Derbyshire on Immigrants.

I can understand why out of control illegal immigration might upset anyone. I can even, to a point, share the dislike for rewarding 'illegals' with a decent shot at residency and citizenship. But among some conservatives their dislike for 'illegal immigration' is morphing into a weird type of nativist anti-immigration spite pure and simple. Here , for example, is a reader writing in to agree with John Derbyshire, my favorite NRO commentator, about wanting to trash the 'Nation of Immigrants' image of America as untrue. Here's the key points:

Best I can tell most of my family came from Germany well over a century ago. But I'm not a German, never been there, don't really want to go. I'm an American. Let's start calling ourselves that instead of this ridiculous Nation of Immigrants nonsense.

And I don't buy Andy McCarthy's saying we have a '"nation of immigrants' self image.' I certainly don't. I don't know anyone who does. It's what we're told, we're expected to believe it, but I know nothing of having an immigrant past, and know only one person ... who does.

This is fun for several reasons. One, the Derby himself is an immigrant, from England, I believe (as are Andrew Sullivan, Arriana Huffington, Fareed Zakharia, Christopher Hitchens, etc, etc). Second, his ancestors came from Germany a century ago! Newcomer. My ancestor, a guy named Jesse, an Englishman or a Scots-Irishman, was active in the little North Carolina town near here in the 1760s. As a group, African Americans are the oldest 'American' population there is, if you discount the Native Americans (who really had an illegal immigrant problem).

Yet this relative newcomer now knows only ONE person who has an immigrant past. How odd. I live and work in rural America, the region where the good ol' WASP American culture first crystallized. People here either come from families that have been here for 200 years, or they've been here for less than 15 years. There is little in between.

As for me - I know lots of people with an immigrant past. My Cuban wife, for starters, and my second generation Cuban-American niece and nephew. They've done so well assimilating. My beloved sister-in-law is Vietnamese, which means my other niece and nephew are half-Vietnamese, though pure American and have no impulse to visit the old country tho' the older one says he can still understand Vietnamese.

Then there is my cousin's son: 1/4 African American, 1/4 Japanese, 1/4 Viking Minnesotan, and 1/4 Clemens. And my aunt married a Hungarian Jew who had escaped from Vienna one step ahead of the Nazis. He was actually the most sophisticated and intellectual of all my relatives.

And my friend Maeráed's dad is from Ireland; my niece Mulan is from China; one of my colleagues is from Kenya, one from Russia; one raised in Argentina though at least legally an American; one was socialized as an adult in Mexico and considers himself as Mexican as his Mexican wife who is, btw, legal as all get out; and one is Finnish. Of my two favorite colleagues over in the English Dept one is the daughter of Yiddish speaking survivors of the Holocaust and the other is, well, English.

What is this poor WASP boy to do, except buy into the 'Nation of Immigrants' image?


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