Leftists will often argue that America didn’t always have immigration laws and quotas. Conservatives sometimes respond with a meme showing Native Americans saying that they’re what happens when a nation doesn’t have immigration laws. That’s true, but there are a few more nuances, which I realized listening to a 124-year-old song by Nora Bayes, who was one of the most popular performers in America back then. Add in the problems of a Supreme Court ruling on the 14th Amendment and a recent video from Mali, and you can see why unlimited immigration is impossible.

Here’s an example of one of these memes showing a Native American realizing too late that incoming cultures can swamp and destroy your own:

(Creator unknown.)

Then there’s the song, “Young America,” written by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth and sung by Nora Bayes in 1910. Bayes was born in 1880 as Rachel Eleonora Goldberg, the daughter of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland. She was gifted at singing in dialect, and this song, which saw her using Irish, Yiddish, and German accents, highlighted that skill, making the song incredibly dated. But what’s most notable about the song is the belief that patriotism was the highest goal and duty of public schools and immigrants:

I dropped into an East Side school when school had just begun.

The scholars represented every nation ’neath the sun.

But what surprised me most was that it did not take them long

To try to learn or try to sing a patriotic song.

[snip]

Their daddies may be English, Irish, German, French, or Dutch,

But if the kids are born in Yankee-land the rest don’t count for much.

We’ll put them in our melting pot.

Teach them the golden rule.

Then we’ll hatch our future president in any public school.

Today, our public-school children (along with most private school children, given that the teachers all come from the same colleges) are taught that America is a foul, misbegotten country and that the nations that their parents abandoned are better in every way. That’s one reason we can’t have unlimited immigration: Our education system, rather than teaching patriotism and assimilation, is teaching cultural hatred.

Another reason we cannot have unlimited immigration is that the Supreme Court has held that the 14th Amendment—which was clearly intended to apply to people with deep roots in America whose ancestors had been brought here against their will—actually applies to all illegal aliens. The toxic case is 1982’s Plyler v. Doe, another instance in which the Court stretched the Constitution to the breaking point.

Texas had argued that it had no obligation to place illegal aliens in public schools. The Court’s leftist majority, however, held that the 14th Amendment does not distinguish between legal immigrants and illegal aliens (“any person within its jurisdiction”). The justices, however, cheated to reach that conclusion.

The rule of statutory interpretation called “ejusdem generis” (“of the same kind”) means that, if there is a list in a statute, everything must be interpreted to comport with that list. In this case, the 14th Amendment is clearly talking about persons “born or naturalized in the United States.” Applying ejusdem generis means the phrase “any person within its jurisdiction” must refer to the larger group of persons who are born or naturalized. The justices knew this, of course. They just wanted free education for illegal aliens.

In effect, they did what Justice Gorsuch did in Bostock v. Clayton County, when he held that the word “sex” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covers “gender identity.” In both cases, justices focused on a single word so obsessively that they overturned the intent behind the amendment or statute.

With the Plyler ruling, the Court opened the door for the government to hand over America’s riches to all who came to America. America became a worldwide welfare state and, as we’ve seen, open borders are turning it into the world’s largest refugee camp. Milton Friedman saw what was happening: “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”

And then there’s the problem of the people now being welcomed into America. As Bayes’ song said, the former generations came from Europe, which had a shared Western, Judeo-Christian heritage with America. These people might have different languages and traditions, but their core values revolved around the Bible.

The current crop of immigrants come from cultures that are fundamentally communist/socialist, Muslim, or just completely broken:

This is what Mali, Africa looks like today.

This is what the future of Western countries looks like when you keep importing the third world. You become the third world. pic.twitter.com/C7b5TmMhK3

— iamyesyouareno (@iamyesyouareno) March 3, 2024

If we still had a patriotic, assimilationist education system grounded in Judeo-Christian values, these illegal aliens’ children might still be turned into high-functioning American citizens. But again, we don’t.

When they go to school, despite the hellholes they left behind, our teachers ensure that these children do not know about or understand America’s culture, that they view America’s whites (who are still the country’s largest ethnic bloc) as evil, and that they literally hate America for its (“checks list”) homophobia, xenophobia, immigrant-ophobia, racism, anti-scientism, and overall evil colonialism.

America no longer needs millions of immigrants to feed its industrial growth, it lacks the will to protect itself against diseased, dangerous freeloaders, it’s a welfare state, and its education system runs on anti-American hatred. The era of free immigration into this country is over.

Image: Legal immigrants awaiting examination at Ellis Island (early 20th century). Library of Congress.