This Strange Hesitation about Deporting Illegal Immigrants

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It seems to be widely understood that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States largely because of an expectation that he might halt or at least drastically slow demographic change caused by immigration. Certainly for Ann Coulter, who forecast the imminent demise of the United States through immigration in her book Adios America!, this was the paramount motive for supporting Trump. Coulter  seems to represent a large faction, perhaps the majority, of Trump’s support. On the very day when he announced his candidacy, Trump made illegal immigration one of his main issues. Rush Limbaugh described Trump’s movement (somewhat cryptically) as an attempt to preserve “the Standard Majority.”

Consequently it is with some surprise, as I listen to the public discussion about illegal aliens, especially the so-called Dreamers temporarily exempted from deportation by President Obama through an executive order of questionable legality, that I see so much hesitation to do what is logical and necessary for the fulfillment of an important part of Trump’s mission.  Certainly there was a time, not many decades ago, when there was a presumption that people who had entered the United States illegally should be deported. Why so much squeamishness about it now? Sending people who are illegally present in the United States back to the countries where they are entitled to live is in no way an injustice; if they have acquired skills and education while in the United States, they can use those abilities to be successful in their own countries. How did we become so weak-willed about doing what is clearly just and in our national interest?

We hear that there is a demand for cheap foreign labor from large corporations. Granted, but what is it that weakens the resolve to say no to this demand?

Richard Harwood, I think, gave the answer to this question in 1974. His Revisionist primer, Did Six Million Really Die?, was motivated by observation of the demoralizing effect of Holocaust-propaganda on the British national will for self-preservation. He noted:

“When Enoch Powell drew attention to the dangers posed by coloured immigration into Britain in one of his early speeches, a certain prominent Socialist raised the spectre of Dachau and Auschwitz to silence his presumption.”

Similarly, the fact that the United States ever had a policy of rejecting undesirable immigrants, or of preferring immigrants that resembled the preexisting population, has been speciously represented as a cause of the Holocaust (e.g. by Edwin Black in his book The War Against the Weak). Limiting immigration in order to preserve a nation’s character is supposed to lead, sooner or later, to gassing of Jews. It seems likely that the effect of Holocaust propaganda, much deeper today than in 1974, is at least part of the explanation for the American majority’s hesitation to defend its interests.

High Priest of the Holocaust Elie Wiesel once declared his all-out opposition to immigration-control by non-Jewish states when he uttered the oft-quoted words, “No human being is illegal.” Echoing Wiesel, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum implies on its website that there can be no such thing as illegal immigration by Jews or anybody else, putting the word illegal in scare-quotes.

With the Jewish tendency to make the Holocaust into something broad and nebulous and impossible to refute, rather than something specific, mass-deportation seems to be viewed by many Jews as part of the Holocaust, and thus a crime.

But Jews are certainly not the only population that ever experienced a mass-deportation. Deportation is one of the tools that any relatively prosperous nation must have to preserve its culture, its identity, its everything, against being overwhelmed with opportunity-seekers until the standard of living at home and abroad approaches equilibrium. Even the State of Israel runs afoul of this so-called lesson of the Holocaust, this taboo against mass-deportation.

The Jewish Stake in Illegal Immigration

Jews have a stake in illegal immigration and immigration generally. It is a way of increasing “diversity,” thus making organized opposition to Jewish power more difficult. The various immigrant populations, instead of assimilating, are encouraged to become elements of a “multicultural society” that can be mobilized within an anti-majority coalition. This pattern of behavior by Jews is described by Professor Kevin R. MacDonald, in terms of evolutionary psychology, as a survival strategy. (Less perspicaciously, the same phenomenon is very roughly described in mainstream political parlance as “the Democrats” trying to increase the number of Democratic voters.)

Apart from such theories, Jewish support for illegal immigrants is also clearly a matter of self-justification, insofar as Jews have been notorious as practitioners of illegal immigration.

Famously, Jews illegally entered Palestine during the period of restricted immigration under the British Mandate, and after the British decided in 1939 that no more Jews should settle there. Some of the illegal immigrants to Palestine, like Menachem Begin, became anti-British terrorists, (as mentioned in Walter Sanning’s The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry). Less well known is that even from Axis Europe, during the war, there were attempts at  illegal immigration to Palestine by Jews: two ships that were allowed to leave Romania during the war loaded with Jews, the Struma and the Mefkure, are known because they happened to come to a bad end. Wikipedia’s page about Aliyah Bet mentions a few other examples. This illegal immigration to Palestine was not a mere accumulation of individual choices; it was part of an organized effort to bring Jews into Palestine illegally. The State of Israel could not have come into being when it did without illegal immigration.

Another example. Many Jews from Eastern Europe, called Ostjuden, had entered Germany before Hitler came to power. The ejection of these foreign Jews from Germany is portrayed as somehow a precursor to the Holocaust (quite illogically insofar as expelled Jews could neither be shot nor forced into a gas-chamber). Herschel Grynszpan, the Jew who murdered a German diplomat and supposedly triggered Kristallnacht in November 1938, was from a family of Ostjuden who had been denied citizenship in Germany and were deported to Poland. Grynszpan himself was an illegal immigrant in France at the time of his crime.

A recent book by historian Libby Garland, After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States 1921-1965 (U. Chicago, 2014), documents that Jews rampantly violated restrictions on immigration to the United States before the restrictions were relaxed in 1965, which of course includes the period when Jews are supposed to have perished in the Holocaust. Reviewer Ronald Bayor states:

“Jewish immigrants, like many others from Europe or elsewhere, turned to bribery, smugglers, fake papers, stowing away, overstaying visitor visas and other strategies for illegal admission.” (abstract from R. Bayor, American Jewish History, 2 April 2015)

Some number the Jewish illegal immigrants to the United States during the period 1921-1965 in the tens of thousands. But reviewer Hasia Diner states that Garland has “no hard numbers.” “Where did the Jews go?” is today’s last-ditch defense of the Holocaust. Illegal immigration may supply part of the answer.

As it happens, some portion of the illegal immigrants presently hoping for amnesty under DACA are also Jews. The Jewish Journal presents several examples of illegal-immigrant families from Israel who overstayed visas (one of the tactics mentioned in Libby Garland’s book). A Jewish immigration-attorney in Beverly Hills, Neil Sheff,  says that there are many Jews living as illegal aliens in Los Angeles; they come not only from Israel but from Russia, South Africa, and France. (A. Artsy, Jewish Journal, 13 September 2017)

Even some of the “Dreamers” from Latin America turn out to be Jews. Elias Rosenfeld from Venezuela is a famous example. His name has appeared in several articles, including an apologia by Reform Rabbi Jonah Pesner. Rosenfeld happens to be a student at Brandeis University and an intern for Congresswoman Elizabeth Warren (R. Flores, CNN, 13 March 2017). Rosenfeld may be unusual in the notoriety that he has received, but in respect to being a Jewish illegal immigrant from Latin America he is surely far from unique.

It is clear that Jews have been significantly involved in illegal immigration during the past century. In recent decades Jews have invoked the Holocaust as an argument for indulgence of such law-breakers, and not only for the Jewish ones.

Invocation of the Holocaust in Defense of DACA

On 23 January 2017 Ha’aretz published an essay by Bradley Burston sharply criticizing President Trump’s advisor Stephen Miller, who is a Jew, for his support for curbing illegal immigration and possibly repatriating illegal immigrants. The title was: “Jews Know Deportation as a Crime Against Humanity – Jews, Except Netanyahu & Trump’s Boy Miller.” Burston declares:

“… Jews know mass-deportation for what it is: a crime against humanity.” (B. Burston, Ha’aretz, 18 January 2018)

On 5 September 2017 the Jewish Forward published an opinion by contributing editor Samuel G. Freedman, “We Jews Were Once Dreamers. We Must Stand Up For DACA.”  Freedman begins his article with a reference to Jewish children who, he says, experienced violence from non-Jews in Minneapolis while “the dimensions of the Final Solution were being discovered and chronicled by Allied troops” during World War II. (In fact, films made by Allied troops document disease and deaths from Allied bombing, not the Holocaust.) He says that President Trump’s order to halt DACA “only makes sense as part of a reign of terror.” (Samuel G. Freedman, Forward, 5 September 2017)

Given all this, it may seem surprising that the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Keith Ellison, came under criticism from Jews last September for comparing illegal immigrants to refugees from the Holocaust. Ellison said:

“And if you ask yourself what would I do if I was a gentile in 1941, if my Jewish neighbors were under attack by the Nazis? Would I give them sanctuary? You might be about to find out what you would do.”

The criticism came from Neoconservative Jews like Nathan Lichtman, who declared:

“There is no moral equivalency between Dreamers and Holocaust victims. Period.” (N. Lichtman, PJ Media, 19 September 2017)

This is of course a direct contradiction of what some other Jews have been saying. Ellison was only elaborating an idea already expressed by Jews and for Jews, in Ha’aretz and the Forward. Lichtman and other Neoconservative Jews may be concerned to disengage reverence for the Holocaust from Ellison and his agenda,  so obviously destructive to the United States, and so disagreeable to the White conservative voters that Neoconservatives woo — but a perhaps more pressing concern is that this alleged universal principle, that mass-deportation per se is immoral because of the Holocaust, has already become embarrassing for the State of Israel, subjecting it to a charge of hypocrisy.

An Inconvenient Ramification

Zionist Jews, who have used the Holocaust to excuse the violence of their Jewish State, seem at times to have difficulty living by the alleged lessons of their own myth. Samuel G. Freedman in the Forward and Bradley Burston in Ha’aretz criticized not only the American project of getting control over immigration, but a similar project in the State of Israel:

“This week, Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman … launched a censorship bid to silence comparisons between the targets of Israeli security forces, and the Jews hunted down by the wartime Nazis.

“I am not objective about this issue. No one is. I generally find comparisons to the Nazis to be specious, exploitative, and terribly disrespectful.

“But no less disrespectful is the idea that the lessons of the Holocaust may only be applied to Jews, and only when Jews are the victims.” (Bradley Burston, Ha’aretz, 24 January 2018)

Most likely, Jewish ethnocentrism will not allow such an argument for consistent application of the so-called lessons of the Holocaust, coming from the Jewish left, to motivate the State of Israel to commit demographic suicide. In the United States however the outcome is much more in doubt.