Andy: Someone once called New York City “the capital of a country that doesn’t exist.” It’s an odd sort of place. Personally, I love it, and it’s made a great contribution to the USA. It is not, however, all by itself, the USA. In fact–you might want to sit down for this, Andy–large numbers of Americans hate New York.
Sure, I’m an immigrant, and very pleased to have been allowed to settle here. My wife, whose original home country is in worse shape than mine, is even more pleased–it took a lot of persuading just to get her to go back for a visit.
I don’t think the pleasure of the Derbyshires should be a main goal of US government policy, though. When thinking policy, we should look to the interests of the nation at large, not to the interests of our personal selves, or our kin, or our ethny.
Even if I allow that the “nation of immigrants” tag contains a partial truth–which I do, because it does–it’s an unfortunate fact that it has been hijacked in recent years by ethnocentric cheerleaders http://www.nclr.org/ who do not have the nation’s larger interests in mind, and by open-borders fanatics like the Wall Street Journal crowd, who, as I said in an earlier post, are in thrall to a crazy ideology. For that reason. and whatever its place may previously have been in American discourse, the “nation of immigrants” tag is now an ideological marker. The person who uses it approvingly does so in order to declare himself on the open-borders, or at least the lax-enforcement, side of the immigration debate. It’s a shame to lose a cute phrase, even one whose truth value is only partial, but there you are. I won’t be using “nation of immigrants” myself in future, except to scoff at it, because it is now a key slogan of people I profoundly disagree with, pushing a cause I believe to be harmful to America.