After a long hiatus, Chuck Norris is back sharing his political views. His return to the political arena was unexpected and he made sure to make the most of it by releasing a brand new column, this one in defense of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s tough position on immigration.
Both those on the left and right are in a bit of a quandary over GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s softening stand on deporting illegals from our country. Though I think the uproar is a bit exaggerated, especially by the Clinton political machine, I believe Trump would find wisdom and strategy by turning to our founders’ solutions for immigration. If he cited them in his plan for citizenship, Trump would stand on more solid ground to those on the right and left.
I’ve addressed these issues before, but they warrant repeating and expanding because our founders’ truths are timeless. (I have also detailed them at length in my New York Times bestseller, “Black Belt Patriotism.”)
Now more than ever, we must protect our borders and sovereignty, by providing genuine solutions to the dangers of American boundary fluidity. With estimates showing that by 2060 America will add 167 million people (37 million immigrants today will multiply into 105 million then), it is imperative for us to do more to solve this crisis.
Under the Articles of Confederation (our “first constitution”), each state possessed the authority over naturalization. Such diversity, however, led the founders at the Constitutional Convention to shift the power of naturalization to the federal government. The Constitution, therefore, reads in Article I, Section 8, that the Congress shall have the authority to “establish a uniform rule of naturalization.”
But the federal government has miserably failed to produce a viable solution to the illegal immigrant crisis. Amnesty is not the answer. And immigration laws aren’t effective if we continue to dodge or ignore them. Furthermore, globalization efforts and the invasion of terrorists into our homeland have only confused security matters, increasingly endangering our borders as well as our national security and sovereignty.
From America’s birth, our founders struggled, too, with international enemies and border troubles, from the sea of Tripoli to the western frontier. While welcoming the poor, downtrodden and persecuted from every country, they also had to protect the sacred soil they called home from unwanted intruders.
America’s founders were also concerned with properly assimilating immigrants so that their presence would be positive upon the culture. They expected them to maintain their ethnicity but adopt our culture and customs. They expected their patriotism to be for these United States.
George Washington wrote, “By an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, laws: in a word soon become one people.”
Thomas Jefferson, hailed as one of the most inclusive among the founders, worried that some immigrants would leave more restrictive governments and not be able to handle American freedoms, leading to cultural corruption and “an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and tender it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”
And Alexander Hamilton insisted that “the safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on the love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.”
According to the Declaration of Independence, “obstructing the Laws for the Naturalization of Foreigners” was one of the objections leveled against Britain that warranted the American colonists’ seceding. Yet, even the founders themselves believed that a total open-door policy for immigrants would lead to community and cultural chaos.
While we discuss and debate new ways to resolve the social crisis we call illegal immigration, our founders again pointed the way more than 200 years ago. Like enrolling in an Ivy League school, they considered and promoted American citizenship as a high honor.