Bill O’Reilly had a pretty interesting exchange with Brit Hume on Fox News last week which I happened to catch.
Brit Hume is a senior analyst at Fox with whom I'm quite familiar. In fact, he particularly caught my attention in recent weeks when he suggested that Republicans having their name associated with immigration reform is some kind of moral imperative which will secure Republicans' future viability in elections. I discuss the folly in that assertion here, published at American Thinker.
But he said one particular thing in this one particular exchange that I found absolutely infuriating, well beyond simple naivete. It was outright insulting, and it's crazy to me that this interview has gone relatively unnoticed.
Referring to the mass influx of immigrant children
from Central America, Bill O’Reilly suggested, at odds with the doctrine of “political
correctness” but nevertheless in touch with reality on this issue,
that “the kids are the victims. As I said, you’re creating an underclass. Yeah,
some of them will break out, but most of them won’t…”
“This is a cruel way to look at it, Bill,” Brit Hume
responds, “but I would seriously doubt that with these particular kids, coming
as far as they have, and facing the difficulties that they have, that they’re
going to end up being the underclass.
These are probably the most able kids that are reaching our borders.”
I fully understand what he's getting at. It's a "cruel way to look at it" because, in a Darwinist, "survival of the fittest" sort of way, only the best are making it to our borders. But in another way, he is suggesting that those who get here will socially and economically
advance to surpass American children which, he obviously believes, are inferior. Is that the purpose of immigration reform -- which is, ipso facto, amnesty? To drive American children out of the marketplace?
And even if it is, and I'm being asked to potentially vote my child out of a potential job or a seat in a university in the future, upon what does Mr. Hume base his silly assumptions about these children's prospective ability? The fact that they have survived a northward
trek, chaperoned by coyotes who’ve likely been paid by their parents
for the service of dropping them at America’s doorstep for handouts provided by
taxpayers, believing that they’ll get free food, shelter, healthcare, education, and that they'll be an
anchor point for the parents’ future illegal immigration?
I know that some of these children have died in their journey. That is an awful reality. But the culpability for that does not lie upon me, or any American, but upon their parents which blindly sent them away!
Furthermore, what makes Mr. Hume think that those children will be more perseverant or useful than mine over the coming decades? I have and will dedicate my entire existence to ensuring that my children understand the necessity of education, a solid work ethic, an
adherence to law, and the duty to protect our civil constructs which have given
us our lifestyles and have heretofore preserved our freedoms. Are the parents who've handed their children to the nameless coyote going to do the same for theirs?
And this leads me to what Mr. Hume certainly did not consider in his simplistic and stupid formulation of his argument. (Watch the video linked below, he seems flummoxed when challenged.) It was for that civil construct, the preservation of freedom, and the very idea of America that my grandfather, William J. Sullivan I, served as a tanker
in World War II in the European front.
It was on that very basis that my father David W. Sullivan served in Southeast Asia, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross in defense of
his country. Both of my brothers, Gordon
and David, served in Iraq, as an airborne-infantry soldier and as an Apache pilot
respectively, each with two tours in the campaign.
My siblings and I are each the grandchildren of immigrants
from two different nations, one of which is Mexico, and we were raised with not only an appreciation of our ancestors' culture, but a profound
belief in what America represents, what that means to the world, and fully aware of the anomaly that we are in global context. And we are each willing to fight to protect all of that.
Will those children which Brit Hume stakes his
reputation upon do the same for this country? Will they have the same sense of duty and adherence to a nation of laws when their very existence within that nation has resulted from breaking those laws? And if laws do not exist or are no longer relevant, do we not cease being the nation my family has fought to protect?
Watch the interview below.
William Sullivan
