Graham, Conley, & the Xenophobe Label

Brad Warthen of the aptly titled newspaper, The State, has begun an attack on conservative Democratic US Senate candidate Bob Conley. On his DHEC (Department of Health and Environmental Control) funded blog, he accuses Conley and his supporters of being ‘nativists’ a term begun by McCain to replace the oftentimes used term ‘xenophobe’. I left this response:

The xenophobia label is an inadequate description and doesn’t address the truth of the matter. How about liberty? Liberty is deeply rooted in private property and non-aggression by the state. The intentional mass immigration is another aggressive big governement program. Driving down wages and living standards is the opposite of promoting prosperity and the general welfare.
The liberal policies that Graham and his ilk promote serve only to promote the prosperity of them and their corporate allies at the neglect of their constituents: the American worker and entrepreneur.
While Conley’s propositions aren’t perfect, they are certainly better than Graham’s pathetic ‘moderation’ (code word for leftist).

Conley’s website says this about jobs and immigration:

Corporate greed is robbing us of our jobs and driving our down our wages. Bob Conley supports secure borders. Corporations that fuel the immigration fire must pay the price. Greedy corporations and unscrupulous businessmen profit, while our working families and taxpayers foot the bill for services for illegals. This is corporate welfare, and it must end.

The legal importation of foreign workers is also driving down wages, and placing Americans in unemployment lines. This is wrong, and must end. Policy needs to change and should be based on what is good for our workers, our families, and our communities – not the bottom lines of corporations and their lobbyists’ demands!

The term ‘corporate greed’ seems typical of Democratic vocabulary, but I would probably extend that to the uniting of corporations and the government bureaucracy in unholy matrimony. As a former Republican who boasts that he voted for Ron Paul in the primary, when he says, ‘our workers, our families, and our communities,’ I take that to be literal and not (as is the case with most mainstream Democrats) to be another code word for the state’s dominion over those things.

The labels of ‘nationalism’, ‘nativism’, and ‘xenophobia’ are merely intended to conjure up images of National Socialism. The current popular opinion regarding immigration issues has very little to do with aggressive statism, but is, in fact, opposition to it. If we addressed this issue in terms of personal liberty and property rights instead of the usual tit-for-tat name game, real solutions may surface.