America: A Marketplace, not a Nation
November 21, 2014
FROM OBAMA’S speech last night creating amnesty for five million immigrants so that they can someday vote for the Democratic Party and calling for more visas for foreign, high-skilled workers:
“Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs here, create businesses here, create industries right here in America?”
There is nothing that joins Americans but money:
“For more than 200 years, our tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world has given us a tremendous advantage over other nations. It’s kept us youthful, dynamic, and entrepreneurial. It has shaped our character as a people with limitless possibilities — people not trapped by our past, but able to remake ourselves as we choose.
We have no distinctive identity or common past:
“We are a nation of immigrants.
“We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship …”
— Comments —
Alan M. writes:
Well said. Material prosperity for all with its associated demiurge, the market, is the one god the world can rally around. Removing the Final Cause only results in one of the other of the 4 causes (material, formal, efficient) to take its place for we cannot live as humans without a final cause.
Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:
The president’s speech last night is what passes in the liberal madhouse for political oratory. The speech is historically shoddy and grammatically mendacious. Thus –
Question: “Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us?”
Answer: Emphatically no, with the first item in evidence being Barack Hussein Obama, graduate of Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard.
Question: “Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs here, create businesses here, create industries right here in America?”
Answer: Emphatically no – Homo Economicus Americanus having sold its manufacturing infrastructure lock, stock, and barrel to China, India, and Mexico. The first item in evidence is Detroit, Michigan.
Statement: “For more than 200 years, our tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world has given us a tremendous advantage over other nations. It’s kept us youthful, dynamic, and entrepreneurial. It has shaped our character as a people with limitless possibilities — people not trapped by our past, but able to remake ourselves as we choose.”
Response: It is not true that our North American civilization has been “welcoming immigrants from around the world for over 200 years.” From 1620 to 1900, settlers, not immigrants, first founded and then extended that civilization from New England to California, Oregon, and Washington. Immigrants proper in the Nineteenth Century came almost exclusively from Western Europe. From 1924 t0 1965, there was a severe moratorium on immigration, so that those who had immigrated might acculturate – and acculturation was not, in those days, an option.
Statement: “We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.”
Response: Not so. The “we” of the Mayflower colonists were a small, face-to-face community, in which everyone personally knew everyone else, spoke the same language, and practiced the same religion. Again, non-European immigrants were not welcomed in the Nineteenth Century nor were they again in the early Twentieth Century; and efforts were made – including the immigration moratorium of 1924-1965 – to keep them out. There were, moreover, perfectly sound moral, cultural, and political reasons for not welcoming just anyone who wanted entry, and for keeping people out. Rhetoricians play fast and loose with the second-person plural. When uninvited trespassers break down the door and begin to loot the house, the householders do not include them in their “us.”
Laura writes:
Here is related commentary at VDare by Patrick Buchanan, who writes:
Today, in 2014, after an influx of perhaps 50 million in 50 years, legal and illegal, no longer from Northwest Europe, or Europe at all, but Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, of every race, color, creed, culture and language we seem less a nation than some mammoth Mall of America. An economy, but not a country.
Anita Kern writes:
Anita Kern writes:
Hello from Toronto:
Finally, another website with a comment that corrects the “nation of immigrants” babble that we see also so often here about Canada. I have had occasion to write to several columnists and others about this. Canada had settlers already in the 1500s, and there are families in the East that go back for many generations! The same is true of the United States, and the Maine writer John Gould had some funny lines on this matter in his columns and books. Mark Steyn also had a witty line about the Constitution…. may I quote ( see World should give thanks for America – 2007/updated 2013 ) :
“We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together.”
