Two Narratives

Since the election of Donald Trump, illegal immigration has become the cause célèbre for social justice warriors. They conflate legal, vetted and appropriate immigrants, many of whom have waited for years to get a visa into the USA with illegal immigrants who sneak across our borders and then hide in the population. That enables them to label Donald Trump and his supporters as anti-immigrant monsters.

The problem, of course is that illegal immigrants are breaking the law when they cross the border. But that doesn't stop the narrative. SJWs argue that illegal immigrants are "forced" to come to the United States due to horrific conditions in their own countries—poverty, crime, corruption, to name only a few. Undoubtedly, those conditions do exist, but if we opened our borders and allowed people who live under regimes that foster poverty, crime, corruption, poor health care, poor education, and the like, our population would swell uncontrollably, and social services designed for our own citizens would disappear.

Recently, SJWs have added a small twist to their cause célèbre, telling us that victims of domestic violence should be granted asylum. Angered that many claims of domestic violence among asylum seekers are deemed to be bogus, Nancy Pelosi accused the Trump Administration of "staggering cruelty."

But here's the irony. The same people who follow Nancy Pelosi's ideological path, tell us repeatedly that the American patriarchy subjugates all women, that misogyny abounds among white males, that a "rape culture" exists at American universities, that the workplace is toxic for women, that the USA is not a "safe space" for women—in short, that their own country is a caldron of domestic violence.

Heather McDonald comments on the irony of all of this:

But why should social-justice warriors want to subject these potential asylees to the horrors of America? In coming to the U.S., if you believe the dominant feminist narrative, the female aliens would simply be exchanging their local violent patriarchy for a new one. Indeed, it should be a mystery to these committed progressives why any Third World resident would seek to enter the United States. Not only is rape culture pervasive in the U.S., but the very lifeblood of America is the destruction of “black bodies,” in the words of media star Ta-Nehesi Coates. Surely, a Third World person of color would be better off staying in his home country, where he is free from genocidal whiteness and the murderous legacy of Western civilization and Enlightenment values.

But the same left-wing establishment that in the morning rails against American oppression of an ever-expanding number of victim groups in the afternoon denounces the U.S. for not giving unlimited access to foreign members of those same victim groups. In their open-borders afternoon mode, progressives paint the U.S. as the only source of hope and opportunity for low-skilled, low-social-capital Third Worlders; a place obligated by its immigration history to take in all comers, forever. In their America-as-the-font-of-all-evil-against-females-and-persons-of-color morning mode, progressives paint the U.S. as the place where hope and opportunity die under a tsunami of misogyny and racism.

Which reality do progressives actually believe? They likely hold both mutually exclusive concepts in their heads simultaneously, unaware of the contradiction, toggling smoothly between one and the other according to context. But both claims cannot be true. And actions speak more loudly than words. In pressing for an immigration policy determined by the desire of hundreds of millions of foreigners to enter the U.S., progressives implicitly acknowledge that the left-wing narrative about America is false. In fact, there is no place on earth less governed by tribal prejudice and machismo than the United States. The left-wing narrative is simply a form of moral preening.

At the end of the day, maybe the most important question is why millions want to come here—even if they must come here illegally? Maybe, despite what social justice warriors continually tell us, their outrage over the ills of our country is monumentally overblown. Maybe, just maybe, the illegal immigrants have a better feel for the benefits offered by the United States than their supposed protectors on the Left.