Luke Ford

Immigration activist Jeffrey Kaye writes for the Jewish Journal:

In a 2007 book chapter, “Were Jews Political Refugees or Economic Migrants?,” UCLA economics professor Leah Platt Boustan provides a painstakingly thorough debunking of the “common belief that the exodus from Russia was a uniquely Jewish event and thus cannot be incorporated into a general model of migration.” Boustan compares migration flows of Russian Jews and of Austro-Hungarians and Italians during the same period, showing that the “timing of Jewish migration, like that of other migrations to the New World, responded to economic conditions.” Boustan doesn’t discount the push of anti-Semitism and political hardship but does make the case that persecution, along with the combination of economic adversity in Russia and promise in the United States, spurred the move to what the predominantly Yiddish-speaking immigrants called die goldene medina, the “golden land.”
That view directly contradicts the perspective of Stephen Steinlight, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) in Washington, D.C., who has emerged as a leading Jewish voice in favor of more restrictionist immigration policies.
“Jews during the Great Wave fled pogroms, oppression and discrimination,” he wrote recently. “There’s no commonality between the Jewish refugees of that era and today’s economic migrants.”
He concluded, “[A] growing majority of American Jews opposes illegal immigration because a confident American identity makes them empathize with fellow Americans first, not immigrants.”
It’s a potent argument, one that essentially calls on assimilated American Jews, blinded by the fog of historical memory, to disregard their own ancestral experiences and draw an artificial line between us and them. Steinlight rightly assumes that identity breeds empathy. If we can somehow disassociate our own experiences from those of more recent border crossers, we can try to convince ourselves that those people are not like us. Empathy does loom large in the Jewish experience, and public-opinion surveys show that Jews tend to be comparatively tolerant of illegal immigrants.
But attitudes may be changing. A 2007 poll by the American Jewish Committee showed that 67 percent of Jews backed some form of legalization program for illegal immigrants. By December 2009, according to a CIS survey, the percentage of Jews supporting a path to legalization was down to 60 percent.
In this regard, the changing Jewish opinion is in line with historic patterns of attitudes toward immigration. Namely, depressed economies are often accompanied by anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation. But Jews would do well to draw a lesson from our own history and resist the temptation to scapegoat and demonize those whose crimes consist mainly of crossing political boundaries in search of better lives. Immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were viewed not only as “hereditary defectives,” they were considered dirty, depraved, disease-ridden, crime-prone, a burden on society and incapable of assimilation.

A solid majority of Americans have been against more immigration for over 120 years but who cares about them right?

The 19th Century critiques of immigrants were pretty accurate and along with this accurate criticism and proper application of stigma, many immigrants to America learned to behave in accord with American norms.

Ron Guhname writes: WASPs rule! I wrote in a recent post that I was getting the sense that Americans with Protestant European backgrounds were the best behaved. So I decided to sum all my prior post numbers that dealt with ethnicity and moral behavior to assess this idea systematically. I followed the simple strategy of assigning a rank for each behavior for each of the 8 ethnic groups with sufficiently large sample sizes. Jews were often ignored in previous posts since one must turn to the religion rather than the ethnicity variable to get estimates, but I wanted to include them, so I calculated numbers and then ranks for them.

I included all variables that I have posted on–here’s a list of them: okay to cheat on taxes; drinks too much; ethnocentric; dirty house; frequents prostitutes; promiscuous men over 30; feel that infidelity is not wrong; gay; lesbian; husbands and wives who cheat; fathers divorcing mom; women arrested; and promiscuity for men and women and under. I realized that I had not posted on drug abuse so I added that to the rest. I ranked group so high numbers indicate more bad behavior, then I simply summed the 16 rankings for each ethnic group. Here are the totals:

Bad Behavior Index

Blacks 106
Mexicans 85
American Indians 85
Italians 70
Irish 67
Jews 64
Germans 56
English/Welsh 47

My hunch was correct. This pattern coincides with that feeling that goes way back among nativists that the moral quality of the country was slipping with the mass immigration from Catholic, southern and eastern European countries, and more recently in concern over immigration from Mexico.

Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz writes:

We must remember as a nation the timeless rabbinic teaching, “Do not judge your fellow until you stand in his place” (Pirke Avot 2:4). We must not attack undocumented workers with the harmful, hateful rhetoric that many use today as they are stuck in a very challenging predicament that few can related to. The rabbis even promoted immigration: “He who has not made good in one place and fails to move and try his luck in some other place has only himself to complain about” (Bava Metzia 75b). One cannot remain stuck in an underprivileged region if it is a clear dead end for oneself and one’s family. In the Torah, there is a positive commandment to love the foreigner in our midst (Deuteronomy 10:18), and a negative commandment against oppressing or perverting justice for them in any way (Exodus 22:20, Deuteronomy 24:17). The rabbis elaborated on this prohibition: “You shall not wrong or oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not wrong with words, and you shall not oppress financially” (Mekhilta d’Rabbi Yishmael Mishpatim). We not only owe them basic human rights; we also have specific religious obligations to go above and beyond to protect them from harm. We should be grateful that America is a desired home for those fleeing dire straits and be proud of what we have to offer.
Significant numbers of Jews immigrated (and continue to immigrate) to the United States without documentation. We also needed a safe refuge like many others fleeing poverty and persecution today. Our responsibility to the vulnerable immigrant (and heroic journeyer) requires that we honor the image of G-d in all people. Perhaps Emmanuel Levinas, the French Talmudist and Jewish philosopher, said it best: “The respect for the stranger and the sanctification of the name of the Eternal are strangely equivalent” (Nine Talmudic Readings: “Toward the Other,” p. 27).
Now is the time to hear the eternal calls of our religious traditions and of human conscience to ensure the dignity of all humans by providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. We are long overdue but sure to prevail, since our commitment is steadfast and justice is on our side.

What kind of person introduces himself as “Rabbi Dr”?

Strangely, the rabbi does not advocate that Israel commit suicide by allowing in millions of alien immigrants.

Rabbis Abraham Cooper and Yitzhok Adlerstein write for The Jerusalem Post: “There is no wiggle-room concerning the consequences of a one-state solution. Combined with a right of return for millions of Palestinians living for decades in Muslim countries, Jews would quickly become a minority in their own land. The lone Jewish state would cease to exist, its inhabitants left as secure as the Yazidis or Christians in Iraq.”

It’s a shame that these Orthodox rabbis don’t similarly support America’s core white population from demographic overturn. I guess nationalism and borders are only for Jews.

The documentary Hollywoodism concludes with a rant by Douglas Rushkoff, author of Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism: “The thing that makes Judaism dangerous to everybody, to every race, to every nation, to every idea, is that we smash things that aren’t true. We don’t believe in the boundaries of nation states, we don’t believe in these ideas of individual gods that protect individual people, these are all artificial constructions and Judaism really teaches us how to see that. In a sense, our detractors have us right in that we are a corrosive force, we’re breaking down the false gods of all nations and all people because they’re not real and that’s very upsetting to people.”