The history of Jewish immigration to America makes for interesting reading. What can we surmise from the fact that Irving Kristol was born in Brooklyn in 1920 “into a family of low-income, nonobservant Jews”? Irving’s father was in the clothing business, meaning that he was quite likely from Poland. Between 1880 and 1914, about two million Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated to the United States, and the Polish Jews created the Garment District in New York. But “real” Americans weren’t all that keen on this invasion of Christ-deniers. Among other things, Jewish immigration helped inspire the Dillingham Commission which concluded that allowing Jews and Italians to immigrate to this country constituted a serious threat to our culture and led to the Emergency Quota Act the year after Irving was born, and the KKK-inspired Immigration Act of 1924 when Irving was four.
That ought to be chilling history to Irving’s son, Bill. But it doesn’t appear to be:
The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol has some advice for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on the Senate’s immigration reform bill: Walk away.
“He should walk away from it,” Kristol said Tuesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.” “He should say, I made a good faith effort, but you know what, this is not a piece of legislation.”
“Think of the trust you have to have in bureaucracy to make all this work,” he said. “There’ll be certifications and border security, there’ll be tests of whether people paid back taxes. … If you like Obamacare, you should like this immigration bill. And I honestly think conservatives should oppose it on those grounds alone.”
The Immigration Act of 1924, “targeted immigrants based on their nation of origin rather than ethnicity or religion, [but] Jewish immigration was a central concern. Hearings about the legislation cited the radical Jewish population of New York’s Lower East Side as the prototype of immigrants who could never be assimilated.” As a result, when the Holocaust happened, America was legally barred from serving as a haven for all but a few endangered Jews.
“I’m a liberal, as you know, on immigration reform. I was more liberal than you were, I think, in ’06, ’07. I’ve got to say, I couldn’t vote for this bill,” Kristol said. “I just don’t think it’s good conservative governance, and I don’t think there’s any need to compromise with Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama at this point. There’s no crisis.”
And, Kristol added, “the impulse that we have to act or that doing something foolish is better than doing nothing is always a mistake, and particularly a mistake in immigration. Because once you legalize, you legalize. It’s done.”
Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the immigration reform bill by a 13-5 vote, when Arizona’s Jeff Flake, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, and Utah’s Orrin Hatch joined all the Democrats on the panel in support. Marco Rubio did not take Bill Kristol’s advice:
“I appreciate the work of the Senate Judiciary Committee in taking the bill my colleagues and I introduced in April as a starting point for debate,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a member of the “Gang of Eight.” “We have a historic opportunity to end today’s de facto amnesty and modernize our immigration system to meet our 21st century needs. I remain optimistic that the Senate, by improving the bill through an open and deliberative floor debate, will seize this opportunity.”
Irving Kristol became a Trotskyite, thereby justifying the reactionaries’ doubts about allowing “radical” Jews into the country who would never assimilate. But he “evolved” into one of the founders of the neo-conservative movement, which teaches us that we really don’t know shit about how any individual Latino will vote forty years from now. Bill Kristol should be ashamed of himself.