ZGram - 11/13/2001 - "...but is it good for the Jews?" - Part III

[Ingrid Rimland]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

November 13, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Last night I reread this astounding document, and I admit I got more and
more upset - especially about Part III of the Stephen Steinlight essay
titled "The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography:  Reconsidering a
Misguided Immigration Policy".

It bears repeating that Steinlight, by his own admission, is a former
pro-immigration activist who, riding on the "free pass" (his words) of the
so-called "Holocaust", lent himself to helping wreck the social fabric of a
largely homogeneous America which welcomed Jews with open arms and gave
them lots of leeway to push their own agenda.

Now he takes it blithely upon himself, again,  to pull the brakes on
rampant immigration because he realizes that what he and his ilk have
imported are people who think with their blood - and thus follow their own
inner drummer to fulfill their own agenda at the expense of America's
Silent Majority.

Particularly revealing for the ever-so-accommodating goyim world is
Steinlight's admission that, in his formative years, he as a Jewish kid,
along with other agemates, attended all-Jewish, apartheid camps.  There he
was indoctrinated in an "Israel First" ideology that included singing of a
foreign national anthem, saluting a foreign flag, being taught an "us
versus them", "we are superior" etc. mindset.  There was thus shameless
training as a virtual Fifth Column force to keep on milking the goodwill of
the American goys for Israel.

Now that it is expedient for his group, he once again remembers his
"loyalty" to his host country and exhorts his brethren to please do the
same - after all, the day might come when those in the Diaspora, confronted
with Sharon's murderous behavior, so generously fortified with the billions
of dollars, the sniper rifles, Apache helicopters, the tanks and even the
handcuff, will have to face the wrath of those they persecuted for so long.

[START]

Supporting Immigration by Reducing Its Scale

Before offering specific recommendations about immigration policy, we
should immediately anticipate the predictable   opposition and state
emphatically what we are not advocating. We are not advocating an
anti-immigration position. It would   be the height of ingratitude, moral
amnesia, and gracelessness for a group that has historically benefited
enormously from   liberal immigration - as well as suffered enormously from
illiberal immigration policies - to be, or to be seen to be,   suggesting
that we cruelly yank the rope ladder up behind us. It is also, frankly, in
our own best interest to continue to support   generous immigration. The
day may come when the forces of anti-Semitic persecution will arise once
more in the lands of the   former Soviet Union or in countries of Eastern
Europe and Jews will once again need a safe haven in the United States. The
Jewish community requires this fail-safe. We will always be in support of
immigration; the question is whether it should be   open-ended or not? The
question is what constitutes the smartest approach to supporting
immigration?

   We also believe that generous immigration has been and remains one of
the greatest strengths of American life for a multitude   of reasons,
perhaps the chief source of the remarkable social, cultural, and
intellectual vitality and continual revitalization that is   the byproduct
of the periodic reinvention of American society. Along with our
constitutional principles, democratic values, ideal   of equal opportunity,
and free market economy, immigration and the cultural variety it produces
is one of the principal engines   of our creativity, genius for invention,
impatience with outworn ideas, anachronistic social arrangements, and
stifling cultural   conformity. It is also main source of a deep-seated
historic tolerance for diversity.

   Which is not to say that Americans are ever well inclined toward the
present crop of immigrants. We tend to dislike them in   present time and
only appreciate their virtues in retrospect - usually primarily as foils to
compare to the even more repulsive   characteristics of the newly unwashed
arrivals in a curiously insincere but useful form of social nostalgia.
American history is   replete with outbreaks of political xenophobia (from
the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party to the America First movement to
Buchanan's Reform Party), and racism, in particular, has been our Achilles
heel. But all in all, and especially in comparison to   the more
ethnocentric European and Asian societies, we have a comparatively
excellent record with regard to welcoming   strangers to our shores over
time. Time is the key factor. We are, to use the well-worn clich=E9, a natio=
n
of immigrants, but   acceptance only comes when a critical mass of what are
perceived by ordinary Americans as characteristically American   cultural
norms and attitudes are imbibed and displayed by immigrants in their daily
lives.

   Also, U.S. world leadership in virtually every area of science, high
technology, in the learned professions, and in every sphere   of artistic
endeavor is the direct result of the vast range of sources of creativity
that immigration provides. We are able to draw   on distinctive modes of
creativity and inspiration from across the entire earth and then liberate
it in the free air of America to   accomplish all it is capable of
achieving. Immigration gives America intellectual, social, and artistic
vitality unknown in equal   measure anywhere else in the history of the
world.

   Having made this sincere genuflection to the great good that has come of
immigration, in light of unprecedented, ascending   challenges, what
changes might we contemplate with regard to Jewish advocacy on immigration
and immigration-related   issues? How should we think about acculturation,
assimilation, and an old term we should not be ashamed to resuscitate -
Americanization?

   For starters, we should give serious, immediate consideration to
terminating our alliance with the advocates of open borders -   we do not
belong in their coalitions - and ally ourselves, instead, with
pro-immigration advocates who favor immigration   reform that includes
moderate reductions in immigration, such as the Center for Immigration
Studies. With them, and others,   we should support an approach to
immigration that restores its good name and helps immigrants make a
successful,   well-planned transition to American life. These goals are
realistic only if the present stratospheric numbers are reduced, criteria
for entry are rationalized, and legal and cultural processes of
naturalization and acculturation are more efficient and deliberate.
Successful immigration is defined in this context first of all as
naturalization - acquiring citizenship - and, second, as   striking a
proper balance between ethnic/cultural group loyalty and a larger sense of
national belonging.

   Immigration Policy and Identity Politics

   Our current policies encourage the balkanization that results from
identity politics and the politics of grievance. The high   percentage of
new immigrants who are poor and uneducated, suffer linguistic handicaps,
dizzying cultural disorientation, and   possess no competitive skills for a
postindustrial labor market remain effectively trapped within the
underclass and/or the   suffocating and meager support systems offered by
their tight tribal enclaves. The numbers simply overwhelm available
resources at the state and federal level. The new faith-based initiatives,
so questionable from a First Amendment standpoint,   potentially troubling
in terms of generating sectarian strife over the pursuit of federal
dollars, and capable of providing federal   government sanction to
discrimination, would also be utterly incapable of laying a glove on the
problem. That is if - and it is a   big if - the program survives the
Senate and is found to be constitutional.

   Now, none of this would be a problem if we were willing to adopt the
Chamber of Commerce/Wall Street Journal   mentality. That worldview
applauds an endless supply of immigrants as desirable in order to fill the
bottomless demand for the   wretched of the earth to occupy the bowels of
the service sector, to suppress U.S. wages overall, and to further weaken
the   already marginalized American labor movement. But if we are
interested in sustaining the American dream of upward mobility   and social
integration, that vision is both cynical and hopelessly inadequate.
According to social analysts from the political left   to the political
right, the Alan Wolfe thesis tends to find substantial if not solid
agreement. American social cohesion and the   integrity of its democratic
process are faring pretty well but the nation faces one paramount
challenge: the growing chasm   between the very rich and everyone else.
With this large anxiety in mind, and with concerns about creating a
workable   pluralism in the face of an exploding and increasingly transient
immigrant population, does it make sense for America to follow   the
European model and create a massive underclass of impoverished, alienated,
and socially disconnected guest workers? It is   hard to imagine that
anyone who values social democracy could favor such a solution - but it is
becoming a reality on the   ground for three reasons: the misery of the
world's desperately poor, employer greed, and the loss of control of
America's   borders.

   The inability of government to begin to cope with the scale of the
problem (whether on the side of policing borders or   providing adequate
social services) also strengthens the role of the ethnic enclave in
addressing it. And the resultant   dependence on the religious and cultural
institutions within the ethnic communities for sustenance often slows or
blocks   acculturation, and worse. Within those tight ethnic enclaves, home
country allegiances and social patterns endure, old   prejudices and
hatreds are reinforced, and home-country politics continue to inordinately
shape, even control, the immigrant's   worldview. In many cases, ethnic
communal support for new immigrants or patronage of their business
establishments are   subject to the blessings of atavistic, unassimilated,
and anti-pluralistic communal and religious leadership that frequently has
a   political agenda fundamentally at odds with American values. This is
certainly the case within the Pakistani immigrant   community. In many
cases, the Old World political party structures, replete with their
targeted, self-serving meager handouts,   remain powerful.

   Breaking these patterns of control exerted by the sending country and
promoting acculturation that honors the immigrant's   culture and origins
but principally foregrounds and nurtures American values can be achieved
only by reducing the present   overwhelming scale of immigration that
thwarts any effort to develop practicable solutions to these problems. As
noted earlier,   cheap air fares and overseas telephone rates, and the
internet permits the home country to exert a strong continuing influence
on immigrants that is substantially different from what was the case with
previous generations of newcomers. Many new   immigrants are and remain, in
effect, primarily citizens of their home countries and resident aliens in
America, here merely to   benefit from American resources and return income
to the home country before returning themselves. (There are even cases of
immigrants to the United States that hold political office in their home
countries!) The present tidal wave of immigration   swamps all efforts to
promote an active sense of civic partnership, dramatically slows the
process of naturalization by taxing the   INS and other institutions beyond
their capacity to respond, and sustains a meaningless approach to
naturalization and   citizenship tests. (The citizenship tests with their
intellectually lame content constitute a particular disgrace.) It also
allows no   time and space for one group to begin assimilating before the
next wave comes crashing ashore.

   Though there has been some progress in recent times, the number of
resident aliens not seeking naturalization is enormous.   Contrary to
popular mythology, it was not unusual for many immigrant European national
groups in the great wave of   immigration in the nineteenth century and at
the turn of that century for large numbers to return home after only a
brief sojourn   in America. Something like half of the Italians who
immigrated to the United States at the turn of the 19th century returned to
Italy. Now we have large groups remaining but not naturalizing.

   The time may have arrived to advocate a policy that determines that a
legal prerequisite for immigration, in the first instance, is a   sworn
affidavit that the prospective immigrant will seek citizenship at the
earliest practicable date, with timeframes rigorously   enforced by
deporting violators. The bottom line should be up or out. Needless to say,
adequate funding must be provided to   the INS to handle this process in an
orderly and efficient manner. The goal of immigration should be
citizenship, an acceptance   of the rights and obligations of full
participation in the national life, accompanied by an embrace of American
political and   social values; its goal should not be access to
opportunities for better-paying jobs and public benefits, and nothing more.

   Trendy Postmodernism Skews the Debate

   There are, of course, within the opinion-making set, increasing numbers
of trendy philosophical internationalists, mostly   privileged academicians
protected from real world pressures by tenure, who strenuously object to
the notion that one must   select and emphasize one aspect of the multiple
cultural and national identities human beings possess. Though still a
relatively   small fraternity, one bumps into them more and more at
foundation-sponsored conferences on immigration policy. According   to
their worldview, such hoary notions as citizenship or whole-hearted
assimilation - God forbid patriotism - are historically   outmoded,
embarrassing concepts. In a shrinking, porous world with huge populations
on the move, we are told, they have little   to recommend them, and we
should feel greater and greater comfort with multiple simultaneous
identities, juggling conflicting   national and cultural allegiances, and
the attenuation of specific national loyalties. Such thinkers not only have
no problem with   multiple citizenship, but they see it as an ideal, the
embodiment of a higher form of global consciousness, the ultimate
expression of New Age cosmopolitanism.

   The great masses of ordinary humanity across the world have no such
perspective: tragically for themselves and for those who   are often
victimized by them, they continue to be driven by various forms of
tribalism, including the most violent and extreme   sort. This is true from
lethal interethnic clashes in soccer arenas in every continent, and from
the mass killing fields of Africa,   to the killing fields of the Balkans.
Ethnocentrism and has proven remarkably enduring into the new millennium;
those who   counted it out, who thought humanity was ready for some higher
notion of fraternity, have been shown to have been utterly   mistaken in
their predictions. Ethnocentrism is the undisputed world champion.

   The great masses, increasingly on the move, are also driven by economic
necessity, especially the billions living in dire poverty.   For better or
for worse, these people have no coherent global ideology about supplanting
the tribe or the nation; they don't   have the luxury to sit back and
expound on such themes. But there is a cadre of dilettantes with academic
and law degrees who   proffer a postmodern philosophy that sees the nation
state, even open ones with pluralistic values, as an anachronism. They
constitute an intellectual cheering section for the breakdown of law,
historical notions of what makes for nation states and civil   society,
civic traditions, the violation of the sanctity of borders that once
commanded unquestioned assent, and use a term like   patriotism only
jokingly. They lend the present crisis the veneer of a conceptual
breakthrough.

   Jews and Identity Politics

   We Jews need to be especially sensitive to the multinational model this
crowd (many of them Jewish) is promoting. Why?   Because one person's
"celebration" of his own diversity, foreign ties, and the maintenance of
cultural and religious traditions   that set him apart is another's
balkanizing identity politics. We are not immune from the reality of
multiple identities or the   charge of divided loyalties, a classic staple
of anti-Semitism, and we must recognize that our own patterns are easily
assailed,   and we need to find ways of defending them more effectively as
the debate goes on. Much public opinion survey research   undertaken in
recent years continues to indicate that large numbers of Americans,
particularly people of color, assert that Jews   are more loyal to Israel
than the United States.

   For Jews, it is at best hypocritical, and, worse, an example of an utter
lack of self-awareness, not to recognize that we are up to   our necks in
this problem. This has been especially true once we were sufficiently
accepted in the United States to feel   confident enough to go public with
our own identity politics. But this newfound confidence carries its own
costs; people are   observing us closely, and what they see in our behavior
is not always distinct from what we loudly decry in others. One has to   be
amused, even amazed, when colleagues in the organized Jewish world wring
their hands about black nationalism,   Afrocentrism, or with cultural
separatism in general - without considering Jewish behavioral parallels.
Where has our vaunted   Jewish self-awareness flown?

   I'll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids
of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a
quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for 10 formative years during
my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish   summer camp. There, each
morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its
colors, sang a foreign national   anthem, learned a foreign language,
learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the
true homeland.   Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue,
and, like many other Jewish teens of my generation, I spent two   summers
working in Israel on a collective farm while I contemplated that
possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was   taught the
superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were
taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy   outsiders, people from whom
sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive,
intelligent, and moral than   ourselves. We were also taught that the
lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one.

   I am of course simplifying a complex process of ethnic and religious
identity formation; there was also a powerful   counterbalancing
universalistic moral component that inculcated a belief in social justice
for all people and a special   identification with the struggle for Negro
civil rights. And it is no exaggeration to add that in some respects, of
course, a   substantial subset of secular Jews were historically Europe's
cosmopolitans par excellence, particularly during the high noon   of
bourgeois culture in Central Europe. That sense of commitment to
universalistic values and egalitarian ideals was and   remains so strong
that in reliable survey research conducted over the years, Jews regularly
identify "belief in social justice" as   the second most important factor
in their Jewish identity; it is trumped only by a "sense of peoplehood." It
also explains the   long Jewish involvement in and flirtation with Marxism.
But it is fair to say that Jewish universalistic tendencies and tribalism
have always existed in an uneasy dialectic. We are at once the most open of
peoples and one second to none in intensity of   national feeling. Having
made this important distinction, it must be admitted that the essence of
the process of my nationalist   training was to inculcate the belief that
the primary division in the world was between "us" and "them." Of course we
also   saluted the American and Canadian flags and sang those anthems,
usually with real feeling, but it was clear where our primary   loyalty was
meant to reside.

   I am also familiar with the classic, well-honed answer to this tension
anytime this phenomenon is cited: Israel and America are   both
democracies; they share values; they have common strategic interests;
loyalty to one cannot conceivably involve disloyalty   to the other, etc.,
etc. All of which begs huge questions, including an American strategic
agenda that extends far beyond Israel,   and while it may be true in
practice most of the time, is by no means an absolute construct, devoid of
all sort of potential   exceptions. I say all this merely to remind us that
we cannot pretend we are only part of the solution when we are also part of
the problem; we have no less difficult a balancing act between group
loyalty and a wider sense of belonging to America. That   America has
largely tolerated this dual loyalty - we get a free pass, I suspect,
largely over Christian guilt about the Holocaust   - makes it no less a
reality.

   At the very least, as the debate over multinational identity rises, I
hope the Jewish community will have the good sense not to   argue in favor
of dual citizenship and other such arrangements. I would also advocate that
those who possess dual citizenship   to relinquish it in order not to cloud
the issue and to serve the best interests of the American Jewish community
and of   American national unity. The recent case of the Israeli teenager
who committed a murder in suburban Maryland (his victim was   a young
Latino) and fled to Israel, where he was permitted to remain despite
attempts at extradition by U.S. prosecutors, with   considerable
congressional support, must never be repeated. That incident inflicted
serious damage on Israel's good name, and   it shapes the public's
perception of Jews as people in a special category with additional rights
who have a safe haven where   they can escape the reach of American
justice.

[END]

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

Thought for the Day:

"Public opinion - not entirely reflected in the media - is increasingly
seeing that Israel's (behavior) cannot be excused using endless Holocaust
coverage."

(Letter to the Zundelsite from England)