
Obama: America is a Nation of Immigrants. Trump: Nah.
President Barack Obama never missed an opportunity to remind us that we were a “nation of immigrants.” He said this not because he was a history buff who liked to spend his days tracing back the ethnic and cultural diversity of the United States, of course, but because it was a handy sound bite to trot out whenever he wanted to make Republicans sound like fascist Nazis for daring to want just a little bit of border control. No duh we’re a nation of immigrants! What the hell does that have to do with anything? Is that supposed to mean that we just erase our borders and let anyone and everyone flow in, unimpeded, unvetted, and unwatched? If that’s your policy suggestion, come out and say it. If it isn’t, then admit that you’re using a pat phrase to cover up your failure to enforce the law.
President Trump vowed to do away with that nonsense propaganda that takes an obvious fact about the history of American diversity and turns it into a political weapon. This week, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services revised its Mission Statement to reflect the new dawn of sensible thinking about migration (and boy, has it angered the left).
The old, Obama version of the statement: “USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.”
The new, Trump-powered version: “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.”
Now THAT’S a difference you can sink your teeth into.
The left is naturally turning this into another, oh God, look how horrible Donald Trump is…how positively RACIST he is. Because that’s what they do with everything.
But let’s be really clear. No one is denying that everyone in America ultimately came from somewhere else. No one HAS to deny it because no one believes for a minute that our European, African, Asian, what-have-you ancestry has anything to do with the importance of enforcing our laws. We can appreciate our diversity without going overboard into fantasy proclamations like: “Our diversity is our strength.” Oh yeah? Prove it. That’s what we thought.
Our diversity isn’t our strength and our country is not made stronger by opening the doors to any and all immigrants. Our strength is derived from our freedom: Period. A freedom tempered by the democratic, but final, Rule of Law. Trump is not saying there’s anything wrong with “immigrants,” per se, or anything wrong with “diversity,” as it happens. He is merely dispensing with the left’s use of those concepts as propaganda for their socialist goals.