ParaPundit has another post up addressing Muslim immigration into the West. Randall states:
The more Muslims that come to Australia (or any other Western nation) the more there will be to complain and lobby for allowing more to come and to allow more radical ones to come. Until Islam grows up and goes thru something equivalent to the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment why should Western nations put themselves in the position of having to deal with this?
I haven’t stated a pro or con opinion on this topic because I am not totally sure how I will articulate agreements or disagreements with Randall’s position, and many of my concerns are procedural rather than practical, but I think this idea needs to be aired openly, because I believe many Americans, and to a greater extent Europeans, speak of it privately quite frequently. You see this sort of sentiment, expressed in far less measured and reasoned language on message boards, and I believe this sort of thing happens when the punditocracy consciously avoids discussing certain topics, leaving the inarticulate but unvoiced to speak up.
That being said, I know that the first reaction that occurs to many people is that it is fundamentally “unfair” to judge an individual based on group attributes (foreign citizenship). Certainly I have argued against the government making these sort of decisions in the case of citizens [1]. But I do know of a situation where we routinely judge people by their citizenship when they come to this country-asylum & refugee seekers. Back in the 1980s a graduate student that my father knew from Ethiopia got a greencard because his nation was judged to be a tryanny (it was under a Marxist dictator). The individual in question was intelligent and not in fear for his life, but he was from a country where there is a presumption of persecution. In a similar manner, Cubans, or during the Cold War, Soviet Jews, receive considerations that other groups of immigrants do not. What Randall is suggesting is basically the reverse-the presumption that someone should be kept out instead of let in, which means that some individuals will be unfairly targeted, just as many individuals did and do take advantage of the accident of tyranny in the old country to make a case for staying in the United States outside the purview of the law’s intent.
[1] This does not mean that as a legal point it is unfair treatment, non-citizens are routinely treated somewhat differently, I know as I was a green card holder for many years before naturalization.
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