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[See earlier, by Allan Wall Obama’s Administrative Amnesty Not Applicable To White, Legal, English Girl. And While We’re On The Subject, Aren’t British Immigrants Preferable To Mexican Immigrants Anyway]

The Obama administration, to put it mildly, is keen on not enforcing immigration law. But it’s not that the administration neglects immigration enforcement, it’s that the Obama administration actively works to impede the enforcement of immigration law. It actively supports the illegal invasion. It’s electing a new people.

The Obama administration refuses to get operational control of the border. It won’t track visa absconders. It attacks Arizona and other states that try to enforce the law.

The administration hardly deports any illegal aliens. There are at least 11 million illegal aliens in the U.S., but that’s the low estimate, many suspect it could be 20 million or more. Only a small fraction of that entire number is deported. You have to try extra hard to get deported these days.

Then there’s the unilateral Dream Act Administrative Amnesty, which in effect legalized the under 30 crowd of illegals that are supposedly all going to become students.

On top of that is the proposed amnesty/immigration reform being pushed by the government (with plenty of Republican supporters.)

We’d have to conclude that the Obama administration is anti-deportation.

Not entirely, however. The administration has found a few foreigners it would like to deport.

Eric “My People” Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is actively working to deport a German family who had already been granted refugee asylum status.

It’s not an oversight. It’s not a technicality. Eric Holder’s DOJ has gone out of its way to get this family deported.

Here’s an index of articles which provide more information on the plight of the Romeike family:

• US grants home schooling German family political asylum
  By Daniel Nasaw, The Guardian, January 27, 2010
• Deportation of German homeschool family affects US homeschool freedom
  By Bryana Johnson, Washington Times, February 12, 2013
• Homeschooling Not a Fundamental Right, Justice Dept. Argues
  By Napp Nazworth, Christian Post, February 14, 2013
• Justice Department: Home Schooling not a 'Right'
  By CBN February 19, 2013 (with video)
• German Homeschoolers Appeal Decision on Asylum in US Court
  By Michael Gryboski, Christian Post, February 26, 2013
• German family seeking asylum in US to homeschool kids,
  Fox News, March 3, 2013 (video)
• Obama Admin Wants to Deport Christian Homeschoolers
   By Todd Starnes, Human Events, March 5, 2013
• Obama Justice Department Fighting to Deport Christian Homeschooling Family Seeking Asylum
  By Heather Clark, Christian News Network, March 6, 2013

In a nutshell, here’s the story. Uwe Romeike and his wife Hannalore are both music teachers who fled their native Germany in 2008. They settled in Tennessee and applied for asylum. The couple currently has six children (five school-age). Here’s a recent photo, via Christian News Network,.

The Romeikes left Germany because of the harassment they received from the government for home schooling their children. They had been fined and were facing the possibility of

This week’s Detroit headlines:

• Former Mayor of Detroit Guilty in Corruption Case, by Mary M. Chapman, New York Times, March 11, 2013

DETROIT — Kwame M. Kilpatrick, a former mayor of Detroit, was found guilty on Monday of a raft of charges, including racketeering, fraud and extortion, capping a five-month public corruption trial against him and two co-defendants.

 The jury found Mr. Kilpatrick guilty of 24 of the 30 charges against him, including the most serious charges of racketeering and extortion, which each carry maximum sentences of 20 years.[VDARE.com note: This is Mr. Kilpatrick's  conviction  on Federal charges. He's already done time under Michigan law for perjury, etc., and then again for violating probation

• Kevyn Orr Named Emergency Manager of Detroit by Governor, by Chris Christoff, Bloomberg.com, March 14, 2014

Governor Rick Snyder named Washington lawyer Kevyn Orr as emergency manager to lead Detroit out of a financial crisis that threatens to make it the largest municipal bankruptcy in the U.S.

Orr, 54, previously a partner at Jones Day who worked on the 2009 bankruptcy of the former Chrysler LLC, will tackle a city in a downward spiral of shrinking population and revenue, whose municipal government opposed a state takeover. Detroit’s deficit hit almost $327 million last year and its long-term obligations have grown to more than $14 billion, according to a recent state review.

When I purchased Charlie LeDuff's new book, Detroit: An American Autopsy, I assumed from the cover that I was buying a fearless examination of the causes of Detroit's decline by a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, which has been highly rated by Amazon and the New York Times Sunday Book Review. [Breakdown, By Paul Clemens, February 22, 2013]

Normally in an "autopsy," a forensic pathologist will dissect a body in an attempt to determine its cause of death. But, unfortunately, LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy is more of a montage of his reportage at The Detroit News, personalized by weaving the story of his own family into the arc of Detroit's demise.

In the course of this book, the reader will learn a lot about Charlie LeDuff, his staunchly Catholic mother who worked at a now ruined flower shop, his wife who was born and raised in Detroit, his dead sister Nicole (a streetwalker), his dead niece Ashley (a heroin addict), his three brothers who are high school dropouts (one of whom sold thousands of subprime mortgages for Quicken Loans), and his great-grandfather Henry LeDuff (aka "Frenchie"), a Louisiana mulatto who crossed Jim Crow's color line and reinvented himself as a white ethnic in Michigan. (LeDuff reportedly is also a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa tribe).

LeDuff is at his best in sketching vivid, compelling portraits of Detroit's power elite, its beleaguered public employees, and the ordinary people who are living and dying among the blighted ruins of a city that used to be called "the Paris of the West": Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (just convicted…again) and Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, who were both indicted and sent to prison amid sex, corruption, racketeering, and bribery scandals; Walt Harris and Mike Martel, a black firefighter who lost his life fighting arson, and a white homicide detective caught on the front lines of senseless gang violence.

We are introduced at the outset to Jonnie "Dollar" Redding (a cousin of soul singer Otis Redding), a black homeless man who died "frozen in indifference" at the bottom of an elevator shaft in an abandoned warehouse while "urban explorers" played hockey around his body, and later we learn the stories of Je'Rean Noble and "Little Martha Burnett, “who are just homicide statistics on the Forbes list of the most miserable city in America. [Detroit Most Miserable City In America: Forbes Ranking,  Reuters, February 21, 2013]

It is clear that Charlie LeDuff cares about these people. He cared enough about Detroit to throw away his career as a big-shot journalist in Los Angeles so that he could return home and report on the "losers" who are left behind there. He wants us to care about them and succeeds with this series of hard-hitting anecdotes and vignettes in pulling our heartstrings for people like "Big Martha" who couldn't afford to bury her baby.

LeDuff doesn't shy away from dropping bombs on individuals. He goes after incompetent GM executives whose corporate offices in the GM Renaissance Complex face Canada so they don't look down upon the ruins of Detroit. He goes after the brass in the Detroit Police Department for fudging homicide statistics. He put his own life in jeopardy by getting involved with an informant in the Deandre Woolfolk case. He systematically went through financial records to expose the corruption under black  Fire Commissioner James Mack who was ultimately fired as a result of his reporting.

Similarly, Charlie LeDuff has no problem offending the small enclaves of Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs) who are always complaining about Detroit's negative publicity and the lack of coverage of positive developments like the opening of their new Detroit Whole Foods store:

"But these things are not supposed to be news. These things are supposed to be normal. And when normal things become the news, the abnormal becomes the norm. And when that happens, you might as well put a fork in it."

Later in the book, LeDuff serves up his definition of "normal":

“My wife and I loaded up the baby in the SUV and drove to my aunt’s funeral in a rural corner of Oakland County, where the land rolls like a ship on the swells. A boat, a house, a lake, a foreclosure sign.

“Jesus, it’s Whitey McWhiteville out here,” my wife said distractedly, noticing a white-faced lawn jockey. My woman is a white girl who grew up in Detroit—not the suburbs—which makes her a special kind of white person. …

The funeral for my aunt was weird in the fact that it wasn’t weird. It was normal. It was white. It started on time. Everyone wore a tie and

I don’t have sufficient experience or knowledge to call myself an Old China Hand, but I can claim to be something of an authority on China punditry—an Old “Old China Hand” Hand, as it were. I think I’ve read ’em all at some time or other in the past forty years, from Matteo Ricci and the Abbé Huc  to Bill Gertz and Richard McGregor.

The spectrum of opinion on China and her prospects is, and always has been, very wide. At one end of the spectrum is the “sleeping giant” school arguing that if China can get her sociopolitical ducks in a row and keep them there, she will bestride the world like a Colossus, at least commercially.

This view has deep roots in the Sinophilia that swept 18^th-century Europe (and was derided by the unfoxable Sam Johnson). Its present-day proponents include Thomas Friedman and practically all educated young Chinese people..

At the other end of the spectrum are the China skeptics. Forbes.com Asia columnist Gordon Chang holds the current franchise, but he has had many predecessors.

A personal favorite of mine among those predecessors is Rodney Yonkers Gilbert, a Harvard-educated American businessman and journalist who went to China shortly after the 1911 revolution and stayed through the ensuing two decades of chaos. Gilbert’s 1926 book What's wrong with China is a bracing antidote to Sinophilia; or perhaps, depending on your point of view, a sad record of “China fatigue”—a psychological ailment known to afflict many Westerners who stay too long in that country.

Gilbert leaves no positive stereotype unexploded. The hard-working Chinese?

The Chinese day labourer, working for another at a daily wage without adequate supervision, would furnish a striking cinema picture of slow motion. He will move no faster than he is driven, and it is no exaggeration to say that a dozen Chinese pick-and-shovel men, left to their own devices, will do less work in a week than two white labourers will do in a day.

(On the same theme, here is a scrap from the notes I took while living in China thirty years ago. It is extracted from an article titled “Studying in the United States,” which appeared in The World of English, a bilingual magazine published in Peking for advanced students, January 1983 issue: “Work in general is something that is highly valued in American society. Since hard work is believed to help people get ahead, Americans often work long hours and do not take afternoon naps as we do . . .” My italics.)

Gilbert was experiencing China at the lowest point of a dynastic cycle, though. For a cooler view, somewhere around the middle of the spectrum, I recommend Robert Fortune, an English botanist who traveled around China in the 1840s, in the lull between the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion.

Fortune adopted Chinese dress and spoke the language well enough to pass himself off as a traveler from a distant province. His observations overlap somewhat with Gilbert’s of eighty years later. Both authors, for example, note how extremely rare it was to see a Chinese person reading a book for pleasure—another stereotype exploded.

Fortune is less bombastic and more just than Gilbert, though. Occasionally he is rhapsodic:

I fully believe that in no country in the world is there less real misery and want than in China. The very beggars seem a kind of jolly crew, and are kindly treated by the inhabitants.

One lesson I have taken from all that reading is that it is a mighty difficult thing to make accurate predictions about China. The Chinese themselves are not much good at it, as I noticed in the case of Liu Binyan five years ago. For foreigners it’s a mug’s game.

That game, though—let’s call it the Great China Guessing Game—is irresistibly fascinating to many of us, and new rounds of it are constantly being played.

Especially popular recently are debates about whether China’s managerial authoritarianism is competitive with,

 [On CPAC in 2012, see: “High Fences, Wide Gates”: CPAC Continues Immigration Cop-Out, by Washington Watcher]

 "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket,” Eric Hoffer is supposed to have said.  Nowhere is this more obvious than with Conservatism Inc., the D.C.-focused parasitical congerie of corrupt interest groups which is now all that is left of the Late, Great American Conservative Movement that carried Ronald Reagan to victory in 1980. And nowhere is it more visible that at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC], which begins pre-festivities with the Weyrich Awards keynoted by Senator Ted Cruz tonight (March 12).

CPAC is characterized by massive youth turnout and parties (leading to the popular slogan, “What happens at CPAC stays at CPAC”). This gives it a certain utility in gauging the grassroots mood—for example, VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow, observing the first post-Obama CPAC, predicted the fierce backlash that became the Tea Party triumph of 2010.

But Brimelow also noted CPAC’s tight control by a self-interested D.C. in-group. This in-group’s crude (if eccentric) exclusionary policies have now precipitated a number of quarrels even within the Beltway Right.

The exclusion has become especially totalitarian on the immigration issue. In the past, CPAC’s managers have pretended to be even-handed. This year, as POLITICO’s Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman report,

Immigration, too, is flaring up as a point of contention. [CPAC sponsor American Conservative Union’s head Al] Cardenas is an outspoken backer of immigration reform [a.k.a. amnesty plus immigration surge], and the CPAC panel on the topic is stacked with like-minded Republicans at a moment when the issue still divides conservatives. [Links added by VDARE.com]

CPAC muddle mirrors GOP mess, March 13, 2013. See also Does CPAC matter anymore? By Karen Tumulty, Washington Post, March 13, 2013. VDARE.com emphasis. 

In the short run, however, the CPAC managers’ biggest problem is likely to be with libertarians—CPAC is the ideal setting for the emerging “Liberty Movement” to flex its muscle. Indeed, the Beltway Right is on the verge of being displaced by what might be called Libertarianism Inc.

Immigration patriots don’t have a dog in this fight, but should watch it closely.

Conservatism Inc.’s remarkable collapse of morale following President Obama's re-election is no surprise. It has profited for years by transmuting the grievances of the core American population into an illogical agenda that has nothing to do with defending that constituency’s interests. It drew on the style of Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis, while eliminating intellectual substance, and purging anyone who thought differently. The result is that “conservatism” has become a chaotic morass of irrational (but oddly Politically Correct) conspiracy theories, alarmist rhetoric about foreign policy threats, fanciful historical revisionism, and maudlin nostalgia for a simultaneously traditionalist and anti-racist America that never actually existed.

The Stupid Party is rather, well, stupid. It is incapable of serious thinking on a host of issues, especially those surrounding immigration. The endless search for a vibrant non-white face to front the same platform cannot conceal the reality that Conservatism Inc. is intellectually exhausted. The well has run dry.

Thus, young dissenters against Leftism, who would have been “Movement Conservatives” in the Reagan Era, are looking for something new that can promise victory. They have found it in libertarianism, following the rise of Ron Paul.

Unlike contemporary conservatism, libertarianism provides a coherent worldview. It at least attempts to address the crises that Leftism has created and to provide (if I can be forgiven the phrase) final solutions. For that reason, it attracts much of the better human caliber of the young Right. These activists can at least make the case that if only “the state” is drastically reduced or eliminated, everything from economic recession, to war, to ethnic conflict will be eliminated. Youth is also inherently more attracted to movements with revolutionary overtones. And young libertarians see the problem as the “neoconservatives” who have infiltrated Conservatism Inc.

Beltway conservatives who are wondering what happened to their movement have only themselves to blame. For decades, these clever charlatans slapped Politically Correct “limited government” sheen of sophistry over the actual interests of their unmentionable white middle and working class supporters. Now, a new generation has grown up believing that propaganda.

Conservatism Inc. was shocked in 2010 and 2011 by Ron Paul's victories in the CPAC Presidential Straw poll—and also by the raucous reception supposed conservative “heroes” received. In one especially amusing incident, Donald Rumsfeld and was massively booed in 2011 while receiving the “Defender of the Constitution Award” from ACU head David Keene—as was former Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Conservatism Inc. responded with an elaborate effort to suppress the Paul vote in 2012. The paper ballot was switched to an easier-to-use computer ballot, encouraging more casual attendees to vote. CPAC managers also undertook reforms to prevent “stacking” by libertarians and actively promoted various neoconservative speakers. And there was wailing and gnashing of teeth about the lack of “civility” supposedly shown by Paul supporters.

The intended result was achieved: Mitt Romney won the 2012 straw poll—and, of course, went on to blow the Presidential election.

This year, the battle will be between Conservative Inc. favorite Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. CPAC's changed location to remote Maryland may be part of a deliberate effort to skew attendance and guarantee Rubio's victory.

That said, Conservatism Inc. itself is on the verge of cracking up. Some factions within the Beltway support the libertarian surge—provided they can stay in control.  They want libertarians to stay on the reservation, and not challenge the reigning leadership in policy (and donations).

For example, Open Borders shill/ CPAC grey eminence Grover Norquist has voiced support for Ron Paul and his movement. Both Rand Paul and his ghost-writer/ grassroots ambassador Jack Hunter have responded with warm praise.

And FreedomWorks, until recently the home of illegal immigration supporter and corporate lobbyist Dick Armey (there was a predictable dispute over—you guessed it—money) is a pillar of Conservatism Inc. but simultaneously a supporter of Paul, providing a home for popular libertarian activists on staff.

Finally, the Cato Institute occasionally takes time from hailing Open Borders to praise the libertarian revolution and give support to groups like Students for Liberty.

Both nominally anti-Establishment libertarians and Conservatism Inc. get something from this reciprocal relationship. The former gain access. The latter purge away some of the more subversive elements of libertarianism and restructure it to fit within Conservatism Inc. Both have an interest in transforming grassroots American conservatism into an “economistic” movement.

One problem: many younger libertarians do not want to be seen as being on the “Right.” Historically, Conservatism Inc. has been cunning enough to use middle class white Americans as useful idiots. But many of the emerging libertarians are so housebroken to Political Correctness that they can't stand to be in the same room as even implicitly patriotic movements.

Thus the forthrightly left-libertarian Students for Liberty recently attacked the idea of “fusionism”

The Beltway is buzzing over President Obama's likely nomination of Thomas E. Perez as the next head of the U.S. Department of Labor. But when Americans find out whom Perez has lobbied for most aggressively over the course of his extremist leftwing social justice career, they'll be wondering which country Obama's pick really plans to serve.

Press accounts describe Perez, currently the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's civil rights division, as a "tireless advocate of worker and civil rights." The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Perez was a former special counsel for the late illegal alien amnesty champion Sen. Ted Kennedy.

During the Clinton years, Perez worked at the Justice Department to establish a "Worker Exploitation Task Force" to enhance working conditions for ... illegal alien workers. While holding down his government position, Perez volunteered for Casa de Maryland. This notorious illegal alien advocacy group is funded through a combination of taxpayer-subsidized grants (totaling $5 million in 2010 alone from Maryland and local governments) and radical liberal philanthropy, including billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute.

That's in addition to more than $1 million showered on the group by freshly departed Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez's regime-owned oil company, CITGO.

As I've reported previously, Perez rose from Casa de Maryland volunteer to president of the group's board of directors. Under the guise of enhancing the "multicultural" experience, he crusaded for an ever-expanding set of illegal alien benefits, from in-state tuition discounts for illegal alien students to driver's licenses and tax-subsidized day labor centers. Casa de Maryland opposes enforcement of deportation orders, has protested

The conclave to elect Pope Benedict XVI’s successor begins today (March 12). As a traditional Catholic and an American patriot, I am mildly hopeful about the liturgical and theological outcome—but, frankly, not optimistic about the implications for the immigration debate.

Just over ten years ago, (January 22, 2003), the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB] and the bishops of Mexico sent a Pastoral Letter to Catholic parishes throughout the US and Mexico entitled, Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope. Complete with footnotes and definitions, it amounted to a Treason Lobby vade mecum, a blueprint that, for all its Biblical injunctions, primarily sought the amnesty of untold millions of illegal aliens currently in the US—the majority of whom are Mexican nationals (and nominal Catholics).

As VDARE.com readers are well aware, Amnesty attempts were twice defeated in Congress during the second term of President George W. Bush. But now the Obama Administration has made “comprehensive immigration reform”—the cowardly code word for amnesty—a top priority in its second term. The GOP Establishment is in obvious disarray and appears willing to cave on core issues, including amnesty.

And, as if prompted by the Obama Administration, on the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6), the USCCB's Migration and Refugee Services Committee, which is headed by Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles—himself a Mexican immigrant—launched a postcard campaign calling on Congress to pass bills that

provide a path to citizenship for undocumented persons in the country; preserve family units as a cornerstone of our national immigration system; provide a legal path for low-skilled immigrant workers to come and work in the U.S.; restore due process protections to (illegal) immigrants, and address the root causes of migration, caused by persecution and economic disparity.

As a Catholic, I can only say sadly that it is all too understandable why critics see the USCCB merely as a wing of the Democratic Party. (Of course, the leaders of many Protestant denominations have taken positions on immigration similar to the Catholic Bishops—and their parishioners have responded in similar ways to their Catholic brethren, by rejecting them.)

Within USCCB, the current President, Timothy Cardinal Dolan of the New York Archdiocese, has become the “go-to guy” in articulating the Church's position on immigration.

In February, 2012, upon returning from Rome where he had received his red hat as a cardinal, Dolan was quoted by the NY Times in which he said:

[H]e first wanted the church to be more effective locally and nationally in its outreach to immigrants, particularly Latinos, who are no longer in Catholic schools in the numbers they once were.

“The church has been the engine of welcoming people, caring for them and getting them settled as happy, productive citizens who are loyal citizens and loyal Catholics,” he said. “It bothers me that for the first time in American Catholic history, we may not be responding well to the needs of immigrant children in our Catholic schools.”

Cardinal Dolan Sets Agenda for Return to New York, By Sharon Otterman, February 20, 2012

On his own Diocesan blog, Dolan wrote

"Comprehensive immigration reform" is a logical, long-overdue expression of the true "sentiment in our national soul...of welcome and embrace to the immigrant."[Immigration Reform, April 27th, 2010]

(Appallingly, Dolan is now being mentioned as the next Pope—for example