Speaking Out on Immigration

By Stephen Steinlight on April 23, 2007

The Jewish Advocate, April 23, 2007

Eight years of analyzing socio-political trends impacting American Jews can make one exceedingly risk averse. I'm naturally anxiety-prone, but a coldly rational assessment of contemporary forces would lead one to the same conclusion. The American-Jewish Establishment is purblind and suffers from severe cognitive dissonance. Its raison d'être is protecting Jewish interests and values; in practice it jeopardizes or betrays them.

The nexus between political analysis and policy-making is ideology, not logic. The Establishment's social "philosophy" is political correctness. This is not to say the Establishment is authentically leftwing or liberal; political correctness is neither. Rather, it's the absence of intellection, replaced by knee-jerk reverence towards unexamined mantras and faddish propositions that appear "progressive" but often don't survive scrutiny.

The failure of the establishment to protect Jewish interests or pursue social justice is displayed in its immigration policy. Like the capitalist in Lenin's aphorism, it sells the demographic rope with which to hang us. It gets the ethics wrong by elevating multiculturalism over economic/class analysis, supporting an exploitative Senate-Bush scheme to create a permanent Mexican underclass to lower wages for all working-class Americans and devastate the poorest among us, yet labels this reactionary policy tikkun olam.

Blind to the self-evident, it cannot see that Mexican immigration represents a greater threat than the Muslim immigration about which it obsesses.

Only Muslims are more anti-Semitic than foreign-born Hispanics according to solid survey research. Latino anti-Semitism hovers in the upper 40th percentile. Latinos loathe us less, but they'll have infinitely more power. If the Bush bill passes, Hispanics will soon control the American political system. Better to be hated by 2-3 million Muslims than strongly disliked by 100 million Latinos, a third of the population, who will outnumber us 50-1.

Reliable figures for American Muslims are hard to come by. Islamist organizations invent numbers, repeating the Big Lie ad nauseam: 6-7 million. Neither the Census Bureau nor INS keeps records by religion. Most demographers place their numbers between 1.5-3 million, the plurality African-American converts.

Muslims in America represent a security concern for the Jewish community, not a political one. Their numbers are tiny, and many Americans fear and hate them.

The potential Hispanic absolute majority represents a grave danger to Jewish values and interests. Not only would deeply religious and conservative Mexicans challenge the ersatz religion of most American Jews - secular liberalism - they would also wish to see U.S. foreign aid re-directed from Israel to Mexico, Central and South America, a shift that would weaken Israel, perhaps mortally. We have no choice but to oppose "Comprehensive Immigration Reform." It's not only cockroach capitalism; it also endangers Jewish values and imperils Israel.


Dr. Stephen Steinlight, senior policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C, was the former national affairs director at the American Jewish Committee.