VDH: "The elite charm of comprehensive immigration reform"

Here's a good essay from Victor Davis Hanson in National Review:

Illegal Immigration: Elite Illiberality 

The elite charm of comprehensive immigration reform 

By  Victor Davis Hanson 

The divide over immigration reform is not primarily a Left/Right or Democratic/Republican divide; instead, it cuts, and sharply so, across class lines. 

Elites blur the distinction between legal and illegal immigration to ensure that the opponents of the latter appear to be against the former. They talk grandly of making legal immigration meritocratic, but fall silent when asked to what degree.  

They talk darkly of racist subtexts in the arguments of their opponents, but skip over the overt ethnic chauvinism of proponents of amnesty; they decry conservative paranoia over a new demography, but never liberal euphoria over just such a planned reset. They talk deprecatingly of rubes who do not understand the new global realties, but never of their own parochialism ensconced in New York or Washington or San Francisco. They talk of reactionaries who do not fathom the ins and outs of the debate; never of their own willful ignorance of the realities on the ground in East L.A. or southwest Fresno. 

The elites favor de facto amnesty for a variety of self-interested reasons. 

Read the whole thing there.