Stop Making Excuses for Antifa Thuggery

Just a few picnickers and peace activists wanting to use their park...

Stop Making Excuses for Antifa Thuggery
Rich Lowry, National Review

One of the least safe places to be in Berkeley, California, is in the vicinity of someone holding a “No Hate” sign. So-called anti-fascist, or antifa, activists bearing shields emblazoned with those words assaulted any of the handful of beleaguered Trump supporters they could get their hands on at a small political rally over the weekend. All in the cause, mind you, of demonstrating their supposed opposition to hatefulness.

Too many people were willing to perfume antifa in the wake of Charlottesville, where it clashed with Nazi thugs who caused, and deserved, a wave of national revulsion. But Berkeley demonstrates once again the true nature of this left-wing movement, which is thuggish in its tactics and totalitarian in its sensibility. Anyone who at this point makes excuses for antifa — or worse, justifies it — is participating in its moral rot.

The antifa goons showed up in force at Berkeley at what had been a small “anti-Marxist” rally of Trump supporters at a public park. Antifa wore its usual fascistic garb of black masks and body armor. They overwhelmed the police who had been trying to maintain order and, holding aloft smoke-spewing flares, chanted, “Whose park? Our park!”

They then treated suspected Trump supporters with all the decorousness of torch-wielding medieval villagers who believed they had stumbled upon a witch. A leader of a pro-Trump group had to run from a mob that pepper-sprayed and beat him, until he was taken into police custody for his own protection. The targets weren’t Nazis bearing Nazi regalia, but supporters of the duly-elected president of the United States. Or people who were guilty of the offense of committing journalism — a reporter was beaten by the antifa cadres.

Antifa benefited enormously from the horrific events in Charlottesville. It became Nazis versus the people standing up to the Nazis, and in that formulation the people standing up to the Nazis always win. There can be no moral equivalence, we were told, between Nazis and their opponents. But that depends on who the opponents are — there is a vast difference between peaceful counterprotesters and violent thugs, even if they are marching on the same side.

There was certainly moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin. Likewise, bully-boy fascists spoiling for a fight and black-clad leftists looking to beat them up exist on the same moral plane. They both thrill to violence and benefit from the attention that comes from it. They both reject civility and the rule of law that make a democratic society possible. They both are profoundly illiberal.

All this was lost in the reaction to Charlottesville. Liberal commentators spread memes comparing antifa to American GIs who stormed the beaches at Normandy. The comparison would be apt if the 1st Infantry Division got together to spend an afternoon beating up fellow Americans rather than giving its last measure of devotion to breaching Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. There is a cottage industry in excuse-making for antifa. Mark Bray of Dartmouth College says in the Washington Post that its activists are characterized by “their willingness to physically defend themselves and others from white supremacist violence and preemptively shut down fascist organizing efforts before they turn deadly,” i.e., assault people and shut down uncongenial speech as they deem necessary. Todd Gitlin of Columbia University writes in the New York Times that antifa is “not squeamish about its means” — but he is clearly squeamish about describing it frankly.

There will always be thugs who enjoy breaking things and hurting people. The real scandal is that otherwise respectable people are willing to look the other way or explain away the violence, so long as its perpetrators are on their side. They are just as cowardly as the mask-wearing antifa thugs who are brave enough to punch and kick people, but not to show their faces.

 — Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2017 King Features Syndicate

Troubles in the House of Liberalism

Troubles in the House of Liberalism

Col Mike Walker, USMC (ret)

This court ruling below is informative for the GOP.

The GOP contains a number of uncompromising factions that leads not to just disunity but too often disfunction. That raises a number of questions:

(1) Does the GOP want to go down the Democratic Party road of near lock step discipline among its members in the House and Senate?

(2) Does the GOP want to go back to the old smoke-filled back room methods for picking its presidential candidates? Had that been the case, the GOP establishment could have avoided a Trump nomination. Does the GOP want to adopt the Democratic Party model discussed in the article?

(3) How does all this bode for the preservation of free speech and democracy in America?

If the two political parties are willing to (a) suppress or nullify fair and open public debate, (b) create elites to manipulate the system to determine who can or cannot run for president or other senior office, (c) demand those chosen and elected to adhere to absolute loyalty to the party -- not the people they represent, and (d) declare the opposition party members as "enemies of the state" either directly or indirectly then how can democracy survive? 

If the two key political parties are run like ideological dictatorships then how can our form of government not devolve into a one-party ideological dictatorship? 

How can we not get to the point where only what is good for "the party" can be deemed good for the country and its people?

The dangers we are facing are far greater than a balanced budget or the deficit or the size or role of government. We are nearing an existential crossroad.

It is no exaggeration that we as a people are more divided today then at any point is several generations and the fate of the Union may soon hang in the balance.

Today, meeting the challenges facing the GOP are critical to the ongoing success of our nation. As the original members of Congress once concluded: We can hang together or we can hang separately.

The GOP must reject the road the Democratic Party is on and it must find a way to be a party of many competing -- even opposing -- voices that nonetheless can find a reasoned, moderate, and most of all common voice to govern. 

It the GOP fails to meet either of those two challenges then we as a nation are in grave trouble.

Court Admits DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schulz Rigged Primaries Against Sanders

Common sense kind of problem solver...

TRUMP PARDONS JOE ARPAIO

Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

President Trump today issued a pardon to the man he calls “Sheriff Joe” — Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. Arpaio was convicted of failing to follow a court order to end the practice of detaining people based on the suspicion that they lack legal status and turning them over to the border patrol. 

The White House provided this explanation of the pardon:

Arpaio’s life and career, which began at the age of 18 when he enlisted in the military after the outbreak of the Korean War, exemplify selfless public service. After serving in the Army, Arpaio became a police officer in Washington, D.C. and Las Vegas, NV and later served as a Special Agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), formerly the Bureau of Narcotics. After 25 years of admirable service, Arpaio went on to lead the DEA’s branch in Arizona.

In 1992, the problems facing his community pulled Arpaio out of retirement to return to law enforcement. He ran and won a campaign to become Sheriff of Maricopa County. Throughout his time as Sheriff, Arpaio continued his life’s work of protecting the public from the scourges of crime and illegal immigration. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is now eighty-five years old, and after more than fifty years of admirable service to our Nation, he is worthy candidate for a Presidential pardon.

I think there should be a strong presumption against granting pardons. I would prefer that the judicial system, flawed though it is, have the final word on the fate of those who are, or who may be, before it.

But if presidential pardons are going to be granted, and every modern president has granted them, it seems to me that Arpaio is a good candidate, basically for the reasons set forth by the White House. Sheriffs shouldn’t defy court orders. But in a real sense, Arpaio’s crime consists of being overzealous in combating illegal immigration. 

It arose in the context of lack of zealousness on the part of the federal government. According to this account, the judge found Arpaio couldn’t detain those who lack legal status because that’s the federal government’s job. But the feds hadn’t been doing that job. 

Arpaio was accused by the Obama Justice Department and other left-wingers of targeting Hispanics. Indeed, the legal case that led to his conviction arose from claims of racial profiling. But in Maricopa County, the illegal immigrant population is overwhelmingly Hispanic. Had the County been plagued by mass illegal immigration by Koreans, chances are Sheriff Joe would have targeted Asians. And he would have been right to do so. Sheriffs shouldn’t be expected to check their common sense at the door. 

To be sure, the pardon of Arpaio is, at least in part, a political act by a president who campaigned on a tough-as-nails immigration policy and who received Arpaio’s backing. But there’s a pretty good argument that the prosecution of Arpaio was also political. 

It was the highly politicized, left-wing Obama Justice Department that chose to prosecute Arpaio in connection with the hot button political issue of enforcing immigration laws. The judge whose order Arpaio defied apparently was satisfied with civil contempt. Team Obama went criminal on the octogenarian sheriff. And it did so, according to Arpaio’s lawyers, just two weeks before he stood for reelection. 

The pardon thus can be said to represent a political end to a political case. 

Some may defend the pardon by comparing it to egregious pardons of the past, like President Clinton’s pardon of wealthy fugitive Marc Rich and President Obama’s pardon of a Puerto Rican terrorist. Arguing form these outliers strikes me as misguided. Their pardons were so flagrantly unjust that the same argument could be used to defend a great many indefensible pardons. 

No such argument is required to defend Trump’s pardon of Arpaio. It was a reasonable exercise of the pardon power.

Fed Up With The Divisive Hard Left Elites

Fed Up With The Divisive Hard Left Elites

For the Hard Left Elites in America today, it is not enough to be against racism and discrimination. 

You have to be both against racism and for publicly disrespecting the flag of the United States and our National Anthem.

For the Hard Left Elites in America today, it is not enough to be against nationalist socialist fascism. 

You have to be both against nationalist socialist fascism and publicly condone the hate-filled actions of violent radical socialist groups like the Antifa.

Here is what I say:

I will always oppose racism and discrimination.

I will always honor the American flag and our National Anthem.

I will always oppose nationalist socialist fascism in all its forms.

I will always oppose violent radical socialist groups like the Antifa in all their forms. 

God Bless America

Mike Walker

Col USMC (Ret)

Google Teaming with Left-Wing Groups to Drive Conservatives off the Internet

Google Teaming with Left-Wing Groups to Drive Conservatives off the Internet

John Hinderaker, Powerline

This is a big subject which I don’t have time to do justice to in this post. I am afraid that we will need to return to it frequently in the months ahead. The place to begin is this excellent piece by Paula Bolyard at PJ Media: “Is Google Working with Liberal Groups to Snuff Out Conservative Websites?”

Briefly, Google is partnering with far-left groups like Pro Publica, BuzzFeed and the Southern Poverty Law Center to create a database of “hate” news for use by journalists. “Hate,” of course, means everything from opposing mass immigration to failing to endorse the latest LGBTQIA fads, while trying to murder Republican Congressmen apparently doesn’t qualify. Pro Publica’s page titled “Documenting Hate News Index” is here.

Ms. Bolyard writes:

On the surface, this looks rather innocuous. It’s presented by Google as an attempt to create a database of hate crimes — information that should be available with a quick Google search, it should be noted. But a quick glance at the list of partners for this project should raise some red flags:

The ProPublica-led coalition includes The Google News Lab, Univision News, the New York Times, WNYC, BuzzFeed News, First Draft, Meedan, New America Media, The Root, Latino USA, The Advocate, 100 Days in Appalachia and Ushahidi. The coalition is also working with civil-rights groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, and schools such as the University of Miami School of Communications.

***

It’s easy enough to figure out the direction of this project by taking it for a test drive. A search for “Scalise” returned four results, one of which didn’t even mention Steve Scalise, the congressman who was shot by a crazed leftist in June. A search for “Trump” during the same time period yielded more than 200 results. A search of the raw data resulted in 1178 hits for Trump and not a single mention of Scalise.

Note that Google, which recently fired an employee for expressing his counter-progressive opinions, thinks this information could be used to “help journalists covering hate news leverage this data in their reporting.” What do they mean by “leverage this data”? They don’t say, but an email sent to several conservative writers by a ProPublica reporter may give us some indication. Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer along with some others received this from ProPublica “reporter” Lauren Kirchner:

I am a reporter at ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in New York. I am contacting you to let you know that we are including your website in a list of sites that have been designated as hate or extremist by the American Defamation League or the Southern Poverty Law Center. We have identified all the tech platforms that are supporting websites on the ADL and SPLC lists.

We would like to ask you a few questions:

1) Do you disagree with the designation of your website as hate or extremist? Why?

2) We identified several tech companies on your website: PayPal, Amazon, Newsmax, and Revcontent. Can you confirm that you receive funds from your relationship with those tech companies? How would the loss of those funds affect your operations, and how would you be able to replace them?

3) Have you been shut down by other tech companies for being an alleged hate or extremist web site? Which companies?

4) Many people opposed to sites like yours are currently pressuring tech companies to cease their relationships with them – what is your view of this campaign? Why?

Leftists are trying to drive conservatives off the web by pressuring hosting services, payment services like PayPal, and other companies that provide technical support on a more or less indiscriminate basis to web sites. They already have had considerable success in this regard. Their pretense that the campaign is directed only at “hate” sites is absurd. No rational person would put pamelageller.com, for example, in that category.

And don’t think for a moment that this effort will end with the initial targets. Before long, the Left will try to make it impossible for mainstream conservative sites like Power Line, as well as Christian and Jewish web sites, to exist. Bill Jacobson writes at Legal Insurrection:

Attempts to induce corporations to silence conservatives are nothing new. We have seen years of pressure tactics from groups such as Media Matter to shut down voices such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity by pressuring and harassing advertisers. Campaigns are currently underway to force advertisers away from websites such as Breitbart and Gateway Pundit.

As discussed in many posts, this tactic can be effective when highly organized because major corporations are scared to death of bad publicity in general, but particularly bad publicity that could find it accused of supporting racism or other -isms. So the easy decision is to drop the advertising, rather than face protesters outside headquarters and in social media.

That tactic now has gone to a completely different level with attempts to intimidate internet hosting companies and companies that provide internet infrastructure to cut off access to the internet. So far, the effort has been focused on the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. People might not care that The Daily Stormer is taken down, but the history of leftist tactics shows that the target universe will expand dramatically and it will not be long before efforts are directed, as they are now for advertisers, at mainstream conservative and right-of-center websites.

This is an important topic, and one to which, I am afraid, we will have many occasions to return in the future.

What Identity Politics Hath Wrought

What Identity Politics Hath Wrought

 Michael Barone, RCP

There's a whiff of Weimar in the air. During the years of the Weimar Republic (1919-33), Germany was threatened by Communist revolutionaries and Nazi uprisings. Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau was assassinated, and violent street fighting was commonplace. Then Adolf Hitler took power in 1933.

America is nowhere near that point. But many surely agree with The American Interest's Jason Willick, who wrote Sunday that "this latest round of deadly political violence has" him "more afraid for" the United States than he has "ever been before."

But as he pointed out, this political violence -- identity politics violence is a more precise term -- began well before Saturday's horrifying events in Charlottesville, Virginia, and before the election of Donald Trump. Examples include the June 2015 murder by a white racist of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, and the July 2016 murder by a Black Lives Matter sympathizer of five police officers in Dallas.

This year, we've seen a Republican congressional candidate shove a reporter in Montana and a Bernie Sanders booster shooting at a congressional Republican baseball practice and seriously wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise in Alexandria, Virginia.

In Charlottesville, there were multiple bad actors. White nationalists and neo-Nazis uttering vile racism demonstrated against removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. One drove a car into a crowd -- killing one young woman and injuring about 20 others -- a tactic of Islamic terrorists.

Many so-called antifa (anti-fascist) counter-demonstrators, some disguised with masks, attacked the Lee statue supporters with deadly weapons. "The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right," tweeted New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Charlottesville. "I saw club-wielding 'antifa' beating white nationalists being led out of the park."

As Stolberg noted, the police not only failed to separate the two groups but maneuvered them into direct and predictably violent confrontation. Antifa believe that hateful words are violence and that they're entitled to be violent in response, as they have been on campuses from Berkeley to Middlebury -- a view profoundly at odds with the rule of law. "The result," writes Peter Beinart in The Atlantic, "is a level of sustained political street warfare not seen in the U.S. since the 1960s," led by a group that is "fundamentally authoritarian."

President Trump was widely criticized -- by many conservatives, as well as liberals -- for his Saturday statement condemning "this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides" without specifically denouncing white nationalism. Barack Obama faced much less criticism in July 2016 when he lamented the Dallas police murders but went on to decry "the racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system."

On Monday, Trump, obviously under pressure, said: "Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans."

Then, in a Tuesday Trump Tower press availability, Trump defended his Saturday statement but was hectored by reporters for condemning the "alt-left" demonstrators and allowed himself to be drawn into a needless debate over the merits of Robert E. Lee and whether protesters will soon target George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Gratuitously and apparently without evidence, he said there were "some very fine people" in both groups.

Like Obama in 2016, Trump this week was (mostly) accurate. But both presidents made themselves vulnerable to the charge of sending dog whistles to favored groups -- playing identity politics. Both failed, to varying degrees and with varied responses, to deliver undiluted denunciations of criminal violence and bigotry.

What's ironic is that the percentages of Americans who support white nationalism or antifa violence are in the low single digits. "Groups like the KKK," reports political scientist Ashley Jardina on a 2016 survey of white Americans, "are deeply unpopular."

But Americans have grown increasingly accustomed to the view that your politics are determined by your racial, ethnic or gender identity. Politics is seen as a zero-sum battle for government favor. College and corporate leaders join in.

Universities sponsor separate orientations, dormitories and commencements for identity groups. (Are separate drinking fountains next?) A corporate CEO fires an employee who has challenged the dogma that only invidious discrimination can explain gender percentages in job categories different from those of the larger population.

America today is a long way from Weimar. But identity politics threatens to get us a little closer. Possible solution: Unequivocally condemn bigotry and violence and, in the fired Google engineer James Damore's words, "treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group."

COPYRIGHT 2017 CREATORS.COM

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for  the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

The Liberal Crackup

Our fascist youth... it is verboten to disagree... interesting times!

THE LIBERAL CRACKUP

Steven Hayward, Powerline

The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt from Mark Lilla’s new book, The Once and Future Liberal, coming out on Tuesday that we mentioned here yesterday. Here’s a link to the whole piece if you are a WSJ subscriber, but if not here are two of the better paragraphs in it:

As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that they are engaged in politics as an X, concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness. And they are less and less comfortable with debate.

Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X…This is not an anodyne phrase. It sets up a wall against any questions that come from a non-X perspective. Classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces argument, then, are taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary opinions.

This phenomenon, I submit, is why conservatives have the advantage out in the real world, and why conservatives are more likely to win political battles in the long run, despite the left’s near monopolistic control of academic, the media, popular entertainment, and corporate human resources departments.

Two further notes: What Lilla describes as having burst the bounds of academia into the media mainstream now also applies to large parts of corporate America. See: Google. I’d love to see a study some time of how many graduates with degrees in Gender Studies or related politicized fields end up in corporate human resources department jobs, or consulting companies that put on “diversity” training seminars for corporate America.

Second, I’ll wait to read the whole book to see Lilla’s complete judgment, but one question the early excerpts raise is whether “progressive” students are in fact not liberals at all (and not actually in favor of progress for that matter: I saw Harvard’s Steven Pinker give a great lecture in June on the question “Why are ‘Progressives’ against progress?” He has a book coming out in March that will explore this question.) If it is the case that today’s so-called “progressives” are in fact anti-liberals, does it not require then that liberals go into explicit opposition to “progressivism,” and—horrors—ally with conservatives?

ON NORTH KOREA, ANTI-TRUMP HYSTERIA REPLACES REPORTING

ON NORTH KOREA, ANTI-TRUMP HYSTERIA REPLACES REPORTING
JOHN HINDERAKER, Powerline

The threat from North Korea is real, and is growing more imminent. President Trump is trying to rally international opposition to the crazed North Korean regime, to prepare Americans for possible dramatic action to remove the threat, and–most important–to deter North Korea from moving forward with aggressive plans against the U.S. This is serious business, but it isn’t being treated as such by most of the news media, which see only an opportunity to continue their daily assault on President Trump.

The Associated Press is one of the worst offenders. When Fox News reported that U.S. spy satellites had detected the North Koreans loading anti-ship cruise missiles onto a patrol boat, the AP couldn’t focus on anything other than a tweet by Trump.

First, the Fox story:

Despite the United States’ insistence that North Korea halt its missile tests, U.S. spy agencies detected the rogue communist regime loading two anti-ship cruise missiles on a patrol boat on the country’s east coast just days ago.

It’s the first time these missiles have been deployed on this type of platform since 2014, U.S. officials with knowledge of the latest intelligence in the region told Fox News on Monday.

It also points to more evidence that North Korea isn’t listening to the diplomatic threats from the West. 

“The best signal that North Korea could give us that they’re prepared to talk would be to stop these missile launches,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in the Philippines Monday.
***“North Korea is not showing any evidence it plans to halt its missile tests,” said one official who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive information. “It’s a trend that does not bode well for hopes of de-escalating tensions on the [Korean] peninsula.”

The latest moves by Pyongyang point to a likely missile test in the days ahead or it could be a defense measure should the U.S. Navy dispatch more warships to the Korean peninsula, officials said.

Thereafter, President Trump tweeted a link to the Fox News story. To the monomaniacal Associated Press, Trump’s tweet is the story: “Trump retweets Fox report based on anonymous sources.”

President Donald Trump has retweeted a Fox News report based on anonymous U.S. intelligence sources, despite his attorney general’s pledge to clamp down on government leaks.

On Tuesday, Trump retweeted a story that said U.S. spy agencies have detected North Korea “loading two anti-ship cruise missiles on a patrol boat on the country’s east coast just days ago.” The story was attributed to anonymous U.S. officials. 

Trump has repeatedly complained about leaks of government information to the press. Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed a crackdown, arguing such leaks could harm national security.

This is mind-numbingly stupid. Trump and his administration have denounced leaks of America’s secrets, not North Korea’s. Moreover, in this case it is obvious that the disclosure to Fox News was authorized. The administration wanted to send a signal to North Korea’s rulers that it knows about the cruise missiles and, more broadly, knows the North Koreans are not taking actions consistent with an intent to stop missile tests. President Trump’s tweet reinforced that message. An intentional release of information by a person authorized to release it is not a leak. The AP’s goofy analysis is on a par with saying that the Kennedy administration “leaked” the fact that Russian missiles had been installed in Cuba.

That was bad enough, but the AP had another story waiting in the wings: President Trump is just like Kim Jong Un! The AP’s headline is “Trump’s ‘fire and fury’ parallels North Korean rhetoric.”

President Donald Trump ventured into North Korean territory with his vow to respond to threats from the isolated dictatorship with “fire and fury” unparalleled in history.

***

“North Korea had best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” Trump said during a briefing at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.

If the rhetoric sounded similar to North Korean pronouncements, it was. Here is a look at some past comments by Pyongyang:

The AP went to the vault to come up with five statements by North Korean officials that, according to the AP, are just like Trump’s warning to Kim.

Someone, somewhere, may be covering the situation with North Korea intelligently, but don’t look to the Associated Press for anything other than anti-Trump propaganda.

The Anomaly of American Immigration

The Anomaly of American Immigration

by Max Bloom, National Review

None of our peer countries place as little emphasis on skills as we do. 

In the first half of 2017, the United States dispensed slightly more than 560,000 green cards. Looking over the numbers yields a sort of awe at the breadth of American immigration: The biggest sources are not particularly surprising (81,000 from Mexico, 38,000 from China, 31,000 from India), but beyond that there is the vast constellation of global peoples admitted to America every year: 7,700 immigrants from Ethiopia, 5,800 from Nepal, 5,200 from Peru, 4,900 from Ukraine. Close to every single country in the world is represented. We accepted immigrants by the thousands from Yemen, Guatemala, Burma, and Pakistan; by the hundreds from Guinea, Georgia, and Kuwait; by the dozens from Mauritius, Suriname, and Niger. Even Luxembourg got 19 green cards. It might seem as if the rationale behind American immigration policy was in part to simply represent as many countries as possible. 

This, in fact, is exactly what is going on. 

The United States accepts more immigrants than anywhere else in the world — though in fairness, we also have a larger population than most other countries — but we do so in one of the most convoluted and unusual ways. Aside from America, the five Western countries with the largest immigrant populations are Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Australia. Each one of these countries has more or less the same system: Educated immigrants with certain skills may obtain visas as skilled workers, and they may bring their spouses and their children with them. There are, of course, some differences: The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia manage skilled workers using a points-based system, for instance; the United Kingdom, France, and Germany all have to abide by the free movement of the Schengen zone; Canada also allows residents to sponsor immigration by certain relatives. But in all countries, the major framework remains the same: The free movement within the European Union notwithstanding, legal immigration is primarily about skilled labor. 

Now consider the American system. Of those 560,000 green cards, only 75,000 were granted on the basis of “employment-based preferences.” This means that approximately 13 percent of immigrants to America are selected for economic reasons. For comparison, Canada plans to accept 57 percent of its 2017 immigrants on an economic basis. We also accepted 76,000 refugees and 259,000 immediate relatives of U.S. citizens (spouses, children, and parents). 

What about the remaining 150,000 immigrants? Some 117,000 were “family-sponsored preferences.” This refers to a host of relations — adult children, siblings, etc. — of permanent residents and citizens who don’t fall under the category of immediate family members. Unlike spouses or minor children, these categories aren’t automatically eligible to immigrate to America. Yet these sponsored categories accounted for over 20 percent of American immigration. Even more striking is the diversity lottery, which randomly grants admission to applicants from “low-admission states” — countries that are not highly represented in American immigration figures — who have completed high school. This lottery accounted for 21,000 immigrants. This means that about 4 percent of American immigration is allocated purely for the sake of making America more diverse. Too few immigrants from East Timor? Increase the lottery figures for Dili. 

It is worth noting how unusual this is. The vast bulk of American immigration has nothing to do with merit, which is not the case in almost any of our peer immigration systems. Instead, most of the American immigration system consists of family-based immigration, about a third of which is under the family sponsoring system and is far more generous than the international norm. (It is true, as mentioned earlier, that Canada also has family-sponsored immigration — but once spouses are excluded, this accounts for only 7 percent of Canada’s permanent residents. Extended family members account for 0.1 percent.) Nor is there any international equivalent of the diversity lottery, which amounts, as Charles Krauthammer memorably quipped, to picking people “out of the Karachi phonebook.” 

In essence, while America doesn’t necessarily have the most open immigration system in the developed world (Canada admits more immigrants in proportion to its population, for instance), we do have the least rigorous immigration system. In part, this may reflect relatively open American attitudes toward immigration: Americans are far more likely than Europeans to believe that diversity is intrinsically good, and to welcome immigration for the sake of immigration. (Incredibly, American conservatives are more pro-diversity than German or Swedish liberals.) Hence the fondness for a diversity lottery that would probably be anathema to most of Europe, the lack of opposition to exceedingly generous policies of family reunification, and the relative tolerance for an immigration policy that doesn’t particularly prioritize the national interest. 

What this all means, without getting into the merits of the plan here, is that a skill-based point system along the lines of what Tom Cotton and David Perdue are proposing, and which the White House has supported, would represent a shift in line with international norms regarding immigration. (Cotton-Perdue would also cut the total amount of legal immigration roughly in half, which is a different issue.) This is in itself an argument neither for nor against immigration reform: Some international norms are good, some bad. But it does mean that the temptation on the left to view skills-based immigration as a descent into ethno-nationalism is unfounded. Really, it would just make us more like the rest of the world. 

— Max Bloom is a student of mathematics and English literature at the University of Chicago and an editorial intern at National Review.