Extended vs. nuclear family reunification

One of the few positive surprises in the Kennedy-Bush immigration bill is the slow phasing in of a Canadian-style points system intended to bring in more skilled legal immigrants by cutting back on nepotistic chain migration. Reunification bonus points for Of course, that's exactly the part of the bill that Democrats such as Barack Obama have zeroed in on to criticize. As Your Lying Eyes pointed out, Obama proclaimed:

But the most disturbing aspect of this bill is the point system for future immigrants. As currently drafted, it does not reflect how much Americans value the family ties that bind people to their brothers and sisters or to their parents.”

“As I understand it, a similar point system is used in Australia and Canada and is intended to attract immigrants who can help produce more goods. But we need to consider more than economics; we also need to consider our nation's unique history and values and what family-based preferences are designed to accomplish. As currently structured, the points system gives no preference to an immigrant with a brother or sister or even a parent who is a United States citizen unless the immigrant meets some minimum and arbitrary threshold on education and skills.”

“That’s wrong and fails to recognize the fundamental morality of uniting Americans with their family members. It also places a person’s job skills over his character and work ethic. How many of our forefathers would have measured up under this point system? How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island?”

“I have cosponsored an amendment with Senator Menendez to remove that arbitrary minimum threshold of points before family starts to count and to bump up the points for family ties.”

“And at the appropriate time, I will be offering another amendment with Senator Menendez, to sunset the points system in the bill. The proposed point system constitutes, at a minimum, a radical experiment in social engineering and a departure from our tradition of having family and employers invite immigrants to come.

Let's not try to make the current immigration system more rational because that would constitute "a radical experiment in social engineering"!!! Whereas the effects of the current free-for-all are downright Burkean.

The thing that makes Obama so dangerous is his mastery of conservative rhetoric -- "a radical experiement in social engineering" -- that he deploys shamelessly to advance his own leftist and/or idiosyncratically personal obsessions, combined with how his charisma interacts with white American fantasies about racial transcendence to inspire the He Understands Us! response that De Gaulle mastered to get enormous power put in his hands. Well, yeah, sure, Obama understands us. Foxes understand hens, too.

One obvious distinction that is lost in this kind of demagoguery is that the proposed changes would retain "nuclear family reunification" (spouses and minor children) while cutting back on "extended family reunification" (siblings, parents, and adult children). Although Hillary and Barack have been rattling on about how America is built on family values, the reality is that traditional American culture values nuclear families (e.g., Ozzie and Harriet) and is suspicious of extended families (e.g., the Corleones).

Extended family reunification has been bad for low-skilled Americans, especially African-Americans, who have very little chance to get hired by by nepotistic immigrant entrepreneurs, who would rather import their low-skilled relatives. As you travel about the country, notice how few American blacks work in immigrant-owned businesses versus how many African-Americans work in big national chains (e..g, Hertz, Marriot, Ruby Tuesday, etc.)

Of course, driving African Americans out of New York City and replacing them with more docile immigrants has been long one of the covert reasons for the media enthusiasm for the current immigration arrangement.

However, with Obama, everything is personal. His biggest motivator is his enormous personal ambition. He chose ethnic politics as his career, so helping African-Americans get ahead in the market place isn't all that interesting to him because he is a politician and is rewarded for delivering tax money and favors.

Second, his unknown African extended family has always played a much more idealized role in his emotional life than his white semi-nuclear family that actually raised him.

The son of a bigamous marriage between an 18-year-old Kansas girl and a Kenyan who quickly abandoned her, grew up, as he details at vast length in his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, fantasizing about the love of his African extended family and resenting his white mother. He has approximately a half dozen half-siblings by his father. Some of them, such as his beloved alcoholic half-brother Roy (who now calls himself Abongo after converting to Islam and Afrocentrism) might have trouble qualifying for immigration under a rational system designed to benefit American citizens. In contrast, Obama's half-brother Mark, a physicist whom Obama cut off all contact with because he rejects Obama's Afrocentrism, is exactly the kind of skilled individual who would be chosen under the rational Canadian-style immigration system that Obama opposes.

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