Recent News

[Previously by Susie Green: Harmony before Insight? The Destruction of Western Man ]

There can be no better statement on the 2013 Amnesty/ Immigration Surge War than this:

The level of lying that has become common in the illegal alien debate is truly frightening and bespeaks an America that has passed some new threshold on the road to self-destruction.

One of these lies is intrinsic to the Senate bill and its variants: that these bills combine “enforcement” with amnesty. Given our current systematic failure to enforce the law and protect our borders, and given the president’s own palpable lack of interest in enforcing the law, and given the nonchalant or celebratory statements about illegal immigration by many of the president’s supporters, such as William Kristol and Michael Bloomberg, no intellectually honest person could believe that the enforcement side of the bill would be seriously acted upon.

Therefore the only way to establish the president’s and the government’s bona fides in this area is to pass an enforcement-only bill first and see if it is enforced. Otherwise we will inevitably end up with a vastly worse repetition of what happened in 1986, an amnesty of millions of illegal aliens, with no improvement in enforcement, leading to continued mass illegal immigration, followed by further calls for yet another amnesty.

Another big lie is the establishment’s denial that their various proposals are, in fact, amnesty proposals. Starting with the stinking head of our body politic…down to every liberal newspaper reporter, it is now simply taken for granted that a bill is only an amnesty bill if it involves giving the illegal alien instant citizenship. Anything short of that, such as giving him legal status in the United States with the option to pursue citizenship, is not, the establishment insists, amnesty.

Thus Jonathan Weisman writes in the Washington Post about a compromise bill that is now being floated:

The compromise could satisfy some conservatives opposed to any program that offers illegal immigrants a way to stay in the country and work toward citizenship, which they term “amnesty.”

See? A bill to allow illegal aliens to stay in the country legally and work toward citizenship is not amnesty. It is only falsely described as “amnesty”—by conservatives. See Weisman’s scare quotes. Thanks for straightening us out on that, Mr. Weisman.

In reality, amnesty means removing the penalty or the due consequence for a wrongful act. Under our law, the due consequence for a person who has illegally entered the United States is to be removed from the United States. Therefore to give illegal aliens legal residency in this country is amnesty, period.

All the bills that are on the table to give illegals some kind of legal status in the U.S., however that legal status is defined, are amnesty bills, period.”

[Hyperlinks added by VDARE.com]

Actually, wait a moment... that isn't about the Obama Administration's push for an Amnesty/ Immigration Surge at all! It’s about the second President Bush's efforts to push a nation-breaking legalization program in 2006, by my old friend, the late Lawrence M. Auster. [We must stop lying to ourselves or we will die, View From The Right, April 04, 2006 ]

It tells us something, both about Larry and about the 2013 Amnesty/ Immigration Surge Bill, that not a word needs to be changed—and once again, Larry’s View From the Right blog cuts to the core of the issue.

Immigration patriots have been here before. This isn't the first and may not be the last time Americans will have to face down a “stupid and evil” effort to push through amnesty. Luckily, we have a guide to waging the long war in the writings of the late and lamented Lawrence Auster, who never stopped

The firing of Jason Richwine by the Heritage Foundation is the most depressing thing that has happened in American politics for many years—and that’s a very hot competition.  Heritage was in an impregnable position:

The collapse of legitimacy in Washington continues, and the immigration debate is no exception. The rule of law withers away, while partisans wallow in sentimentalism, with curious consequences: consider the religious leaders who are at the forefront of the pro-amnesty movement. Somehow, they're on the same side of the issue as Big Business, the banksters, and the Wall Street Journal.

How did this come to pass?

A little history helps. In the past 40 years, evangelicals have made significant inroads into the once-Catholic populations of Mexico and Latin America. This was due in large part to the Catholic political detour into liberation theology that swept across the continent a generation ago. Protestant missionaries, often sponsored by small, independent congregations in the United States, had a simple message: "the Catholics preach politics, we preach the Bible." Tens of millions of Latino Catholics left the Church.

In the United States, the accusation rings true all too often. The Catholic Church has a strong political presence in Washington. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) spent some $26.67 million on political advocacy in 2009; only AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, spent more ($87.90 million). Most recently, this activity focused on the bishops' battle against the HHS Contraceptive Mandate and homosexual "marriage." But over the long haul, those advocacy efforts have supported key elements of the Left's agenda: national health care, amnesty for illegal aliens, and expansion of the welfare state.

Several studies confirm that Catholics are leaving the pews—on both sides of the border. What happened in Latin America is also happening here: Timothy Cardinal Dolan, President of the USCCB, observes that some thirty million Americans today identify themselves as former Catholics. That is almost half the number of self-identified Catholics (some 60-70 million).

Post-Christian or Post-American?

We have entered a "post-Christian era," says Providence Bishop Thomas Tobin. The bishop was addressing the legalization of homosexual "marriage" in Rhode Island, but I wonder if his insight might also be playing a prominent role in the U.S. bishops' campaign for amnesty.

When it comes to immigration, America's bishops support an agenda so vast that its passage would quickly create some thirty million new Americans, once "family reunification" kicks in (with all of the reunions taking place stateside, of course).

I wonder, do the bishops want all those new Americans because they're so unhappy with the Americans they've already got?

Maybe so. Consider Los Angeles Archbishop José  Gomez. He's the point man in the USCCB's amnesty campaign. Born in Mexico, he loves his homeland and his people. Like his predecessor, Roger Cardinal Mahony, he has made amnesty his prime political cause. He has a parochial interest—the Los Angeles Times reports that ten percent of the residents of LA County are in the U.S. illegally—but his vision goes much further.

Archbishop Gomez avoids the terms "illegal" and "amnesty," advocating instead "comprehensive reform." More importantly, even when addressing legislative particulars, he speaks with authority, in the name of the Catholic Church. Occasionally he admits that Catholics can differ on the issue, but opponents of amnesty seldom hear an encouraging word from his pulpit.

Is the "Next America" the "New Mexico"?

According to Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, a nonpartisan research group, the average rate of immigration from the 1950s through the 1970s was three million a decade. Since 1990, the rate has been 11 million per decar]de. Of the immigration bill proposed by the "Gang of Eight" passes, 33 million new green cards will be issued in the next decade.

Such a large wave of new Americans raises serious questions regarding the challenge of assimilation, but Archbishop Gomez simply bypasses it—because he opposes it.

Three years ago, Archbishop Gomez described his vision of "The Next America" at a conference in the Napa Valley. For him, the "Next America" will be decidedly better than the current one. Echoing Bishop Tobin, he says that

"Our culture is changing…We have a legal structure that allows, and even pays for, the killing of babies in the womb. Our courts and legislatures are redefining the natural institutions of marriage and the family. We have an elite culture… that is openly hostile to religious faith."[Immigration and the “Next America”: Perspectives from Our History, August 10, 2011]

All too true. So what is to blame for this travesty? Pope Benedict XVI blamed

For generations, Massachusetts was ruled by a demographic that could proudly trace its heritage back to colonial times. Indeed, it was once a considerable challenge to get elected to higher office in Massachusetts if you were not considered a “Proper Bostonian.”

Perhaps the best example of a Proper Bostonian legislator: Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924). A staunch defender of American sovereignty, Lodge is best known for being the lead opponent of U.S. membership in the League of Nations. But people forget that Lodge was also a vocal critic of immigration policy, even when it was still exclusively European.

Senator Lodge believed that immigration policy should be tailored to benefit the historical American nation, not just the immigrants themselves. In those days, that was an opinion no one was afraid to express.

Incidentally, Lodge also strongly supported greater rights for blacks—but in those days goodwill toward minorities did not require subordinating oneself to them.

The Proper Bostonian’s views on immigration and race mirrored the late Samuel Huntington’s distinction between settlers and immigrants. We are not a “nation of immigrants”; rather, we are a nation of “settlers” (the Anglo-Protestants who founded the country) and “immigrants.” And those who immigrate into this established Anglo-Protestant society are obligated to assimilate into it. (I say this as a New England Catholic of substantially Irish descent.)

But things began to change around the turn of the century, when Boston’s James Michael Curley (1874-1958), the American-born son of Irish immigrants, began stoking resentment against America’s founding demographic. But Curley didn’t just incite resentment among the Irish—he also successfully instilled guilt in the Yankee Protestants. And that’s where the real damage was done.

Seemingly overnight, being a Proper Bostonian became a moral weakness while membership in the “oppressed” immigrant class became a moral strength—a bandwagon the plutocratic Kennedys rode all the way to White House.

In due course, Henry Cabot Lodge’s grandson, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., was defeated in 1952 by then Rep. John F. Kennedy. And Lodge’s great grandson, George Cabot Lodge, was defeated by Ted Kennedy ten years later. As Cardinal William O’Connell triumphantly put it: “The Puritan has passed. The Catholic remains.”

Future historians will certainly be dumbfounded

[See also Burn The Witch!” Heritage Foundation Scuttles Away From Jason Richwine—And The Cold Hard Facts, By John Derbyshire]

How low will supporters of the Gang of Eight immigration bill go to get their way? This low: They've shamelessly branded an accomplished Ivy League-trained quantitative analyst a "racist" and will stop at nothing to destroy his career as they pave their legislative path to another massive illegal alien benefits bonanza.

Jason Richwine works for the conservative Heritage Foundation. He's a Harvard University Ph.D. who co-authored a study that pegs the cost of the Ted Kennedy Memorial Open Borders Act 2.0 legislation at $6.3 trillion. Lead author Robert Rector is a senior research fellow at Heritage, a former United States Office of Personnel Management analyst and the intellectual godfather of welfare reform. He holds a master's degree in political science from Johns Hopkins University.

Both Democrats and Republicans leaped to discredit the 102-page report without bothering to read it. The Washington Post falsely claimed the study did not take into account increased revenues from amnestied illegal alien workers. It did. Haley Barbour immediately proclaimed that the Heritage assessment of government costs incurred by amnestied illegal aliens was "not serious."

They want to talk gravitas? Let's talk gravitas. Blowhard Barbour is a career politician and paid lobbyist for the government of Mexico who has carried water for open borders since the Bush years. Richwine received his doctorate in public policy in 2009 from Harvard University's prestigious Kennedy School of Government. He holds bachelor's degrees in mathematics and political science from American University. Before joining Heritage in 2010, he worked at the American Enterprise Institute on a dissertation fellowship.

Richwine's 166-page dissertation, "IQ and Immigration Policy," is now being used to smear him—and, by extension, all of Heritage's scholarship—as "racist." While the punditocracy and political establishment sanctimoniously call for "honest discussions" on race, they rush to crush bona fide, dispassionate academic inquiries into the controversial subjects of intelligence, racial and ethnic differences, and domestic policy.

Richwine's entire thesis is now online here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/140239668/IQ-and-Immigration-Policy-Jason-Richwine. Part One reviews the science of IQ. Part Two delves into empirical research comparing IQs of the native-born American population with that of immigrant groups, with the Hispanic population broken out. Richwine explores the causes of an immigrant IQ deficit that appears to persist among Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. through several generations.

The thesis analyzes social policy consequences of these findings and uses a model of the labor market "to show how immigrant IQ affects the economic surplus accruing to natives and the wage impact on low-skill natives."

The smug dismissal of Richwine's credentials and scholarship is to be expected by liberal hacks and clown operatives. But a reckless and cowardly pileup of knee-jerk dilettantes on the right—including former McCain campaign co-chair Ana Navarro and conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin—have joined the character assassins of the Soros-sphere, MSNBC and Mother Jones in deeming Richwine a "racist." The drooling attack dogs of the far-left blog Daily Kos have now launched a pressure campaign against the JFK School demanding to know "why the school awarded Richwine a Ph.D. and what they plan to do in the future to prevent it from happening again."

No researcher or academic institution is safe

Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson has gotten himself into the usual sort of Larry Summers / James D. Watson-style trouble for answering a question about economist John Maynard Keynes’s famous quip—“In the long run, we are all dead”—by cheekily pointing out that Keynes was a childless homosexual. There’s no transcript of his original remarks, but a writer who heard him speak wrote it up on his magazine’s website. [Harvard Professor Trashes Keynes For Homosexuality, By Tom Kostigen, fa-mag.com, May 3, 2013.]

Ferguson commented: “In the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive, and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.”

Ferguson has groveled, needless to say, but the Homintern is still pursuing him—see Niall Ferguson: Keynes Was Gay for Germany, by Jonathan Chait, nymag.com, May 7, 2013.

(In contrast to Keynes, the philoprogenitive Ferguson has three children by his first wife and one by his latest, the courageous anti-Islamist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.)

Ferguson’s off-the-cuff comments generated a vast global spasm of gasping and tsk-tsking. A Google search of “niall ferguson keynes gay” comes up with over two million  hits.

Why the hysteria?

Because intellectual life has declined to the point where all that matters is Are You on the Side of the Good Guys or the Bad Guys? And the Good Guys are powerful groups of self-proclaimed victims.

Ferguson’s suggestion that family life can influence ideology is, of course, true. For example, Mitt Romney carried only 16 percent of the gay vote in 2012 in contrast to 57 percent of the married vote. Over the last four elections, the rate in each state at which whites are married has been the strongest determinant of the Electoral Vote.

But Ferguson felt it necessary to issue “An Unqualified Apology” [May 4, 2013]because he makes a lot of money giving speeches to financial organizations, so he can’t afford to offend Designated Victim Groups that play a major role within them—such as gays, Jews, and women. At this moment in our culture, gays are particularly dominant, and thus are looking for ways to throw their weight around to intimidate skeptics for good.

What’s more striking, though, are the Voluntary Auxiliary Thought Police who rush in to denounce heretics. As Dennis Dale commented during another recent brouhaha of ridiculous moral outrage:

The Left has routed us and is now chasing us into the weeds to cut us down individually--because they haven't even the capacity to imagine doing anything else.

What are they going to do, declare victory and behave graciously? Where's the fun—or more importantly the influence and cash—in that? They are like a vast standing army with nothing to do and no wish to return to civilian life.

Still, Ferguson was somewhat unfair. Keynes (1883-1946) betrayed today’s conventional wisdom by doing the supposedly impossible: he converted, permanently, from a homosexual lifestyle to a heterosexual lifestyle when—to the shock and dismay of his former Bloomsbury boyfriends—he married the popular ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925.

He wasn’t under any particular social or career pressure at the time. He just switched his affections.

Moreover, we can see that Keynes was concerned about the welfare of future generations of the British from his lifelong advocacy of….(wait for it) eugenics!

After all, in 1911 Keynes, along with the great statistician and geneticist

Americans have two days to intervene in their own affairs—specifically, to protest the refugee/ asylee scandal that, among other atrocities, produced the Boston Bombers.

If asked to describe VDARE.com's theme and purpose in one sentence, I'd say: "The site exists to document, vividly, that every aspect of the U.S. immigration regime amounts to a victimization of the American people ... and to press for immigration sanity in the national interest."

Our refugee and asylum programs constitute a major element in that victimization.  This particular, long-running scandal finally received a massive surge of publicly beneficial exposure from the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings and the subsequent revelation that the perps were beneficiaries, via their parents, of asylum—and, of course, generous public benefits.

But VDARE.com has been covering the abuse of asylum and refuge since at least 2002.  That August, in EOIR Immigration Court -- Implementing the permanent amnesty, Juan Mann wrote:

International alien smuggling enables virtually anyone in the world without legal documents to bypass the system of U.S. consular refugee processing abroad. Aliens who simply appear without documents at any U.S. land border or airport on American soil can request asylum through the "credible fear" process, be released from custody, travel on to another city, and perhaps later appear for a hearing to be awarded asylum by an EOIR immigration judge. The potential for abuse of the current system is so great that the INS "credible fear" and EOIR asylum process has the potential to become the greatest back-door amnesty program of all.

Over the years, VDARE.com’s Thomas Allen, who specializes in this subfield, has written some twenty articles and blogs about the wide spectrum of outrages.  And our prolific Brenda Walker has frequently focused on this area, including, most recently, Burmese Refugees Flood Iowa Town to Fill Tyson Jobs.

My own "favorite" refugee/asylee story is of the Kurd who fled his native Iraq, landed first in Iran, stowed away on a ship to Brazil, lived in Brazil for a while, then stowed away again on a ship to New York.  Only upon reaching the U.S. did he apply for asylum, which was granted—at least provisionally, a year later.[ Tortured Iraqi Fugitive Given U.S. Sanctuary,  By Mark Fritz, LA Times, April 17, 1998]

(The "abuse of asylum and refuge" was the theme for the Summer 1997 issue of The Social Contract quarterly.  Articles by Norman Matloff, James Walsh, James Robb, Jack Martin, and Don Barnett should be helpful antidotes if you have low blood pressure.  The PDF versions are more readable than the HTMLs.)

So how is this obnoxious topic going to warm you up for the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge death match that's just ahead? 

Well, 5 p.m. Eastern Time, Wednesday, May 8 is the deadline for your emailed and faxed public comments regarding the Fiscal Year 2014 refugee admissions program to the State Department's Delicia Spruell (spruellda@state.gov  or fax (202) 453-9393).

That's also the deadline—if you live in the Washington, DC area and could attend the May 15 meeting itself to glower at the bureaucrats—for reserving a seat, by contacting Ms. Spruell.  Details are in this brief announcement.

On Sunday, May 5, I emailed Ms. Spruell my observations and questions about the program.  The questions are implicitly criticisms that the public isn't being provided with essential and internally-consistent data about the program's burden on taxpayers.  My note to Ms. Spruell is appended to this article, as an example, but your input doesn't need to be anywhere near as long as mine.

Beyond the niggling numerical points I focused upon in my email, here are several possible themes—courtesy of Don Barnett, who's a real expert on refuge and asylum abuses—that you could choose from to incorporate in your input, recasting the ideas into your own words:

• Implement a National Governors Association recommendation calling for consultation with state and local communities before refugees are resettled in a community. Local and state entities should have the right to refuse resettlement.
• Discourage “secondary migration”—when refugees move to a different location within the U.S. immediately after being resettled, usually to join an existing enclave of their own countrymen. This causes unplanned and unfunded demands on social services at the “secondary migration” destination. It could be largely prevented by allowing access to social services only in the original state
  

[See also Coolness Under Fire: Six Points To Remember About The 2013 “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” a.k.a. Amnesty War and The Boston Bombers, “Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” And The National Question]

Congress is back in town and the mark-up on the Obama-Rubio Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill is scheduled for Thursday, May 9. But this legislative Titanic continues to spring amusing leaks, for example news that the most recent version (up from 844 to 867 pages, changes shown here) quietly increases the slush fund to pay for implementation from $100 million to $1 billion. [With one click, key part of immigration bill becomes ten times more costly, by Byron York, washingtonexaminer.com, May 4 2013].

I was particularly struck by this acid comment from Mickey Kaus, one of the very few Main Stream Media figures to risk the Curse of Stein by criticizing current manic immigration enthusiasm, on a recent network Sunday talk show lineup:

Has there ever been an issue on which the big national media were so one-sided and so untroubled by how one-sided they are?

You’d think they’d at least find the kookiest anti-amnesty crackpot they could find and put them on. But they don’t even do that.

If the national debate is so unanimous, why is it so hard for amnesty to get passed? Who are these mystery opponents, never seen, who wield vast under-the-radar influence? …

TV chat: All pro-amnesty, all the time, April 8 2013

(Needless to say, the networks Sunday talk shows have continued their shameless pimping—see here and here and here and here).

Well, as we all know, Diversity Is Strength. And as a British immigrant I am able to answer Kaus’ question: yes, a similarly one-sided debate was the central feature of the British elite’s bipartisan, equally nation-breaking 1960-1975 campaign to get the U.K. into what was then called the “Common Market” (rapidly changed to the “European Economic Community” and subsequently, casting aside the mask, the “European Union”—an aspiring unitary polity without even a pretense of U.S. style federalism, dramatically negating 1500 years of British history).

In those days, we didn’t even have internet guerillas. We did have Enoch Powell, in my opinion the most significant British politician of the twentieth century. But he was shunned and suppressed by the Establishment—very like Pat Buchanan, in many ways his American equivalent, twenty years later.

I don’t like to bore my American readers with these remote tribal tragedies. But I will note that the Eurofanatic Economist Magazine, recently whooping up immigration in general and the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge Bill in particular, has just casually observed of the EU “debate” in retrospect that

the economics of entry seemed weak or even negative: it was the politics of gaining global influence through Europe that drove successive governments.

Forty years on: Lessons of compromise and influence, January 19, 2013

Of course, this economic reality was always obvious to anyone who looked into the question, and eerily echoes the never-reported current consensus among U.S. labor economists that immigration confers no significant advantage to native-born Americans in aggregate (specific Americans benefit, but their fellow-citizens do not).

No doubt in forty years’ time, the Economist will, equally casually, acknowledge

The economy created 165,000 jobs in April, a smidgen above the consensus estimate but not nearly enough to shake the view that a spring/summer slowdown lurks. Economists say the double whammy of higher payroll taxes and lower federal and state spending create insuperable obstacles to economic growth.

Diana Swonk, chief economist for Mesirow Financial in Chicago, agrees:

What’s the biggest drag on the economy? The government. If the government simply did no harm, we could be at escape velocity.  [U.S. Spending Cuts Seen as Key in Slowing Growth, By Nelson D. Schwartz, New York Times, May 2, 2013]

Ms. Swonk is right: government is the problem. But like most mainstream economists, and all Main Stream Media commentary, she is oblivious to the harm done by federal immigration policy.

About 90,000 legal immigrants are allowed into the country every month. This means that more than half last month’s job gain is needed just to absorb new legal entrants.

The “other” employment survey, of households rather than businesses, reported a fairly robust job gain of 293,000. Our analysis finds that, for the second straight month, native-born Americans enjoyed all the job gains while the number of foreign-born employed declined.

            In April:

• Total employment rose by 293,000, or by 0.20%
• Native-born employment rose by 317,000, or by 0.26%
• Foreign-born employment fell by 24,000, or by -0.10%

The return of illegal immigrants to Mexico in a U.S. weak job market could explain some of the foreign-born employment slippage.

It’s also a fact that, for whatever reason, immigrants have lost ground relative to the native-born in each of the past three Aprils. Indeed, immigrants’ job performance relative to the native-born was, if anything, better in 2013 than in prior years:

After declining by 0.6% and 1.3% in April 2011 and 2012, respectively, foreign-born employment fell by only 0.1% this April. The same trend is evident in the share of jobs held by immigrants.

So while the immigrant penetration of the U.S. workforce was reversed last month, the magnitude of the reversal was nowhere near what had occurred in the two prior Aprils.

The overall trend is made clear in our New VDARE.com American Worker Displacement Index (NVDAWDI).  It tracks native-born and foreign-born employment growth for every month since the start of the Obama Administration:

Native-born employment growth is the blue line, immigrant employment growth is in pink, and NVAWDI—the ratio of immigrant to native-born job growth—is yellow. To chart American worker displacement, we set both the native-born and immigrant employment