Oh, Let Us Not See the Simple Truth!

I don’t always agree with Ann Coulter — though I always pretend to because I’m afraid she’ll hurt me. But I have to say, she is so obviously right about Dave Brat’s victory over Eric Cantor in the Virginia primary last week, and virtually every other commentator is so obviously dead wrong, that I can only think we are observing a collective act of denial from both the left and the right, a willful blindness to the simple truth.

The first ever defeat of a House majority leader in a primary was so unexpected that it was variously described by commentators as “stunning,” “stunning,” “an earthquake,” “stunning,” “a stunning earthquake,” and “an earthquake that was stunning.” And to sum up the explanations that followed from the best and brightest of our political minds: “It wasn’t about illegal immigration. It was about anything except illegal immigration. It was about the Tea Party, it was about politics-as-usual in Washington, it was about Cantor’s arrogance, it was about anti-semitism, it was about Boehner’s tan, I don’t know what it was about, no one could possibly say what it was about, it was because the dog ate my homework, it was because — look, a squirrel! But whatever it was about, it sure wasn’t about illegal immigration!”

Here’s Ann:  “Economics professor Dave Brat crushed House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary Tuesday night, in a campaign that was mostly about Cantor’s supporting amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens….  His crushing defeat reinforces a central point: Whenever the voters know an election is about immigration, they will always vote against more immigration — especially amnesty.”

Yes, when you’re as smart as he is, you can have these sideburns too.

Well, yeah! I mean, look, even if your opinions about amnesty are…  what’s the word the left uses to mean stupid? — oh yeah, nuanced….  Even if your opinions about amnesty are nuanced, you have to see what a colossal act of kiss-my-ass arrogance it was for the Republican-led Congress to keep threatening to deal decisively with the issue before an election they look fair to win by a large margin. It was like saying: “We don’t care if our constituents disagree, we don’t care if they haven’t made up their minds, we don’t care what they think at all, we’re going to do this our way right in their face.”

So the voters responded with a great big Oh yeah? How do you like these apples? And Cantor is going home.

Which is not to say fixing our immigration policy is going to be easy. But that too requires us to take the blinders of denial off.  For anyone who’d like to try this, or who just wants to think about the subject at a level above the usual panic and idiocy, let me recommend this terrific article by yet another brilliant friend of mine (I have a lot of brilliant friends because they know standing next to me makes them look even smarter): A Splash of Immigration Reality, by the mind-bendingly insightful and knowledgeable Myron Magnet over at City Journal:

The cultural revolution and the come-and-get-it welfare system that remade America in the 1960s have thrown sand in the gears of America’s upward-mobility machine. America used to give immigrants the opportunity to succeed and assimilate or to fail and either accept marginalization or go home. Plenty of immigrants still gladly accept that offer, and here in New York, our selective high schools are bursting with immigrant kids from poor families—many of them Indian and Chinese—who are well on their way to becoming doctors, inventors, entrepreneurs, and tycoons. A reasonable pro-immigration policy would say, bring us more of these kids and their families, as many as want to come. But it would also notice that some groups have children who disproportionally end up in jail or on welfare. Everyone can see how hard the immigrant parents work, providing cheap labor to agribusiness, construction, hotels, and restaurants, and cheap maids, nannies, and gardeners to the rich. But, learning from more than two decades’ experience of how their children are burdening our economy and society, a reasonable immigration policy would be slower to welcome such immigrants.

No kidding: read the whole thing, it’s great. If we’re going to address this crisis that our president is attempting to turn into a catastrophe, we can’t do it with our eyes closed.