Foreigners don’t have any inalienable constitutional right to immigrate here

By Hunter Wallace

Am I the only one who doesn’t get the point that Khizr Khan was making about the Constitution at the Democratic National Convention last night in Philadelphia?

“If you are a Republican, you should watch this video clip and be ashamed. That mother and father lost their son. He died on the battlefield while serving the United States against our enemies in the Middle East. This is a muslim family. They immigrated from the United Arab Emirates, where I grew up.

They are proud American patriots. If Donald Trump had his way, they’d have never been allowed into the United States.

“You sacrificed nothing and no one,” is a line that is going to echo through Campaign 2016. It was the most powerful moment of the past two weeks and the most powerful words spoken in either Cleveland or Philadelphia.

Shame, Republicans. Shame on you.

The cucks haven’t stopped crying about poor Khizr Khan … I mean that literally:

“If you haven’t yet seen it, you really need to watch Thursday night’s Democratic convention speech by Khizr Khan, the father of Army Cpt. Humayun Khan, a Muslim immigrant who was killed in action in Iraq in 2004 while protecting his unit from a car bomb.

Khan demanded to know whether Donald Trump had even read the Constitution, pulled out his pocket copy, and offered to lend it to Trump.

I watched this moment live and was awed by it. I watched it again Friday morning, and I cried. …

If you are a white model from Europe, like Antonio Sabato Jr. or Melania Knauss, you are welcome in Trump’s America. If you are a brown or black person, you are suspect, even if you are a citizen, and even if you were born in Indiana or Hawaii (as in the cases of Curiel and Obama).

This is the philosophy of a major-party candidate for president, who has most of his own political party lined up behind him. It is enraging, it is scary, and it is sad. And I cried Friday morning because it was even necessary for someone to stand up at a party convention and explain why that candidate is wrong.”

I’m not “ashamed” at all. This “philosophy” also used to be reflected in the immigration laws of the United States. Muslim immigrants don’t have any inalienable constitutional right to come to the United States. In fact, we have discouraged them from coming here throughout the vast majority of our history, and for a time they were actually banned and prevented from becoming naturalized American citizens.

1.) First, the Immigration Act of 1790 and subsequent naturalization laws in the 19th and early 20th centuries restricted American citizenship to “free white persons.” American citizenship didn’t cease to be grounded in whiteness (with the exception of American born blacks, who after Reconstruction were covered by the 14th Amendment) until the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952.

2.) Second, the Immigration Act of 1870 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 established federal control over immigration and explicitly banned the Chinese from coming here. Later, the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907 informally restricted Japanese immigration to the United States.

3.) Third, the Immigration Act of 1917 established the “Asiatic Barred Zone” which explicitly prohibited immigration to the United States from most of Asia:

4.) Fourth, the US Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923 that South Asians were unable to become naturalized American citizens because, racially speaking, they were not “free white persons” because the Aryans of India had mixed with Dravidian races in the Indian subcontinent:

“The eligibility of this applicant for citizenship is based on the sole fact that he is of high caste Hindu stock, born in village Taragarh Talawa, Amritsar district, Punjab , one of the extreme north western districts of India, and classified by certain scientific authorities as of the Caucasian or Aryan race…In the Punjab and Rajputana, while the invaders seem to have met with more success in the effort to preserve their racial purity, intermarriages did occur producing an intermingling of the two and destroying to a greater or less degree the purity of the “Aryan” blood. The rules of caste, while calculated to prevent this intermixture, seem not to have been entirely successful… the given group cannot be properly assigned to any of the enumerated grand racial divisions. The type may have been so changed by intermixture of blood as to justify an intermediate classification. Something very like this has actually taken place in India. Thus, in Hindustan and Berar there was such an intermixture of the “Aryan” invader with the dark-skinned Dravidian.”

5.) Fifth, the Immigration Act of 1924 affirmed that Asians were banned from immigrating to the United States, and expanded the ban to include the Japanese.

6.) Sixth, it wasn’t until the Luce-Celler Act of 1946 that South Asians were allowed to immigrate to the United States and become naturalized American citizens. Even then, a hard quota of 100 immigrants a year was placed on Indian immigration, which at that time included India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It was little more than a token gesture.

It took the Immigration Act of 1965 to open the United States to mass immigration from Third World countries like Pakistan where Khizr Khan came from in 1980. That’s also just a federal statute. It did not establish any inalienable constitutional right for foreigners from any country to immigrate here. There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents Congress from banning Muslims or anarchists or the Chinese or epileptics or any number of undesirables who have been previously banned under our immigration laws.

Note: BTW, Obama shut down immigration from Iraq in 2011 on his own authority. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all used their executive authority to restrict immigration.