THE FEDERALIST/ Lew Jan Olowski-
To profane a holy day, politicize it. Politicians’ profanity du jour is to exploit Christmas by making false arguments about immigration policy. Yet their rhetoric unintentionally supports the opposite points from what these politicians intend.
Consider Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. On Christmas day, he said, “[D]ivinity on earth … came into this world not in riches but in poverty, not as a citizen but as a refugee.”
Buttigieg is wrong. Members of the holy family were not noncitizen refugees. Rather, they traveled to their home town of Bethlehem to register for a tax, or census. Their story relates to the $150 billion in cross-border remittances the United States loses each year when foreign residents send money abroad, and to the importance of counting citizens in the U.S. census — but it has nothing to do with refugee policy. Continue reading…
