Jews and Immigration: Time for Change

Our country and its Jewish intelligentsia are currently torn by a debate about immigration. On one side the Trump administration is trying to pass executive orders limiting immigration from particular, though certainly not all, Muslim-majority countries while also deporting people — largely from Mexico or Central America — who are in the US illegally.

On the other side are activist judges shutting down these executive orders and what seems like the entire constellation of journalists, pundits and activists in the country decrying these moves. From looking at the writers of many op-ed pieces or from looking through Jewish publications such as Forward, it is clear that Jews are disproportionately lobbying in favor of immigration and against deportation or immigration restrictions. Jewish organizations ostensibly formed to lobby for Jewish interests are on the side of resettling more Muslim refugees. Some voices on this side go so far as to call for “open borders” as in a recent piece in Salon. Most of the left has long decried the idea of White interests or White rights as being inherently racist in a way that Black rights or Latino interests aren’t. See for instance David Aaronovitch’s recent op-ed “Defending ‘white interests’ can never be right” in the Financial Times.

I think Jews are on the wrong side of this debate, and have been for decades. Countries are not arbitrary designations on a map; and borders are not imaginary lines. Countries are defined by their people, and borders generally demarcate necessary walls between peoples. Good fences make good neighbors, as the saying goes. Globalization and mass immigration result in what amounts to demographic invasion. It is natural for host populations to resist this being forced upon them.

The Jewish support for so-called “immigrant rights” is supposed to be rooted in the Jewish experience of diaspora and constant movement. Being exiled from our home in ancient times, we should feel sympathy with others who need to leave their homes in modern times. Jews have prospered in America because it is a multicultural society with such a rainbow of peoples that no true majority exists, or will soon, if current demographic trends continue.

I think Jews should be looking at this in another way.

My ancestors hid from the Nazis and their Eastern European allies as small children. Shuttled from place to place, sometimes shielded by kind-hearted Christians, our family ultimately survived both Nazi and later Soviet occupation. But communism was not to their liking and they fled, not to the US, but to Palestine, which they then helped make into Israel.

The great story of Jewish diaspora does not end in a borderless world, it ends in Zionism, and Israel.  Despite the countless mistakes the Zionists have made and continue to make, the basic reasonableness of their position remains: a people need a homeland. Israel is very far from perfect but at least it is a home that provides a haven for a people. Our great mistake is thinking this situation is unique to Jews — a point the Palestinians vainly try to remind us of.

In Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, France elects an Islamic-Left coalition government which supervises a national transition to Islam. The Jews of France, realizing they aren’t safe, leave. Not for the US, but for Israel. As the narrator says goodbye to his Jewish girlfriend, she asks him if he will stay. “There is no Israel for me,” he says.

People deserve their own homelands. When Rep. Steve King sent his famous tweet about “other people’s babies,” that is what he meant. Throughout its history, the US was primarily composed of White Europeans. The average demographic balance in the country was a little less than 90% White. The country’s demographic composition changed as a result of the Jewish-backed 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. When the act was passed, its backers promised that there would be no overall change in demographic composition. But not only was that untrue, but now large swaths of the left and open-borders advocates argue that to care about this change much less take any action whatsoever try to stop or reverse it is racist.

Imagine if Israel admitted enormous numbers of non-Jewish immigrants, say Muslim Kurds, and made them citizens. I greatly admire the Kurds, and I’m sure Israeli society wouldn’t suffer from a few new Kurdish citizens. But imagine that their numbers were so many that Kurds, along with Palestinian Arabs, were projected to outnumber the Jews in 50 years. The Jews would once again be a minority. Jewish leftist, liberals, and even neocons pretend that this is different. How exactly so?

What is the moral imperative for European Whites to become the minority in their homelands? Africa’s population is projected to triple in the next century. How many African migrants must Europe take in? How many refugees from Muslim countries? Must Houellebecq’s vision become a reality?

Japan’s population is over 99% ethnic Japanese. This is in fact the norm in much of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Why should Japan’s ethnic homogeneity be unthreatened but France’s population altered completely? One can argue this is rooted in colonialism, but Japan also participated in an aggressive imperialism throughout East and Southeast Asia, and yet Japanese immigration laws remain strict, largely without leftist or Jewish complaint.

Jewish organizations and activists use the Holocaust as a reminder of the immorality of not taking in people under specific threat. In these specifics they are right — I think it was morally wrong to turn the St. Louis back and not arrange for later temporary safe haven for the 20,000 Jewish child refugees. Similarly, few people think that genuine war refugees fleeing for their lives from ISIS should just be treated with a shrug and left to die. But the lesson drawn is also wrong. After World War II, the Jews of Europe poured mainly into Israel. For Jews, the lesson of the Holocaust was that Jews needed a homeland, not that any particular country should take them in. Now having a homeland, Jews have no business denying other nations their own, and a people’s desire to control their demographic destiny is their fundamental and moral right. There are other ways of helping war refugees without making them a permanent presence in your nation, such as peacefully settling them in their own culture regions.

The US is not in fact a propositional nation and Jewish-American poet Emma Lazarus’ poem was not actually about immigration. As American Jews, we are essentially guests in the US, a historically White Christian nation where a Jewish minority has thrived, but has in many ways acted against the interest of our hosts. As Kevin MacDonald points out in his trilogy on Jews and Jewish ethnic activism, partially because of our fear of persecution and being noticed as an ethnic minority outgroup, Jews have promoted mass immigration and multiculturalism to devastating effect. We cannot atone for the immense historical mistake influential Jewish thinkers and activists made in doing this. But ordinary Jews can help do our part to undo these errors by at least supporting the rights of the majority to control their homeland and demographic destiny. This can be done peacefully, by removing those here illegally, helping resettle refugees back in their home countries, and making immigration laws more restrictive. In the US, reasonable organizations like VDARE have pointed towards this for decades. In Europe the situation is in many ways more desperate and here too Jews should understand and support the movements to project strong European majorities in all countries.

It is not racist for European people to want to be majorities in their own countries, any more than it is for Asians, Africans, Arabs, or Jews.  It is not Hungarian supremacy that makes Hungary close its borders and try to maintain its cultural uniqueness. It is not Jewish supremacy that makes Israelis think a Jewish majority in Israel in the midst of an overwhelmingly Arab Middle East is necessary and reasonable.  And it is not white supremacy that makes white Americans wish to preserve a basic, white majority, which implies no ill-treatment or legal second-class status for Americans of color.

All Jews know open borders would be a disaster for Israel. It is equally a disaster for everybody else.