Rumsfeld thinks people in other countries like the U.S. Think again.

[Cocoa]

Yglesisas nicely tears this immigration cliche to pieces, though I disagree with the part about Rumsfeld believing this nonsense. He knows it's B.S., he's just trying to score points with the morons.


http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=7693

Presumably exhausted after hours of earlier testimony before both the Senate and the House, Don Rumsfeld strayed a bit off-topic late Friday afternoon in response to a question from Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.). Langevin wanted to know, sensibly, "how do we restore our credibility on human rights," in the wake of revelations of torture and abuse at U.S.-run detention facilities. Rumsfeld's answer:

America is not what's wrong with the world. And the overwhelming majority of the people in the world know that. I mean, why do people line up to get into this country, year after year? I read all this stuff -- "people hate us, people don't like us" -- the fact of the matter is, people line up to come into this country every year.

It doesn't come through on the transcript, but it was clear from Rumsfeld's tone, his body language, the expression on his face, and the look in his eye that this was one of those disturbing moments when you realize that this administration's real problem isn't that they lie too much. The problem is that they actually believe what they're saying.

The immigration point is transparently wrong. True, a significant number of people come to this country each year, some legally, some illegally. Still, the total numbers involved -- about 1.3 million per year according to anti-immigration groups that tend to inflate the numbers -- are not very large in the greater scheme of things. Total world population is nearly 6.4 billion, making an "overwhelming majority" somewhere on the order of four or five billion. In other words, about 0.02 percent of the world immigrated to the United States last year. To put that in perspective, 2.8 million people voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, without constituting an overwhelming majority of anything.

The notion that immigrants come to America out of love for our political system, meanwhile, though a comforting piece of civic mythology, fits a bit awkwardly with the facts. People move to the United States not, as Rumsfeld said, "because they respect the fact that we respect human beings," but because we are rich, and the countries they come from are poor. They come here for the same reason that Rumsfeld and I (and the president, for that matter) came to Washington, D.C. -- to get jobs. Lastly, any effort to spin immigration as an endorsement of current U.S. foreign policy must cope with the fact that immigrants and their descendents vote fairly overwhelmingly for the party that's out of power.

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