I have spent a lot of my life looking positively at the consequences of migration. Now I'm being forced to see that there's a nightmare as well as a dream.
Rushdie is of course referring to the threat posed by radical Islam, now solidly implanted across Western Europe. But there's reason to think mass migration may simply be undesirable in its own right, Islam or no.
Not all dreams are nightmares, of course, but that doesn't necessarily mean the rest are sweet...
Esteemed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has said what quite a few people have long suspected but not dared say in public: that high degrees of ethnic and racial diversity destroy the conditions of social solidarity in affected communities.
A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, one of the world’s most influential political scientists.His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.
[...] When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. “They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,” said Prof Putnam. “The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.”
The FT has a follow-up article here. It's worth noting that Putnam intentionally delayed publishing his findings before he could find a "solution" to the problems he identified. The solution, you ask?
“What we shouldn’t do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us.”
Thanks for the science, Bob.
Alas, it is universally acknowledged that our government has no such intention. So what to make of all the fuss south of the border? Le Figaro reports:
As a protest against the manipulation of this law, Mexican President-elect Felipe Calderon is reluctant to visit the United States before his inauguration. Calderon has already visited nine Latin American countries as well as scheduled a forthcoming trip to Canada.
Apparently, the very idea that elected American representatives might for once bow to public opinion on the question of immigration -- symbolically and in complete bad faith, I hasten to add -- is enough to generate a mini-crisis in Mexican-American diplomatic relations.
You shouldn't take it so hard, Felipe. George Bush has let us down, too.
When Poland and seven other former Soviet bloc countries joined the European Union in 2004, Tony Blair’s government assured the British public that the country would not be flooded by job-seeking migrants from the East. At most, ministers asserted—at most—Britain could expect around 15,000 additional immigrants per year.Not for the first time, a government’s math has proven wildly, grotesquely wrong...
Elsewhere in Europe, ministers struggle to come to grips with the growing wave of illegal immigrants attempting to enter the EU on its southern frontiers. Heather first blogged about it here. Since then, French Interior Minister and 2007 presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has urged fellow EU leaders to agree to a ban on future amnesties. Le Figaro reports (my translation here):
At a speech today in Madrid before an inter-ministerial meeting of the European Union's eight Mediterranean member states, Nicolas Sarkozy will endorse a "ban" on massive regularizations. According to a text made public on the eve of the Madrid meeting, M. Sarkozy will prospose a "future ban on all massive regularizations" as part of the "European pact" on immigration that he supports.
Sarkozy is an astute politican who understands that positionning himself as an advocate of tighter borders makes the best electoral sense. But he is also right: Europe will never get control of its immigration mess as long as individual member states continue to use amnesties as a way of making up for temporary labor shortfalls.
Hey Michelle, help me out here!
I've already posted a disclaimer on the VDARE.com BLOG setting the record straight that IT'S NOT ME! But to no avail.
So far, I've gotten e-mail inquiries from ABC News and 60 Minutes, and as far away as Brazil asking if I'm the "Juan Mann" in the video. But they've got the wrong man. The identity of the guy in the YouTube video remains a mystery. I can assure you though, that it's not this Juan.
I sure wish the media gave a fraction of this landslide of attention instead to things such as VDARE.com, DeportAliens.com and the rigged behind-the-scenes reality of the federal immigration bureaucracy. But then again, bringing up the unpleasant necessity of summary removal of illegal aliens and criminal alien residents is such a downer.
Here we are five years after September 11, 2001—and the federal government is still as uninterested as ever in receiving reports of illegal aliens and criminal alien residents.
There’s virtually no interest in the executive agencies for getting deportation proceedings rolling against the millions of immigration scofflaws in the country. And there’s even less interest in Congress in setting up a coherent system to (my hobbyhorse) SUMMARILY REMOVE ILLEGAL ALIENS AND CRIMINAL ALIEN RESIDENTS…which just so happens to be perfectly allowable by 100 years of U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
Here’s the proof of the continuing immigration law enforcement disgrace—an e-mail from a VDARE.com reader dated September 7:
“I have made reports 3 months ago of the practice of hiring illegal aliens where I work (there are 45 currently there now) to the following agencies: DHS, LOCAL BORDER PATROL OFFICE, INCLUDING 3 MEETINGS WITH 2 BORDER PATROL AGENTS IN PERSON, DEPT. OF LABOR, DEPT OF JUSTICE, SOCIAL SECURITY, IRS, STATE FRANCHISE TAX BOARD, OSHA . . . and 3 months later nothing has happened!“Please tell me what I can do.”
Well, it looks like you've done all you can. Welcome to the futility of this situation . . . where the federal government follows its own agenda in direct conflict with the citizens. The end-game here is the three-country merger of North America.
The more the federal propaganda for public consumption changes, the more things remain rigged behind the scenes.
Since 9/11, among other things, I’ve embarked on a one-man crusade to find the most accurate information possible for reporting aliens to the federal government. Here’s the latest word on what to do:
It’s as if doing something to round up and summarily remove illegal aliens, previously-deported criminals, and the expired visa scofflaw crowd who all have no business being in this country is still a strangely unthinkable concept…even for a country allegedly “at war”.
Since 9/11/01, I’ve been writing about the largely unknown U.S. Immigration Court system of hearings and appeals within the Department of Justice, which is a federal agency called the Executive Office for Immigration Review ( EOIR) that conducts Immigration Court hearings. Ever heard of it?
I’ve been calling for the litigation-based EOIR to be abolished and replaced with a system of summary removal so illegal aliens and criminal alien residents will actually leave the country.
An extraordinary concept, apparently.
Fortunately, Michelle Malkin picked up my thesis and published it in her best-selling book, Invasion (pages 215-16), and also in a September 2002 "backgrounder" by the Center for Immigration Studies report called "The Deportation Abyss: It Ain't Over 'Til the Alien Wins"—[ PDF ].
But the silence since than has been deafening. And the EOIR system of Immigration Court hearings, administrative appeals, and more Federal Circuit Court appeals remains as rigged and alien-friendly as ever.
The Immigration and Nationality Act remains as much of a loophole-filled mess shot full of holes as ever.
The federal immigration bureaucracy still lumbers along is all of its litigation-soaked sloth.
As my VDARE.COM colleague Ed Rubenstein has shown, workplace enforcement has collapsed — even though the costs of immigration law enforcements are a fraction of the Iraq War.
More government employees collecting Department of Homeland Security paychecks are managed by even more superfluous Washington D.C.-based managers.
Five years after 9/11 and the federal immigration bureaucracy is as much of a disgrace as its most-hated predecessor, the abolished Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The proof is the 20-million-plus illegal aliens in the United States who should be immediately reported and deported . . . and the fact that the Bush Administration hasn’t done a damn thing about it since 9/11.
Britain's South Asian population largely arrived in the country during the first big wave of post-WWII immigration in the 1950's and 60's. It would be hard to fault the Blair government for bad decisions made well over a generation ago.
But what about the bad decisions being made today?
The Times' Camilla Cavendish writes:
It is hard to think of another issue over which there has been such concerted and effective censorship. For years, this Government has systematically underestimated the numbers of people coming in, selectively picked data to overstate migrants’ net economic contribution, dismissed questions about those figures as scaremongering and ordered the bewildered burgers of the big cities to rejoice at the new rainbow world in which they found themselves. [...]
“If we are not careful”, Frank Field, the Labour MP, said recently, “we will be transformed into a global traffic station. That is not what most people mean by being part of a country.” It is time to make some decisions. Do we want to be the doormat of globalisation, passively accepting that people will flow to where the money is, no matter what strain is put on Britain’s social fabric? Or do we mean something more by a country? And if so, how do we preserve it? In talking of setting an optimum level for immigration, Mr Reid has signalled a potentially significant shift in what was a wilfully passive policy: a woolly mix of kindness, fatalism, a desire to fill skill shortages and a sense of duty to countries such as Poland (a sense I share). There will no doubt be much wrangling over who gets to sit on the committee that will dictate the numbers. But that will be academic unless the Government can also reduce illegal entry. Official figures put the number of illegal immigrants at 900,000, but it is thought to be three or four times as many. So far there has been no real political will to stem the flow. Few companies have been prosecuted for hiring illegal labour.
Sound familiar?
Over a generation after their parents and grandparents first arrived in Britain, many British Muslims continue to entertain a nostalgic and sometimes violent attachment to their ethnic and national origins. Will the millions of immigrants who have arrived in the UK under Blair's watch be any different?
Sadly, the Blair government only now seems to be posing the question.
The Treason Lobby’s latest pro-alien propaganda effort by its handmaidens in the media and the foundations was released last Monday. It's a report called Immigration Judges—An extensive analysis of how hundreds of thousands of requests for asylum in the United States have been handled has documented a great disparity in the rate at which individual immigration judges declined the applications.
The effort was produced by TRAC Immigration (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse), which calls itself as "a non-partisan research organization associated with Syracuse University." It was dutifully covered promptly in the press.
An e-mail accompanying the TRAC report explained that "[s]upport for this report -- part of a wider project on U.S. immigration matters -- was provided by the JEHT Foundation [that’s "justice, equality, human dignity and tolerance" . . . of course], the Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the New York Times Company Foundation as well as Syracuse University."
The report publishes EOIR statistics identifying particular Immigration Court judges from the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), for the apparent unstated purpose of chastising them for not granting enough asylum applications in Immigration Court.
I’ve maintained repeatedly that the EOIR should be abolished outright. But the Treason Lobby calls the shots in the media. So the only criticism of the EOIR allowed in print is the type indicting the EOIR for the scandalous crime of not loving asylum-seeking aliens enough.
Fortunately for EOIR-watchers like myself, the report actually lists the EOIR immigration judges who have been granting asylum to just about any alien with a pulse who shows up and asks for it.
The report specifically identifies the main offender (from VDARE.COM's point of view):
"The judge with the smallest proportion of denials [the most asylum grants] of all the judges for this period was Margaret McManus of New York. She declined 9.8% of her 1,638 asylum requests in represented cases. Judge McManus was appointed in 1991. She began her career in private practice and for one five year period was a staff attorney with Legal Aid Society's Immigration Unit."
With an over 90 percent grant-rate for asylum cases, oh that all EOIR immigration judges could emulate former legal aid lawyer McManus . . . the Treason Lobby hopes!
MSM coverage of the TRAC report features anguished hand-wringing over all the un-McManus-like asylum-denying immigration judges out there. But the report is not exactly explicit about remedies. By implication, the Treason Lobby’s solution to its newly-perceived problem of disparate asylum results in the EOIR is that it could be fixed by providing taxpayer-funded lawyers for the aliens— among other bureaucracy-expanding and burden-of-proof-rigging measures.
But this forgets or conveniently obscures a key fact about the nature of asylum cases heard by EOIR Immigration Court judges: many of the cases have already been rejected…and should be denied again!
The fact is that asylum applications can reach the EOIR in two distinct ways. As the EOIR’s 2005 statistical yearbook explains [PDF, page 27]:
"There are two ways that aliens may request asylum: "affirmatively," by completing an asylum application and filing it with a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Asylum Office [of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) division]; or "defensively" by requesting asylum before an Immigration Judge. Aliens who file affirmatively with DHS, but whose requests for asylum are not granted [by USCIS], may be placed in removal proceedings and referred to the appropriate Immigration Court for further review of the case."
What the Treason Lobby’s henchmen at TRAC Immigration don’t mention in their report is that a good percentage of the asylum applications reaching the EOIR Immigration judges have already been rejected by the USCIS asylum offices.
This omission of the distinction between previously-rejected "affirmative" and newly-filed "defensive" applications skews the EOIR’s statistics by making denial rates seem that much higher.
According to the EOIR’s 2005 statistical yearbook [PDF, page 27], approximately 30 percent of the total number of asylum applications heard in Immigration Court were already "referred"— in other words: rejected—by the USCIS asylum office. In fiscal year 2005, the EOIR received 35,049 asylum applications filed for the first time “defensively” in Immigration Court, but also received 15,551 “affirmative” asylum applications that were already rejected by USCIS asylum officers.
So TRAC Immigration’s interpretation of the EOIR statistics is flawed right off the bat with the 15,551 already suspect asylum applications mixed throughout the EOIR data.
In the asylum statistics provided by EOIR, all of the presumptively valid cases already approved by the USCIS asylum offices are nowhere to be found. They’ve been already cherry-picked out and granted refugee status by the USCIS. Unlike the rejected cases, all the “good ones” never reach the EOIR immigration judges at all.
So by definition, all the inherently suspect and outright bogus applications reach the EOIR in the "affirmative" asylum track.
But how many are completely bogus? No one really knows.
Remember that these "affirmative" (USCIS-rejected) applications are the cases that even the notoriously pro-alien USCIS couldn’t grant. And so what if the EOIR’s judges reject them all over again?
I say bravo to the immigration judges with the courage to deny bogus asylum applications. Well done!
The USCIS has the power to grant refugee status to aliens like it’s going out of style, but not the power to actually "deny" anything. As part of Congress’ ongoing full-employment act for immigration lawyers, the rejected applications are just passed along to the EOIR so that the aliens and their lawyers can give it another try all over again before an immigration judge.
Such is the nature of the beast. Remember that legal formalism, duplicative work and endless litigation represent the hallmark of the federal litigation bureaucracy.
And while the Treason Lobby bemoans the differing asylum "grant rates" of particular immigration judges, they fail to recognize the fact that 15,551 USCIS-rejected asylum applicants are included in the supposedly damning asylum statistics.
So much for the Treason Lobby’s vendetta against asylum-denying immigration judges.
In taking a step back from the immigration and National Question orbit recently, I discovered the fascinating work of economic freedom heroine Catherine Austin Fitts. Here’s probably the most significant piece of advice she gives to freedom-loving Americans: stop worrying that there’s a conspiracy against you . . . you need to start one!
In the immigration law enforcement sphere, VDARE.com readers across America are already forming the building blocks of an immigration law enforcement conspiracy. The trouble is that the plan is still in its formative stages, the parties don’t know each other and aren’t collaborating…and all of the pieces of the puzzle haven’t even been dreamed up yet.
But nevertheless, there is great cause for hope. Through the miracle of the internet (as Peter Brimelow frequently points out), there’s a formidable assemblage of brain-power among the broad coalition of folks visiting VDARE.com just waiting to be tapped.
The Treason Lobby has made millions profiting from the illegal alien invasion over the years. Now it’s time for patriotic Americans to put their heads together and figure out some contrary incentives, monetary and otherwise, to get some immigration law enforcement rolling in America again.
I regularly see some great conspiracy ideas are scattered throughout my e-mail in-box.
Here’s some of the latest wisdom of three entirely unrelated VDARE.com readers, which I’ve fashioned into one downright smashing conspiracy . . . if I do say so myself.
Here’s the plan: put illegal alien-hiring companies under surveillance, report their illegal alien workers, figure out a way to take down their businesses using the muscle of the Internal Revenue Service—all while making money in civil class action lawsuits against them too!
Now start conspiring! . . . legally, of course.
It’s time for patriotic Americans to put our heads together.
Read the complete story in the Juan Mann Archive on VDARE.com
Thanks for the heads up, Mike. The Mayor, you see, also tried to talk tough on immigration enforcement. But his solicitude for immigration law-breakers provided an irrefutable argument why the Bush-Hagel-Martinez "comprehensive" approach to immigration reform won't work, as I argue here.
Compare the front page of today’s New York Times (national print edition) and the Los Angeles Times.
New York Times lead story: “Israel Steps Up Gaza Raids.” Accompanying articles: a new partnership between John McCain and George Bush; a rise in corporate headquarters located in Manhattan; a marijuana club on Fisherman’s Wharf; internet phone calling; and a blueprint found on a computer for the terrorist attack in Bali last October.
Now check out the Los Angeles Times: “Confusion Grips Mexico Election,” splashed across four of the five front page columns, and occupying nearly half the page. Three additional stories on the Mexican elections are bill boarded on page one.
Is this difference in perspective explained by the three hour time difference that allows LA Times editors to put later-breaking stories on their front page?
No. The New York Times does have a comparable article to the front page LA Times story—discussing the razor-thin margins in the election returns—but it puts it on page eight, without any front-page notice.
No, it was editorial judgment, not time zones, that explains the complete absence of a Mexican election story on the New York Times’s front page, and the all-encompassing coverage in Los Angeles. Mexican immigration is the dominant reality in Southern California. Ten percent of all Mexicans now live in the U.S., most of them in California. Mexican politics have become central to California’s fate: if Mexican governments continue to promote illegal immigration as a solution to their failed economic policies, California’s political and cultural fabric will continue its transformation, for better or worse, into a modern-day Aztlan.
Following each illegal immigration march this Spring, the Los Angeles Times mutated into what was basically a set of lavish advertising supplements for amnesty: full page after full page of photos and text celebrating the explosion of illegal immigrant power. No East Coast paper poured anywhere near the resources into demonstration coverage.
When the establishment elites in New York and Washington pronounce on the inevitable assimilation of Mexican immigrants and invoke Ellis Island to buttress their argument, they are speaking from a position of pure ignorance. Few have spent much time, if any, in California, which many regard with barely concealed contempt. Before they issue their next bromide, they might visit a few California cities and talk to residents, both Anglo and Hispanic, about how they see their communities. They might talk to jail wardens and hospital executives about their clients populations, and to school leaders about the cultural identity of their schools and curricula. Or they might speak to the editors on W. 1st St. in Los Angeles about what drives their editorial decisions.
The Beltway and Manhattan power brokers might still reach the same conclusions about the minor role that immigration is playing in shaping the country’s future, but at least they would be forewarned.
The focus of VDARE.com is on immigration and the National Question. It’s a noble endeavor, but I believe it represents only one component of a much greater problem.
The root of the evil: our apparent forced march toward a "comprehensive" New World Order of regional and ultimately global government, where nation-busting mass immigration is just one part of the process.
Though hardly a recent development, the excellent recent work by Jerome R. Corsi exposing the North American Union, the Amero currency, the NAFTA Superhighway—and its Texas highway segment which is already underway—leaves little doubt that the collectivist, internationalist agenda of America’s ruling elite continues full steam ahead whether the public likes it or not.
The late Dr. Sam Francis identified this danger.
Shortly after the Mohammedan jihadist attacks of September 11, 2001, Dr. Francis wrote that a "large bucket of cold reality has been splashed into my face" by a Chicago Council on Foreign Relations poll on elite vs. public attitudes concerning mass immigration. [10/24/02 - Poll Exposes Elite-Public Clash On Immigration]
Dr. Francis wrote:
"The [Summer 2002] poll shows that there is a vast gulf between the elite and the public at large on immigration, but more than anything it also shows that if the American majority that favors reducing mass immigration because they see it as a ‘critical threat’ to themselves and their nation really wants to meet that threat, then they must first remove from power the entire class of ‘leaders’ who are unable to perceive the dangers of immigration even when its dangerous consequences literally blow them out of their own skyscrapers."
Yes, America’s ruling class already knows that America is being transformed by massive legal and illegal immigration. And they reply: so what?
They want it that way. They made the decision long ago.
The made-for-TV conflict between dueling immigration bills (S. 2611 and H.R. 4437) illustrates that the wishes of the American people—not to be transformed in their nation and displaced out of their livelihoods—only go so far in influencing the will of Congress.
In the U.S. Senate, the mass immigration fix is in. But in the people’s House of Representatives, there is hope . . . well, at least a glimmer of hope.
But what should real immigration law enforcement fans be hoping for anyway?
As I have written before, one of the most critical components of the so-called "enforcement" provisions of H.R. 4437 is really a serious step backward for immigration law enforcement.
As I wrote in December, 2005:
H.R. 4437 undercuts the [Immigration Act Section 235(b) Expedited Removal] laws already on the books by scaling back the expedited removal authority granted (but never implemented) by Congress in 1996. The bill allows the summary removal of illegal aliens found within 100 miles of a land border within 14 days of entry. But in 1996 Congress previously authorized the removal of any [illegal] alien found anywhere in the U.S. within 2 years of entry!
So not only has there been a quiet rigging of the nationwide expedited removal provisions by successive administrations, but now the much-celebrated H.R. 4437 "enforcement" bill actually destroys the possibility of there ever being nationwide summary removal (outside of border areas).
And without the summary removal of illegal aliens—sending them packing without years of immigration litigation — there will be no real immigration law enforcement in this country . . . because no one will be leaving anytime soon.
[ . . . Read the full story on VDARE.com]