What Obama’s immigration plan means

The new Congress will advance a Jeffersonian model of states rising independently, through their own strengths; in Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) words, to “save America from Washington.” Sens.-elect Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) and others will advance this approach in the Senate; Perry on the 2016 campaign trail.

{mosads}But how can mature, culturally distinctive regions remain intact when a president becomes, in the words of New York Times distinguished columnist Ross Douthat, “an elected Caesar, a Cheney for liberalism, a president unbound”?

This influx has been compared by a colleague of mine who shares my own ethnic persuasion to the bringing over of millions of impoverished Irish to the mills and factories of Massachusetts, where our grandparents worked. We did change everything, for better or worse, and some, still entrenched in the old neighborhood, will claim that we actually drove the Yankees out, to Texas and beyond. I cannot help think that the tens of millions of European ethnics with this same history see the president’s initiative in the very same light as my colleague; as a continuum of their own benevolence, passing on 21st-century opportunities to new generations of different ethnicities.

It is absurd. I am sure my great aunties from the old sod were delighted to read the inscription on the Statue of Liberty as they approached Ellis Island, they the “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” But they weren’t brought here to seek freedom. They were brought here to labor in factories and fight in wars and held the same human value to the industrialists who brought them here as a measure of coal or a barrel of gunpowder.

And incidentally, many, like my own ancestor of 1863, were pulled into advancing warfare shortly after arrival and a military draft exploiting their ignorance. Vast numbers quickly became the catalyst to great war. President Obama’s millions, take note. Retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal today dreams utopian, egalitarian dreams of military conscription and other retired military suggest (seriously?) preemptive war against China. No doubt y’all have helped trigger their feverish visions of imperial conquest.

There is no industrial revolution going on this side of the Pearl River Delta as there was when the Irish were brought to New England, although as Leslie Chang indicates in her fascinating study, “Factory Girls,” on the migrant workers today of southern China, the situation in China does indeed bear similarities to that of New England when workers went from field to factory.

Obama’s newly liberated minions will be pool boys, housekeepers and landscapers for wealthy eloi much like himself in the dry suburbs of Los Angeles and will form an ad hoc proletariat to the yuppie gentry of Silicon Valley, as John Kenneth Galbraith well prophesied in his 1992 text, The Culture of Contentment.

And this, the new Congress must consider, may have some suggestion regarding our own situation with this rogue president.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.