Traitors to the American Tradition
We face a threat to traditional American values, not from the Left but from the extreme Right. The new authoritarians who have taken control of the Republican Party despise and hate both immigration and open and free trade, preferring restrictions on both to favor corporate interests instead of consumers. It isn’t socialism per se, but it is fascism.
They want to pretend advocates of either trade or free migration hate America. But historically their position is the one American leaders and founder attacked. In particular today’s Republican Party wouldn’t resemble traditional Republican values at all. Here is what some prominent Americans have said about immigration — all of it in conflict with today’s Trumpist totalitarianism.
Pres. Ronald Reagan
“We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow.
Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
“More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands.”
“Rather than talking about putting up a fence [on Mexican border], why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit. And then while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they want to go back, they can go back. And open the border both ways.”
Pres. Grover Cleveland
“It is said that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable. The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens.”
“America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.”
Milton Friedman
“You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.
If you have free immigration, in the way we had it before 1914, everybody benefited. The people who were here benefited. The people who came benefited. Because nobody would come unless he, or his family, thought he would do better here than he would elsewhere. And, the new immigrants provided additional resources, provided additional possibilities for the people already here. So everybody can mutually benefit.”
Pres. James Madison
“America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.”
Pres. George Washington
“The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respected Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges…”
“I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”
Sen. Mitt Romney
“We are a nation of immigrants. We are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the ones who wanted a better life, the driven ones, the ones who woke up at night hearing that voice telling them that life in that place called America could be better.”
Ayn Rand
“You want to forbid immigration on the grounds that it lowers your standard of living — which isn’t true, though if it were true, you’d still have no right to close the borders. You’re not entitled to any ‘self-interest’ that injures others, especially when you can’t prove that open immigration affects your self-interest. You can’t claim that anything others may do — for example, simply through competition — is against your self-interest. But above all, aren’t you dropping a personal context? How could I advocate restricting immigration when I wouldn’t be alive today if our borders had been closed?”
Pres. George W. Bush
“It says something about our country that people around the world are willing to leave their homes and leave their families and risk everything to come to America. Their talent and hard work and love of freedom have helped make America the leader of the world
Thomas Paine
“The United States should be an asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty.”
Pres. Thomas Jefferson
“I was for extending the rights of suffrage (or in other words the rights of a citizen) to all who had a permanent intention of living in the country…”
“Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules.”
Frederick Douglass
“There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible. Among these, is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever.”
Sen. John McCain
“If we do not provide the same opportunities for future immigrants that were provided for our forefathers, it is an affront to our national ideals
Pres. George H W Bush
Nearly all Americans have ancestors who braved the oceans-liberty-loving risk takers in search of an ideal-the largest voluntary migrations in recorded history. Across the Pacific, across the Atlantic, they came from every point on the compass-many passing beneath the Statue of Liberty-with fear and vision, with sorrow and adventure, fleeing tyranny or terror, seeking haven, and all seeking hope…Immigration is not just a link to America’s past; it’s also a bridge to America’s future.
Ludwig Mises
“There cannot be the slightest doubt that migration barriers diminish the productivity of human labor.”
“In the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the first decades of the twentieth, the favorite weapons of Imperialism were commercial weapons — protective tariffs, prohibitions of imports, premiums on exports, freight discriminations, and the like. Less attention was paid to the use of another powerful imperialistic weapon — limitations on emigration and immigration. This is becoming more significant now.”
Yes, there is a new anti-American philosophy going around. It isn’t a sign of communism, but fascism. It isn’t from so-called RINO’s but from the MAGA morons. It wasn’t espoused by Republicans of the past but comes out of the mouth of a felon and a rapist pushed by the GOP pretending he is a good, moral upright religious man. Trump would be a better fit in Mussolini’s Italy, Putin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, or Franco’s Spain, but not in America.
If pro and anti views toward America are judged by whether they stand for or against traditional American views, then today’s Republicans are the most anti-American crowd around.
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