Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [44]
CHAPTER FOUR
ASSIMILATION: THE NATIVISTS ARE RESTLESS
Whether behind the scenes or within the government itself, Linda Chavez has been fighting the good conservative fight for more than a quarter-century. She’s a veteran of the Reagan White House and a former executive director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She’s a FOX News political analyst, a nationally syndicated columnist, and head of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a think tank that promotes assimilation over multiculturalism and actively opposes affirmative action quotas and bilingualism. She’s written extensively on organized labor, including the book, Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics. She was the Republican candidate for U.S. Senator from Maryland in 1986 and President George W. Bush’s nominee for Secretary of Labor in 2001 before withdrawing her name from consideration.
Chavez was born and raised in the United States, though as the surname suggests she is of Hispanic heritage. Still, she doesn’t hesitate to take on the liberal ethnic activists whose identity politics do far more harm than good for the people they claim to represent. You probably have to be a member of a racial or ethnic minority to appreciate fully the flak that someone like Chavez catches for casting her lot with the political right. Personal attacks—complete with pop psychoanalysis—are considered fair game, even in the mainstream media. If Antonin Scalia opposes racial preferences, he’s simply wrong (and evil). If Linda Chavez opposes them, she’s not only wrong but also an ethnic traitor. And “ungrateful.” And “self-hating.” And a “sellout.” To be Chavez requires uncommon mettle, with a courage of convictions that can withstand relentless below-the-belt criticism for the sin of thinking independently. Chavez has always been up to the task, and movement conservatism is the better for her participation.
But none of that ideological capital counted for much after Chavez penned a column on immigration in the spring of 2007 that ruffled some right-wing feathers. The Senate was considering immigration-reform legislation, and the country was in the middle of a high-volume debate over its merits. In her column titled, “Latino Fear and Loathing,” Chavez had the gall to suggest that racial and ethnic animus was informing the national discussion, particularly on talk radio, cable news, and conservative Web sites.
Never mind that race and ethnicity have always informed our immigration debates. When it comes to determining who can and can’t come here, they have been front and center. Two hundred and fifty years ago, in writings that predate the nation’s founding, Benjamin Franklin complained that German immigrants, whom he called “the most stupid of their nation,” were too plentiful. “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens,” he wrote in 1751, “who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of us Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language and Customs?” The racial focus of the nation’s first major anti-immigration law, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, need hardly be argued. (The name notwithstanding, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were less about restricting immigration than about Federalist attempts to muzzle political opponents.) Early twentieth-century eugenicists like Madison Grant and Harry Laughlin, who heavily influenced the Immigration Act of 1924, went so far as to present “scientific” data classifying Southern and Eastern Europeans as different (and inferior) races in order to oppose their entry to the United States. Even the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which repealed the 1924 national-origin quotas and ended Asian exclusion policies, was