   Immigration Forum, the key lobbying group for large-scale
immigration, a group in which the Jewish organizations present are   often
alone in opposing what is, in essence, a policy of open borders.

   Yet, for the time being, as if on automatic pilot, Jewish organizations
repeat the familiar mantras and continue with their   uncritical
"celebration" of diversity. (Diversity meaning, of course, diversity of
race and ethnicity but not opinion.) Like   sleepwalkers, we instinctively
plod along the corridors in the familiar patterns and pursue old-fashioned
attempts at "dialogue"   with the new constellation of groups while we
attempt to get our arms around the New America. (Dialogue frequently being
a   one-way street where we strive to please our partners at any price,
often reinforce stereotypes of Jewish money-grubbing and   privilege by
promising entrepreneurs of color entr=E9e to business insiders and frequentl=
y
ask for little in the way of concrete   support for our own agenda in
return.) Sometimes it also seems as if we're trying to look like value-free
sociologists and not   give the slightest outward signs of the intense
vertigo we're experiencing or the least hint that we may be prepared to
reconsider policy. Though we undoubtedly appear green around the gills to
those who know us well. For a community that has   long advanced an
ambitious and unapologetic public agenda, and not infrequently in a
rambunctious, in-your-face style, this   hesitancy is striking and does not
go unnoticed. If unchanged, in the long run it may also prove dangerous.

   Of course research and reflection are always necessary prerequisites to
policy formation or revision, but does anyone seriously   doubt that we
also assume this meditative posture because it carries no immediate
political risks? And this despite the fact that   like Americans of all
backgrounds, including a high proportion of fairly recently arrived
immigrants, much now going on   makes us profoundly uneasy, and we can't
remain quiet for much longer. Our concern with not giving offense, for not
getting   precisely the press we want, should not be allowed to strangle
our willingness to speak. There are questions of great moment to   which we
do not have answers, and we shall never find them if we are afraid even to
pose them.

   Also, so long as we remain frozen in an attitude of unwise wise
passivity, we treat the new realities as if they were inevitable.   We fall
into the trap of seeing the reconfiguration of the American sociological,
cultural and, perhaps most important for us,   political landscape as if it
were being carved out by a glacial force of nature before which we were
powerless.

   The Anti-Democratic Nature of the Determinists

   This tacit surrender to determinism - the belief that economically
motivated, unceasing immigration on a vast scale is   unstoppable because
it is due to inexorable global market forces - makes us complicit in a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Such   surrender also means, ominously, that we
have, in effect, accepted the notion that something as momentous as
immigration   policy - and no public policy arena carries wider
implications for the whole of American society - need not, indeed can not,
be subject to the democratic will of the American people. Given the rising
unpopularity of current policy on immigration and   even reports of
isolated violence against immigrants nationwide, cutting off democratic
channels of redress raises the specter of   serious social unrest.

   Surrender to the alleged inevitable also makes a mockery of the rule of
law, as evidenced by President Bush's recent   ill-conceived, transparently
political, and ethnically divisive initiative to grant legal status to some
or all of the three to four   million Mexican illegal immigrants in the
United States.

   Predictably enough, now comes word the president may compound the error
and extend a policy of sanctuary for lawbreakers   to illegal immigrants of
all backgrounds to satisfy disgruntled new arrivals from other ethnic
groups who feel aggrieved. We   have come to live within a culture in which
illegal immigrants have joined the roster of victims demanding rights,
recognition,   and recompense; in effect they wish to join the ranks of the
only just ethnic recipients of affirmative action: African Americans.
Many of the traditional "people of good will" not only find this astounding
act of collective social gall appropriate, but also   view the satisfaction
of the demands of illegal aliens as if they constituted moral imperatives.
To make matters even worse, not   to be outdone by the president's deft
pandering to Mexican-Americans, leading Democrats have proposed a
significant   extension "on humanitarian grounds" of family-reunification
policy, a highly questionable approach to the selection of   immigrants in
the first place.

   Where, pray, will all this end? Astonishing data drawn from the 2000
Census indicates that there may be something like nine   million illegal
residents in the United States. Most people on earth have nothing; if they
manage to make it to America they   will have something. But do we really
wish to construct immigration policy on the catastrophe of global poverty
and chaos,   and the breakdown of nation-states around the world that
threatens to overwhelm all notions of separate nationhood and erode   all
borders? An appeal based on global misery can know no boundaries and can
make no distinctions. And we must   continually bear in mind that the
Republicans and Democrats pushing these agendas do not do so out of genuine
compassion   (where were they during the Rwandan genocide?) but in a shabby
public relations battle for the Latino, especially Mexican,   vote. And no
one imagines that we could afford such compassion economically, or that the
American people would stand for   such a policy if one were explicitly
presented.

[END]

Tomorrow:

"Abandoning the Field to Nativism and Xenophobia"

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Thought for the Day:

"Today America would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to
restore order;  tomorrow they will be grateful!  This is especially true if
they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real
or promulgated, that threatened our very existence.  It is then that all
peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil.  The one
thing every man fears is the unknown.  When presented with this scenario,
individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their
well-being granted to them by the world government."

(Dr. Henry Kissinger, Evian-Les-Bains, France, 1991)