WHY WE DON'T DEFEND OUR BORDERS

Presidential candidate Duncan Hunter notes on his official campaign website that the Kennedy-McCain immigration bill currently before the Senate calls for the construction of only 370 of the 854 miles of fence mandated by last year’s Secure Fence Act—and that only 11 miles have thus far been built. Meanwhile, former Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan ponders the proposed legalization of 12 to 20 million aliens in this country and terms it “national suicide.”

Many Americans are familiar with arguments put forward on both sides of the immigration debate—the argument that illegals stimulate the economy by filling jobs that would otherwise go wanting, and the counter-argument that they depress wages for employees in labor-intensive industries.

They’ve heard that undocumented immigrants help support the Social Security system, and they’ve seen a recent Heritage Foundation calculation that puts the net entitlement cost per illegal household at $20,000. They know that PBS lauds the virtues of diversity and that Roger Hedgecock deplores a “press one for English” society.

They’ve listened to border control advocates who observe that most illegals don’t have high school diplomas—and to activists who tout the work ethic of folks who only want to support their families. They’ve been told that the pending Kennedy-McCain legislation will bring illegals “out of the shadows”—and that Z visas for folks who broke the rules will spawn a greater wave of illegal immigration in the future—as happened after the 1986 amnesty.

What is seldom pondered in this contentious debate, however, is why a nation would largely ignore its immigration laws in the first place—and thus invite the dissolution of its culture. That’s a question to which I’ve given a lot of thought.

Nations, I think, have few problems regulating immigration as long as they retain confidence in their heritage and feel deserving, to some degree, of the blessings they enjoy. On both those counts many Americans are now uncertain.

For almost five decades Michael Moore media types and humanities professors have tried to convince Americans that the U.S. is a nation not of brave patriots, but of racist robber barons. Indeed, the author of our most popular American history textbook, Howard Zinn, recently said in an interview with talk-show host Dennis Prager, that, on balance, his nation had done more bad than good.

One must add to this drumbeat of self-hatred the shame that rightly attends a society that’s sanctioned 45 million abortions and tolerates, or revels in, a vast cultural cesspool. Individuals bearing this moral burden find it hard to tell foreign laborers who earn a tenth of what low-wage Americans earn that they must follow the rules. In the moral scale of things, not getting in line to cross a border seems a lot less reprehensible than indulging and exporting a pop-culture that sexualizes kids, glorifies rule-breaking, and regularly ridicules flag-waving churchgoers.

In short, unless we reclaim our heritage and get our moral act together, the will to preserve our culture won’t be there—nor should it be.