Amnesty Equals Abortion

When a Roman general returned victorious from a war against an enemy of the Republic, he was typically granted a “triumph”: a lavish, bloodthirsty, pagan version of a ticker-tape parade, which centered on long lines of enslaved captive enemies marching in chains behind his chariot, and climaxed with the butchery of their general before throngs of cheering patriots. After that, the general used his newfound status as a hero to advance his political power, often squeezing the stay-at-home politicians in the Senate to grant him and his partisans special privileges — especially of the kind that would help them grab and hold on to power.

We probably should be grateful that the raid that enacted justice on the mass-murdering orthodox Muslim Osama bin Laden did not yield thousands of captives for a parade through New York City — as cathartic as they might have momentarily been. However, the president has not been slow to follow the rest of the pagan precedent, using his surge of popularity to press for special favors that will benefit his faction. No sooner have the crabs done picking the bones of bin Laden than President Barack Obama has announced another push to obtain legal amnesty and citizenship for the many millions of illegal aliens who still reside in the United States — who, as soon as they are legal, will prove ideal recruits for the Abortion (i.e., Democratic) Party.

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In many states that last year elected a pro-life, pro-family member of the Senate or the House, the vote margins were relatively close, and Hispanics voted two-to-one in favor of the pro-abortion Democrats. Had the voting rolls been padded with recently legalized immigrants — most of them comparatively poor and eligible for the government benefits Democrats love to dole out at the expense of middle-class, working families — how many of these seats would still be in the hands of liberal Democrats who favor abortion on demand for all nine months (if need be, paid for by the taxpayer), gay “marriage,” explicit sex education, and countless other measures that violate the most fundamental premises of the natural law? While individual immigrants might sound like social conservatives in their hearts or their answers to opinion polls, they tend to vote their pocketbooks and their racial solidarity — much as white segregationists in the South (despite their Christian faith) used to do.

More importantly, if President Obama’s amnesty is granted, it is easy to predict how this will affect the next election — which is, of course, the reason Obama is pushing his amnesty now: He is desperate to recruit new liberal voters for the 2012 and subsequent elections, to reverse the pro-life gains of the 2010 elections and guarantee a pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage majority for the foreseeable future. There is ample historical precedent for this: Whenever the Southern, pro-slavery forces gained the upper hand in antebellum America, their focus was always foremost on their single issue: admitting new slave states to the Union, to lock in proslavery votes and keep the peculiar institution legal. Civil war erupted in Kansas and several other states, whose residents (on both sides of the issue) knew the stakes: demography is destiny. The safest way to gain solid votes is to import them — as the Democrats now hope to import millions of safe, pro-abortion votes by admitting them to the Union, via amnesty.

If we were to grant amnesty — the full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote, collect government benefits, and use affirmative action at the expense of (for instance) impoverished white male war veterans — to the estimated 10-12 million illegal immigrants in America, we would be adding at the very least 6.3-8 million liberal, pro-abortion voters. No, these recent illegals need not, by the laws of physics, vote for liberal, pro-abortion Democrats. But that is how they will vote, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Anyone who claims to value unborn life, who favors padding the voter rolls with those who will vote to leave the unborn unprotected, is also either lying or simply and doggedly refusing to consider the consequences of his actions. A school bus driver who downs a fifth of Jim Beam before climbing behind the wheel might not have intended manslaughter against his tiny passengers — but when he crashes them into a wall, that is how the prosecutor will charge him.

 

I do not wish to imply that those who know how amnestied illegals are almost certain to vote and who still favor amnesty are not, in cold fact, pro-life. I would never leave such a statement to mere implication. I wish to say it outright: Those who favor amnesty for illegal immigrants are not, in cold fact, pro-life. That goes for politicians and voters, bishops and priests, men, women, and children, red and yellow, black and white. Such people may be pro-life in theory, as thousands of antebellum Southerners claimed to be inward abolitionists. But those who lobbied for admitting new slave states to the Union knew that their actions spoke louder than words. No one who really believes that abortion is a life-and-death issue will allow any secondary considerations (economic “justice,” “diversity,” or misguided compassion for lawbreakers) to trump the legal murder of a million Americans each year. This amnesty — proposed by a president who, as a senator, fought almost singlehandedly to keep partial-birth abortion legal — will make such legalized murder permanent. End of story.

I have already made extensive and un-rebutted arguments against the groundless claim that we somehow owe a “path to citizenship” to people whose very presence in our country is a crime. Instead of rehashing them here, let me direct the reader to this piece, this one, this one, this one, and this one. Those Catholics who cry for “justice” for immigrants should be careful what they wish for: The starkly just outcome for illegal immigrants who violated just and democratically enacted laws to enter our country is clear — immediate deportation. That would be mere justice.

Now, I myself don’t favor this. I favor mercy for illegal immigrants, as I crave God’s mercy myself. But I insist, as does the Christian tradition, that mercy not violate justice. Justice for America’s unborn — and also for its working poor, and its hard-pressed middle class — forbids granting citizenship to amnestied illegals, as the Abortion Party wants.

Instead of rewarding lawbreaking with the precious gift of American citizenship — and rewarding with millions of votes the party that fought to keep America from protecting its own borders — there are two steps we could take that would secure the rights owed Americans (born and unborn) in simple justice, while extending to illegal aliens a generous measure of mercy:

  1. Fully secure America’s borders, completing the border fence with Mexico so that it covers the whole expanse between the countries, and walls off the “impassable” deserts in which hundreds of migrants die every year. Implement E-Verify, an effective, existing (but currently voluntary) system that keeps employers honest about hiring legal workers, and quickly track down and deport those visitors who (like the 9/11 hijackers) illegally overstay their visas.
  2. Once this is done, offer illegal immigrants who haven’t committed other serious crimes (including identity theft) the right to reside here permanently and to work, but never to vote. Their children who are born here will have full rights, of course, but adults who chose to flout our laws should never have the right to help make those laws.

If pro-business lobbyists or pro-abortion liberals reject this rational compromise, it tells us that they were never really serious about protecting the human rights and dignity of immigrants. All they wanted was cheap labor and cheap votes, and we in America value both those things too highly to treat them like trash.

Author

  • John Zmirak

    John Zmirak is the author, most recently, of The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Seven Deadly Sins (Crossroad). He served from October 2011 to February 2012 as editor of Crisis.

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