US sans California? That’s acceptable
Mark Steyn
My friend Tom says most of America’s problems would be solved if we could just get California to secede.
I know what he means – and not just because, without the huge head start they get from California’s electoral strength, Democrats would be unlikely to re-take Congress or the presidency in my lifetime. You can make an economic case for dumping California. You can also make an international relations argument. Without California, most of the global resentment at American cultural imperialism would be transformed into resentment at Californian cultural imperialism – the movies, TV shows and pop music produced by Hollywood.
You can also make a geopolitical defence argument. Without the Golden State, North Korea would be less of a pressing problem, since at the moment its celebrated No-Dong missiles are capable of nuking only San Diego, Los Angeles and the rest of the California coast. Kim Jong-Il? Not our problem, guys.
But these are all relatively marginal benefits. A lot of us have learned more about California’s political circus than we ever wanted to from the last few weeks. By “circus”, I don’t mean the movie actors and pornographers and billboard models currently running for governor: God bless ’em all for finding honest employment in their various business ventures. No, I mean what passes for the professional political class in California. Desperate to stave off the end of his political career, Governor Gray Davis appeared before the various big chiefs of Indian tax-free casino operations and basically offered, in exchange for campaign contributions, to let them nominate guys from their tribes to the state gaming commission – in other words, let’s auction off the regulatory authority to the fellows it’s supposed to regulate.
Yet even that’s just business as usual compared to Davis’ other big idea. On September 5, the governor signed a law that allows illegal immigrants – or, in the preferred euphemism, the “undocumented” – to acquire California driver’s licences. A driver’s licence is not just a licence to drive: it’s the principal form of ID in North America; it allows you, among a thousand and one other useful functions, to board planes, cross the US/Canadian frontier, buy firearms, and register to vote. The last of which, in theory, only citizens are meant to do.
California’s not the first state to regard illegal aliens as just another minority group in need of government largesse, like African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans. Several already shower the blessings of the state on fine upstanding non-citizens from the Undocumented-American community. In the summer of 2001, for example, a couple of fellows showed up in Falls Church, Virginia, in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven where undocumented Hispanics congregate in search of casual labour. They were looking for ID, and it pretty much fell into their lap. Luis Martinez-Flores, an illegal from El Salvador who’s been in America since 1994, offered his services, accompanied them to the nearest Department of Motor Vehicles office, supplied the guys with fake addresses for the residency forms and certified that they lived there. The ID was processed on the spot.
Newly certified as lawful residents of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the pair returned to the DMV the very next day to walk two of their friends through the same process. A month later, on the morning of September 11, all four of these young Middle Eastern men used their newly acquired Virginia documents to board Flight 77, and fly it into the Pentagon.
There are lots of reasons why the al-Qaeda killers managed to pull off their audacious feat, but one of them is very clear: they took advantage of the vast networks that exist to ease the transition of illegal immigrants into American life. In other words, the law Gray Davis has signed is a threat to national security. If you’re a terrorist and you can get across the US border, Davis will give you the paperwork to ensure you can stay there.
While one can respect those who are pro-immigration or anti-immigration, to be pro-illegal immigration is to collude in the corrosion of civic infrastructure. Yet enlightened opinion is as insouciant as ever on this issue. Indeed, it’s regarded as boorish to be hung up on pernickety things like sovereignty. Cruz Bustamante, the Democrat with the best chance of succeeding Davis, has refused to disavow his affiliation with MEChA, a group that favours the establishment of a new Hispanic state in the American south-west.
In most democratic societies, secessionists tend to belong to explicitly secessionist parties; in Northern Ireland, Gerry Adams is a member of Sinn Fein, a party committed to taking the province out of the United Kingdom; in Canada, Bernard Landry, latterly Quebec’s separatist premier, is head of the separatist Parti Quebecois. But Bustamante seems to feel there’s nothing incompatible between his membership of a racial separatist movement and the Democratic Party: Hey, it’s no big deal. And he has a point. After all, MEChA simply wants to undermine one big chunk of the country. By contrast, the law Bustamante and Davis support is a threat to all 50 states.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who filled in all the forms, paid all the fees, waited for hours in the crummy Immigration Service lines, is the ideal candidate to point out that subverting the credentials of American citizenship is an insult to all legal immigrants.
In the election, what matters is that Davis and Bustamante are defeated. That way, at least a few of the political class might understands that there’s a price to be paid for turning the government bureaucracy into a counterfeit ID racket. If you destroy the integrity of a nation’s citizenship, pretty soon you won’t have a nation to be a citizen of. |
