We all know John McCain is terrible on immigration. For years he held America’s sovereignty and security hostage to amnesty and increased immigration, and his newfound support for “enforcement first” is so insubstantial and transparently insincere that it insults our intelligence. He’s so bad that Americans for Better Immigration ranks his performance in office as the worst of all the presidential candidates — including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. (See the GOP grid
here and the Democratic one
here.) And as Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has
pointed out, passage of McCain’s bill “would represent the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years.”
But his support for de facto open borders is merely one manifestation of a larger problem — John McCain is a multiculturalist.
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I don’t mean he eats tacos at the Cinco de Mayo parade (nothing wrong with that!) — I mean he’s an ideological multiculturalist. Francis Fukuyama has
described (PDF) the ideology of multiculturalism this way: “not just as tolerance of cultural diversity in de facto multicultural societies but as the demand for legal recognition of the rights of ethnic, racial, religious, or cultural groups.” At almost every turn over his entire public career, John McCain has supported the
pluribus over the
unum.
Take bilingual education. McCain has been an enthusiastic proponent of this divisive and discredited program for years. He was
honorary co-host of the 1995 convention of the National Association for Bilingual Education; The New Republic reported that he wrote to convention participants that “[t]o reject a native language as a tool for teaching as well as enriching our national heritage makes learning all the more difficult and makes us a poorer nation.”
In 1998 he said, “I have always supported bilingual education programs to help students learn English. Proposals to restrict the use of languages other than English are always divisive.” That was the year that California voters approved Proposition 227, “English for the Children,” which (sort of) abolished bilingual education there.
In 1999 McCain was given the “Legislative Friendship Award” from LULAC, the League of Latin American Citizens, at which point, in the words of the
Human Events report, he “hailed the bilingual education that Californians banned with the successful ‘English for the Children’ initiative last year. Insulting the motives of California voters, McCain told the LULAC banquet, ‘We don’t need laws that cause any American to believe we scorn their contributions to our culture.’” (The
Los Angeles Times report noted wryly that “McCain’s remarks were all but indistinguishable from those of the vice president
.”) Despite the fact that he mentions the long-discredited “transition” rationale for bilingual education, McCain has embraced foreign-language maintenance as the real goal, buying into the “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” justification for Hispanic group rights. This is what he means with his frequent references to the historical primacy of Spanish in Arizona.
McCain’s ideological multiculturalism is also apparent from his longstanding opposition to official status for the English language; as he boasted on
Hardball in 2000, “
I have fought against English-only ballot initiatives.” He started at least as far back as 1988, when he opposed Article 28, an official-English initiative approved by Arizona voters but thrown out by the courts.
More recently, he voted for the Salazar amendment to his 2006 amnesty bill, which would have codified Clinton’s Executive Order 13166. That order enshrines official, legally mandated multilingualism, requiring all government agencies and all recipients of federal funds to provide any services in any foreign language requested. (See the text here and more details here and here.) With his eye no doubt on the coming presidential race, he flip-flopped and voted against the very same amendment this past summer during the debate over his most recent amnesty bill.
