May 2006 » The Immigration Blog

While Congress moves dutifully forward on passing some sort of amnesty, now most likely in the form of the much-lauded Pence sellout, something like open revolt seems to be brewing within the GOP’s conservative base.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reports on the uphill primary battle facing Utah Congressman Chris Cannon. This is not the first time that Cannon, a fifth-term incumbent and President Bush’s point man on immigration in the House, has faced a primary race challenge over his stance on the issue. In 2004, former Utah state legislator Matt Throckmorton gave Cannon a nasty race for his money. The money ultimately prevailed – in addition to being the state GOP Chairman’s brother, Cannon’s personal fortune is estimated at $12 million – but only after Cannon outspent Throckmorton 9-to-1 in an election that was supposed to be a cinch.

This time around, Cannon may be less lucky. His opponent, Utah businessman John Jacob, is just as rich as Cannon and then some. What’s more, the political ground has shifted in important ways since the 2004 elections. With conservatives up in arms over the President’s plan to regularize the status of the 12 to 20 million illegals already in the country and invite millions more, Cannon actually found himself defeated 52 to 48 at a state GOP convention two weeks ago.

Lest we forget, Cannon is the candidate who, in 2002, boasted to a roomful of MALDEF notables: “We love immigrants in Utah. And we don't make the distinction very often between legal and illegal.” While Cannon might not make that distinction, my guess is that the citizens of Utah do – and will do so at the June 27th primary election. For supporters of genuine immigration reform – that is, the vast majority of the American people – there would be nothing sweeter than to see Cannon sent back home to sell insurance or whatever it was he did before money and family connections bought him a career in politics.

Washington is watching the campain closely. As one Republican Congressman told the WSJ: “House Republicans are already spooked about immigration, and should one of our own lose on the issue, you will see panic break out.”

While efforts need to be focused now on the House, voters must not forget last week’s extraordinary Senate betrayal. Fourteen Republican Senators are up for re-election, four of whom voted in favor of S.2611. All four seem safe for the moment but at least one of them, Indiana Republican Richard Lugar, faces a write-in campaign to protest his pro-amnesty stance. The campaign’s organizer, Navy veteran and grass roots activist Rick Hale [donate to Rick's campaign here], has this to say about his rival:

Perhaps Senator Lugar is arrogant because he currently has no Democratic Party challenger in the upcoming election, so he feels safe to ignore the desires of Hoosier voters. Perhaps he is too interested in pleasing those business owners who want a cheap source of illegal labor. Or, perhaps 29 years in Washington, D.C. is just too long. Whatever the case, I believe Hoosiers and other Americans deserve someone who is looking out for them, and Richard Lugar has proven he is not that person.

Hale’s campaign is indicative of the profound sense of betrayal felt by millions of conservatives across the country. It is also a model of civic action.

While there’s still time to make our voices heard, it’s quickly running out. Take a moment and tell your Congressman what you think, by telephone or brick. And then, once you’ve done that, be sure to donate to one of the many worthy groups that are valiantly trying to turn the tide in this debate.

Out of all the chatter going on about illegal alien amnesty, no Main Stream Media writer has picked up on the "under the red cover" scandal of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) 1986 Amnesty—the dirty business of known fraudulent amnesty applications being summarily granted by unseen forces and then promptly covered up through convenient "confidentiality" provisions. Consequently, the extent of the 1986 amnesty fraud is STILL UNKNOWN.

Fortunately for America, courageous folks like "Prolific Whistleblower X" have an insider’s knowledge and also care about what happens to our country. America desperately needs experts who have been paying attention and are now telling the truth about what really happened during the first illegal alien amnesty disaster . . . and what will happen to America again if S.2611 is not stopped in its tracks.

Read the Exclusive Report by “Prolific Whistleblower X”, now on VDARE.com.

Also, related articles from the Juan Mann Archive on VDARE.com:

Amnesty Betrayals Past and Present

Blowing the whistle on 1986 amnesty fraud

Under the red cover the truth about the 1986 amnesty

Ask an amnesty advocate -- how much fraud last time? excerpts from OIG reports on 1986 agricultural amnesty fraud

There are two must-read items on the web today.

First, this piece by Newsweek's Joseph Contreras, "Stepping Over the Line: Don't Try Sneaking North Across Mexico's Other Border" (linked in this much worth reading Certain Slant of Light post). Contreras writes:

As tough as the United States can be for workers who slip in from south of the border, Mexico is in a poor position to criticize. The problem goes far beyond the predatory gantlet of thugs and crooked cops facing defenseless transients like Moisés. There's ample precedent in Mexico for just about everything the United States is—or isn't—doing. Calling out the military? Mexicans may hate the new U.S. plan to deploy 6,000 National Guard troops on the border, but five years ago they cheered President Vicente Fox for sending thousands of Mexican soldiers to crack down on their southern frontier. Tougher laws? Hispanic-rights groups are enraged over U.S. efforts to criminalize undocumented aliens—yet since 1974, sneaking into Mexico has been punishable by up to two years in prison. Foot-dragging on amnesty? Fox has spent the past five years urging the United States to upgrade the status of millions of illegals from Mexico. Meanwhile, his own government has given legal status to only 15,000 foreigners without papers.

Such double-standards can be found everywhere outside the developed world. It's nice to see that they are finally receiving a bit of attention but too bad they didn't receive any before. It may already be too late.

Meanwhile, VDare.com's Allan Wall offers a wrap-up of Vicente Fox's American Fairness Tour. Wall comments:

I suspect it must actually be a psychological letdown for the presidente to be back in Mexico, where Fox is treated with much less deference than in the United States.

In the U.S. Henhouse, Fox was treated like a conquering hero. He was wined and dined, lionized and celebrated, and carefully kept isolated from protestors and hostile questions from the media.

Transfer of sovereignty to the new North American superstate is moving ahead nicely, thank you very much. Those who persist in thinking that America as we know it is worth preserving have very little time left to their voices heard -- or forever hold their peace.

On May 19th, John McCain held a fundraiser at New York's posh Regency Hotel. The New York Observer's Jason Horowitz reports:

“What kind of a country do we want to be?” Mr. McCain asked his audience, walking around in the middle of a horseshoe-shaped table as he proceeded to answer his own question.

He cautioned against ghettoizing immigrants, which he noted has brought about disastrous results in France, and criticized elements in his own party as “nativist” before lambasting the punditry of Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs and Michael Savage for helping to “fuel the problem,” according to two of the sources.

A week later on the Senate floor, a stuttering and indignant McCain responded in these terms to Senator Jeff Bingaman's (D-NM) amendment to put a cap on the annual number of visas awarded under S.2611:

He [Bingaman] wants us to be like other countries, maybe France, maybe Germany [...] This is against family, this is against everything that America stands for.

McCain is right: nobody in their right mind would want to model immigration policy on Europe's example. The problem is, that's exactly what McCain and his allies in Congress are proposing.

Here's why:

The centerpiece of S.2611 is a guest-worker program that lays the foundations for giving citizenship to the millions of illegals already here as well as the millions more who will soon follow. Woops! That's precisely how Europe got its restive immigrant population in the first place.

Between the mid-fifties and the mid-seventies, Europe imported millions of ill-educated foreign workers from former colonial holdings in North Africa and the Mideast. They were supposed to go home once their jobs were finished. They didn't. The result was that, when European economies tanked in the mid-seventies, these guest-workers, now unemployed (and, increasingly, unemployable) quickly set about reproducing all the worst traits of urban ghetto life. In the meantime, they had become citizens.

By opening the path to citizenship for guest-workers, S.2611 makes temporary labor flows permanent, with consequences that are sure to be just as destructive -- if not more so -- than those which Europe is now experiencing.

The Senate bill will also lead to an immense increase in the annual number of legal immigrants granted entry to the US -- some 66 million over 20 years. Woops again! If France and Germany have trouble "digesting" their large immigrant and immigrant-descended populations, it's because new waves of immigrants are constantly arriving, settling in the same towns and neighborhoods as their predecessors. Over time, these have become self-sustaining islands of ethnic difference.

S.2611 sets the stage for exactly the same thing in the US. In both places, mass immigration plus birth-right citizenship plus family reunification are and will be a recipe for social disaster.

S.2611 is integral to the supra-national project dear to the Bush administration and Chambers of Commerce everywhere. But if it's hard to control your own borders, it's even more difficult to control those of your neighbors. Once again, Europe leads the way. By providing for the free movement of citizens between member states, the European Union puts every member state at the mercy of all the others, effectively removing immigration policy from the hands of national governments.

Poland won't control immigration to Britain's liking. Is there any reason to suppose that Mexico will do so to ours?

The legislation now before Congress follows the European example to the letter. With one exception: the scale of immigration provided for by S.2611 is several orders of magnitude greater.

Don't want the US to be like France and Germany, Senator McCain? Fine. Then enforce our borders, reduce immigration, and start acting like national sovereignty and national security come before the unholy alliance of "Chambers of Commerce, unions, and Hispanic groups" you so arrogantly serve.

That, after all, is your job.

Today's Washington Times reports:

The Senate yesterday easily approved an immigration bill that allows 10 million illegal aliens to become citizens, doubles the flow of legal immigration each year and will cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $54 billion over the next 10 years.

54 billion. The sums involved are hardly the only problem with the Senate bill. Sill, while we await the House response, it's useful to consider the politics of such immense transfer payments.

In a much-remarked 2004 essay (see here), Prospect editor David Goodhart examined diversity and the welfare state in contemporary Britain. The gist of the essay was that sharing and solidarity – and thus the public’s willingness to finance the social state – are in conflict with high degrees of ethnic diversity.

“The left's recent love affair with diversity,” Goodhart warned fellow progressives, “may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once championed.”

The article continues:

We share public services and parts of our income in the welfare state, we share public spaces in towns and cities where we are squashed together on buses, trains and tubes, and we share in a democratic conversation - filtered by the media - about the collective choices we wish to make. All such acts of sharing are more smoothly and generously negotiated if we can take for granted a limited set of common values and assumptions. But as Britain becomes more diverse that common culture is being eroded.
[...]
In the rhetoric of the modern liberal state, the glue of ethnicity ("people who look and talk like us") has been replaced with the glue of values ("people who think and behave like us"). But British values grow, in part, out of a specific history and even geography. Too rapid a change in the make-up of a community not only changes the present, it also, potentially, changes our link with the past [note: I less elegantly make the same point here]. As Bob Rowthorn wrote in Prospect in February 2003, we may lose a sense of responsibility for our own history - the good things as well as the shameful things in it - if too many citizens no longer identify with it.

The less we have in common, the less generous we are likely to be toward our fellow citizens, the less willing we will be to support transfer payments to the less well-off.

The bill passed by the Senate, in this respect, is a recipe for welfare state meldown.

Some on the right will no doubt rejoice at this prospect. They shouldn't. The welfare state won't be the only thing swept away by the coming immigrant tsunami. National identity, political stability and common civility are also on their way out.

The numbers proposed by the Senate bill -- at least 66 million over twenty years -- are simply too vast. That we've completely given up on assimilation and happen to share a long border and troubled history with the principal immigrant soucre country doesn't help either.

Should all this come to pass, it may also mean the end of the two major parties. But then they will be the least of the new bill's victims.

[scroll down for updates...]

The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (S.2611) is scheduled to go for a final vote before the Senate today (Thursday). It will almost certainly pass, putting the Senate on a collision course with House law makers, who have already voted for their own, enforcement-only approach.

If the bill is to become law, the Senate will need to reach a compromise with the House. In preparation for this, President Bush has already twice dispatched Karl Rove to meet with Republican Representatives, prompting one skeptical Congressman (Florida Republican Ric Keller) to observe:

Karl, yesterday Ted Kennedy gave a passionate speech on the Senate floor supporting President Bush’s proposal. If you get in bed with Ted Kennedy, you’re going to get more than sleep.

Expect the White House to use whatever political capital it has left to get this legislation passed.

I will be updating on the Senate vote and related issues over the course of the day. In the meantime, it's not too late to call your Senators and tell them what you think...

UPDATE (8am):

Clinton better than Bush on border security, Congressional study finds. The Washington Times reports:

Mr. Bush trails his predecessor on a series of measures of border security, says the briefing from the Congressional Research Service to the House Judiciary Committee, which was based on Department of Homeland Security data. [...] Although Mr. Bush last week said his administration has caught and returned 6 million illegal aliens, that's actually a drop from any five-year period during Mr. Clinton's administration, the briefing says.

Yeah, Mr. Bush said a lot of things last week. Lest we forget, this is not the first time he has promised to get serious about border enforcement.

Vicente Fox's American Fairness Tour is in full swing. Tickets for the Mexican Fairness Tour have yet to go on sale...

Bush's New World Order. Jerome R. Corsi writes:

Without announcing his intentions to do so, President Bush has decided to support the creation of a North American Union through a process of governmental regulations, never having to bring the issue before the American people for a clear referendum or vote.

Beware the "middle ground" proposals that are already sprouting like mushrooms in the House. On American sovereignty, there is no middle ground.

So tell us how you really feel: Face Right reports on John McCain's May 19th fundraiser at New York's Regency Hotel and all the, er, indiscreet things he said there.

UPDATE (noon): If you've not already done so, read Michelle's post on the ongoing Senate floor debate and then read Jim DeMint's top ten reasons to oppose the bill.

Via HotAir: Video from this morning's debate.

Some, uh, highlights:

Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) on his incredibly modest proposal to put a cap on the number of legal work visas offered under S.2611: "We need to be somewhat prudent in what we're doing."

John McCain (R-AZ) angrily denounces Bingaman ammendment: "He wants us to be like other countries, maybe France, maybe Germany [...] This is against family, this is against everything that America stands for. [...] Ths is just one of a series of ammendments to restrict people's abilitity to come to this country. [...] I don't want America to be like every other country in the world. [...] Lately, these ammendments have had a tenor and effect, and I don't think it's good for this country and I don't think it's healthy for America."

Bingaman responds: "His [McCain's] proposal had a cap of 290,000. Now, I'm proposing a proposal that's more than twice the proposal that his bill had [...] I'm saying legal permanent residents should not exceed 600,000 per year. [...] So I don't think this is unfair. It's more than twice what he and Senator Kennedy proposed."

Yes, it's come to this. The Senate is literally haggling over our future.

UPDATE (1pm): Polipundit links to John O'Sullivan at NRO:

A political party is not a suicide pact. Neither House nor Senate Republicans need follow George W. Bush—a lame lemming if ever there was one—over a cliff. Senate Republicans can mount a filibuster against the bill. And if that fails, House Republicans can refuse to go to conference on it and halt the bill that way. They would be entirely justified.

And here's yet another ten reasons to oppose S.2611 (HT: CSL).

Update (2.30pm): Bingaman ammendment passes. Allahpundit has the details.

Update (4.40pm): California Conservative carries an open letter to Vicente Fox from Californian Assemblyman Chuck DaVore. "President Fox, we call upon you to deal with Mexico’s immigration issues before you deign to tell us how to reform our own laws."

Update (6.05pm): As expected, S.2611 is approved by the Senate. Allahpundit has the vote at 62-36 in favor. I'll update once the rollcall is up.

And here it is:

YEAs ---62
Akaka (D-HI)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Bennett (R-UT)
Biden (D-DE)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brownback (R-KS)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Carper (D-DE)
Chafee (R-RI)
Clinton (D-NY)
Coleman (R-MN)
Collins (R-ME)
Conrad (D-ND)
Craig (R-ID)
Dayton (D-MN)
DeWine (R-OH)
Dodd (D-CT)
Domenici (R-NM)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feingold (D-WI)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Frist (R-TN)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hagel (R-NE)
Harkin (D-IA)
Inouye (D-HI)
Jeffords (I-VT)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Leahy (D-VT)
Levin (D-MI)
Lieberman (D-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Lugar (R-IN)
Martinez (R-FL)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Murray (D-WA)
Nelson (D-FL)
Obama (D-IL)
Pryor (D-AR)
Reed (D-RI)
Reid (D-NV)
Sarbanes (D-MD)
Schumer (D-NY)
Smith (R-OR)
Snowe (R-ME)
Specter (R-PA)
Stevens (R-AK)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Warner (R-VA)
Wyden (D-OR)

NAYs ---36
Alexander (R-TN)
Allard (R-CO)
Allen (R-VA)
Bond (R-MO)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burns (R-MT)
Burr (R-NC)
Byrd (D-WV)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Dole (R-NC)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Grassley (R-IA)
Hatch (R-UT)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Lott (R-MS)
Nelson (D-NE)
Roberts (R-KS)
Santorum (R-PA)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Sununu (R-NH)
Talent (R-MO)
Thomas (R-WY)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)

Not Voting - 2
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Salazar (D-CO)

By Party:
Yeas: 23 Republican; 39 Democrat.
Nays: 32 Republican; 4 Democrat.

For the Democrats, at least, it was by party line. I will have more to say about the vote over the weekend. For the moment, I think I need a breath of fresh air.

In the past few days, a number of commentators have remarked on the striking parallels between the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, which the Senate is set to pass any day now, and the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.

As Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese pointed out in yesterday’s New York Times:

Like the amnesty bill of 1986, the current Senate proposal would place those who have resided illegally in the United States on a path to citizenship, provided they meet a similar set of conditions and pay a fine and back taxes. The illegal immigrant does not go to the back of the line but gets immediate legalized status, while law-abiding applicants wait in their home countries for years to even get here. And that's the line that counts. In the end, slight differences in process do not change the overriding fact that the 1986 law and today's bill are both amnesties.

A difference of semantics, then, but also of numbers. The 1986 amnesty regularized the status of 5 million aliens. The present amnesty, which would have never seen the light of day had any of the governments of the past twenty years kept their promises, proposes to regularize between 12 and 20 million of them. Meese isn't hostile to the idea of a guest-worker program but sees enforcement as a necessary firs step. As in 1986, amnesty will only compound the problem of illegal immigration unless it is preceded by a rigorous crack-down on those who employ illegals as well as immediate (and real) enforcement on the border.

Fair enough. It's clear that amnesty will only encourage yet new waves of border crashers. It's also clear that the Bush administration wants it this way. Meese is right to demand that the administration end its double-talk on the issue. In the absence of genuine border enforcement
(studiously avoided by the Senate bill), Bush’s “guest-worker” proposal will only fuel the spread of the parallel economy. Instead of two economies, we will have three: the legal, the semi-legal, and the illegal. In ten years time, we will be back where we started, and then some.

But there's another problem with the guest-worker idea and, more generally, the vast expansion of legal immigration envisionned by the Senate bill: what happens to immigrants and their children when the economy they've come to service changes?

Consider the case of France and Germany. Between the mid-fifties and the early seventies, both countries imported millions of peasants from remote corners of Turkey and North Africa to make up for temporary labor shortfalls. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. And yet, when European economies tanked in the mid-seventies, neither the guest-workers nor their children, now largely unemployed, opted to leave. For both countries, the result has been a huge drag on unemployment benefits, health care and education. In the meantime, the very fabric of national identity has reached a snapping point, with increasingly embittered immigrants exacerbating a siege-mentality among ethnic Germans and French.

The European experience gives the lie to those who see importing foreign labor as the magic solution to domestic labor shortages. Former Wall Street Journal editor William P. Kucewicz, for example, who argues in the most recent number of NRO that Hagel-Martienz is "the next best thing" to native-born demographic growth:

While it’s too late to change the boomers’ baby-mating habits, policymakers can do the next best thing: that is, import as adults via liberalized immigration policies the children who were never born. Working-aged immigrants would do just as nicely as native-born Americans in terms of maintaining a viable ratio of workers to retirees.

Perhaps they would -- in the first generation. But what if most of those workers are themselves , like so many Mexican immigrants, dependent on social services? And what happens when they retire? Who's going to pay for Medicare then? I'm not an economist but it seems to me obvious that such Kucewicz-type "solutions" are stop-gap at best, disastrous at worst. What's being proposed here is a recipe for indefinite immigration-driven population growth -- unsustainable in the long-term, undesirable in the short -- followed by social collapse and political convulsion.

Once again, the European case is instructive. Europe's demographic crisis is, if anything, far more grave than that facing the US. At the same time, the European social model is far more generous than ours. For years, mass immigration has been central to European government strategies for propping up the welfare state. But does it work?

A little remarked year 2000 UN study [PDF] gives a hint:

In contrast to the migration streams needed to offset total or working-age population decline, the levels of migration that would be needed to prevent the countries from ageing are of substantially larger magnitudes. By 2050, these larger migration flows would result in populations where the proportion of post-1995 migrants would range between 50 percent and 99 percent. Such high levels of migration have not been observed in the past for any of these countries or regions. Moreover, it seems extremely unlikely that such flows could happen in these countries in the forseeable future.

That last sentence, it seems to me, is an understatement. Like much of Europe, postwar America erected a social welfare system founded on an illusion of permanence. That illusion has since been shattered. The solution is not to desperately prop up the system at whatever cost. The solution is to recognize the problem, change the system, and hope for better times.

Markets and demography are transient. Immigration is not. Should the President and Senate have their way, we will be paying the price for the rest of our lives.

The AP reports that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's motion for cloture has passed. This effectively ends debate on S.2611 and clears the way for a vote on the legislation later this week (or even later today).

To judge by the number of Senators who voted for cloture -- 73 yeas, 25 nays -- it seems likely the bill will pass. I will update with a breakdown of this morning's Senate vote as soon as one is available...

UPDATE (1.10PM):

If you've not done so already, contact your Senators here and tell them to vote 'no' on S.2611.

What others are saying:

They Call me Vonski with an email from Numbers USA's Roy Beck: "THE PROCEDURAL BACKROOM DEALS PREVAILED -- MANY OF OUR ALLIES SOLD OUT OUR BEST OPPORTUNITY TO STOP THE SENATE AMNESTY [...] THE NEED FOR PHONING HAS NOT ENDED."

Iowa Voice warns: "Get ready, folks....the big sell-out is coming."

Hot Air with continuous updates.

A Certain Slant of Light observes: "Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) has become the Republican Party’s version of John Kerry — he voted for border security first before he set the stage to vote against it."

UPDATE (5.20pm): The roll call vote on this morning's cloture motion is finally up. Here it is grouped by vote:

YEAs ---73
Akaka (D-HI)
Alexander (R-TN)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Bennett (R-UT)
Biden (D-DE)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brownback (R-KS)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Carper (D-DE)
Chafee (R-RI)
Clinton (D-NY)
Cochran (R-MS)
Coleman (R-MN)
Collins (R-ME)
Conrad (D-ND)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Craig (R-ID)
Dayton (D-MN)
DeWine (R-OH)
Dodd (D-CT)
Domenici (R-NM)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feingold (D-WI)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Frist (R-TN)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hagel (R-NE)
Harkin (D-IA)
Hatch (R-UT)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inouye (D-HI)
Jeffords (I-VT)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Kohl (D-WI)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Leahy (D-VT)
Levin (D-MI)
Lieberman (D-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Lott (R-MS)
Lugar (R-IN)
Martinez (R-FL)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Murray (D-WA)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Obama (D-IL)
Pryor (D-AR)
Reed (D-RI)
Reid (D-NV)
Salazar (D-CO)
Sarbanes (D-MD)
Schumer (D-NY)
Smith (R-OR)
Snowe (R-ME)
Specter (R-PA)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Stevens (R-AK)
Thomas (R-WY)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Warner (R-VA)
Wyden (D-OR)

NAYs ---25
Allard (R-CO)
Allen (R-VA)
Bond (R-MO)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burns (R-MT)
Burr (R-NC)
Byrd (D-WV)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Dole (R-NC)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Ensign (R-NV)
Grassley (R-IA)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Roberts (R-KS)
Santorum (R-PA)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Sununu (R-NH)
Talent (R-MO)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)

Not Voting - 2
Enzi (R-WY)
Rockefeller (D-WV)

Rockefeller was apparently away for back surgery. I don't know about Enzi. Of the 25 who voted against cloture (the good guys), 23 were Republicans. Of the 73 who voted for it (the other sort), 31 were Republicans.

Check this list to see where your Senators stood and then call them first thing tomorrow morning. S.2611 is almost certain to pass out of the Senate before week's end. It is nevertheless important to let those Senators who sided with Frist know that their votes have not gone unremarked at home.

Contact your Senators here.

[Original posting in the Juan Mann Archive on VDARE.com]

While the Treason Lobby is chock-full of attorneys bought and paid for by every pro-immigration special interest group under the sun, the real, patriotic immigration reform movement has precious little public support from esteemed members of the bar.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) closes in on achieving a 10,000 attorney army representing illegal aliens, criminal alien residents and American-replacing H-1B (employment) visa-holders from sea to shining sea. But are there any patriotic attorneys out there—actually familiar with the inner workings of the federal immigration bureaucracy—willing to lend a hand for our side?

So far . . . not many!

I’ve been observing the real immigration reform coalition since going public with DeportAliens.com in November, 2001. I published just about everything I have to say about the federal immigration litigation bureaucracy of the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) in my Absolutely Definitive Essay in December, 2005.

But so far, the silence from immigration-savvy attorneys has been deafening.

Some exceptions:

Recovering immigration attorney Matt Hayes—familiar with the EOIR – wrote columns for Fox News and others. He even spoke out against corrupt snakehead lawyers in New York City.

I received an excellent whistleblowing letter from a former Immigration and Naturalization Service attorney in June 2002. The attorney finally left the INS “[a]fter 4 long years of banging my head against the wall and listening to people lie and be rewarded with permanent residence.”

In other words, it’s a rare event when I receive e-mail from attorneys commenting on what’s really going on in the inner sanctum of the EOIR immigration court.

But it just so happens that a recovering immigration attorney sent me some comments via e-mail this past week.

[ . . . Read the full story in the Juan Mann Archive on VDARE.com]

Update 5/24 (2pm): Frist's cloture motion passed this morning by a large margin. Click here for updates.

The Senate will tomorrow (Wednesday) hold a cloture vote on S.2611. "Cloture" ends debate on a bill and puts it before the Senate for a final vote. Should the motion for cloture be passed, S.2611 will likely go before the assembled Senate by week's end.

Senate Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), who introduced the cloture motion, explained it this way:

We allowed discussion and debate, and I think the country's understanding of this legislation, which is complex, has improved over the course of the several weeks we've had it on the floor.

Translation: the Senate debate has been too successul in alerting the American people to the stakes of the present legislation. Quick! Let's move on!

The Washington Post reports:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) filed a “cloture motion” designed to keep the bill’s opponents from using endless debate to delay a vote beyond this week.

Now that sounds more like it.

Should Frist's motion pass and the Senate approve the bill, it will then be sent to a House-Senate Conference committee to hammer out a compromise. At the moment, the House seems unlikely to back the bill. But nothing is certain.

A Certain Slant of Light (CSL) and Numbers USA offer a convenient ranking of the 41 Senators who will be key to defeating the cloture motion. Contact your Senators and tell them what you think and then contact other Senators on the Numbers USA list and tell them the same thing.

Simply killing the cloture motion would be a victory in itself. A defeat for Frist would mean more debate, and that's just what's needed.

Here's what I've told my representatives: no Senator who votes for cloture will have my vote in future elections and, should the bill pass, only candidates who advocate its repeal will receive my support.

Republican politicians need to think about this NOW. There's been much talk in the media about Hispanic political clout. As Steve Sailer observes at the VDare.com blog, however, alienating one's base is a losing proposition. The much touted Hispanic vote, which has a long way to go before it materializes as a major force on the national scene in any case, shows every sign of voting Democrat.

In the meanwhile, the GOP establishment stupidly waits for the big Hispanic payoff. They'd better not wait too long. When the bubble bursts on this illusion, as it inevitably will, there may be no Party left to bail them out.

I have already posted on the little-discussed legal immigration provisions of Senate bill S.2611, now moving inexorably toward passage.

The major and most immediately measurable consequence of these provisions will be a dramatic increase in America’s yearly intake of immigrants. According to a revised impact analysis issued last week, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act will add an additional 66 million (and possibly as many as 90 million) legal immigrants to America’s population over the next two decades. Add these figures to Census Bureau projections of natural population growth [PDF] over the same period (+34 million) and you wind up with a net gain of 100 million people.

The most recent Census Bureau estimate puts the US population at over 296 million. Should S.2611 become law, that figure will rise to 396 million between now and 2026.

As usual, the devil is in the demography. For the US population is already undergoing rapid and profound transformation due to the combined effect of ongoing mass immigration, relatively low native birth rates, and relatively high immigrant ones. As a year 2000 Census report noted:

Among women 40 to 44 years old in 1998, only Hispanic women, with an average of 2.4 births each, had exceeded the level required for natural replacement of the population (about 2.1 births per woman). African American women (2.0 births per woman) and Asian and Pacific Islander women (2.0 births) had fertility levels not significantly different from the replacement level, while White non-Hispanic women (1.8 births) were significantly below replacement level.

Or, as Gregory Spencer, Census Bureau chief of population projections, put it:

'The main thing is migration. We have over a million additions to our population through migration. [...] When you think that many are young and of child-bearing age you can expect what's going to happen. They're going to have children and that keeps multiplying the effect'.

And that was two years ago! Were immigration cut off, the Census data suggests that the US population would actually begin to shrink in line with most Western European countries. Instead, it is growing rapidly. Throwing another 66 million newcomers into the mix will only accelerate these trends.

Demographers have a term for this: it's called replacement migration. Relatively low native-born birthrates plus relatively high immigrant birthrates plus a never-ending stream of new arrivals means that, in twenty years, America will be, literally, another country.

While no one disputes these projections, open borders advocates are quick to slam those who worry over them as nativists and worse. This response is just further evidence of their total lack of historical imagination. Solidarity is the foundation of nations. But it is built, not invented.

As the great French historian Ernest Renan remarked in a famous 1888 lecture to the Sorbonne:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present- day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. Man, Gentlemen, does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion.
[…]
A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life.

What are the prospects for a nation in which the ties to the past have been severed? What are the chances that, tomorrow, Americans will still desire to live together?

These are the questions, it seems to me, that all Americans, whatever their political orientation, need to be asking themselves. The Senate is playing a dangerous game. Should S.2611 be signed into law, we shall all pay the consequences.

Yesterday, Joe Guzzardi of VDare.com posted the full text of Jeff Sessions' extraordinary Friday Senate floor speech.

Sessions is the Alabama Republican responsible for outing S.2611's little discussed legal immigration provisions. In the speech, which is both passionate and thoroughly informed, Sessions explodes the myth that there are jobs Americans won't do, exposes the consequences of mass immigration for American wages, lauds French and Australian efforts to screen out poorly educated immigrants in favor of more qualified ones, and takes his colleagues to task for their dishonesty and apparent indifference to the legislation's probable consequences.

This is the great Senate of the United States of America, and we are not here just to do something, anything. We are here to do the right thing. We are here to confront one of the big issues of our time, and to do it in a way that is consistent with our laws and our values and the values of the American people. That is what we should do. That is our responsibility to our constituents, to our posterity, to the heritage we have been given. That is absolutely our responsibility.

I will tell you, and I will say it plainly, and others may not, but this legislation fails miserably in that regard. It is unworthy of the Senate. It should never pass, it should never become the law of the United States of America. It does not meet our highest ideals. It does not create a system that is consistent with the national interests of the United States.

[...]

In terms of lawfulness, decency, morality, and the national interest, the American people are head and shoulders above the Members of Congress who are asserting and pushing this flawed legislation. A huge majority of the American people have been right on this issue for decades. It is the executive branch and the Congress that have been derelict in their most solemn duties. Had the American people been listened to and not been stiff-armed by an arrogant elitist bureaucracy and political class, we wouldn't have 11 million to 20 million people in our country illegally today.

Read the full speech here. And then call your elected representatives in Washington and tell them what you think.

There are still patriots in the US Senate. It is not too late to kill this legislation.

As the US Senate debated away America's future this week, the lower house of France's legislature passed "comprehensive immigration reform" of its own (the law now still needs to be approved by the legislature's upper house).

It is the mirror image of what the Senate is preparing for America.

Instead of expanding legal immigration, the French law restricts it. Instead of loosening rules on "family reunification", it tightens them. Instead of making it easier for illegals to become citizens, it makes it harder.

The Washington Post reports:

The proposed law would dramatically change several longstanding French immigration policies. It would make it easier for the country to screen out low-income, poorly educated immigrants in favor of highly skilled workers; it would tighten restrictions under which immigrant workers can bring their families to France; and it would abolish the right of illegal immigrants to receive residency papers after living in France for 10 years.

While the American and French situations are not identical, they have important points in common. Like the US, France is confronted with economic migration on a scale unprecedented in its history. And, in both countries, the sheer number of new-comers is placing huge strains on social services, inter-communal relations and national security.

So why has France chosen restriction over liberalization? The answer is simple: the law's creator, Nicolas Sarkozy, hopes to win next year's presidential election.

In 2002, Front National (FN) candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen beat out sitting Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the first round of voting. To avoid a repeat of 2002, Sarkozy muct win over as much of the FN's base as possible without simultaneously alienating centrist voters -- and pushing for immigration restriction is the most obvious way to do that. As a number of recent polls have demonstrated, there is broad consensus among French voters on the need for immigration restriction. If record numbers of them voted for the FN in 2002, it was because they feel their concerns have been ignored by more centrist politicians.

Sarkozy is no dream candidate and his law, like most of his gestures, can fairly be described as cynical political calculation. But then that, increasingly, is politics. The real question is why it's not happening here.

Republican politicians take note. "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" may not be the only thing to which the US Senate is giving birth.

UPDATE: One of my favorite British bloggers, Pub Philosopher, recently expressed his views on America's immigration predicament ("Why I Fear for America"). This has led to lively debate in comments regarding the challenges posed by European and American immigration, respectively. Interested readers are encouraged to check it out.

In a move that must surely have Karl Rove sweating, Rush Limbaugh yesterday expressed his disgust with the Senate Republicans who on Tuesday voted to reject Sen. Johnny Isakson's enforcement first ammendment to S.2611:

Folks, I know, it's getting worse by the day, and it's inexplicable. It doesn't make any sense. What are these 18 Republicans doing? What is so difficult to understand about this in terms of the smart, sensible thing to do here? The first thing is the security of the border, and to have 18 Republicans, "Oh, nope, can't put that in there." Maybe they didn't like the fact that we can't do anything else until the border is secure. Well, what is wrong with that? I am trying to maintain my composure, but no matter where I look and no matter how deep I dig, I can't come up with a explanation for any of this that makes sense to me.

Limbaugh also poured scorn on those who support the bill's provision to greatly increase the yearly intake of legal immigrants:

[Senator] Jeff Sessions succeeded in reducing these numbers from 100 to 200 million to somewhere between -- I think the top will be 60 million. It's strange when you can have new immigration of 60 million over 20 years be considered a victory. These guys start with this massive high starting point, 100 to 200 million new legal immigrants, and Sessions said, "Whoa, that's too many," and starts alerting people in the Senate, and they voted to amend it and they get it down to the top now would be, yeah, 60 million is what it would be if the full caps are reached.

Recent polls give reason to think that voter support for the Senate's immigration legislation is reaching new lows. I reported here on two such polls yesterday. A survey conducted by the Washington Post and ABC in the immediate run-up to the President's May 15th speech confirms the trend. 34% of respondents approved of Bush's handling of immigration while 56% disapproved.

For Republican Congressman anticipating midterm elections, the message is loud and clear: if you like your job and want to keep it, oppose the President's "guestworker"/amnesty sellout.

(HT: A Certain Slant of Light)

The first post-borders’ speech polls are in and the results are encouraging. Here's what they have to say about the public's response to the policies unveiled by the President on Monday:

The President’s plan won't resolve America's illegal immigration problem.
The polls, by Zogby and Rasmussen, both asked voters to indicate whether they thought the President’s plan would help or hinder efforts to reduce illegal immigration. In the Zogby poll, 47% of respondents said they thought the plan would make“solving” the illegal immigration problem more likely while 49% said it would make solving it more difficult. The Rasmussen poll found that support for the President’s plan was considerably lower: only 35% of respondents believe the plan would reduce illegal immigration. 47% thought it would not.

The President has done a poor job on immigration.
A separate Zogby poll conducted between May 12th and 16th found that only 17% of respondents approve of the job Bush has done on immigration, while only 16% approve of his track record on border security. In the Rasmussen poll, meanwhile, 39% of respondents said they "agreed" with Bush’s approach to immigration, 39% "disagreed" with it and 22% were “not sure”.

Enforcement First.
Asked to choose between three options, respondents to the more sophisticated Rasmussen poll overwhelmingly preferred enforcing employer sanctions (63%) over putting National Guard troops on the border (16%) or building a wall (13%). 79% of respondents, meanwhile, said they support strict employer penalties to reduce illegal immigration.

Consistent with previous polls, the Rasmussen survey also showed that the public continues to favor an enforcement-first approach:

The survey asked participants to choose between two immigration bills. "One would improve control of the borders but do nothing about the status of working immigrants who are here illegally. The other would legalize the status of working immigrants who are here illegally but would do nothing to improve control of the border."
By a 63% to 19% margin, voters prefer the bill that controls the borders but does nothing about the status of illegal aliens.

Only one cloud darkened the good news. According to Rasmussen:

61% favor an earned citizenship approach. Sixty-one percent (61%) favor an earned citizenship policy approach "that would let illegal aliens eventually become citizens if they pay a fine for entering the country illegally, pay all back taxes, and learn to speak English." Again, those who prefer the enforcement-first approach share the majority view on this question.

Clearly, work remains to be done educating the public about the nature and likely consequences of the legislation now making its way through the Senate. That said, the crisis of confidence in Bush administration handling of the issue means that the public is more open to persuasion on the issue than has been the case in many years.

And, as these polls show, amnesty's critics hold all the advantages: the public has a dim view of Bush's plan, little faith in the administration's credibility and strongly favors enforcement of existing law.

We've already won the debate. Now we've just got to win Congress.

[Original posting in the Juan Mann Archive on VDARE.com]

Extraordinary citizen efforts like the Minuteman Project and its precursors—including the California Coalition for Immigration Reform and Glenn Spencer’s heroic American Border Patrol—have transformed the once non-existent illegal immigration “debate” into a raging national firestorm.

By showing that Americans can do the jobs that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can’t or won’t do—namely, identifying and reporting illegal aliens—these “undocumented Border Patrol Agents” have gotten the attention of Congress and the President of the United States.

So don’t give up . . . ever.

At VDARE.com, among other things, I’ve been providing what I believe to be the most effective information for reporting illegal aliens to the federal government. There is also a similar link on Glenn Spencer’s American Patrol.

I warned last week that

“We hear a lot from VDARE.com readers who have followed up on reporting illegal aliens and criminal alien residents and who have realized that nothing has happened. Often, the federal immigration bureaucracy apparently couldn’t care less about these reports.”

Subsequently, I received the following e-mail on May 9 from a whistleblowing VDARE.com reader. As the reader is self-identified as a federal employee, I provide the following disclaimer:

The opinions expressed on this page do not in any way represent the official position of the DOJ, EOIR, BIA, DHS, CBP, ICE, CIS or any other branch of the United States government . . . but they will someday!

This VDARE.com reader writes:

“I just finished reading your latest post [Reporting Illegal Aliens – More Immigration Reality from Juan’s In-Box] on VDARE.COM. I can tell you, without any doubt whatsoever, that you will never get a response from ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] when you report an illegal alien. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you work.
“I am an Immigration Inspector working for CBP [Customs and Border Protection]. I personally talked to both ICE and CIS [Citizenship and Immigration Services] about an illegal alien. I went so far as to give them proof of the person’s status and even a fraudulent application for an Immigration benefit that was filed on their behalf. Nothing has been done.

“The person I reported became a visa overstay over 18 months ago. Her visa expired 3 months ago. She is working illegally in the U.S. She fraudulently acquired a driver’s license. I talked to ICE. Nothing has been done.

“The aunt of this person filed a fraudulent I-130 on her behalf. The aunt obtained a fraudulent birth certificate from their home country showing this person to be her sister. The aunt filed the I-130 naming her niece as the sister of a U.S. citizen. I talked to CIS. Nothing has been done.

“Also, while investigating all this, I discovered that the aunt and her husband, now US citizens, obtained their LPR [lawful permanent resident] status through a fraudulent asylum petition. Nothing will ever be done about this, either.

“Tell those that write you upset that nothing gets done to not take it personally. I work in the immigration field and can get nothing done. I know the “right people” to contact and can get nothing done. I have documentation from government databases and can get nothing done. I have even offered to take them to where they live and work and can get nothing done.

“Do you really think that ICE, CIS & CBP care about doing the job properly? The people in charge sure don’t.”

So someone already working within the federal immigration bureaucracy can’t get action on reporting an illegal alien to ICE. How much hope is there for the average American citizen (or law-abiding immigrants and non-immigrants—they write to us all the time too)?

This is a monumental scandal—and something that can easily be fixed by a good election.

But it’s still worth reporting aliens.

Firstly, if someone makes a report against a particular criminal alien that ICE just so happens to be interested in, ICE Special Agents with guns just might be paying that particular alien an early-morning visit sometime soon.

Secondly, even if the illegal alien is just, well, illegal, a file will still be created—a “paper chain” that the bureaucrats will know might one day trap them.

It might seem improbable—it might even require a President other than a Bush dynasty member—but hey, none of these people ever thought our collapsing southern border would be a political issue either. So they can’t rest easy.

I say again: Citizen action does work. Maybe the next step is for patriotic Americans to shame the federal government even further by establishing a private cyber registry to out the co-ordinates of illegal aliens—and their employers.

Until then, we all must do our part in the fight against immigration anarchy—and that means reporting illegal aliens to the feds, whether they like it or not.

How about this for a rallying cry: remember the Minutemen!

As Michelle has noted, Monday’s big push for amnesty was just more of the same old, same old from an administration in which official cynicism long ago became the modus operandi. Still, credit is due to the President’s talented team of speech writers (text here): they did a wonderful job weaving the ragged tissue of lies, half-truths and non-sequiturs that is the administration’s “argument” into a seamless and surprisingly elegant whole.

Bravo!

The many bloggers who gave their time to cover the speech and its aftermath deserve the same, this time without irony. If the public is better informed about the stakes of the present debate, it is in no small measure due to their efforts.

That said, it seems to me (but not just me) that all the attention given the amnesty question has had the unfortunate effect of diverting attention from the other, equally objectionable aspects of the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act” (CIRA S.2611) now before the Senate. Chief amongst these is a provision which will certainly double and potentially quintuple – quintuple! – the number of immigrants legally admitted to the United States each year.

To grasp what this means, some perspective is needed. Over the past two decades, annual legal immigration to the US has hovered around the 1 million mark (compared to an estimated annual intake of 500,000 illegal aliens). Under present law, the US should thus receive an additional 19 million immigrants over the next twenty years.

All that will change should the President and Senate have their way. As a recent Heritage Foundation report observed, instead of 19 million immigrants, under the new law the US will receive 103 million, or the equivalent of one third of its present population. The Foundation’s report was confirmed by a separate impact analysis ordered by US Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL).

The Washington Times reports:

Although that "amnesty" would be granted to about 10 million illegals, the real growth in the immigrant population would come later.

As part of the bill, the annual flow of legal immigrants allowed into the U.S. would more than double to more than 2 million annually. In addition, the guest-worker program in the bill would bring in 325,000 new workers annually who could later apply for citizenship.

That population would grow exponentially from there because the millions of new citizens would be permitted to bring along their extended families. Also, Mr. Sessions said, the bill includes "escalating caps," which would raise the number of immigrants allowed in as more people seek to enter the U.S.

The amnesty question has so far sidelined the legal immigration debate. Worse, it has led critics of amnesty to seize upon legal immigration as a point of contrast, thereby implying that there’s nothing wrong with the latter’s present levels and sources. My personal view is that immigration to the US is already too high, that the country has embarked on a great experiment in multicultural nation-building without debate and with little or no thought given to the experiment’s long- and middle-term consequences – for population growth, for the environment, for public services, for wages, and for national identity.

Liberals and Conservatives can pick and choose between these as they see fit, there's more than ample reason to be worried.

Indeed, the great transformation is already afoot. A recent census bureau report showed that immigration plus differential birth rates are contributing to a population boom (70% of the growth in the nation’s birthrate is attributable to Hispanic women). Even before the Senate announced plans to regularize the status of the 10 to 20 million illegals in the country and more than double the number of legal immigrants, the US population was projected to grow [PDF file] from 293 million to over 419 million by 2050. All of that growth is the direct and indirect consequence of present immigration policy.

So just think what quintupling – or quadrupling or just doubling -- the annual number of legal immigrants will mean. Nations are not made in a day but they can – as the Senate is on the brink of showing us – be unmade in one.

Now is the time to act. Contact your Senators and Congressmen and tell them what you think.

Support the House of Representatives enforcement-only bill; reject the Senate’s “guestworker”/amnesty betrayal.

It's happening now...

Call your Senators and tell them what you think.

Then call your Representatives and tell them the same thing.

Last night, President Bush tried to distract the American public with symbolic shows of border enforcement, while making sure to preserve the interior sanctuary zone status quo. Illegal aliens: 1; American law: 0.

In a gesture so mendacious that it gives a whole new meaning to the notion of “transparency in government”, President Bush will tonight unveil a plan to place National Guard troops on the US border with Mexico. White House aides spent the weekend busily prepping journalists for the President’s speech. Three talking points have emerged:

The President will announce plans to send several thousand National Guard troops to the border, ostensibly to shore up Border Patrol efforts and reduce the flow of illegals crossing into the country. Anyone concerned that National Guard units, already stretched to the breaking point in Iraq, are not up to the job can rest assured. Yesterday, Bush told a “worried” Vicente Fox that the Guard’s presence on the border would be only temporary -- the time it takes, no doubt, to push his amnesty legislation through Congress.

The President will promise to ratchet up workplace enforcement, cracking down on those who employ illegal labor. That won’t be hard: under Bush’s leadership, workplace enforcement has plummeted to nearly zero. In coming weeks, expect a flurry of high profile round-ups and then, just as suddenly, a return to business as usual. Here, again, timing is everything.

The President will once again tout the Senate version of his wildly unpopular “guest worker” amnesty. Viewer discretion is advised: you can count on Bush to recycle all of the unsavory and insulting platitudes with which he has addressed the issue from the start of his administration.

Anyone out there who is still prepared to grant Bush a shred of credibility on immigration should consider the following:

That, since taking office, the Bush administration and its appointees at the Department of Homeland Security have consistently sabotaged efforts to deal with illegal immigration: killing successful interior enforcement efforts, failing to meet promised Border Patrol hiring and funding objectives, turning a blind eye to Mexican government meddling in America’s internal affairs and, perhaps most spectacularly of all, reversing the Clinton administration’s already shamefully modest efforts to guarantee workplace enforcement.

Don't be fooled: Bush has no intention of cleaning up the mess at the border.

That all of this has been done despite strong voter opposition to current immigration “policy” and with complete disregard for its consequences for a whole array of pressing public issues: the threat to national security, rapid population growth and demographic transformation, downward pressure on native born wages, the burgeoning illegal alien crime wave, deteriorating public services and increasing tax-payer burden and, last but not least, the prospects of all this for social solidarity and national identity in the 21st-century.
Driven by a post-national vision and a large dose of personal vanity, Bush doesn’t care about the consequences for American citizens.

Bush’s plan, meanwhile, will only aggravate an already unmanageable situation. By regularizing the status of the 10 to 20 million illegals presently residing in the country, the legislation presently before the Senate will simply serve as an incentive to yet more illegal immigration, sending a green light to a new wave of would-be border crossers at the same time it gives unscrupulous employers a new incentive to underbid the market.
Far from ending the black market in illegal labor, Bush’s plan will simply create a parallel market of semi-legal guest workers. Both will compete with Americans for jobs.

Bush’s plans for amnesty have already cost him dearly in public opinion polls and are set to cost the Republican Party even more at the next election. But it should be clear that the issues at stake here exceed run-of-the-mill politics.

However things go in coming weeks, this is a decisive moment for the country. Bush’s reckless support for amnesty has cost him but it is a price he’s willing to pay. I suspect that most Americans are not. If we wish to keep our country, we had better start showing it. Call your representatives and tell them what you think. Support the House of Representatives' enforcement-only legislation; reject the Senate's "guestworker" amnesty sell-out.

Contact your Senators here: 866-220-0044/ 888-355-3588/ 866-340-9281 (toll free numbers)

Contact your Congressmen here: 866-220-0044/ 888-355-3588/ 866-340-9281 (toll free numbers)

Matthew Richer sends me his Right Reason interview with Harvard immigration economist George Borjas (interview available here in PDF).

The interview offers little that is new or startling. But it does provide a succinct rebutal to those who continue to pretend that the policies pushed by the Senate and White House have something to do with the economc well-being of American citizens.

An excerpt:

Richer: We are repeatedly told that immigrants are coming in to do jobs that native-born Americans won't do.
Borjas: That's one of the biggest myths in the immigration debate. [...] If you go to southern California, virtually every gardener is of Mexican origin, and very often illegal. Does that mean that if you leave southern California, that there are no gardeners? No, there are plenty of American-born gardeners in Iowa, although the service might cost a bit more there, just as the immigrant-driven taxis might cost a bit less in New York City than in Iowa.
If the demand for the service is there, the service will get done. What immigration does is prevent the wage from going up to take care of the shortage of workers.

This, at least, is finally starting to get through to the public.

[Original posting in the Juan Mann Archive on VDARE.com]

In case you’ve missed it before, here’s the quickest way of reporting illegal aliens—that is, if you’re not in a border area with a U.S. Border Patrol station nearby.

TO REPORT AN ILLEGAL ALIEN OR CRIMINAL ALIEN RESIDENT contact the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security by calling (866) DHS-2ICE to "report suspicious activity" (866) 347-2423.

You can also make a report with the DHS/ICE Investigations division in a city near you through the telephone numbers listed on the ICE web site — for Special Agent-in-Charge (SAC) Offices, and their subordinate field offices called Resident Agent-in-Charge (RAC) and Resident Agent Offices (RAOs). You can even write them a letter if you want to make a written record.

As the so-called public debate on immigration law enforcement reaches greater heights of stupidity, it becomes increasingly necessary to look at the reality of what forty years of massive legal and out-of-control illegal immigration has done to these United States and its law-abiding citizens . . . one case at a time.

From time to time, I’ve discussed some amazing tales sent in by VDARE.com readers:

From Juan’s Mailbag . . . Americans’ Anger At Illegal Immigration Now White Hot

Americans Getting Desperate—And Mad

Ground Zero In Occupied America: What You Can Do

And the latest batch of mail is no less compelling. First of all, the stream of reader e-mails requesting the latest information on reporting illegal aliens shows NO SIGN of ever letting up.

[Read More . . . ]