Shooting fish in a barrel

Now that common sense about immigration appears to be finally breaking out on Capitol Hill, Wall Street Journal editorials are verging on apoplexy. Punching holes in them is getting too easy. Here's the WSJ's latest:

Tom Tancredo's Wall

The Colorado Congressman tries to make America the world's biggest gated community.

... Tom Tancredo has done everyone a favor by stating plainly the immigration rejectionists' endgame--turn the United States into the world's largest gated community.

Great argument! Who in the world would want to live in a "gated community?"

Uh, except for Wall Street Journal subscribers, who are far more likely to live in gated communities than subscribers to any other newspaper.

And what proportion of Wall Street Journal editors live in apartment buildings with doormen who keep a baseball bat close at hand to keep out illegal entrants? Why shouldn't the average American citizen similarly enjoy living in a gated country?

By the way, this editorial is a perfect example of one of my recurrent themes: the utter disconnect between public discourse and private behavior regarding real estate.

A reader writes:

Yeah, of course our elites are all for illegal immigration since they have enough money to shield themselves from its consequences. On my way up to New York City last Friday, I sat a couple seats over from [the WSJ's favorite "expert" on immigration] Tamar Jacoby on the Business Class Acela train. Lots of room, no riffraff and screaming kids like you get on the regular train. It was quite a metaphor, I felt: Tamar doesn't even want to take the train with the common folk, yet she wants to...well, you know.

Another reader writes:

The funniest thing about the editorial was their use of the phrase “smears the law-abiding aliens with the lawbreakers.” The absence of the word illegal before aliens jumps off the page. A complete non sequiter. How about “the small but vocal constituency” which I believe is 70% of the American people opposed to illegal immigration. It is getting really hard to take anything they say seriously.

In Jeffrey Hart’s column on American Conservatism he stated that “ideology is always wrong because it edits reality and paralyzes thought.” It is hard to find a clearer example of this than the WSJ and open immigration.

On the WSJ site, readers tee off on the WSJ's editorial here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer