If the only people who could vote in November were members of the immigration bar and other open-borders enthusiasts, Obama would win in a walk.
Yet when you examine their posture on family immigration (and non-deportation of family members) you will find that the more-migration people are thinking in deeply Republican terms, though they probably do not realize it.
My sense is that Democrats are more cosmopolitan than Republicans, more sympathetic to the rest of the world, and, all too often, considerably more inclined to welcome immigrants.
Yet when you examine the position of the more-migration advocates, you will find them taking an almost "America First" attitude toward family migration; and they are consistent about this in discussions of admissions policies, as well as in terms of deportation policies.
The basic concept of the more-migration people is that family unification, or re-unification, is absolutely vital, but what they really mean is family unification in the United States is vital, and that family unification cannot really take place anywhere else in the world.
It is a surprisingly narrow — and never stated — argument coming from a part of the population that is otherwise largely worldly and tolerant.
And it is an important one. It is because of this way of thinking that we have an enormous percentage of our incoming immigrants arriving only because of family ties to people currently here, not because of their talents. If you are a citizen with alien relatives, you not only can bring a spouse and the spouse's alien children, you can cause the immigration of your parents, and your siblings, and your nieces and nephews — and later all the members of your spouse's family, too — all so that the extended family can be unified in the United States.
That such a reunion could take place in the land where all those aliens were born is never mentioned.
When it comes to deportation, which is the simple (albeit mandatory) restoration of someone to the land of their birth, you run into similar thought patterns. Time and again there are journalists writing totally one-dimensional stories about the deportation of a parent tearing up the family. There is very rarely a recognition that the family, that clearly has at least some ties to the country to which the parent is returning, is perfectly free do join the deportee in that nation.
The notion that the family can only live happily together in the United States is a very conservative, very America-centric sort of thought process, but one that is all too common among the more-migration advocates of our nation.
The ironic thing is that there is no recognition on the part of these advocates that they are thinking that way, and that those unconscious thought patterns run counter to so much else in their own lives.
