Sunday 2 November 2008

Huddled Masses

No wonder that John McCain is making no fuss about Barack Obama’s illegal aunt. One Kenyan is, in principle, wrong: illegal is illegal. But she is politically as nothing next to the millions of Latinos to whom McCain, in one of his most striking metamorphoses in Jorge Bush, wishes to grant an amnesty.

There are those (mostly blue-collar Catholics and white Evangelicals) who suffer as much as the blacks as a result of such policies, official and unofficial. But no one suffers more. A Presidential candidate whose base is the blacks is the candidate for all those who so suffer, and for all those who believe in strictly limited and strictly legal immigration into the English-speaking country that is America.

And a Presidential candidate whose base is the black church is the candidate for all those who share the values common to blue-collar Catholics and white Evangelicals, by no means only (though certainly) in the Catholic Church or in the Evangelical churches.

2 comments:

  1. Both candidate were pro-illegal immigration. The people who were supposed to vote for one of them, unfortunately, were not - and he was the one wot lost.

    Gotta be a moral in there somewhere

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  2. No one is more opposed to illegal immigration than the blacks, whose ancestors were in America long before those of many whites.

    Their families have been entirely English-speaking for almost the whole of that period, whereas much of America was German-speaking in the nineteenth century, while Italian, Polish, Yiddish and others were spoken in many white homes well within living memory, still being spoken in some white homes right up to the present day.

    And they are in competition with the Latinos for low-end jobs.

    In the South-West, especially, rather fewer Hispanics voted for Obama than had been expected.

    They didn't really want a President whose base was the blacks and who would be looking to that base to deliver a second term.

    They preferred the aged figure of John "Amnesty" McCain, the candidate of continuation with George "Bilingual America" Bush.

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