At the moment, Donald Trump, deservedly, is all of the rage for remarks he made regarding Mexican immigrants to the United States:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Mexico sends its people, they\u2019re not sending their best\u2026They\u2019re sending people that have lots of problems, and they\u2019re bringing those problems with us. They\u2019re bringing drugs. They\u2019re bringing crime. They\u2019re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Democrats and Republicans, both politicians and their apologists in the \u201cmainstream\u201d and \u201cconservative\u201d media, wasted no time in pouncing upon Trump.<\/p>\n
Some thoughts:<\/p>\n
First, it is obvious to those with a modicum of intelligence and honesty that Trump never intended to suggest that all <\/em>Mexican immigrants are reprobates. For starters, Trump himself qualified <\/em>his statement by including \u201cgood people\u201d among Mexican immigrants. But even if he hadn\u2019t done so, it is either bad faith or intellectual density that could lead anyone to confuse a general<\/em> remark of the sort that Trump made with a categorical <\/em>one.<\/p>\n If I say that men are physically stronger than women, do I risk being accused of \u201csexism\u201d lest I explicitly acknowledge that there are exceptions<\/em>?<\/p>\n Not coincidentally, I\u2019m sure, the indignant who now judge Trump by this standard have been exempting themselves from it for as long as they <\/em>have been condemning whites <\/em>for slavery, Jim Crow, and so forth. Notice: Even though the overwhelming majority of white Americans never owned a slave, and even though there were no fewer than 4,000<\/em> black slave owners <\/em>in the antebellum South, talk of historical injustices suffered by \u201cblacks\u201d at the hands of \u201cwhites\u201d is never, ever <\/em>fine-tuned by modifiers like \u201cnot all,\u201d \u201csome,\u201d \u201cmost,\u201d etc.<\/p>\n When Jeb Bush says that immigrants who enter America illegally do so out of \u201clove,\u201d no one complains that he \u201cpaints with too broad of a brush.\u201d<\/p>\n This leads us to our next point.<\/p>\n Second, both those Hispanic \u201cleaders\u201d (read: racialist lobbyists) who are now demanding that GOP presidential contenders distance themselves from Trump as well as those among the latter who are all too eager to comply have hurled themselves onto the horns of a dilemma.<\/p>\n On the one hand, since Trump never implied that all <\/em>Mexican immigrants are criminals, drug dealers, and rapists, his critics must object to his assertion that there are some <\/em>criminals, drug dealers, and rapists coming to America from Mexico.<\/p>\n But if this is their grievance, then they have before them the impossible task of defending a position\u2014there is no <\/em>criminal element among Mexican immigrants\u2014that is demonstrably, patently <\/em>false.<\/p>\n On the other hand, if this is not <\/em>their view; if they concede that there are criminals among Mexican immigrants and that some of them are among the worst of the worst, then they acknowledge that Trump spoke truthfully and, hence, have no intellectual<\/em> or factual<\/em> basis for being upset with him.<\/p>\n That they remain upset with him proves that their motivations are political <\/em>or ideological. <\/em><\/p>\n Third, that immigrants from Mexico (and other Central and South American countries) are indeed bringing \u201clots of problems\u201d with them is undeniably true. <\/em>That some of them are \u201cbringing drugs;\u201d that some of them are bringing other sorts of \u201ccrime;\u201d and that some of them are \u201crapists,\u201d is true. <\/em><\/p>\n Fourth, the 19th<\/sup> century philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche memorably remarked that the truth is \u201chard.\u201d For our politicians, partisan media pundits, Hispanic special interest\/activist groups, the Immigrant Lobby, the Chamber of Commerce, and the agents of the Racism-Industrial-Complex generally, certain truths about the relentless wave of Third World immigration that\u2019s descended upon America for the last 50 years or so aren\u2019t just hard. <\/em><\/p>\n They are intolerable.<\/em><\/p>\n Thus, it\u2019s not enough that Trump\u2019s position<\/em> be repudiated. Trump<\/em> must be demonized.<\/em><\/p>\n Fifth, that some of Trump\u2019s staunchest critics are fellow Republicans speaks volumes\u2014about his critics<\/em>.<\/p>\n Larry Elder once said that between the GOP and the Democrats, there was hardly a dime\u2019s worth of difference. If the issue of immigration is a barometer of anything, it\u2019s painfully clear that Elder was right on the money.<\/p>\n For years, Republicans, including and especially many of those who have entered the presidential field, have ached every bit as much as their Democratic counterparts for \u201ccomprehensive immigration reform\u201d\u2014i.e. amnesty. <\/em> And this aching has endured despite the fact that the last amnesty\u2014presided over by the Republican<\/em>, Ronald Reagan\u2014failed miserably to resolve any problems.<\/p>\n Republicans, like Democrats, have done nothing to secure the southern border. Even when Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, GOP politicians still did nothing to resist the flow of illegal immigration from the south. This, in turn, encouraged <\/em>more of the latter.<\/p>\n Republican governors like Rick Perry and Jeb Bush, presidential candidates who have taken to blasting Trump, along with their colleague, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, have all arranged for illegal immigrants in their states to avail themselves of in-state tuition rates in the event that they decide to attend college while living illegally in America.<\/p>\n Finally, even assuming, for argument\u2019s sake, that it\u2019s the case that \u201cimmigrants\u201d commit fewer crimes than native born Americans, this is utterly irrelevant to anything that Trump has said.<\/p>\n Immigrants, and illegal immigrants specifically, may be in <\/em>America, but they are not of <\/em>it. An American immigration policy should be designed to benefit America. <\/em>No American benefits from the importation of any<\/em> criminals.<\/p>\n Trump never said that Mexican gutter snipes in America are overrepresented or not among America\u2019s gutter snipes. He simply pointed out that there are <\/em>gutter snipes coming to our country from Mexico.<\/p>\n Again, if his opponents believe that this empirically verifiable statement is inaccurate, they should say so. And if they don\u2019t object to its truth, then they have no intellectual ground on which to object.<\/p>\n As for their political motivations\u2026Well, that\u2019s a different story.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the moment, Donald Trump, deservedly, is all of the rage for remarks he made regarding Mexican immigrants to the United States: \u201cWhen Mexico sends its people, they\u2019re not sending their best\u2026They\u2019re sending people that have lots of problems, and they\u2019re bringing those problems with us. They\u2019re bringing drugs. They\u2019re bringing crime. They\u2019re rapists. And…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n