Outside the Beltway

Immigration: The Final Solution

James Joyner · Tuesday, May 16, 2006 · 2 comments

Novelist, Christian libertarian, and Mensa member Vox Day has a rather bizarre piece for WorldNetDaily on solving the immigration problem. Responding to President Bush (aka “Dear Jorge”)’s statement that, “Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic — it’s just not going to work,” Day responds:

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.

Well, there you go. Also, putting up a wall, the favored tool of most of the “secure borders” crowd, is unnecessary.

Instant deportation policies, employer fines and bounty programs combined with the denial of all social services to non-citizens would suffice to settle the matter without the need to imprison the American citizenry. As the Minutemen have proven, again, unleashing the power of motivated private citizens is far more efficient than relying on government bureaucrats.

So, we’ll just turn the vigilantes loose?

That this idea is disgusting unites all sides of this debate.

Steven Taylor, who tipped me to the piece, observes that,

One doesn’t have to be a member of Mensa . . . to know that such a statement is explosive and evokes not only racial politics of the worst kind but also the need for a massive deployment of state power to extract the people in question. I am not suggesting that Day is recommending genocide for illegal immigrants, but certainly he is pointing to a police state as some sort of model for application in America’s immigration situation. An odd prescription for someone who claims to be libertarian.

Quite so.

Ed Morrissey, who says he is normally a fan of Day’s writing, thinks he has “lost all sense of perspective” and points out the obvious:

The Germans “rid” themselves of six million Jews by annihilating them through industrialized mass murder. In fact, a great many of them weren’t German at all and never spoke German or were assimilated into German society. A great deal of them were Poles, Russians, French, and so on, an inconvenient fact that renders his point moot. And how exactly did the Germans accomplish this feat that Vox finds so exemplary? They transformed Europe into a racist police state from the Pyrenees to the Caucasus.

A small quibble, to be sure.

Digby is “not surprised at this,” seeing it as the natural extension of conservative politics and their propensity to “exploit racial fears.” While I obviously disagree, the imprimatur of WorldNetDaily, a hard right but relatively mainstream site, helps give that impression.

Day, responding to his critics at his blog, rather misses the point: “So, there are no lessons to be learned from the National Socialists? Better disown our nuclear weapons program and NASA!” He then explains that many of the Jews were rounded up by willing citizens, disproving the idea that a police state is necessary for mass murder–let alone rounding up illegal aliens.

Can one learn positive lessons from the Nazis? Sure. The Interstate Highway System, for example, is a great thing. Cheap economy cars for the working classes? Brilliant! Ways to round up millions of undesirables? Not so much.