Former CIA director Michael Hayden defended Monday his comparison of the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement policy to the treatment of concentration-camp prisoners in Nazi Germany.
In reference to a concentration camp he had visited he actually said, “I’ve walked down that railroad siding where the families were separated and that’s why I used that picture. That’s the scene where families were separated.”
Wow. It’s a stunning example of context-dropping.
Context-dropping is when you deliberately leave out facts relevant to your conclusion. Sometimes the error is subconscious, but in a case like this it’s breathtakingly obvious — and dishonest.
The Nazis rounded up Jews (and others) against their will and forced them into prison camps where they ultimately were starved, abused and tortured.
Today’s incarcerated illegals — whose conditions are nothing like those of the Nazi camp inhabitants — chose to leave their homes in Mexico and elsewhere of their own free will. They deliberately attempted to enter the United States illegally, knowing the risks but hoping to get in anyway. After years of open border policies in the United States under Obama, can you blame them for thinking it? Freedom, prosperity and billions of dollars in freebies awaited them.
Hayden and other opponents of Trump’s immigration policy seek to put the President on the defensive. But why aren’t the opponents of Trump’s immigration enforcement on the defensive? Because the only alternative they offer to Trump’s policies of enforcing immigration laws are totally open borders. That’s the policy of the Obama administration. Laura Bush and other me-too Never Trump Republicans all miss Obama.
Open borders rest on a fantasy. The fantasy is the same as that of an anarchist. An anarchist believes we need no government — not even a limited government to protect the rights of individuals to be free from force and fraud. Similarly, an open border advocate believes we can indiscriminately let all people into the country without consequences. In such a fantasy, there are no terrorists or evil people. And there’s enough wealth, capital and debt in the United States to support free health care, free schools, free food stamps and all the rest for an unlimited number of immigrants.
People who oppose President Trump’s immigration policy are obliged to offer an alternative. All he’s doing is what even the Obama administration did at the start of its term — enforce existing immigration laws, instead of having open borders.
If you advocate open borders — the only alternative being offered to Trump’s policy of enforcing existing laws — then it falls upon you to explain why a nation can let in anyone it chooses without consequence.
I am all for open immigration, by the way. But open immigration is not lawless immigration. I detest the idea of selectively leaving people out of America based on standards such as race. (Islam is not a race; it’s an ideology, one explicitly at war with America.) How do we know we’re not missing out on the next Einstein? But allowing Einstein in doesn’t mean you have to indiscriminately let in any terrorist or welfare-state seeking moocher.
The only real solution to the immigration crisis, as I’ve said many times before, is to eliminate the transfer-of-wealth state altogether and return to the limited government of the original Constitution. Yet that’s the farthest thing from the minds of those shrieking that Trump’s enforcement of existing immigration law consists of “concentration camps”. In fact, they seek virtually unlimited government intervention in every area of our lives from education to health care to control of the Internet to gun ownership and even censorship of ideas they dislike.
We live in amazing, crazy times. And Donald Trump is not the reason. The reason is the culture-ruling and agenda-shaping progressives who want NO government when it comes to open borders — and virtually unlimited government for all citizens once they get here.
The contradictions are piling up to the point where they’re incomprehensible. The struggle of the progressives and the Never Trumpers to maintain that one plus one does not equal two can only go on for so long before there’s a breakdown.
We’re witnessing their breakdown now.
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