From this morning's Kausfiles:

Steve Sailer chops up Dana Milbank's sneering treatment of Sen. Jeff Sessions, who has committed the sin of arguing in a detailed, reasonable and lawyerly fashion against the Senate immigration bill. ... Sample Milbank sneer and Sailer response:

(Milbank) Sessions has joined the immigration debate with typical ferocity, impugning the motives of those who disagree with him. "We have quite a number of members of the House and Senate and members in the media who are all in favor of reforms and improvements as long as they don't really work," he said last week of those who opposed the 370 miles of fencing. "But good fences make good neighbors. Fences don't make bad neighbors."

The senator evidently hadn't consulted the residents of Korea, Berlin or the West Bank. [Emphasis added]

(Sailor) Killer line, Dana! Obviously, the residents of Korea or the West Bank would have lived in perfect harmony without those horrible fences keeping them separate.

Pardon me for stating the obvious, but isn't there a bit of a difference between the relationship our country has with its neighbor to the south, and the relationship between Jews and Arabs on the West Bank, or North and South Korea since 1950, or between NATO and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War? Not even the most paranoid fantasists obsessed with Reconquista and Aztlan believe that our relationship with Mexico is akin to that of two countries at war.

Kaus goes on to defend Senator Sessions, whose track record on civil rights is, shall we say, a bit spotty. To wit, back when President Reagan attempted to put the then U.S. Attorney on the U.S. District Court in 1986, during his confirmation hearings:

Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people." In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as "un-American" when "they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions" in foreign policy. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to "pop off" on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes "loose with [his] tongue." He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a "piece of intrusive legislation," a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings.

It got worse. Another damaging witness--a black former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama named Thomas Figures--testified that, during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he "used to think they [the Klan] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers." Sessions claimed the comment was clearly said in jest. Figures didn't see it that way. Sessions, he said, had called him "boy" and, after overhearing him chastise a secretary, warned him to "be careful what you say to white folks." Figures echoed Hebert's claims, saying he too had heard Sessions call various civil rights organizations, including the National Council of Churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, "un-American." Sessions denied the accusations but again admitted to frequently joking in an off-color sort of way. In his defense, he said he was not a racist, pointing out that his children went to integrated schools and that he had shared a hotel room with a black attorney several times.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, controlled at the time by the G.O.P., voted against sending his nomination to the floor. Since then, his record on civil rights has been even more spotty, a fact that obviously hasn't inhibited the good people of Alabama from electing the man to two terms in the U.S. Senate.

The fact that Senator Sessions is, or is not, an unreconstructed bigot is not, by itself, a reason not to pass strong laws against illegal immigration. I just got through reading a biography of William Jennings Bryan, the perennial Democrat Presidential nominee of the turn-of-the-century, and one of the fascinating points the author makes is that most, not just some, but most of the cherished progressive principles liberals believe in, and defend, today, were ideas that came from the heads of some of the most virulent racists of the day. This wasn't just true of Southern Democrats, who because of competition from the Populist Party in the 1890's were forced to evolve into the wing of the party that most embraced economic liberalism at that time. Many of the great radical figures of the day, men like Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and "Big Bill" Haywood, were also racists, but that doesn't mean that child labor laws, the 40-hour work week, or collective bargaining were bad ideas. The fact that the poison of racial bigotry was mixed in with the soup of modern progressivism is a reminder that we are all prisoners of the culture in which we live.

What it should mean today, however, is that no immigration law that seeks to punish border crossers should be taken up until its supporters get their own house in order, purge their ranks of the bigots, in the same way that supporters of welfare reform were made to purge their ranks of the idiots who saw the black "welfare queen" as their bête noire before any serious debate about welfare legislation could commence.

Of course, not all people who support tighter border enforcement are bigots, and not all reasons for supporting such a policy are nativist, but unfortunately, racism does permeate the issue. As long as the fear of the brown-skinned lurks behind the surface of this debate, we must make sure that any legislation ultimately passed not be tainted by such an association with racist bigotry. I would rather live in the Aztlan of the nativist's warped fantasy than in Jeff Sessions' America.