Why is Obama comparing Muslim refugees fleeing from ISIS stricken countries, to African-Americans fleeing the South in the 19th century?
We may never know why he chooses this time and place to say these things, but we can mention the absolute truth about immigration by looking into our past.
In our Constitution, there is absolutely no mention of any law regarding immigration. Congress has the ultimate authority to set laws on immigration. Just how Congress can enact Obamacare, welfare, gun bans, and social security, Congress has full discretion over immigration.
For some reason, we as Americans have completely forgotten that our government wastes our hard-earned money, controls what guns we can and cannot have, manages our retirement accounts, and even chooses our doctors. Yet, we are utterly appalled when someone who is not even in political office says he is going to ban certain people from entering the country. The first four scenarios are fact, and the latter is nothing more than someone's theory, yet we will fight tooth and nail to rid the theory. What have we become? We must not believe that banning a certain group of people from our country, while difficult to pass in Congress, is unconstitutional. It may be immoral and harsh, but it does not negate any written language in our Constitution. Gun bans, federal tax codes, social security, and Obamacare directly defy the Constitution. Somewhere along the lines, we have negated Constitutional fact and exchanged it for theory. We completely disregard our own rights as Americans which have been fought for violently, in exchange for the rights of people that we know nothing about.
This issue has presented itself before in America.
A letter from George Washington to John Adams in 1794 regarding immigration:
My opinion, with respect to emigration, is, that except of useful mechanics, and some particular descriptions of men or professions, there is no need of encouragement : while the policy or advantage of its taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the Language, habits and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures and laws: in a word, soon become one people.
Thomas Jefferson has several thoughts in his book “Notes on the State of Virginia”:
The first consideration in immigration is the welfare of the receiving nation. In a new government based on principles unfamiliar to the rest of the world and resting on the sentiments of the people themselves, the influx of a large number of new immigrants unaccustomed to the government of a free society could be detrimental to that society. Immigration, therefore, must be approached carefully and cautiously.
Yet from such we are to expect the greatest number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it [157] their spirit, warp and bias its directions, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass. I may appeal to experience, during the present contest, for a verification of these conjectures. But, if they be not certain in event; are they not possible, are they not probable? Is it not safer to wait with patience 27 years and three months longer, for the attainment of any degree of population desired or expected? May not our government be more homogeneous, more peaceable, more durable? Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of half a million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here.