Why Immigration Matters in Gun Rights Debate

From my experience, a lot of the Westerners I know who have immigrated to the United States are very pro-freedom. They came to the United States because they wanted what the United States stands for. They left their homes in England, Portugal, Australia, the Soviet Union (that’s where they left, not “Russia” as it is today), and other places because they didn’t necessarily have it there.

But a lot of people come into this country from other places, and they’re not really all that interested in embracing America as it is. They want to change it into what they left, not recognizing that if what they left was so great, there’s no reason to come here. And, of course, my experience isn’t necessarily representative of anything other than my experience.

It’s not universal, necessarily, but it is something we need to talk about. It’s not something I even thought about until I read this from David Codrea.

“Immigration and the importation of anti-gun voters present an existential threat to our Second Amendment rights,” constitutional attorney and Four Boxes Diner commentator Mark W. Smith asserted Saturday.

“Because the people that come into the United States from Latin America, from Europe, from Africa, from Asia, they have one thing in common, at least one thing in common, and that is they all come from cultures that do not have any sort of real private gun ownership, self-defense oriented gun culture,” Smith explains. “These are not the sort of people that are going to vote for anything other than more and more gun control.”

He’s offering more than opinion. That assessment is backed up by every credible poll and by real-world experiences in places like California, where engineered demographic changes have turned the state into a Democrat stronghold in a generation, with Democrats being the party calling for gun bans in its platform and enacting them whenever it gets the votes. Adding such new citizens to the voting rolls will result in supermajorities in state and federal legislatures that will then be able to pass all kinds of anti-gun edicts.

It will also result in nominations and confirmations of judges to the Supreme and federal courts who will uphold those edicts and reverse gains made to date. That’s happened before, and anyone who thinks Heller, McDonald, and Bruen will be immune is whistling past the graveyard of history.

We also can’t overlook the effect foreign national residents being counted in the census has on congressional representation.

This is why gun owners who say they’re for legal immigration, just not the illegal kind, are both kidding themselves and enabling a pathway to citizenship for Democrats and cheap labor Republicans to swindle them out of their rights. And that’s where we sometimes see pushback in comments below articles, arguing things like “I know people from [insert country of choice], and they own guns and go to the range.”

Now, I’m one of those who is fine with legal immigration. Again, my experience with most immigrants is that many actually do embrace what it is to be American, and not just so far as owning a few guns and going to the range. They value their freedom, and ours.

But there are a lot of people who come here who don’t. They see economic opportunity here, sure, and they might see lower taxes, but like progressives leaving a state like California or Massachusetts, they also often start voting for the same policies that created the environment they wanted to leave in the first place.

Yet I don’t think ending legal immigration or anything like that is desirable. Most of us have an origin outside the United States. We all descended from people who came here from elsewhere. The only difference with Native Americans is that their ancestors crossed a land bridge before recorded history. The rest of us can find where we came from, and it seems a little whacked to just shut the door entirely.

That doesn’t mean that gun rights groups should ignore the immigration question, either. Illegal immigrants can and will impact the census, and the fact that sanctuary cities exist is little more than a way to get them to congregate in already blue areas of the country and increase the voting power of the citizens who live there.

That’ll happen with legal immigrants who live there, too, especially if they can’t vote yet, but there are concerns we need to consider as it might impact our gun rights.

I can’t help but think that reaching out is a better approach than, say, shutting the door.

Now, Codrea never explicitly, outrights says that we should. I don’t want to be accused of putting words in his mouth here, though it’s hard not to read it that way. He is saying that gun rights groups shouldn’t ignore immigration as it will have an impact on gun rights, and on that, I think he’s right. It does have an impact. It might be an indirect one, but just like how bans on 3D printing files have an indirect impact on free speech, an indirect impact is still an impact.

It’s worth talking about, at a minimum, especially since I happen to think outreach is a better direction to go with something like this. I’m sorry, but I won’t turn my back on people like our own Ranjit Singh or some of my other immigrant friends simply because they might not be the majority of immigrants.

The trick is to reach out to immigrants and make sure they understand why gun rights matter to us and why, as newly-made Americans, it should matter to them, too.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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