How did we suffer from not having 12 to 20 million illegal aliens here?
by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4600
The American Conservative Magazine
On reading George W. Bush’s discourse to the New York Economic Club last week, http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=992’s insight came to mind: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”
With the Iraq War entering its sixth year, the dollar sinking to peso levels, the economy careening into recession, and 12 to 20 million illegal aliens roosting here, Bush alerted us to what really worries him: “I’m troubled by isolationism and protectionism … [and another “ism,” and that’s nativism. And that’s what happened throughout our history. And probably the most grim reminder of what can happen to America during periods of isolationism and protectionism is what happened in the late—in the ’30s, when we had this America First policy and Smoot-Hawley. And look where it got us.”
Let us try to sort out this dog’s breakfast. First, America was never http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2528 that began in 1929 and lasted through FDR’s first two terms. This is a liberal myth, probably taught to Mr. Bush by New Deal Democrats at the Milton Academy.
America First was an organization of 800,000 anti-interventionists formed at Yale in 1940 by patriots like Gerald Ford, Potter Stewart, and Sargent Shriver, backed by John F. Kennedy, to check FDR’s drive to war. Herbert Hoover supported it, and its greatest spokesman was the Lone Eagle, Charles Lindbergh.
But America First did not make policy. FDR did. And it was FDR who, by cutting off Japan’s oil in July 1941, rebuffing Prince Konoye’s offer to meet him in the Pacific or Alaska, and issuing a virtual ultimatum on Nov. 26, 1941 to get out of China, propelled Japan to its fatal decision to attack Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7.
Isolationist is an epithet used to smear those patriots who adhere to George Washington’s admonition to stay out of foreign wars, Thomas Jefferson’s counsel to seek “peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none,” and John Quincy Adams’s declaration that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Does Bush regard these statesmen as blinkered isolationists?
Protectionism is the structuring of trade policy to protect the national sovereignty, ensure economic self-reliance, and “prosper America first.” It was the policy of the Republican Party from Abraham Lincoln to Calvin Coolidge. America began that era in 1860 with one half of Britain’s production and ended it producing more than all of Europe put together. Is this a record to be ashamed of?
Compare protectionism’s success to Bush’s record. Since 2001, he has presided over the seven largest trade deficits in history, the loss of 3.5 million manufacturing jobs and the collapse of the dollar, and added but one-fifth of the private sector jobs Bill Clinton created. Gold has gone from $260 an ounce to $1,000, oil from $28 a barrel to $100.
“Nativism” is another smear term, dating to the early 1850s and the Know-Nothing Party, which sought to halt immigration after millions of Irish flooded in following the famine of 1845. It carries a connotation of xenophobia, the fear and hatred of foreigners.
Thus does Bush tar critics who deplore his dereliction of duty in failing to defend this nation’s borders against a Third World invasion that may turn this Republic into a Tower of Babel.
From 1924 to 1965, there was indeed little immigration. Does that make Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Kennedy knuckle-dragging nativists? When JFK took office, we were as united and strong a country as we have ever been. How did we suffer from not having 12 to 20 million illegal aliens here?
http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/06/pjb-bush%e2%80%99s-black-list/