immigration extremists, such as those who tore the American flag down from the United States Post Office in Maywood, California, during protests against a proposed crack down on illegal immigration. The protestors replaced the American flag with the Mexican national tri-colors and placed Old Glory underneath it—upside down. The culprits were students from a nearby high school, many of them almost certainly anchor babies.
Yet as disturbing as those events are and what they may well portend, a far more ominous threat continues to uncoil in the nation’s capital.
“There is something much more insidious going on, on both sides of the political aisle, that angers me because I think it is a repudiation of all that America stands for and all that is good; and it has the uncanny reflection of the arguments made in the old slave south,” Eastman said. “On the one hand you have the Democrats, which are the social welfare party—and the longer that you have huge groups of people that rely on government entitlements the more political power the Democrats can gain from that. They have a vested interest in keeping a subclass population. Then you have the big business wing of the Republicans, they have a vested interest in not having a new labor pool, but in having a new illegal labor pool, so they can take advantage of them and treat them like slave labor. The arguments made by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal have an uncanny parallel to the arguments made by John C. Calhoun and the old defense of slavery [asserting that] our economy depends on this. And it is a travesty that these two positions have gained enough of a [legislative] majority to force the government to ignore our immigration laws.”
Judging by the events which unfolded in early 2009, it might seem difficult to imagine the country suddenly afire with a citizenry demanding an end to birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants—but grassfires tend to start small and then explode. In fact, the economy’s downward spiral may make probable what seemed nearly impossible just a few short months ago. Already the long-held arguments of the business and ethnic interests that Americans won’t work in unskilled, lowwage job sectors has disappeared into a sea of Americans grasping for virtually any paycheck they can find.
For Eastman, it seems that this moment more than any other of days’ past may finally bring the mass of the American body politic to the basic, common sense conclusion that birthright citizenships is unsustainable.
To insist that one has an fundamental human entitlement to violate the sovereign boundaries of a nation, to then take up residence and claim the right to remain there in violation of its laws and then to insist that any effort to prevent this is a ‘violation of human rights’ is, to the contrary, a violation of the inalienable right of a people to govern themselves through a system that is predicated on their consent.
It also ferments a fundamental disrespect for the law that ultimately corrodes the rationale for enforcing virtually any other law, as it embraces the tenuous position that some laws are more valid than others and, in the case of illegal immigration, allows those breaking the law to set the terms and conditions for its enforcement. Demands for birthright citizenship by illegal immigrants are a brazenly unilateral claim that undercuts the very basis of the mutual consent that has long been the foundation of the American republic.
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