National Review Online
Friday, August 11, 2023
On The Editors podcast on Friday, NR senior editor Charles C. W.
Cooke blasted Democratic New York City mayor Eric Adams who suddenly sounds
like the immigration hawks now that illegal immigrants are burdening his city.
“This is a side of progressivism that I loathe,” he said.
“It is hypocritical, and it illustrates the capacity of the professional
progressive mind to move between diametrically opposed hyperboles without any
loss of enthusiasm.”
“These people,” he continued, “go from, ‘Have you seen
the Statue of Liberty? Have you read the poem on it?’ They go from crying at
the border. They go from spreading lies about border agents. They go from
lionizing Ellis Island to proposing that the influx of a few thousand of the
people that, until yesterday, they were suggesting could fit quite happily into
tiny border towns in Texas, is going to strain the social fabric to such an
extent that it represents a crisis. And there’s nothing in the middle. There’s
no acknowledgement that they’ve changed their mind. There’s no slow transition from
one to the other. They just turn on a dime, as if overnight they had downloaded
the latest patch to their software.”
Cooke observed immigration policy comes down to how many
immigrants with what characteristics come to the country, and then what happens
when they do. Noting that he was in favor of legal migration, he proposed that
the system is “broken”; that, at some point, there will need to be bipartisan
reform; and that Republicans can also be counter-productive on this issue.
“But from what I can see,” he said, “progressives in this
country have nothing to add to that discussion. We’ve got no change in the
national discourse. We’ve got no change in national policy. What we have done
by bussing immigrants north, which I think is salutary, is demonstrate some
hypocrisy and perhaps add to, as progressives might say, the ‘lived
experiences’ of people in big cities in the Northeast when it comes to illegal
immigration. But these people are useless, I’m afraid.”
“They are useless.”
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