Ruben Navarette: “Let Them Eat Cake”

In response to a jobs-protection provision in a pending amnesty bill, Hispanic chauvinist Ruben Navarette writes:

Why should [as Rep. Luis Guittierez said] “no one born here in this country … ever lose an opportunity for gainful employment at the expense of someone not born here?” Remember, these aren’t illegal immigrants but legal immigrants coming on visas.

Why should U.S. citizens get a benefit not from education or hard work but from something they had nothing to do with — where they were born? If a job is available, U.S. workers should be free to compete for it, but not have it handed to them on a silver platter. Likewise, foreign workers who come here legally should have a shot at competing for that same job.

Of course, protectionists claim that the playing field isn’t level since foreign workers will often accept less money to do the same job, thus putting American workers at a disadvantage.

Tough.

Pro-immigration activists alternately talk about compassion while saying “tough” to Americans. The only unifying principle is the good of their tribe. Ruben is a Hispanic. He is not a loyal American. He has demonstrated this repeatedly in his writings, which are totally indifferent to the good of other Americans. It matters not where he was born; it’s clear he’s totally indifferent to the common good and can’t even think in such terms. This kind of talk would be intolerable among anyone but minorities.

I suppose if we enforced our laws against border-hopping, stopped fraudulent H1B Visa applications (which supposedly require a company first to hire an American), and generally leveraged US power for the benefit of American citizens, even at the expense low-skilled Mexican workers, “tough,” wouldn’t exactly fly with Ruben. That’s when we’re called to be “compassionate.” Ruben’s column is not a moral statement aiming at justice but a triumphalist one: we’re winning, you’re losing, and you people need to deal with it and stop complaining. “You” . . . Americans that is . . . must be sacrificed for the principles of globalism, for the “economy,” for all the bad things your ancestors did, and for the good of morally exquisite Third Worlders that are trying to make more money at our expense.

Allowing mass immigration is a policy choice. It’s a choice to underenforce the laws, and it’s a choice to let people in with visas. No company or family or individual would behave the way Navarette counsels when dealing with people they genuinely care about. No CEO would say, “Well we can give this business to our own in-house team and save some jobs and keep the money in house or we can save a nickel by sending it to a vendor.” There is a community of interest in a firm, and the firm’s management is supposed to look out for the good of the firm as a whole. This is obvious. No family would shrug its shoulders at a brother or sister or dad’s job loss due to the pressure of low-wage, low-skill competitors. A country is no different. It was obvious, until recently, that its leaders should look out for the good of its citizens.

There is no doubt that Navarette would not be fighting for mass immigration if it did not benefit his group to acquire greater numbers, greater cultural influence, and greater wealth at the expense of native-born Americans. We know this because leftists like him who now prattle about the virtues of globalism spent a good part of the middle 20th Century defending the mass exclusion of “neo-colonialists” (i.e., white Europeans) from places like India, Rhodesia, and Mexico. Leftists swooned with admiration as these countries built up nationalist economic orders, complete with protectionist state-owned monopolies like PEMEX. When will Navarette dare to speak out about this vital feature of Mexican political and economic life? Can anyone imagine Navarette telling South African blacks or Indian nationalists or Mexican protectionists “tough” when they defend their historically nationalist and anti-white policies?