Paul, Cruz refugee bills reflect true compassion and tolerance

Obama and his leftist allies are incapable of answering one salient question: what is tolerant about importing an ideology that is stridently intolerant, incompatible with democracy, and promotes ethnic and religious supremacism?  What is humanitarian about transforming America into Europe where Jews, ironically and tragically, are forced to flee because of the growing Islamic intolerance?

The morally detached elites that populate the political Left are feigning outrage over legislation from Senators Paul and Cruz barring Obama from admitting Islamic refugees from Syria.  They are tossing out all sorts of arguments about equality, discrimination, racism, hatred, intolerance, etc. – the usual panoply of ad hominem attacks that fill the void left by their vacuous intellectual defense for their suicidal immigration policies.  In reality, they have no legal or moral argument to stand on.  In fact, their plan to turn America into ‘Eurabia’ without the consent of the people is immoral.

Legal Argument

When our Declaration of Independence declared that “all men are created equal” and when the 14^th Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law, it means one thing and one thing only.  Everyone present in the country has equal access to due process before they are punished with imprisonment or the forfeiting of private property.  Immigrants, while lacking the full array of privileges as citizens, are also entitled to that due process and equal protection.  However, there is absolutely no affirmative right for any of the 7.2 billion individuals in this world to immigrate in the first place.  That is up to the discretion of the existing citizenry through their elected representatives.

At the foundation of the social compact and the sovereignty of its society is the principle that the citizenry has the right to decide who joins the society.  As James Madison wrote with regards to immigration and sovereignty, “a new member is added to the social compact” only through a vote “by a majority of the governing body, deriving its powers from a majority of the individual parties to the social compact.”

In addition, the existing society can place conditions on the status of those who are admitted as immigrants until they are granted citizenship by the society. Founding Father, Gouverneur Morris, observed at the Constitutional Convention that, “every society from a great nation down to a club had the right of declaring the conditions on which new members should be admitted.”

Even the courts, which have long infringed upon the popular sovereignty of the people and their representatives, have ruled since our Founding that Congress has absolute power to exclude anyone or any group they desire – whether for prudent reasons, sophomoric reasons, or discriminatory reasons.  As the Supreme Court observed in 1895, “It is an accepted maxim of international law that every sovereign nation has the power, as inherent in sovereignty, and essential to self-preservation, to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its dominions.”

Moral Argument

While a Republic has the legal authority to exclude any class of immigrants it deems necessary, its elected officials have a moral obligation to protect the existing citizenry and use the discretion over immigration to benefit, not harm the existing society – much less transform it.  When discussing immigration during the Constitutional Convention, Madison said that he desired to “maintain the character of liberality which had been professed in all the Constitutions & publications of America” and “wished to invite foreigners of merit & republican principles among us.”  The reason why we only want to admit those who will enhance our country’s values and economy is because, as Calvin Coolidge said, “as a nation, our first duty must be those who are already our inhabitants, whether native or immigrants.”

The reality is that Sharia law is incompatible with classical liberalism and republican principles.  It poses an existential and virtually insurmountable threat to the existing society, as witnessed by the security and cultural collapse in Europe.

Sometimes we have exercised our right to sovereignty in a prudent manner, other times we have been gratuitously discriminatory.  But this time by excluding the Islamists, we are protecting against the importation of a discriminatory and supremacist ethos that are incompatible with our “liberal” values.   For liberals to compare exclusion of Islamic immigrants to the exclusion of Jews leading up to the Holocaust is scandalous.  We have never dealt with refugees from countries that emanate from a region and a demographic that is infected with a genocidal and totalitarian mindset that is inextricably connected to their religious ethos.  How is it humanitarian to tolerate the intolerant under the guise of tolerance?

We have never admitted immigrants from a country we were at war with during the time of the conflict.  We didn’t increase immigration from Japan and Germany during World War II.  And remember, the genocidal mindset of those regimes was temporary and not endemic of the vast majority of the people.  Sharia law, on the other hand, is inextricably tied to the mindset that is at war with the US.  The Middle East is infected with this mindset.  No one is saying that everyone will come here and practice that mindset, but a heck of a lot will, and already do.

There is no prudent way to disentangle this mess without needlessly harming the existing society.  Doubling our immigration from these countries instead of calling for a cool off period would be akin to doubling immigration from a country while it is experiencing a ubiquitous plague of deadly diseases.

Numbers Matter

As we learned from Europe, numbers matter.  The more Islamic immigrants they admit, the more they cluster together, adhere to Sharia, eschew assimilation, and cultivate the climate of homegrown terror.  America is just one generation behind Europe simply because we started our large-scale admittance of Muslim immigrants later.  But the massive increase from this generation has already resulted in the spread of radical mosques, homegrown foreign fighters, and a record number of homegrown terror attacks.  Liberals would have you believe the world was created in 2015 and this is the first time we are bringing in immigrants from the Middle East, but as we’ve reported on numerous occasions, the lion’s share of refugee resettlement in recent years has been from Muslim countries, while our other categories of immigrant and non-immigrant visas have increasingly come from that part of the world.

It’s time for politicians to do the moral thing and defend the safety of their constituents – the citizens of their sovereign states.

[1] Lem Moon Sing v. United States, 158 U.S. 538 (1895)

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