Great Blog I Stumbled On

one of the great things about bad things like this very bad immigration 'reform' bill is that it stirs up a hornet's nest of normally idle blogs - as this one (bold highlights mine)

Importing "Family Values"

"But it would also seem a priori likely that third-world immigrants should have stronger family values than white, middle-class, suburban Americans, while their work ethic and willingness to defer to traditional sources of authority should be greater as well."

Francis "Still Waiting for the End of History" Fukuyama

"My second argument is that the immigrants themselves are like a booster shot of traditional morality injected into the body politic. Immigrants work hard. They build community groups. They have traditional ideas about family structure, and they work heroically to make them a reality."

David Brooks

"As a Texan, I have known many immigrant families, mainly from Mexico, and I have seen what they add to our country. They bring to America the values of faith in God, love of family, hard work and self reliance -- the values that made us a great nation to begin with."

George W. Bush

The sub-species of reptilia known as neoconservatives are among the chief proponents of (altogether now) "comprehensiveimmigrationreform" because they loathe bourgeois, middle-American values and breathlessly await the birth of "The First Universal Nation."

Feel free to quibble, but any rational definition of a nation begins with a homogeneous population sharing a common identity and occupying a contiguous territory; speaking the same language; having a common religion, literature, manners, customs, literature, and mythology; governed by the same principles and traditions; and conscious of common destiny and solidarity. In short, it is an ethno-cultural entity and by definition cannot be universal in nature.

Neocons believe in the concept of a "propositional" nation, where nationhood is defined ideologically, and rather than tied together through ancestry or a shared history, a people is united by a common commitment to a set of ideas and ideals, a creed. As Lawrence Auster has argued, Neocons start with an organizing mythology about nationhood: "America was built on universal principles of human rights, equality, and open borders; therefore America, by definition, must have a virtually infinite capacity for absorbing racially and culturally diverse peoples into its national fabric; and therefore any serious concerns about what immigration is actually doing to the country are un-American and must be automatically dismissed."

Hence the American nation is reduced to a series of bumper-stickers--"The First Universal Nation," "A Melting Pot," or a "Nation of Immigrants" grounded in the principles of "Family Values."