South Africans vs. Somalis: Some Immigrants Are More Welcome Than Others

Well now, it's a relief to see that as 2003 begins, the U.S. government is finally getting tough with illegal immigrants.

From South Dakota comes news that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has ordered an entire family of immigrants to pack up and get out. They were supposed to have left this week, but whether they managed to finagle the laws to stay here I don't know. [VDARE.COM NOTE: our immigration law expert Juan Mann advises that the most effective thing any INS-threatened illegal can do is simply vanish – as Denver Post pinup-boy Jesus Apodaca has now apparently done, despite massive publicity.]

What I do know is that the immigrants are a law-abiding, church-going, productive white family—from South Africa.

No wonder they have to go.

With Mexican illegals pouring across the borders and drenching the country in illegal drugs and Somalis in Maine bankrupting local welfare roles, President Bush is pondering amnesty for the Mexicans and the Democrats are demanding amnesty for all illegals.

But all the "compassionate conservatism" in the White House and the rest of the swill the political class feeds us do nothing for the Steenkamp family.

The Steenkamps—a couple in their 30s with two young children—came to this country in 2001, paying borrowed money to a con artist who promised to get them legal admission to the United States and escape from the rising tides of black terror now engulfing post-apartheid South Africa. Once arrived in the United States, the Steenkamps found themselves deserted by their vanishing benefactor, who was soon busted for running an immigrant smuggling ring.

The Steenkamps got help from Americans, but the INS advised them to leave the country and re-enter from Mexico—which they did. They got parole status and wound up with temporary work visas in Warner, S.D., where they joined the local church, worked, and became part of the community.

"He's an excellent individual," the local farmer who hired Wessel Steenkamp says. "They're not just people who sit in the pew," their pastor reports. "They've really entered into close friendships."

So far no reports about drug-pushing or welfare.

Nevertheless, the INS, eagle-eyed for any infraction of the immigration laws, spied them out and told them they had to leave. Desperately, the Steenkamps applied for political asylum on the grounds of the emerging anarchy that afflicts their native country, the reason they left in the first place.

Sorry, the mass murder of whites because of their race, which is what's beginning in South Africa, is not a legitimate ground for claiming asylum. The attacks in South Africa, you see, are "criminal," not "racial." Never mind that the New York Times and other papers have repeatedly carried reports on the racial targeting of whites by black marauders in South Africa. Never mind that last year there were some 1,400 attacks on white-owned farms in South Africa, with 200 whites killed, on top of some 700 killed in the previous five years.

Anti-white terrorism? Where?

Meanwhile, not only in Maine, but also in Minnesota, not too far from where the dangerous Steenkamp family has invaded, Somali immigrants have arrived to demonstrate the advantages of multicultural diversity. I wrote about the Somalis of Lewiston, Maine, some weeks ago. Now a reader from Minnesota writes me about the Somalis in her area.

“60,000 Somalis,” she writes, “took over an area of Minneapolis that was once a community where American Indians lived. Somalis, who are culturally violent, took to drug running and sending money to Al Quaeda. The FBI has shut down some of their money wiring activities, but the situation has caused a great deal of negative social change. Most Indians had to move out for fear of the constant shootings. Local stores had to put up glass in front of cashiers, because the Somalis spit at the cashiers. People complain about their lack of hygiene (they don't shower their bodies, only their feet) and high rate of tuberculosis. On 9/11 the high school had to be shut down, since Somali teens cheered and American kids fought back, creating a riot. They had a riot a while ago wielding machetes at police. When war comes to America, we know who we'll be fighting in the streets, just watch the movie 'Blackhawk Down.' Why are our enemies living here?"

Actually, the question should be, why does the U.S. government, so eager to round up and kick out the decent Steenkamp family despite all the gabble about being "a nation of immigrants," allow and even encourage the garbage of Africa to come here at all and do nothing to force them out?

Why does it allow millions of illegal aliens from Mexico to invade the country every year—and threaten to punish Americans who try to stop it?

And finally, why does any American who understands how his own government is already waging war against its own people seriously believe that it really remains his government at all?

January 09, 2003