The MSM Spins: Democrats Voted Against Amnesty Because They Love Lower-Skilled American Workers; Republicans Voted Against Amnesty Because We All Hate Spics!

Excellent coverage by Kaus, as usual. His first point -- which I'll just summarize -- is that the Democrats deliberately tanked this bill by voting for Dorgan's killer amendment, which they knew would scuttle the whole deal.

And for that I say: Thanks!

But the MSM really ought to stop pretending the Democrats were all in favor of it. They weren't. They took the step of voting for the Dorgan amendment (with Harry Reid's blessing, no less!) knowing full well it would undo the carefully-calibrated "grand bargain." They knew as they were voting for that amendment they were voting against the bill in its entirety. "Excellent," Harry Reid told Dorgan after he'd gotten his amendment through.

The next point is the killer, revealing the depth of MSM anti-Republican bias:

Sen. DeMint, reports Murray, dislikes the "comprehensive" bill because it includes "a path to citizenship for undocumented workers." (That's not how DeMint would describe it, probably.) And, says Murray,

Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) does not like the immigration bill, either, but for entirely different reasons.

Entirely different reasons? Dorgan thinks the bill would "depress wages and lead to foreigners taking good jobs." And DeMint, presumably, thinks a "path to citizenship" would encourage more illegal immigrants, who would ... depress wages and lead to foreigners taking good jobs! They're both concerned about depressing wages. Bipartisanship! Murray reminds me of those radical feminists who insist that their reasons for censoring pornography are completely different from Pat Robertson's. No they're not.

Indeed. The media is attempting to spin this as "Democrats care about American blue-collar wages, Republicans just hate the wetbacks." A little secret to the MSM: Many Republicans are in fact blue-collar workers and/or poor. Why is that black and/or union Democrats are lauded when they act in their best perceived economic interests, and yet when Republcians act out of the precise same motivations, we're derided as nativist, racist hicks?

Could it be that most Republicans -- with the notable exception of the "labor must be free to cross borders without restriction" WSJ free-market absolutists -- actually give a shit about workers' wages and the employment of their fellow Americans? (Fellow Americans, of course, including themselves -- there are a lot of Republican construction workers, and I can't imagine they're happy to see the prevailing wages being bid down by illegal Hispanic workers.)

Neither most Democrats nor most Republicans dislike foreign-born workers. It's that we both like American-born workers more. Or, at least, our first preference is to see Americans filling jobs in America.

The MSM wants to spin this as "nativist" -- but only on the Republican side. When Byron Dorgan explicitly states he wants to control immigration in order to increase wages for American workers, and increase their employment opportunities, that's apparently not "nativist," though he is explicitly expressing the dictionary definition of "nativist" (i.e., having a preference for policies which favor the native-born over the foreign-born).

When Republicans do the same, they -- and only they! -- are "nativists."

Incidentally, if having a preference for my fellow Americans' economic interests over the interests of foreign workers makes me "nativist," by all means, sign me up for the "nativist" agenda. Though I think I'd prefer the term "economic patriot" -- but why quibble over semantics? Conservatives have never been particularly bashful about stating what the left is loathe to concede -- America first, Americans first. That doesn't mean we wish ill upon the world -- it means that we believe in taking care of our own, and our own interests, first. We're less apologetic about that than the left -- we engage in less mush-mouthed nuance about that principle -- but we believe in that too, just as much as the left, if not more so.

At least we're not afraid to say so.

The MSM desperately wishes to portray the left as acting with "warm hearts" -- They wanted to protect Americans from the wage-depressing effects of unending, uncontrolled illegal immigration -- while the right acts only with "cold hearts" -- They don't want to pay for the social services of all those dirty foreign types!

Actually, it's a bit of both for both the right and left. Obviously, the more Americans who are gainfully employed, the less need for welfare and social-services and sundry other subsidies and supports. The working poor may be poor, but they're vital contributors to the national economy.

But even if their were no selfish motive at play here -- even if, hypothetically, somehow more Americans working at decent wages did not lighten the tax load for richer Americans -- Republicans would still, generally, favor the employement of Americans over the foreign born, to the extent the two were in competition. (Which, of course, they always are, to some extent.) Simply because we believe that when it comes to priorities, Americans come first. Not first, last, and only, perhaps, but definitely first.

The MSM wants to potray those who insist on having borders as somehow acting out of malice. After all, if you insist on a border -- and a distinction between citizen and non-citizen -- you are separating people and treating those outside the borders (non-citizens) less favorably. But this statement itself contains its own corollary -- if you insist on a distinction between non-American and American, you are separating people and treating Americans more favorably.

Byron Dorgan believes precisely what most Republicans believe. And yet he and his sort are credited with the latter -- treat Americans more favorably -- while we Republicans are blamed for acting only according to the former -- treat non-Americans less favorably.

But of course they're inseperable -- you cannot treat Americans more favorably without treating non-Americans less favorably.

If Byron Dorgan is to be credited for acting out of altruistic, patriotic motives, how can the media deny that Republicans are acting out of the same altruistic, patriotic motives, when our motivations are not only congruent, but inescapably so?

One "teachable moment" from all this: economic populism still has a decent amount of cachet in the conservative moment. Maybe we've not piped up about this often enough, but that strand of "nativist" bias still animates a lot of Republicans.

As usual, the MSM, being liberal, attempts to square this very round circle by claiming differing intents, as if intent really matters all that much when the actual outcome is exactly the same. (Liberals are, of course, very big on intentions and not consequences and outcomes.)

Byron Dorgan acts to control runaway illegal immigration so as to reduce wage-depressing effects and to give the marginally-employable lower-skilled American workers a better shot at actually landing a halfway decent job. Republicans act to control runaway illegal immigration, resulting in the exact same benefits to American workers -- and yet we're not be credited for this because our intent is supposedly malicious. They're restictionists out of love; we're restrictionists out of hate.

It's astonishing to me that we conservatives can act, and argue, precisely along the lines of Byron Dorgan, and yet he is praised as having "very different motives" -- i.e., permissible, even laudable motives -- and yet we're branded as "racists" who are "afraid of brown people."

If we were afraid of "brown people," we would have been all in favor of this bill, as it unavoidably harms lower-skilled black Americans, who are definitely "browner" and hence more "frightening" than Hispanics. If we're acting out of racism, why aren't we all conspiring together, as the MSM imagines us, to keep the blacks down?

Hey, even us racists have our priorities when it comes to The Order of Hatred! And everyone knows that blacks are worse than Hispanics, being darker and all! (And having bigger penises with which to steal our white women away!) Keeping down one black is worth holding down at least three or four Hispanics, I figure.*

* Though, admittedly, I haven't worked out all the math on my KKKalculator, but I imagine that's a good enough back-of-the-white-envelope guestimate.

And, of course, it doesn't help that most Hispanics are dirty Pope-worshipping fish-eating Catholics.

But at least they're not Jews, like Sammy Davis Jr. and Hank Aaron.

posted by Ace at 02:07 PM

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