What Obama’s Quick Illegal Immigrant Fix Ignores
Posted by Bruce Thornton Bio ↓ on Jun 19th, 2012
America’s ward-heeler-in-chief just bought some votes with the policy equivalent of a keg of beer and a slab of bacon. Obama’s memorandum to Homeland Security head Napolitano to stop the deportation of illegal aliens brought here as children and granting them work permits bypassed Congress, that branch of government our quaint Constitution makes responsible for such policy. Obama said so himself last year when he reminded people that he couldn’t “change the law unilaterally” and “We have to pass bills through the legislature and then I can sign it.” But the need to stanch the bleeding from a week of economic bad news for his reelection campaign has given the president Constitutional amnesia. If Obama had been sincerely interested in crafting a legal, bipartisan, permanent solution to this problem, he could have negotiated with Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who has crafted a more sensible solution than last year’s Dream Act, and worked through Congress. But the need to throw some goodies to Latino voters in several swing states critical for his own reelection was more important than actually governing according to the Constitution.
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No doubt, many of these young immigrants match Obama’s description. I’d bet that those who have served in the military do. But many do not, particularly the university students usually showcased by their champions. From my years of experience as a teacher in a university about half Hispanic, hundreds of them illegal immigrants mostly from Mexico, I know that many see themselves as Mexican or Chicano first, and Americans second, if at all. They travel to Mexico and speak Spanish, and have imbibed an anti-Americanism that casts them as victims of American imperialism and racism who deserve reparations for those historical crimes.
These attitudes are institutionalized in the courses they take from ethnic studies departments and in the organizations they join. Many universities, for example, have chapters of a group called MEChA, the “National Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán,” the mythical land allegedly stolen by Americans in the Mexican War. This fantasy history claims that the whole Southwest was once Aztlán, the homeland of La Raza, the “bronze” race, who are “the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers,” as the “Plan of Aztlán” puts it. This homeland was lost to the “brutal ‘gringo’ invasion,” and the goal of the “Plan” is the “reconquest” of that lost homeland, and restitution for that historical crime. The racist drift of all this is apparent in the motto of MEChA: “For the Race everything, outside the Race, nothing.”
Obviously, MEChA scorns assimilation to American culture and identity, promoting instead a Mexican identity called “Chicanismo,” which “involves a personal decision to reject assimilation and work towards the preservation of our cultural heritage” and the recovery of a “bronze culture for a bronze people.” Thus MEChA “is committed to ending the cultural tyranny suffered at the hands of institutional and systematic discrimination that holds our Gente [people] captive.” If you need further evidence that this ideology is hostile to American culture and identity, consider a poem published at California State University Fresno in La Voz de Aztlán, a state-subsidized campus newspaper that functions as MEChA’s house organ: “America the land robbed by the white savage / the land of the biggest genocide / the home of intolerance / the place where dreams come to die / the place of greed and slavery,” and so on for another two dozen lines.
What Obama
