Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin

Peggy Noonan is on form with today's column. She correctly focuses on American's inherent love for immigrants and concurrent deep distaste for illegal immigration. One of her key points is to focus on the need to assimilate immigrants.

Thomas Sowell has an interesting column dealing with one of the key components of the proposed major immigration legislation- a guest worker program. He looks at how similar programs have functioned in Europe, especially their failure to assimilate:

Another classic book — Our Culture: What’s Left of It by Theodore Dalrymple — found a similar pattern in France.
Long before the Muslim riots in Paris which shocked France and the world, Dalrymple pointed out how immigrants in France had become a major source of crime and violence, not only in Paris but in other parts of the country.
The housing projects immediately surrounding Paris have become concentrations of “several million” third-world immigrants — a population filled with “the hatred it bears for the other, ‘official’ society of France.”
They are not appeased by “the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity.” What they want is what most people want — respect — and this cannot be given to them, least of all by the French welfare state.In order to feel self-respect, the young especially “needed to see themselves as warriors in a civil war, not mere ne’er-do-wells and criminals.” This anti-social vision has been supported and even celebrated by many intellectuals, much as both black and white intellectuals have celebrated the senseless brutality and cheap vulgarity of rap music in America.
What may be especially relevant to the situation in the United States is that the immigrant parents and grandparents of the violent youths came to France with a very different view.
They were glad to be in France, which for most was a big improvement over where they came from. “They were better Frenchmen than either their children or grandchildren,” Dalrymple noted.They would never have booed the French national anthem at a public event, as the later generations did — and as the American national anthem has been booed in Los Angeles.

We need people who believe that this is the best nation on the face of the Earth. More on this to come.