by Ned Ryun
At what point do the American people wake up and realize that many of their elected officials, both Democratic and Republican, aren’t actually serving their interests? It’s staggering to watch the debate over our immigration system and the building of a southern U.S. border wall play out. But it also highlights how deeply immoral many of our leaders are and the alternate reality of Washington, D.C.
In the real world of common sense, any sovereign nation would, and should, assert its right to secure its borders. It would assert that it had the right to understand who wants into the country and to ask why those people are coming. It would then make a judgment as to whether it was in the nation’s best interests, economically or otherwise, to accept any of those seeking entrance, or whether it was, in fact, detrimental. Would the new immigrants make the country better? Would they strengthen the social fabric of the country or help to tear it apart?
Ultimately, every decision regarding immigration would be made to further the interests of the actual and current citizens of that nation—the ones who fund every last penny of the government and its elected officials. This is because the priority of every nation and its leaders should be to promote and protect the interests of its people, whether in trade or immigration or national security.
That is nationalism. And nationalism is the epitome of morality for any national leader, or leaders. Nationalism is about promoting the national interests of the people who comprise that nation. To prioritize the interests of his or her people isn’t racist, isn’t xenophobic, isn’t anything except the morally right thing to do. To do otherwise is, of course, deeply immoral.
But this is what we have in Washington, D.C. among our ruling class: deeply immoral behavior that has existed for decades in which the government of the people, by the people, but most importantly, for the people has in fact become a government of the ruling class, by the ruling class, and protecting its interests.
Our ruling class has decided that the current immigration system, the one that almost doesn’t even qualify as one since it’s so broken, is in their best interests.
Democrats want to maintain the status quo because of political power, and Republicans, kowtowing to their corporate donors who want cheap labor, don’t want to endanger their reelection donations. The result of all of this is the quiet, but unmistakable, middle finger to the American taxpayer, the arrogance of a detached elite and their sycophants who think they know better than the people they supposedly serve.
The American taxpayer funds the government, the elected officials, funds foreign aid, and then, insult to injury, funds the consequences of our broken immigration system to the tune of tens of billions every year. But God forbid any of those facts should be taken in to consideration by our elected officials.
The election of Donald Trump was in many ways a reaction to this ruling class. Finally the American people might have a champion for their interests, a person who would actually stand up for them and say “enough!” to the status quo and “enough!” of abusing the American taxpayer and not prioritizing their interests.
Trump’s approach in all things isn’t in keeping with the traditional Republican way of handling issues, and that in many ways is the beauty of it—it’s not a rigid party-for-party’s-sake approach, but an appeal to common sense and the questioning of everything.
And we should be questioning everything.
As a country we have been living in defiance of common sense with respect to our trade deals, our immigration policy, our national security, and our out of control spending. There is a freight train named “Reality” barreling down the tracks headed straight for us. We can either choose to accept and acknowledge that, changing our behavior accordingly, or we can continue on our merry way until we get plowed over. The choice in a democratic republic is in many ways up to us. The question still remains as to whether we’re actually going to do anything about it.
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Ned Ryun is a former presidential writer for George W. Bush and the founder and CEO of American Majority. You can find him on Twitter @nedryun.
