Rand Paul: US "Can’t Invite Whole World" To Immigrate

by JASmius

Indeed.  Unfortunately for Senator Paul, that was the only clear comment he made on the topic:

Senator Rand Paul says potential White House rival Jeb Bush was inarticulate when he described immigrants who come to the United States illegally as committing an "act of love."

That's one way of putting it.  It is, I think, such a way that gives Jeb much more benefit of the doubt than he deserves, though.  His choice of phrase - "act of love" - couldn't have been a more egregious attempt to put a positive spin on foreign transgression of our national sovereignty and laws.  Hardly seems accidental to me.

In a wide-ranging interview from New Hampshire with ABC News' Jon Karl, Paul said that those immigrants "are not bad people" but added the United States "can't invite the whole world" inside its borders.

Now look who's being "inarticulate".  The issue is not and never has been whether illegals are "bad people" or not - although some are definitely "better people" than others.  But the fact that every illegal has, by definition, broken our laws by the act of passively invading our territory and sucking off our job base, welfare benies, or both, doesn't make much of a case for their "goodness".

Paul, the Kentucky Republican exploring a 2016 campaign, says Bush should have kept his focus on controlling the U.S. borders.

"I think he might have been more artful, maybe, in the way he presented this," said Paul. "But I don't want to say, oh, he's terrible for saying this. If it were me, what I would have said is, people who seek the American dream are not bad people.

"However, we can't invite the whole world. When you say they're doing an act of love and you don't follow it up with, but we have to control the border, people think well because they're doing this for kind reasons that the whole world can come to our country."

You should want to say that Jeb is terrible for saying what he said, Rand, because what he said was tantamount to the logical conclusion at which you arrived: We must take in the entire rest of the world's population or we're, by definition, "demonizing" them.  As that would be national, cultural, and economic suicide, then yeah, Jeb Bush is quite terrible - perhaps as bad on immigration as Barack Obama himself - and accordingly has no business seeking the presidency with such a crazy hostility to the very ideas and policies that are the foundation of nationhood.

Besides, it isn't as if this "poor, honest peoples seeking the American dream" romanticism isn't six degrees of bogus anyway:

Jeb’s unspoken assumption is that people in the United States who can’t lawfully feed their children can rely on welfare, rather than shoplifting and car theft. Mexico, by his telling, is such a dysfunctional hellhole that even hard-working people can’t find honest work and will go hungry as a result. Prospective illegal aliens find themselves in a “Les Misérables” situation, stealing bread — i.e., jobs in the United States — to feed starving children. 

This is horse flop. Mexico is an upper-middle-income country by world standards, with a per capita GDP, in purchasing-power parity terms, greater than that of Turkey, Brazil, Romania, Iran, South Africa, or Thailand. You want real poverty, try Congo or Zimbabwe, Somalia or Afghanistan. Funny that he’s not calling for unlimited immigration from those countries instead. For someone who makes a habit of assuring Mexicans that “I understand your people,” Jeb seems to have a remarkably one-dimensional view of the place. 

Also, almost all Mexican immigrant workers in the U.S. had jobs in Mexico before they chose to come here. As the late Robert Pastor, no immigration restrictionist by any means, put it:

Surveys of Mexican undocumented workers in the United States discovered that as many as 93% had jobs in Mexico before they came to the United States so they are not coming for jobs. Their motive is income; for similar work, they can earn six to ten times as much in the United States as in Mexico. 

Wanting a higher salary is a perfectly normal and laudable ambition. But it depends on how you go about it. Sneaking into someone else’s country in violation of their laws, stealing American children’s identities, engaging in tax fraud, and then being subsidized by the taxpayers of the country where you are an intruder is not laudable.

Put another way, Mexican nationals quite obviously feel themselves entitled to break our immigration laws and freeload off of our economy.  And people like Jeb Bush have done everything humanly possible to cultivate that attitude.  Which might be fine if the Mexican government, or any other country on the globe, had ever adopted an immigration policy remotely similar - and they have not.

I stick by my conclusion from a week ago: I don't think Jeb Bush is going to run for president in 2016 or any other time.  I think he's taking advantage of this little "run, Jeb, run" boomlet to plug his next book.  If he has the sense to leave it at that, that would be the "act of love" that his party and his country robustly needs.