The important thing to remember about WorldNetDaily columnist Ilana Mercer is that she laments the end of apartheid in her native South Africa. That puts her July 5 WND column in context — not a good one, mind you, but as an indication of where her sense of racial entitlement is coming from.
She starts things off with a fit of immigrant bashing: “America’s immigration policy – driven as it is by policy makers and enforcers – exalts and privileges those of low moral character. It rewards law-breakers, giving them the courtesy and consideration not given to high-value, legal immigrants.” The bulk of it, though, of it is complaining that her daughter, who she says was studying in Canada and was “bamboozled at the border-crossing in Blaine, Washington” and “gave the wrong answer to her petty American inquisitor,” allegedly causing her green card to be taken away.
Then commenced a rant about how people like her and her daughter deserve to be immigrants while those other, swarthy-looking people “have nothing to offer the commonwealth”:
More fundamentally, hers was not an ill-gotten green card.
The principal sponsor, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, had entered the U.S. on an O-1 visa. Unlike the H-1B visa, the O-1 visa doesn’t replace Americans; it adds to them. For it is granted to those with “extraordinary ability in the fields of science, education, business or athletics.” The O-1 necessitates “a level of expertise indicating that the person is one of the small percentage who has risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.”
Not by deceit did my child gain her green card. But by deceit is how the swarms on the border will get theirs. The squeaky wheels squatting on the southern border, funneled daily into the interior to create facts on the ground, are not refugees or legitimate asylum seekers. Rather, they are merely from what President Trump has termed “s–thhole countries.” By that criteria, Americans could be forced to welcome the world.
A refugee, conversely, is an individual who is persecuted on the basis “of race, religion, nationality, and/or membership in a particular social group or political opinion” – like my South-African compatriots, who, every day, are culled like springbok in a hunting safari. But for South Africans, U.S. refugee and immigration authorities reserve their unalloyed prejudice.
Let’s be realistic. Aside from their demands, the hordes on the southern border have nothing to offer the commonwealth.
Back to la bandida. Was my daughter allowed a phone call to her parents? No! What about access to an immigration attorney? No!
A well-behaved, legal resident, who did not enter the United States to cause trouble, this young lady obeyed the laws of the country. She did not defy its enforcers. Timidly, she accepted her lot.
Our daughter had her hard-won green card stripped by state bullies because she gave the wrong answer to a trick bureaucratic question.
Her case, no doubt, was further hindered by the fact that she simply was not a sympathetic “type.” After all, she speaks good English, was attached to productive people, residing lawfully in their own home in the U.S., mere hours away. And she is not of a more exotic persuasion. At least not visibly so.
No, not simpatico at all
So, she was tossed out of the United States of America like so much … white trash.
I hazard that had my daughter spoken in tongues or rendered a “good” Pidgin English; had she cried, created a scene; called for the presstitutes and the immigration advocates – she’d have “passed” with flying colors and would have been sent on her merry way.
It’s as though people of early American probity, to paraphrase writer Mary McGrory, are carefully and purposefully weeded out by contemporary America’s immigration policies and policy makers. (Until Trump.)
Indeed, we South Africans are just not part of the “multicultural noise machine,” now sitting on the southern border seething with rage, poised to make common purpose with America’s professional merchants of racial hatred.
We are not pushy. We do things the right way. And we swallow the pain and indignity.
One would think that being treated like ICE treats everyone else would have aroused in Mercer some sort of sympathy for others. Instead, it seems to have aroused a lingering sense of racial entitlement.