Posted on August 4, 2016

Letters to the Editor: Reaction to ‘Don’t Hate, Vote’ Letter

Tom Shuford, Hickory Record, August 3, 2016

“For a country founded by immigrants . . . ,” writes Keith Orsini, “Why are so many intent on keeping out those who simply want to follow their example?”

Perhaps the founders themselves can explain this mystery.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, for example, “It is for the happiness of those united in society to harmonize as much as possible.”

Immigration risked bringing in habits and outlooks rendering our polity “a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” Jefferson saw no need to augment natural growth by “importation of foreigners.”

Jefferson’s arch rival, Alexander Hamilton, agreed: “The opinion advanced in (Jefferson’s) notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct . . . The influx of foreigners must . . . tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit . . . to introduce foreign propensities.”

“These sentiments were widely shared,” according to immigration historian Otis L. Graham, Jr., “from Jefferson to Hamilton across the political spectrum.”

But immigration was so low in the founding era and for several decades thereafter, that the founders “expressed such worries without devising an effective filter against bad immigration.”

The founders were far-seeing men. But that was then. Nobody would say anything like that today, when diversity has become something of a national religion. Nevertheless, despite unrelenting pro-immigration, pro-diversity propaganda, many sense that something is amiss, that America is becoming an ungovernable open borders, multi-cultural mishmash, and that this will not end well–if not for them, then for their children.

That may be why in 2016 an outsider presidential candidate, contrary to all expectations, vaulted to the top of his party. All alone at first, he pushed back on the mass Third World immigration/multi-culturalism project. Will a heretic from immigration orthodoxy vault into the White House?

Tom Shuford

Lenoir