Just a reminder to the activists here...Keep the heat on...Turn up the heat to your Congressmen & vote out anybody that voted for amnesty-Don't be fooled-Tell them we're sick & tired of lip service & no action...All the info & organizations you can join are at: http://www.wcnc.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1103 & the fine organization that I use almost exclusively is: http://numbersusa.com Your all doing a great job & remember theres strength in numbers so jump on the anti immigration bandwagon 2day..TELL THEM NATURAL AMERICAN CITIZENS COME FIRST FROM NOW ON!..Tell them enuf is enuf were sick & tired of their bullshit & thanks for all your help whatever you can do....Jim M.
Are liberals for free speech for everyone, or just liberals? (Stolen from KMAN)
By the way... San Franciscoans congratulations!!!!
You are close to getting all of the illegal aliens to move to SF to get free legalization... Congrats!
INVASION USA
Savage attacked by officials pushing immigrant bailout
San Francisco leaders want taxpayers to pay for green cards, citizenship
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: August 10, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
San Francisco city officials are trying to force taxpayers to pay for immigrants' green cards and citizenship – and to bolster their case for the new tax, they've introduced a resolution condemning national radio talk-show host Michael Savage for what they call his "defamatory language ... against immigrants."
Supervisor Chris Daly, reacting to the new and significantly higher federal fee structure for immigrants seeking citizenship, imposed last week by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, complained that the fee hikes raise concerns that immigrants "cannot obtain safe pathways to legal immigrant status and citizenship" and "further exacerbates pressures on families, increasing stress," according to the San Francisco Examiner.
Under the new fee structure, the cost to apply for a green card is now $930, up $605 from the old fee. Citizenship applications went from $330 to $595. On Tuesday, Daly asked the city attorney to draw up legislation that would subsidize immigrants applying for citizenship, green cards and petitions for relatives and workers.
On the same day, apparently to further generate sympathy for immigrants and bolster Daly's bailout effort, Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval introduced a resolution condemning popular radio talk-show host Michael Savage, a mainstay of the San Francisco airways for years. Since he was syndicated nationally by Talk Radio Network, Savage has become one of the nation's most-listened-to radio talkers.
Condemning the "defamatory language used by radio personality Michael Savage against immigrants," Sandoval's resolution is apparently in response to Savage's July 5 broadcast, when the talker commented on a group of students who had announced they were fasting in support of changes in immigration policy.
"I would say, let them fast until they starve to death," quipped Savage, "then that solves the problem."
Sandoval's resolution calls Savage's comments "symbolic of hatred and racism," according to the Examiner.
"I really for the life of me cannot understand why there is not more media outrage to what Michael Savage said," Sandoval said in the Examiner report, which added that Sandoval plans to hold a press conference on the steps of City Hall Tuesday just before the entire Board of Supervisors votes on his resolution against Savage.
"The intolerant and racist comments of Michael Savage demand a strong condemnation," Sandoval insisted.
However, almost all of the Examiner's readers who posted comments on the newspaper's website after the story sided with Savage.
Representative responses included these:
"Hey Sandoval, we are not outraged at Michael Savage because we agree with him ... check the polls on immigration, lame-o."
"If we had more Michael Savages and less milk toast leaders we wouldn't be in this situation. They are taking over and bringing our country down to a 3rd world level. Thank God for the Michael Savages and the other true AMERICANS."
"Screw Sandoval and the illegal alien criminals who continue to invade this country. It's people like him who are causing the downfall of the west. Savage is 100% right on! My mom came here LEGALLY – FROM MEXICO ... I have every right to be totally nuclear about these illegal aliens bringing their bankrupt culture from Southern Mexico."
"The Mexican illegal immigrants think they don't have to obey our laws and are taking advantage of our health care system and robbing our Medicare, emergency rooms at hospitals and then have the gall to mail there American dollars back to Mexico!!! I listen to your talk show every night Mr. Savage and can't wait to listen to you tell it like it is ..."
"God Bless M. Savage. Down with La Raza "The Race."
"Making me learn your language (Spanish) to even get a job isn't racist? C'mon, we the legal citizens are tired of the catering to the illegals. Come here legally and follow our laws, that is all we ask. Michael Savage is the voice of the true Americans, not the scum (politicians) who get bought off to cater to lawbreakers."
"Savage is a true man of the people of this country. That is, the people of this country who live here legally. The rest can go to hell – or starve to death."
The San Francisco government's proposed resolution condemning Savage is just the latest in a major, multifaceted – and largely unreported – effort both in and out of government to transform American talk radio. The entire campaign, complete with details of battles against Rush Limbaugh, Savage and other top talkers, is revealed in-depth in the current edition of WND's monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled THE WAR ON TALK RADIO."
By the way... San Franciscoans congratulations!!!!
You are close to getting all of the illegal aliens to move to SF to get free legalization... Congrats!
INVASION USA
Savage attacked by officials pushing immigrant bailout
San Francisco leaders want taxpayers to pay for green cards, citizenship
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: August 10, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
San Francisco city officials are trying to force taxpayers to pay for immigrants' green cards and citizenship – and to bolster their case for the new tax, they've introduced a resolution condemning national radio talk-show host Michael Savage for what they call his "defamatory language ... against immigrants."
Supervisor Chris Daly, reacting to the new and significantly higher federal fee structure for immigrants seeking citizenship, imposed last week by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, complained that the fee hikes raise concerns that immigrants "cannot obtain safe pathways to legal immigrant status and citizenship" and "further exacerbates pressures on families, increasing stress," according to the San Francisco Examiner.
Under the new fee structure, the cost to apply for a green card is now $930, up $605 from the old fee. Citizenship applications went from $330 to $595. On Tuesday, Daly asked the city attorney to draw up legislation that would subsidize immigrants applying for citizenship, green cards and petitions for relatives and workers.
On the same day, apparently to further generate sympathy for immigrants and bolster Daly's bailout effort, Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval introduced a resolution condemning popular radio talk-show host Michael Savage, a mainstay of the San Francisco airways for years. Since he was syndicated nationally by Talk Radio Network, Savage has become one of the nation's most-listened-to radio talkers.
Condemning the "defamatory language used by radio personality Michael Savage against immigrants," Sandoval's resolution is apparently in response to Savage's July 5 broadcast, when the talker commented on a group of students who had announced they were fasting in support of changes in immigration policy.
"I would say, let them fast until they starve to death," quipped Savage, "then that solves the problem."
Sandoval's resolution calls Savage's comments "symbolic of hatred and racism," according to the Examiner.
"I really for the life of me cannot understand why there is not more media outrage to what Michael Savage said," Sandoval said in the Examiner report, which added that Sandoval plans to hold a press conference on the steps of City Hall Tuesday just before the entire Board of Supervisors votes on his resolution against Savage.
"The intolerant and racist comments of Michael Savage demand a strong condemnation," Sandoval insisted.
However, almost all of the Examiner's readers who posted comments on the newspaper's website after the story sided with Savage.
Representative responses included these:
"Hey Sandoval, we are not outraged at Michael Savage because we agree with him ... check the polls on immigration, lame-o."
"If we had more Michael Savages and less milk toast leaders we wouldn't be in this situation. They are taking over and bringing our country down to a 3rd world level. Thank God for the Michael Savages and the other true AMERICANS."
"Screw Sandoval and the illegal alien criminals who continue to invade this country. It's people like him who are causing the downfall of the west. Savage is 100% right on! My mom came here LEGALLY – FROM MEXICO ... I have every right to be totally nuclear about these illegal aliens bringing their bankrupt culture from Southern Mexico."
"The Mexican illegal immigrants think they don't have to obey our laws and are taking advantage of our health care system and robbing our Medicare, emergency rooms at hospitals and then have the gall to mail there American dollars back to Mexico!!! I listen to your talk show every night Mr. Savage and can't wait to listen to you tell it like it is ..."
"God Bless M. Savage. Down with La Raza "The Race."
"Making me learn your language (Spanish) to even get a job isn't racist? C'mon, we the legal citizens are tired of the catering to the illegals. Come here legally and follow our laws, that is all we ask. Michael Savage is the voice of the true Americans, not the scum (politicians) who get bought off to cater to lawbreakers."
"Savage is a true man of the people of this country. That is, the people of this country who live here legally. The rest can go to hell – or starve to death."
The San Francisco government's proposed resolution condemning Savage is just the latest in a major, multifaceted – and largely unreported – effort both in and out of government to transform American talk radio. The entire campaign, complete with details of battles against Rush Limbaugh, Savage and other top talkers, is revealed in-depth in the current edition of WND's monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled THE WAR ON TALK RADIO."
August 16, 2007 PrintSaveE-mailSize: +/–SPECIAL REPORT: Mexico plans to send trucks across border this month Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007 – A Mexican publication that covers Mexico’s transportation industry reported Wednesday that the Secretariat of Communications and Transportes said that the cross-border pilot program is coming by the end of this month.
Despite continued opposition from Mexican trucker group – CANACAR – the country’s transportation secretary claims the plan is on the move, according to the transportation publication T21.
In a business meeting on Tuesday, Mexican Transportation Secretary Luis Tellez Kuenzler announced that “necessary conditions” in Mexico are a reality. He also said he had been informed by the U.S. Department of Transportation that 37 Mexican carriers have been evaluated as satisfactory.
T21 also reported that on Wednesday, Tellez stated through a press release that the necessary conditions existed to develop the project and declared the Mexican government has decided to stick to the proposed start date, which is the last week of August.
While the Mexican government is chatting up the subject, the U.S. DOT is deadly quiet.
Melissa DeLaney, DOT spokesperson, recited the familiar line for Land Line on Thursday that nothing could happen without the Inspector General’s go-ahead. She said she was not aware of any preliminary report on the status of the pilot program.
“The IG is an independent entity. We don’t have a hand in the process of them doing this report,” she said. “We are complying with the law and the law clearly states this program cannot start until that process has been done.”
T21 reported officials from the Mexican government will meet next week with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters in Tijuana to “see the progress of the program” and to “guarantee the start.”
Delaney confirmed to Land Line that Peters was, indeed, going to Mexico next week.
“She is taking congressional staff down there next week, to highlight border operations, to show them an inspection, show them a ‘PASA’ (Pre-Authorization Safety Audit),” she told Land Line. “(It’s) a very standard trip that happens in recess. Not the first time they’ve taken staff to the border to look at the operations down there.”
– By Sandi Soendker, managing editor
sandi_soendker@landlinemag.com
Mexican news reports translated by OOIDA’s Stephanie Caswell.
source; http://ooida.com & http://landlinemag.com
Despite continued opposition from Mexican trucker group – CANACAR – the country’s transportation secretary claims the plan is on the move, according to the transportation publication T21.
In a business meeting on Tuesday, Mexican Transportation Secretary Luis Tellez Kuenzler announced that “necessary conditions” in Mexico are a reality. He also said he had been informed by the U.S. Department of Transportation that 37 Mexican carriers have been evaluated as satisfactory.
T21 also reported that on Wednesday, Tellez stated through a press release that the necessary conditions existed to develop the project and declared the Mexican government has decided to stick to the proposed start date, which is the last week of August.
While the Mexican government is chatting up the subject, the U.S. DOT is deadly quiet.
Melissa DeLaney, DOT spokesperson, recited the familiar line for Land Line on Thursday that nothing could happen without the Inspector General’s go-ahead. She said she was not aware of any preliminary report on the status of the pilot program.
“The IG is an independent entity. We don’t have a hand in the process of them doing this report,” she said. “We are complying with the law and the law clearly states this program cannot start until that process has been done.”
T21 reported officials from the Mexican government will meet next week with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters in Tijuana to “see the progress of the program” and to “guarantee the start.”
Delaney confirmed to Land Line that Peters was, indeed, going to Mexico next week.
“She is taking congressional staff down there next week, to highlight border operations, to show them an inspection, show them a ‘PASA’ (Pre-Authorization Safety Audit),” she told Land Line. “(It’s) a very standard trip that happens in recess. Not the first time they’ve taken staff to the border to look at the operations down there.”
– By Sandi Soendker, managing editor
sandi_soendker@landlinemag.com
Mexican news reports translated by OOIDA’s Stephanie Caswell.
source; http://ooida.com & http://landlinemag.com
From: Dave Gorak
Date: Aug. 14, 2007 4:32 p.m.
LETTER SUCCESSES – Week ended August 11
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL. PLEASE SEND ALL PUBLISHED LETTERS AND QUESTIONS RELATED TO THE LETTER-WRITING PROGRAM TO:
Dave Gorak
DO NOT FORWARD THIS E-MAIL OR MAKE COPIES
Everyone,
--Following is the published letters report for the period August 5 – 11
--BUT FIRST: Californian Bill Terry asks why do we need another guestworker program when one already exists to provide growers with an unlimited number of temporary workers; D.A. King in Georgia says Sen. Arlen Specter still doesn’t get it; and Texan Bill Terry wants to know why the Houston Chronicle places more emphasis on the interests of illegals than it does on those of the city’s legal residents.
--As always, this memo is intended for participants in this program,plus a few friends, and not for wide distribution. Editors tend not to publish letters they suspect are part of an organized letter-writing campaign. So, please refrain from cc:ing us on your letters-to-the-editor and from talking about the program in public forums.
--And please remember to include the full name of the paper that ran your letter and the date.
-- NumbersUSA forwards these letters to you so you can share in the success of the program and see the published efforts of our writers. As a reminder, however, the letters are personal and do not necessarily represent NumbersUSA positions.
RECOMMENDED WRITING STYLE: We recognize that each of you has the ability to make your own decisions about how to write your letters. NumbersUSA's opinion is that letters are more likely to be published and more likely to help our cause of dramatic immigration reductions if they are written in a temperate, self-controlled way that avoids name-calling and arguments based on race, religion or national origin. A strong use of a few facts, voting records, concise analysis and sometimes humor seems the best way to advance our arguments. We encourage specific criticism of open-border politicians and others, but caution against "in your face" rhetoric. Firm but civil argument tends to get the best results. You, of course, are free to disagree. We applaud all published letters that advocate for our immigration-reduction goals, but we may not disseminate those that move outside the tone that we encourage, a tone that many newspapers include in their own letters to the editor guidelines.
--Thanks so much for your hard work and persistence.
Index:
Orange County (Calif.) Register – 8/5
(1) Max Harris
The Seattle Times – 8/6 (online only)
(2) Cliff Borns
The Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star – 8/8
(3) Marty Lich
Pittsburgh Tribune Review – 8/10
(4) Haydee Pavia
The Christian Science Monitor – 8/8
(5) Mark Sussman
Atlanta Journal-Constitution – 8/11
(6) D.A. King
Daily Herald (Ill.) – 8/11
(7) Ronald R. Kowalski
The Washington (D.C.) Times – 8/11
(8) Mark A. Mendlovitz
LETTERS WE’VE JUST RECEIVED
Houston Chronicle – 8/4
(9) Bill Terry
(1)
Orange County (Calif.) Register – 8/5
Another illegal immigration end run attempted
U.S. Senator's Feinstein and Boxer are both co-sponsors of legislation currently pending before the Senate to establish a new farm worker program which will legalize the illegal immigrants currently in the United States. This is nothing but another attempt at amnesty. So, to answer both Feinstein and Boxer's questions on the floor of the Senate to the people of the U.S., NO, we do not want another amnesty program to satisfy AgJOBS requirements. And, NO it isn't true that without illegal workers to fill AgJOBS, American's will starve.
Currently, the U.S. Department of Labor has a program, H-2A. The H-2A temporary agricultural program establishes a means for agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers to bring nonimmigrant foreign workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature. So, there is no requirement for additional legislation which Feinstein and Boxer are heavily pushing.
But, wait! It seems there are those Agriculture growers who do not want to use H-2A because it requires them to follow strict regulations regarding working conditions and salaries which they do not want to pay. Feinstein and Boxer stipulate that this will cause prices to go up on produce in the stores. Quite frankly the program they are pushing will only increase the bottom line for the growers. This brings up an interesting point. Isn't it always the Republican's who are always in favor of "big business?" How come these two Democratic Senator's are so adamant about the necessity of this farm workers bill? Could it have something to do with political coffers? Hummm...
Lets see, at last count there were only 30 co-sponsors to the AfJOBS program.in the Senate (S.340) and 39 in the House (Hr. 371). So why are Senator's Feinstein and Boxer distorting the magnitude of bipartisan support? Let me count the ways...
Max Harris
Laguna Hills, Calif.
(2)
The Seattle Times – 8/6 (online only)
Government recall
New Haven is circumventing the laws of the U.S. Any city that continues this practice should not receive any federal money. We have to hold all local governments responsible for hiring and helping non-Americans gain illegal access to citizenship.
Neither of our senators has a good report card when it comes to this issue. Both seem to think the Democratic Party is more important than America. We have to get them to change their minds. Gov. Christine Gregoire is also lax on this subject.
Somebody, please push the recall button.
Cliff Borns
Spokane, Wash.
(3)
The Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star – 8/8
Money is root cause of the 'illegal' pox
This is in response to Debbie Revely's letter to the editor ("Illegal immigrants do the jobs too many won't do," July 25). She wrote: "Ask your unemployed friends if they would be willing to stand in the hot sun from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. doing farm work or construction work for $7 an hour. They would say no."
The answer is no. But not for the reason she implies.
It is "no" because lawful residents cannot afford to work for that low a wage and not because of the job description itself. If we'd also get, with no questions asked, non-taxed cash income, free medical care, and subsidized housing and utilities, the answer would be, "Oh, yes!"
Regarding those who hire illegal aliens: Why do you think they don't want to pay more for legal employees? You guessed it: money. For every dollar they pay their employees, they pay an additional costly sum to the IRS. And they do not like that.
In the end, it really is all about the money.
Marty Lich
Gypsum, Colo.
(4)
The Christian Science Monitor – 8/8
US Should Pressure Improvements in Mexican Government
The August 3 article, "In Central America, child migrants now face perils alone," is a tragic story. Some will blame Guatemala and Mexico for their inability to care efficiently for their people, which is a valid point. But the US must share some blame for our border chaos and lawlessness.
Guatemala has half the per capita GDP of Mexico, which itself has about a quarter of ours. Our successful system shines like a beacon down through Mexico into Central America. It is a powerful attractant. Guatemala and Mexico apparently have defaulted to governments that are too corrupt or inept for their people to thrive. America has defaulted on the enforcement of its borders, thus raising false hope to others that Uncle Sam can cure their malady.
The US is like a well-meaning enabler of a drug addict. Better that we prescribe the tough love that is needed. In this case that means no illegal entry here plus using our influence to cajole improved democracy and capitalism there. If we provide funds to these neighbors, we must insist on sound legal and economic practices in return. Meanwhile, we need to manage America in accord with our own laws. In the long run, it's the effective, moral solution.
Mark Sussman
Bellevue, Wash.
(5)
Pittsburgh Tribune Review – 8/10
Hooray for Pa.
The Trib's article states, "Weeks after a federal judge struck down Hazleton's ordinance on illegal immigration, the state Senate's top Republican on Wednesday announced that he is pushing legislation to prevent illegal aliens from receiving state benefits in Pennsylvania" ("New battleground on illegals: State aid," Aug. 9 and PghTrib.com).
The people of Pennsylvania are very fortunate to have legislators like Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati.
I live in California, ground zero for illegal immigration. According to a recent report by Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, it costs
Californians $10.5 billion a year to educate, medicate and incarcerate illegal aliens.
We no longer maintain public structures like highways, bridges and overpasses. Most of our budget goes to social services.
We have become the welfare state for Mexican citizens illegally in this country.
Thumbs up to Pennsylvania!
Haydee Pavia
Laguna Woods, Calif.
(6)
Atlanta Journal-Constitution – 8/11
Specter doesn't get it on crisis
Sen. Arlen Specter is hilarious proof —- again —- of the disconnect on the illegal immigration crisis between the American people and those elected to represent and protect them in Washington. He clearly does not "get it." Americans will never again stand quietly by while politicians reward illegal aliens with amnesty and green cards.
Specter's clueless admission that taking the millions of illegal aliens out of "fugitive status" must be the price of Congress appropriating the money to begin to secure American borders and the American workplace is astonishing. And totally unacceptable.
No one thought that President Bush and those in Congress who ask "how high?" when their corporate masters say "jump" would give up on amnesty, but few thought them brazen enough to begin the warm-up process just a month after the American people made their own position so clear.
That Specter has been sent out to start the amnesty attempt so soon brilliantly illustrates the importance it holds to the Washington elite —- the American people be damned.
D.A. King
King is president of the Marietta-based Dustin Inman Society, a non-profit organization opposed to illegal immigration.
(7)
Daily Herald (Ill.) – 8/11
"Hazleton legal battle is far from ended"
The legal battle over the Hazleton, Pa., Illegal Immigration Relief Act is far from over.
Plaintiffs who are in the country illegally were allowed to file anonymous depositions rather than testify.
A U.S. citizen cannot sue a city and remain anonymous. This is one of many reasons Hazleton will appeal the decision.
We, the American people, want our cities secured, our borders protected and our citizenship respected.
When the federal government is unwilling to enforce immigration laws, cities need to be able to take steps to secure citizens from the social, financial and criminal costs of illegal immigration.
Ronald R. Kowalski
Carpentersville, Ill.
(8)
The Washington (D.C.) Times – 8/11
Amnesty by another name
Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter and Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis display an incredible ignorance of how our immigration system works if they believe that "green card" status doesn't mean a path to citizenship. It most certainly does. And they are obviously buying into President Bush's nonsense argument that amnesty is not "automatic citizenship." Again, anyone with knowledge realizes that even legal immigrants are not granted automatic citizenship before a green card ("Republicans pan Specter immigration alternative," Page 1, Wednesday).
In fact, amnesty in this context simply means waiving the usual punishment (deportation) and allowing the violator to keep what it is he broke the law to obtain, namely, a job and residency in the U.S. By that definition, Mr. Specter's plan is an amnesty, and would only encourage future immigration lawbreaking.
The American people made it very clear to our senators that a secure border and interior enforcement is a prerequisite to discussion of any other immigration matters. After two decades of ignoring the problem, Congress owes us at least that much.
Mark A. Mendlovitz
Beverly Hills, Calif.
LETTERS WE’VE JUST RECEIVED
(9)
Houston Chronicle – 8/4
The emphasis is on illegals
There is much frustration with the current status of immigration in America, particularly in the Houston area. Most frustrating of all to me is to see our hometown newspaper's misplaced editorial emphasis on the interests of illegal immigrants versus the interests of area residents and those who are here legally.
There is little doubt that some greedy employers have cheated illegal immigrants on wages. The Chronicle's Aug. 2 editorial "Slave wages / Without workable immigration law, the lawless keep robbing workers" cited 842 complaint cases in 2006. Employers should always pay what they owe to their workers, but were all of these claims verified?
After all, by coming here and working for untaxed cash or with a fake Social Security number, illegal immigrants have a proven track record of deception and dishonesty, and they have an incentive to exaggerate any underpayment in order to garner sympathy and remuneration.
Meanwhile, they and their offspring cost Houston area taxpayers millions of dollars every year in social, educational and medical services.
In financial terms, illegal immigration dwarfs the Enron debacle, but the Chronicle's emphasis is on the equivalent of parking fines.
Bill Terry
The Woodlands, Texas
================
The letters program - as all the projects of NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you, along with grants from private foundations to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America. Would you consider making a donation? Click on: https://www.numbersusa.com/donate or send your donation to NumbersUSA, 1601 N. Kent St., Suite 1100, Arlington, VA 22209-2105; 1-877-885-7733.
This may be a good time for you to make sure that you've let us know all of the areas you are interested in. In order to further customize the type of alerts you receive click here http://www.numbersusa.com/survey?action=longlist
As a NumbersUSA subscriber, you will receive occasional emails about immigration-related opportunities. If you want to increase or reduce the frequency of these emails, click here and choose from Total Activism, Moderate Activism, or Limited Activism at the bottom of your registration form: http://www.numbersusa.com/user
NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America.
Date: Aug. 14, 2007 4:32 p.m.
LETTER SUCCESSES – Week ended August 11
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL. PLEASE SEND ALL PUBLISHED LETTERS AND QUESTIONS RELATED TO THE LETTER-WRITING PROGRAM TO:
Dave Gorak
DO NOT FORWARD THIS E-MAIL OR MAKE COPIES
Everyone,
--Following is the published letters report for the period August 5 – 11
--BUT FIRST: Californian Bill Terry asks why do we need another guestworker program when one already exists to provide growers with an unlimited number of temporary workers; D.A. King in Georgia says Sen. Arlen Specter still doesn’t get it; and Texan Bill Terry wants to know why the Houston Chronicle places more emphasis on the interests of illegals than it does on those of the city’s legal residents.
--As always, this memo is intended for participants in this program,plus a few friends, and not for wide distribution. Editors tend not to publish letters they suspect are part of an organized letter-writing campaign. So, please refrain from cc:ing us on your letters-to-the-editor and from talking about the program in public forums.
--And please remember to include the full name of the paper that ran your letter and the date.
-- NumbersUSA forwards these letters to you so you can share in the success of the program and see the published efforts of our writers. As a reminder, however, the letters are personal and do not necessarily represent NumbersUSA positions.
RECOMMENDED WRITING STYLE: We recognize that each of you has the ability to make your own decisions about how to write your letters. NumbersUSA's opinion is that letters are more likely to be published and more likely to help our cause of dramatic immigration reductions if they are written in a temperate, self-controlled way that avoids name-calling and arguments based on race, religion or national origin. A strong use of a few facts, voting records, concise analysis and sometimes humor seems the best way to advance our arguments. We encourage specific criticism of open-border politicians and others, but caution against "in your face" rhetoric. Firm but civil argument tends to get the best results. You, of course, are free to disagree. We applaud all published letters that advocate for our immigration-reduction goals, but we may not disseminate those that move outside the tone that we encourage, a tone that many newspapers include in their own letters to the editor guidelines.
--Thanks so much for your hard work and persistence.
Index:
Orange County (Calif.) Register – 8/5
(1) Max Harris
The Seattle Times – 8/6 (online only)
(2) Cliff Borns
The Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star – 8/8
(3) Marty Lich
Pittsburgh Tribune Review – 8/10
(4) Haydee Pavia
The Christian Science Monitor – 8/8
(5) Mark Sussman
Atlanta Journal-Constitution – 8/11
(6) D.A. King
Daily Herald (Ill.) – 8/11
(7) Ronald R. Kowalski
The Washington (D.C.) Times – 8/11
(8) Mark A. Mendlovitz
LETTERS WE’VE JUST RECEIVED
Houston Chronicle – 8/4
(9) Bill Terry
(1)
Orange County (Calif.) Register – 8/5
Another illegal immigration end run attempted
U.S. Senator's Feinstein and Boxer are both co-sponsors of legislation currently pending before the Senate to establish a new farm worker program which will legalize the illegal immigrants currently in the United States. This is nothing but another attempt at amnesty. So, to answer both Feinstein and Boxer's questions on the floor of the Senate to the people of the U.S., NO, we do not want another amnesty program to satisfy AgJOBS requirements. And, NO it isn't true that without illegal workers to fill AgJOBS, American's will starve.
Currently, the U.S. Department of Labor has a program, H-2A. The H-2A temporary agricultural program establishes a means for agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers to bring nonimmigrant foreign workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature. So, there is no requirement for additional legislation which Feinstein and Boxer are heavily pushing.
But, wait! It seems there are those Agriculture growers who do not want to use H-2A because it requires them to follow strict regulations regarding working conditions and salaries which they do not want to pay. Feinstein and Boxer stipulate that this will cause prices to go up on produce in the stores. Quite frankly the program they are pushing will only increase the bottom line for the growers. This brings up an interesting point. Isn't it always the Republican's who are always in favor of "big business?" How come these two Democratic Senator's are so adamant about the necessity of this farm workers bill? Could it have something to do with political coffers? Hummm...
Lets see, at last count there were only 30 co-sponsors to the AfJOBS program.in the Senate (S.340) and 39 in the House (Hr. 371). So why are Senator's Feinstein and Boxer distorting the magnitude of bipartisan support? Let me count the ways...
Max Harris
Laguna Hills, Calif.
(2)
The Seattle Times – 8/6 (online only)
Government recall
New Haven is circumventing the laws of the U.S. Any city that continues this practice should not receive any federal money. We have to hold all local governments responsible for hiring and helping non-Americans gain illegal access to citizenship.
Neither of our senators has a good report card when it comes to this issue. Both seem to think the Democratic Party is more important than America. We have to get them to change their minds. Gov. Christine Gregoire is also lax on this subject.
Somebody, please push the recall button.
Cliff Borns
Spokane, Wash.
(3)
The Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star – 8/8
Money is root cause of the 'illegal' pox
This is in response to Debbie Revely's letter to the editor ("Illegal immigrants do the jobs too many won't do," July 25). She wrote: "Ask your unemployed friends if they would be willing to stand in the hot sun from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. doing farm work or construction work for $7 an hour. They would say no."
The answer is no. But not for the reason she implies.
It is "no" because lawful residents cannot afford to work for that low a wage and not because of the job description itself. If we'd also get, with no questions asked, non-taxed cash income, free medical care, and subsidized housing and utilities, the answer would be, "Oh, yes!"
Regarding those who hire illegal aliens: Why do you think they don't want to pay more for legal employees? You guessed it: money. For every dollar they pay their employees, they pay an additional costly sum to the IRS. And they do not like that.
In the end, it really is all about the money.
Marty Lich
Gypsum, Colo.
(4)
The Christian Science Monitor – 8/8
US Should Pressure Improvements in Mexican Government
The August 3 article, "In Central America, child migrants now face perils alone," is a tragic story. Some will blame Guatemala and Mexico for their inability to care efficiently for their people, which is a valid point. But the US must share some blame for our border chaos and lawlessness.
Guatemala has half the per capita GDP of Mexico, which itself has about a quarter of ours. Our successful system shines like a beacon down through Mexico into Central America. It is a powerful attractant. Guatemala and Mexico apparently have defaulted to governments that are too corrupt or inept for their people to thrive. America has defaulted on the enforcement of its borders, thus raising false hope to others that Uncle Sam can cure their malady.
The US is like a well-meaning enabler of a drug addict. Better that we prescribe the tough love that is needed. In this case that means no illegal entry here plus using our influence to cajole improved democracy and capitalism there. If we provide funds to these neighbors, we must insist on sound legal and economic practices in return. Meanwhile, we need to manage America in accord with our own laws. In the long run, it's the effective, moral solution.
Mark Sussman
Bellevue, Wash.
(5)
Pittsburgh Tribune Review – 8/10
Hooray for Pa.
The Trib's article states, "Weeks after a federal judge struck down Hazleton's ordinance on illegal immigration, the state Senate's top Republican on Wednesday announced that he is pushing legislation to prevent illegal aliens from receiving state benefits in Pennsylvania" ("New battleground on illegals: State aid," Aug. 9 and PghTrib.com).
The people of Pennsylvania are very fortunate to have legislators like Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati.
I live in California, ground zero for illegal immigration. According to a recent report by Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, it costs
Californians $10.5 billion a year to educate, medicate and incarcerate illegal aliens.
We no longer maintain public structures like highways, bridges and overpasses. Most of our budget goes to social services.
We have become the welfare state for Mexican citizens illegally in this country.
Thumbs up to Pennsylvania!
Haydee Pavia
Laguna Woods, Calif.
(6)
Atlanta Journal-Constitution – 8/11
Specter doesn't get it on crisis
Sen. Arlen Specter is hilarious proof —- again —- of the disconnect on the illegal immigration crisis between the American people and those elected to represent and protect them in Washington. He clearly does not "get it." Americans will never again stand quietly by while politicians reward illegal aliens with amnesty and green cards.
Specter's clueless admission that taking the millions of illegal aliens out of "fugitive status" must be the price of Congress appropriating the money to begin to secure American borders and the American workplace is astonishing. And totally unacceptable.
No one thought that President Bush and those in Congress who ask "how high?" when their corporate masters say "jump" would give up on amnesty, but few thought them brazen enough to begin the warm-up process just a month after the American people made their own position so clear.
That Specter has been sent out to start the amnesty attempt so soon brilliantly illustrates the importance it holds to the Washington elite —- the American people be damned.
D.A. King
King is president of the Marietta-based Dustin Inman Society, a non-profit organization opposed to illegal immigration.
(7)
Daily Herald (Ill.) – 8/11
"Hazleton legal battle is far from ended"
The legal battle over the Hazleton, Pa., Illegal Immigration Relief Act is far from over.
Plaintiffs who are in the country illegally were allowed to file anonymous depositions rather than testify.
A U.S. citizen cannot sue a city and remain anonymous. This is one of many reasons Hazleton will appeal the decision.
We, the American people, want our cities secured, our borders protected and our citizenship respected.
When the federal government is unwilling to enforce immigration laws, cities need to be able to take steps to secure citizens from the social, financial and criminal costs of illegal immigration.
Ronald R. Kowalski
Carpentersville, Ill.
(8)
The Washington (D.C.) Times – 8/11
Amnesty by another name
Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter and Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis display an incredible ignorance of how our immigration system works if they believe that "green card" status doesn't mean a path to citizenship. It most certainly does. And they are obviously buying into President Bush's nonsense argument that amnesty is not "automatic citizenship." Again, anyone with knowledge realizes that even legal immigrants are not granted automatic citizenship before a green card ("Republicans pan Specter immigration alternative," Page 1, Wednesday).
In fact, amnesty in this context simply means waiving the usual punishment (deportation) and allowing the violator to keep what it is he broke the law to obtain, namely, a job and residency in the U.S. By that definition, Mr. Specter's plan is an amnesty, and would only encourage future immigration lawbreaking.
The American people made it very clear to our senators that a secure border and interior enforcement is a prerequisite to discussion of any other immigration matters. After two decades of ignoring the problem, Congress owes us at least that much.
Mark A. Mendlovitz
Beverly Hills, Calif.
LETTERS WE’VE JUST RECEIVED
(9)
Houston Chronicle – 8/4
The emphasis is on illegals
There is much frustration with the current status of immigration in America, particularly in the Houston area. Most frustrating of all to me is to see our hometown newspaper's misplaced editorial emphasis on the interests of illegal immigrants versus the interests of area residents and those who are here legally.
There is little doubt that some greedy employers have cheated illegal immigrants on wages. The Chronicle's Aug. 2 editorial "Slave wages / Without workable immigration law, the lawless keep robbing workers" cited 842 complaint cases in 2006. Employers should always pay what they owe to their workers, but were all of these claims verified?
After all, by coming here and working for untaxed cash or with a fake Social Security number, illegal immigrants have a proven track record of deception and dishonesty, and they have an incentive to exaggerate any underpayment in order to garner sympathy and remuneration.
Meanwhile, they and their offspring cost Houston area taxpayers millions of dollars every year in social, educational and medical services.
In financial terms, illegal immigration dwarfs the Enron debacle, but the Chronicle's emphasis is on the equivalent of parking fines.
Bill Terry
The Woodlands, Texas
================
The letters program - as all the projects of NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you, along with grants from private foundations to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America. Would you consider making a donation? Click on: https://www.numbersusa.com/donate or send your donation to NumbersUSA, 1601 N. Kent St., Suite 1100, Arlington, VA 22209-2105; 1-877-885-7733.
This may be a good time for you to make sure that you've let us know all of the areas you are interested in. In order to further customize the type of alerts you receive click here http://www.numbersusa.com/survey?action=longlist
As a NumbersUSA subscriber, you will receive occasional emails about immigration-related opportunities. If you want to increase or reduce the frequency of these emails, click here and choose from Total Activism, Moderate Activism, or Limited Activism at the bottom of your registration form: http://www.numbersusa.com/user
NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America.
You might be an illegal alien if:
You go to the DMV and there is a long line and you get moved to the front of the line.
You might be an illegal alien if you crash a party and then decide to never leave and just live there, rent free, for occasionally taking out the trash and other things the members of the family don't want to do.
You might be an illegal alien if Bush is concerned about the quality of your life.
You proudly wear your “I voted for Loretta Sanchez” button.
Your extended family can throw a reunion party without anyone having to leave their own house.
You come to the United States so you can get a job at a Mexican restaurant.
You might be an illegal alien if your Green Card name is “Fred Smith” when your real name is Pablo Garcia.
You might be an illegal alien if your 67 Chevy pickup truck doubles as an overloaded school bus.
You might be an illegal alien if you get medical care in the first 30 minutes, instead of the first 30 hours.
You might be an illegal alien if you get a sudden urge to work in the garden center of Home Depot or Lowes.
You might be an illegal alien if you're on your 7th DUI and haven't even been to court yet.
You might be an illegal alien if 30 people are helping out with the rent on a 2 bedroom house.
You might be an illegal alien if you’re paid in cash, pay no taxes and no social security, and have no withholding, can pay all your monthly bills for you and your extended family, enjoy a new truck and free schooling.
You Might Be an Illegal Alien if you own a Mexican government sanctioned GPS guidance system to help you cross the border.
You might be an illegal alien if your primary care physician’s initials are E.R.
You might be an illegal alien if the IRS thinks it's too much trouble to ask you to pay taxes.
You might be an Illegal Alien if you are a drug smuggler that puts U.S. border guards in U.S. jails while winning a large cash settlement in the process.
You might be an illegal alien if your clothes hamper, your dresser, and your dinner table is the same piece of furniture.
You Might Be an Illegal Alien if You have decided to name your next son Jorge Boosh.
You Might Be an Illegal Alien if You think it's funny that you got a job taking food orders from people speaking English.
You go to the DMV and there is a long line and you get moved to the front of the line.
You might be an illegal alien if you crash a party and then decide to never leave and just live there, rent free, for occasionally taking out the trash and other things the members of the family don't want to do.
You might be an illegal alien if Bush is concerned about the quality of your life.
You proudly wear your “I voted for Loretta Sanchez” button.
Your extended family can throw a reunion party without anyone having to leave their own house.
You come to the United States so you can get a job at a Mexican restaurant.
You might be an illegal alien if your Green Card name is “Fred Smith” when your real name is Pablo Garcia.
You might be an illegal alien if your 67 Chevy pickup truck doubles as an overloaded school bus.
You might be an illegal alien if you get medical care in the first 30 minutes, instead of the first 30 hours.
You might be an illegal alien if you get a sudden urge to work in the garden center of Home Depot or Lowes.
You might be an illegal alien if you're on your 7th DUI and haven't even been to court yet.
You might be an illegal alien if 30 people are helping out with the rent on a 2 bedroom house.
You might be an illegal alien if you’re paid in cash, pay no taxes and no social security, and have no withholding, can pay all your monthly bills for you and your extended family, enjoy a new truck and free schooling.
You Might Be an Illegal Alien if you own a Mexican government sanctioned GPS guidance system to help you cross the border.
You might be an illegal alien if your primary care physician’s initials are E.R.
You might be an illegal alien if the IRS thinks it's too much trouble to ask you to pay taxes.
You might be an Illegal Alien if you are a drug smuggler that puts U.S. border guards in U.S. jails while winning a large cash settlement in the process.
You might be an illegal alien if your clothes hamper, your dresser, and your dinner table is the same piece of furniture.
You Might Be an Illegal Alien if You have decided to name your next son Jorge Boosh.
You Might Be an Illegal Alien if You think it's funny that you got a job taking food orders from people speaking English.
Getting Immigration Right
How conservatives blocked the open-borders establishment
by John O’Sullivan
In summer 1991, beginning a long air trip on a National Review Institute delegation to the Far East, I opened a 14,000-word submission to National Review and settled down to read. My mood was a good deal more optimistic than it usually was toward 14,000-word submissions. Its author was a friend and gifted writer, Peter Brimelow, then a senior editor at Forbes, who had long wanted to write this piece. But was the topic “hot” enough to command as much as 20 pages in a national magazine?
I was soon blown away by one of the most powerful and lively polemics I have ever read. It was comprehensive, too, covering almost every aspect of immigration and its effects in crisp and well-documented sections.
My traveling companions included Bill and Priscilla Buckley. Bill had given me full editorial control of NR at this point, but you don’t devote a magazine’s entire article section to one piece without informing the proprietor. I gave him the manuscript and told him my intentions. He raised a skeptical eyebrow, but proceeded to read.
An hour later Bill walked over, full of enthusiasm for the piece. Priscilla confirmed our judgment. Peter’s magnum opus appeared as “Time to Re-Think Immigration” behind a cover of the Statue of Liberty raising her hand not to lift a torch aloft but to forbid entry.
As xenophobes later explained it, Peter Brimelow, an English immigrant, and National Review, a magazine then edited by an English immigrant, had launched the modern American debate on immigration. But then, as the former occasionally quipped, aren’t immigrants supposed to do the dirty jobs that Americans won’t?
In fact, this particular immigrant had needed converting. For almost three years, I had argued that immigration was the wrong issue on which to hang the wider cause of protecting America’s national identity against bilingualism, multiculturalism, and postmodern deconstruction (the so-called “National Question”). Just before the 1988 election, I had been astonished at a conservative conference in California when a long burst of applause unexpectedly greeted my mild criticism of the slowly developing spread of biculturalism. Knowing the damage that biculturalism had done to Canada—and sensing from the audience reaction that they were anxious on the same score—I judged that language would be the best horse from that stable. “Official English” enjoyed an 80/20 advantage in opinion polls, it had won the few referenda that the political class had been unable to prevent, and it had none of the “Ellis Island” drawbacks attending the immigration issue—few Americans resented their immigrant grandparents’ having to learn English.
But I changed my mind under two influences.
First, I realized that unchecked immigration was fuelling the support for bilingualism and multiculturalism. Not usually directly, as most immigrants intended to learn English and become Americans. Initially, it was Americans who were mainly responsible for cultural balkanization—elite Americans because they believed in a multicultural America and enforced its strictures in both public and private sectors and ordinary Americans because, being tolerant people, they thought it was only reasonable to make the newcomers, once here, feel at home. Immigration made multiculturalism seem reasonable. And the larger the immigrant intake, the more such reforms as bilingual education seemed simply necessary. As well as making these developments seem reasonable, unchecked immigration ensured that a steady supply of new and probably loyal recruits for the new politics of multiculturalism would keep coming.
Even establishment Republicans, who didn’t notice much, noticed this. By the early 1990s, the GOP was backing away from its earlier sympathy for official English and even from its longer opposition to racial preferences. State parties and governors now began to oppose referenda that would go on to overturn preferences or bilingual education by large majorities. They were responding to what they saw as the political market of the future.
My second reason for second thoughts was economic. Both Brimelow and, through him, George Borjas, a respected economist specializing in immigration (and a Cuban immigrant himself), had drawn my attention to the economic effects of immigration. Its impact on native-born Americans as a whole was modest, and it actually imposed serious economic costs on the low-paid. So there was a strong case against unchecked immigration on both cultural and economic grounds. I gradually swung round to regarding immigration as the primary “National Question” and read Brimelow’s article from that sympathetic standpoint.
The piece created a mini-sensation in the world of intellectual conservatism. But it was largely a favorable one. Even those conservatives who dissented from its restrictionist conclusions, such as historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, conceded that it had mounted a powerful case. It made waves outside conservatism, too. Random House—a mainstream publisher but one then headed by another English immigrant, Harry Evans, a journalist to his fingertips who preferred controversy to pieties—commissioned a book based on it. But reviews for the book on publication in 1995 were far harsher than reactions to the article. There were exceptions: Nathan Glazer, for instance, from a neoconservative standpoint, recognized generously that Alien Nation was a strong and original contribution to immigration literature. In general, however, neoconservatives, libertarians, and establishment Republicans were hostile; liberals were poisonous; conservatives were divided.
What caused this change was that conservative immigration reform had become a political possibility. In retrospect, the years from 1995 to 1997 were the false dawn of immigration reform. Such episodes are natural in the evolution of political controversy. A new issue crystallizing popular discontents emerges. For a while it sweeps all before it. Then its opponents rally and block its advance. But if the sentiments it musters are deep-seated, it re-emerges. Goldwater and Nixon were in very different ways false dawns of the Reagan revolution; ditto Edward Heath and Thatcherism in Britain. With a serious political conflict now in the offing, even conservative supporters of the immigration status quo took off the gloves. Things went as follows:
1. On April 19, 1995, Alien Nation was published and Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. That was the kind of timing all authors fear. McVeigh sucked up all available political publicity for several weeks, and, understandably enough, halted the book’s rise on the bestseller lists. McVeigh also had a more damaging effect on the immigration debate: he became the poster boy for a dark vision of America in which the villains were not any kind of aliens but “Us.” To be concerned about immigration, especially to write of an alien nation, suddenly seemed sinister to the media. But …
2. In June 1995, the bipartisan Jordan Commission, appointed by Congress and headed by the respected former congresswoman Barbara Jordan, issued one of its several reports recommending reforms of the U.S. immigration system, including a reduction in legal numbers by about one-third (to 550,000 legal visas annually), changes in provisions for “family re-unification” to prevent chain migration, improved border security, employer sanctions, and easier procedures for deportation. (The year before, in the November 1994 elections, not only had Gov. Pete Wilson won a hotly contested re-election in California on a program that included calls for better control of immigration, but also Proposition 187, which barred illegal immigrants from using non-emergency public services, had passed with a comfortable majority.) The wind was behind the sails of immigration reform. Jordan was warmly received when she outlined her committee’s proposals to Congress. And …
3. On June 8, 1995, President Clinton announced that the Jordan proposals were “consistent with my own views” and a “road map for the Congress to consider.” Since Congress had become Republican the previous year and the House was even then pushing through a “conservative revolution,” passing a satisfactory immigration bill should have been a no-brainer. Alas ...
4. In January 1996, Barbara Jordan succumbed to cancer. Her death removed a strong and respected voice for immigration reform—and one hard to accuse of racism. Next …
5. Clinton who had been proclaiming his fidelity to the Jordan proposals as late as February 1996, suddenly reversed course. In March, the administration told Congress that it opposed changes in legal immigration, especially the proposed reduction in family members allowed to join relatives in America. Why? According to a 1997 article in the Boston Globe, Democratic National Committee vice chairman and fundraiser John Huang urged Clinton to reverse his endorsement of the Jordan Commission proposal to disallow automatic entry for adult siblings of U.S. citizens. Many Asian immigrants sponsor their adult brothers and sisters once they become citizens. And Clinton was at that time hoovering up campaign contributions from Asians, Asian-Americans, and—a novel touch—even Asian intelligence agencies. Furthermore…
6. In congressional debate throughout 1996, the immigration-reform bill was stripped of its major provisions by a coalition of the White House, the majority of Democrats, and a minority of Republicans. (Sound familiar?) And with the 1996 campaign in full swing, the Clinton administration’s interest in it switched to the question of how many immigrants could vote. All of them, decided Al Gore, who placed his people in the Citizenship USA program to ensure a massive citizen enrollment. An estimated 18,000 criminals were duly granted citizenship in time to vote. Gore’s intervention eventually became a scandal, but only after the election had changed many things. Among them…
7. In January 1997, Sen. Spencer Abraham—a leader of those Republican senators who favored more or less open immigration—replaced moderate restrictionist Alan Simpson as the chair of the Senate immigration subcommittee. In February, he visited Silicon Valley to reassure the assembled whiz kids that there would be no further restrictions on legal immigration on his watch. Suddenly, however …
8. In summer 1997, there was a brief rallying of reformers when the National Academy of Sciences released a report on immigration that confirmed all the main economic conclusions of Borjas and Brimelow. No great economic gains were claimed for it, and large fiscal costs were cited. This was such a defeat for the immiphiliacs that the New York Times was compelled to report it under the misleading headline: “ACADEMY’S REPORT SAYS IMMIGRATION BENEFITS THE U.S.—no huge costs are cited.” Yet even though the report was an important victory for immigration reformers, undermining the intellectual self-satisfaction of their opponents, it came too late. Other matters were gripping the political imagination in the Age of Clinton. And on Aug. 22, 1997, in his “Potomac Watch” column in the Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot assessed the final result with complacent assurance: “… the crusade by a few columnists and British expatriates to turn the GOP into an anti-immigrant party seems to have failed. Immigrant-bashing has proven to be lousy American politics. When even California conservatives admit this, the debate should be over.”
Gigot was expressing what was by then the bipartisan elite orthodoxy on immigration. Whereas the various elites that make up the establishment had been divided about immigration—and so open to argument and debate—as late as 1995, they had coalesced around strong support for it by the middle of 1997. A number of social trends, some of which are evident in the above list of events—the need of some corporations and Republican donors for cheap labor, the need of Democrats for cheap votes, the need of labor unions for new recruits, the need of churches and charities for new cases, the need of the media for new narratives of American bigotry, and the continued advance of “victimhood” and “diversity” as concepts explaining American history and society—came together and hardened into a new orthodoxy. It remained the bipartisan elite orthodoxy for the next—well, until last month.
But this was an orthodoxy with weak foundations. It represented the political interests of Democrats much more faithfully than those of Republicans, even if the latter were slow to realize the fact. It ran counter to the instincts of the voters, even if they, too, were slow to realize the fact. And it was chock full of discrepancies, contradictions, fallacies, and simple errors. Consider some of its articles of faith:
Immigrants are necessary to service our growing economy and especially to bail out the Social Security system. Japan enjoyed one of the highest economic growth rates in the world for 35 years with no immigration whatsoever. Since the existence of a thing is absolute proof of its possibility (as Bertrand Russell once pointed out), this demonstrates that a growing economy is possible without immigration. The trick is achieved by a combination of investment and innovation. Current immigration policy—with its emphasis on bringing in unskilled workers and relatives of recent immigrants—discourages both. It distorts as much as it feeds the economy. It ensures that America is a more unskilled and less automated economy, and a more stratified society, than would be the case with lower levels and different types of immigration. As for Social Security, that argument is a Ponzi scheme and, like all such schemes, would require an ever-expanding arrival of new contributors. After a few generations, this ingenious fiscal policy would run out of human immigrants and the U.S. would have to import aliens from outer space to continue financing its vast entitlement programs now accommodating most of the world.
It is essential to legalize illegals and to liberalize legal immigration to win over the growing Hispanic vote. This began a series of arguments addressed to nervous Republicans. It was easily demolished. Since Hispanics currently vote Democrat by roughly a two-to-one margin, admitting more Hispanic immigrants to residence and citizenship would add millions more votes overall to the Democrat column. Hispanics already here favor less restrictive immigration only marginally more than other Americans, and those Hispanics who lean Republican tend to favor more restrictive immigration. Republicans, though, were determined to look on the bright side.
Remember how Gov. Pete Wilson destroyed the Californian GOP by opposing immigration. This argument—to which Gigot refers—is a brilliant device to transform a weakness of the orthodoxy into its strongest point. The weakness in question is that the electoral decline of the California GOP can be plainly traced to demographic change driven by immigration. It is therefore a warning of how unchecked immigration could make the national GOP a minority party. What the Gigot argument does is redirect responsibility for the party’s decline to Wilson’s successful 1994 re-election campaign in which he campaigned for better federal control of immigration. Unfortunately for this claim, Wilson came from behind to win a near-landslide victory in part on this issue. (Proposition 187 also passed handsomely.) It was subsequent Republican candidates who lost heavily—but they had quietly disavowed Wilson and avoided immigration as an issue. To blame Wilson for their defeats is to indulge in magical thinking. That many Republicans did just that testifies to the power of orthodoxy in politics.
Despite its difficulties, George W. Bush embraced this orthodoxy both as a candidate and as president. Indeed, he was more open and went further than most Republicans. For instance, he made it clear that he admired the enterprise of most illegal immigrants and would try to help their families join them in the United States. Most Americans paid little attention to these declarations since other issues were more prominent. Democrats agreed with the president, and the media covered them both favorably and on the inside pages, if at all. In other words, the elite orthodoxy had the effect of ensuring that immigration, illegal and legal, never became a political issue from 1997 to about 2006. Bush’s two elections seemed to confirm it.
Why did this apparent national consensus break down so spectacularly in 2006 and 2007? There are three explanations. Not surprisingly, the elite explanation is the least plausible: namely, that our system is broken. If our system had been less partisan, the argument goes, it would have passed a necessary measure that most Americans wanted. This is the opposite of the truth. In reality, a bipartisan elite tried to force a measure that most Americans opposed into law but were defeated by senators who heeded strong and widespread protests. In sum: our system worked.
The second explanation, advanced by Brimelow, is that ordinary Americans—in particular, grassroots Republicans—have been staging more and more rebellions against the elite consensus: the near-defeat of Utah Republican immiphiliac Chris Cannon in a primary; the clear victory of immigration reformer Brian Bilbray over a pro-immigration Democrat in the hard environment of Duke Cunningham’s former district; the astounding defeat of Republican football hero Tom Osborne for the Nebraska governorship solely over his support for in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants; the replacement of the mayor and five councilors in Herndon, Virginia by rebels running against their sponsorship of an official day-laborer site for illegals; the calls by state GOP conventions in Washington and Texas (yes, Texas!) for the removal of automatic citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants; etc., etc.
These rebellions have alerted Republicans in Congress to both the risks of ignoring popular sentiments and the potential rewards of listening to the voters. Hence, in the debates of 2006 and 2007, two-thirds or more of the Republicans in the Senate and a larger percentage of House members rejected the so-called bipartisan bills. Even before Congress showed its hand, the wider conservative intellectual community had been gradually shifting away from elite orthodoxy. In the most recent debate, a list of conservative intellectuals who opposed it on principle included Thomas Sowell, Roger Kimball, and Robert Bork.
They, too, had been liberated—in part by the insurgencies Brimelow lists, in part by the most distinguished intellectual rebellion on these issues in recent years. This was Samuel Huntington’s book, Who Are We? exploring the deconstruction of American identity by bilingualism, multiculturalism, and mass immigration. There was an attempt by various academic and multicultural bully-boys to crush Huntington and his thesis with the usual slurs of racism and nativism. But this failed when a list of undeniably distinguished scholars rode gallantly (since some disagreed with him) to his defense. Following that, the topics raised by Huntington became respectable and common fare for such outlets as City Journal and even The Weekly Standard. [A personal note may be in order here: I do not include National Review in this company since the magazine has been strongly in favor of conservative immigration reform since 1992. Contrary to some mythology on this topic, I remain on the magazine’s masthead, I write regularly for it (on immigration among other topics), and I am perfectly content with how it has handled immigration since 1997. In particular, both the magazine and the website played an indispensable role in the defeat of the 2006 and 2007 immigration bills.]
Brimelow’s thesis of a spreading popular rebellion is accordingly an important part of the truth. But does it account for the scale of the defeat suffered by Bush and the bipartisan establishment? Surely we might still be living under a national consensus for doing nothing about immigration if some third factor had not intervened? So what is the X-factor?
According to Steve Sailer’s explanation, George W. Bush is the X-factor. He brought about the collapse of the elite consensus on immigration because he insisted on repeatedly raising the subject. Suppose he had simply kept quiet. Simply ignoring illegal immigration inter alia would have enabled Republican donors to continue getting cheap labor while denying Democrats the prospect of cheap votes. Most presidents, especially if they were embroiled in a war crisis, would have acted on that cynical logic. But Bush believes that he has both a moral duty and good economic reasons to reform immigration along the “comprehensive” lines of the proposed bill. And by getting together with the Democrats on two occasions to pass such a bill, he maximized the rebellion of Middle America against both it and him.
Most conservative voters were reluctant to believe that a president they liked could possibly support a policy they detested. His expressions of support for legalizing illegals initially confused them. But the more he embraced amnesty, the more he persuaded supporters he was serious, and the more they abandoned him. Bush’s ratings fall in lockstep with his advocacy of liberal immigration reform with almost uncanny timing. Republicans could now look at the actual bill more critically.
That was dangerous. Because the Bush-Kennedy bill was written largely by Democrats and immigration lawyers, it was riddled with items that Republicans disliked. So it was not difficult for researchers, such as Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, to show that granting 12 or more million low-paid people the right to welfare benefits would impose vast costs on U.S. taxpayers. To get such a costly measure through, advocates had to create a sense of crisis about the existing situation of 12 million illegals. But those shouting “crisis” were in charge of immigration control while the number of illegals doubled. They had gone from complacency to panic in a single bound. It did not increase confidence in their advice. At the same time, the sense of crisis they created gave greater credibility to such alternative “enforcement first” measures as protecting border security, employer sanctions, and making deportation easier.
Advocates of the legislation as different as Sen. John McCain and think-tanker Tamar Jacoby were now trapped in a logical dilemma. On the one hand, they had to dismiss these alternatives to the bill as either unrealistic or barbaric; on the other, they had to assure doubters that these same measures in the bill would work fine and acceptably once the bill had been passed. By the end of the debates, the establishment experts were looking as confused and self-contradictory as the Bush-Kennedy bill itself. It was the leaders of the opposition—Senators Sessions and DeMint in particular—who seemed in command of the facts as well as the situation.
The legislation might still have survived if we had been living in the world of 1997. By 2006, however, the alternative media of talk radio and bloggers had been flourishing for several years. These broke stories, analyzed legislative contradictions, corrected erroneous media accounts, aroused opponents nationally, and in general organized opposition to the bill. Taken together, new media as politically different as Rush Limbaugh, Mickey Kaus, and NRO stalled the rapid progress that was essential for the bill’s passage. They revealed its defects. And they established that the bill’s bipartisanship was a fraud since the overwhelming majority of the GOP outside the Senate opposed it.
That peeled off a final layer of the bill’s conservative support. Bill Kristol, representing many neoconservatives disposed to favor the bill, came out against it. He did so in part because it had serious drafting defects but, more importantly, because it was creating a bitter gulf between rank-and-file Republicans and the party leadership. That in turn was imperiling Republican objectives in other areas, notably Iraq.
The bill failed, and it is unlikely to be revived until after the 2008 election. Some brand of immigration reform, however, there will have to be eventually. McCain in defeat gibed that opponents of the bill were purely negative and had no “solution” of their own. No shame attaches, of course, to being negative if the proposal under consideration will make matters worse, as McCain’s policy would have done. Yet as it happens, there are many sensible conservative proposals on the table. My own would be to revive those in the Jordan Commission of 1995. They are not ideal, but they are a sensible improvement on the status quo.
Until the battle recommences, however, if any indignant xenophobe is thinking of writing an exposé of this conspiracy of English immigrants to impose an “un-American” system of immigration law on the American people, Steve Sailer has already come up with the perfect title: “The Protocols of the Elders of Albion.”
http://amconmag.com/2007/2007_07_30/cover.html
How conservatives blocked the open-borders establishment
by John O’Sullivan
In summer 1991, beginning a long air trip on a National Review Institute delegation to the Far East, I opened a 14,000-word submission to National Review and settled down to read. My mood was a good deal more optimistic than it usually was toward 14,000-word submissions. Its author was a friend and gifted writer, Peter Brimelow, then a senior editor at Forbes, who had long wanted to write this piece. But was the topic “hot” enough to command as much as 20 pages in a national magazine?
I was soon blown away by one of the most powerful and lively polemics I have ever read. It was comprehensive, too, covering almost every aspect of immigration and its effects in crisp and well-documented sections.
My traveling companions included Bill and Priscilla Buckley. Bill had given me full editorial control of NR at this point, but you don’t devote a magazine’s entire article section to one piece without informing the proprietor. I gave him the manuscript and told him my intentions. He raised a skeptical eyebrow, but proceeded to read.
An hour later Bill walked over, full of enthusiasm for the piece. Priscilla confirmed our judgment. Peter’s magnum opus appeared as “Time to Re-Think Immigration” behind a cover of the Statue of Liberty raising her hand not to lift a torch aloft but to forbid entry.
As xenophobes later explained it, Peter Brimelow, an English immigrant, and National Review, a magazine then edited by an English immigrant, had launched the modern American debate on immigration. But then, as the former occasionally quipped, aren’t immigrants supposed to do the dirty jobs that Americans won’t?
In fact, this particular immigrant had needed converting. For almost three years, I had argued that immigration was the wrong issue on which to hang the wider cause of protecting America’s national identity against bilingualism, multiculturalism, and postmodern deconstruction (the so-called “National Question”). Just before the 1988 election, I had been astonished at a conservative conference in California when a long burst of applause unexpectedly greeted my mild criticism of the slowly developing spread of biculturalism. Knowing the damage that biculturalism had done to Canada—and sensing from the audience reaction that they were anxious on the same score—I judged that language would be the best horse from that stable. “Official English” enjoyed an 80/20 advantage in opinion polls, it had won the few referenda that the political class had been unable to prevent, and it had none of the “Ellis Island” drawbacks attending the immigration issue—few Americans resented their immigrant grandparents’ having to learn English.
But I changed my mind under two influences.
First, I realized that unchecked immigration was fuelling the support for bilingualism and multiculturalism. Not usually directly, as most immigrants intended to learn English and become Americans. Initially, it was Americans who were mainly responsible for cultural balkanization—elite Americans because they believed in a multicultural America and enforced its strictures in both public and private sectors and ordinary Americans because, being tolerant people, they thought it was only reasonable to make the newcomers, once here, feel at home. Immigration made multiculturalism seem reasonable. And the larger the immigrant intake, the more such reforms as bilingual education seemed simply necessary. As well as making these developments seem reasonable, unchecked immigration ensured that a steady supply of new and probably loyal recruits for the new politics of multiculturalism would keep coming.
Even establishment Republicans, who didn’t notice much, noticed this. By the early 1990s, the GOP was backing away from its earlier sympathy for official English and even from its longer opposition to racial preferences. State parties and governors now began to oppose referenda that would go on to overturn preferences or bilingual education by large majorities. They were responding to what they saw as the political market of the future.
My second reason for second thoughts was economic. Both Brimelow and, through him, George Borjas, a respected economist specializing in immigration (and a Cuban immigrant himself), had drawn my attention to the economic effects of immigration. Its impact on native-born Americans as a whole was modest, and it actually imposed serious economic costs on the low-paid. So there was a strong case against unchecked immigration on both cultural and economic grounds. I gradually swung round to regarding immigration as the primary “National Question” and read Brimelow’s article from that sympathetic standpoint.
The piece created a mini-sensation in the world of intellectual conservatism. But it was largely a favorable one. Even those conservatives who dissented from its restrictionist conclusions, such as historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, conceded that it had mounted a powerful case. It made waves outside conservatism, too. Random House—a mainstream publisher but one then headed by another English immigrant, Harry Evans, a journalist to his fingertips who preferred controversy to pieties—commissioned a book based on it. But reviews for the book on publication in 1995 were far harsher than reactions to the article. There were exceptions: Nathan Glazer, for instance, from a neoconservative standpoint, recognized generously that Alien Nation was a strong and original contribution to immigration literature. In general, however, neoconservatives, libertarians, and establishment Republicans were hostile; liberals were poisonous; conservatives were divided.
What caused this change was that conservative immigration reform had become a political possibility. In retrospect, the years from 1995 to 1997 were the false dawn of immigration reform. Such episodes are natural in the evolution of political controversy. A new issue crystallizing popular discontents emerges. For a while it sweeps all before it. Then its opponents rally and block its advance. But if the sentiments it musters are deep-seated, it re-emerges. Goldwater and Nixon were in very different ways false dawns of the Reagan revolution; ditto Edward Heath and Thatcherism in Britain. With a serious political conflict now in the offing, even conservative supporters of the immigration status quo took off the gloves. Things went as follows:
1. On April 19, 1995, Alien Nation was published and Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. That was the kind of timing all authors fear. McVeigh sucked up all available political publicity for several weeks, and, understandably enough, halted the book’s rise on the bestseller lists. McVeigh also had a more damaging effect on the immigration debate: he became the poster boy for a dark vision of America in which the villains were not any kind of aliens but “Us.” To be concerned about immigration, especially to write of an alien nation, suddenly seemed sinister to the media. But …
2. In June 1995, the bipartisan Jordan Commission, appointed by Congress and headed by the respected former congresswoman Barbara Jordan, issued one of its several reports recommending reforms of the U.S. immigration system, including a reduction in legal numbers by about one-third (to 550,000 legal visas annually), changes in provisions for “family re-unification” to prevent chain migration, improved border security, employer sanctions, and easier procedures for deportation. (The year before, in the November 1994 elections, not only had Gov. Pete Wilson won a hotly contested re-election in California on a program that included calls for better control of immigration, but also Proposition 187, which barred illegal immigrants from using non-emergency public services, had passed with a comfortable majority.) The wind was behind the sails of immigration reform. Jordan was warmly received when she outlined her committee’s proposals to Congress. And …
3. On June 8, 1995, President Clinton announced that the Jordan proposals were “consistent with my own views” and a “road map for the Congress to consider.” Since Congress had become Republican the previous year and the House was even then pushing through a “conservative revolution,” passing a satisfactory immigration bill should have been a no-brainer. Alas ...
4. In January 1996, Barbara Jordan succumbed to cancer. Her death removed a strong and respected voice for immigration reform—and one hard to accuse of racism. Next …
5. Clinton who had been proclaiming his fidelity to the Jordan proposals as late as February 1996, suddenly reversed course. In March, the administration told Congress that it opposed changes in legal immigration, especially the proposed reduction in family members allowed to join relatives in America. Why? According to a 1997 article in the Boston Globe, Democratic National Committee vice chairman and fundraiser John Huang urged Clinton to reverse his endorsement of the Jordan Commission proposal to disallow automatic entry for adult siblings of U.S. citizens. Many Asian immigrants sponsor their adult brothers and sisters once they become citizens. And Clinton was at that time hoovering up campaign contributions from Asians, Asian-Americans, and—a novel touch—even Asian intelligence agencies. Furthermore…
6. In congressional debate throughout 1996, the immigration-reform bill was stripped of its major provisions by a coalition of the White House, the majority of Democrats, and a minority of Republicans. (Sound familiar?) And with the 1996 campaign in full swing, the Clinton administration’s interest in it switched to the question of how many immigrants could vote. All of them, decided Al Gore, who placed his people in the Citizenship USA program to ensure a massive citizen enrollment. An estimated 18,000 criminals were duly granted citizenship in time to vote. Gore’s intervention eventually became a scandal, but only after the election had changed many things. Among them…
7. In January 1997, Sen. Spencer Abraham—a leader of those Republican senators who favored more or less open immigration—replaced moderate restrictionist Alan Simpson as the chair of the Senate immigration subcommittee. In February, he visited Silicon Valley to reassure the assembled whiz kids that there would be no further restrictions on legal immigration on his watch. Suddenly, however …
8. In summer 1997, there was a brief rallying of reformers when the National Academy of Sciences released a report on immigration that confirmed all the main economic conclusions of Borjas and Brimelow. No great economic gains were claimed for it, and large fiscal costs were cited. This was such a defeat for the immiphiliacs that the New York Times was compelled to report it under the misleading headline: “ACADEMY’S REPORT SAYS IMMIGRATION BENEFITS THE U.S.—no huge costs are cited.” Yet even though the report was an important victory for immigration reformers, undermining the intellectual self-satisfaction of their opponents, it came too late. Other matters were gripping the political imagination in the Age of Clinton. And on Aug. 22, 1997, in his “Potomac Watch” column in the Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot assessed the final result with complacent assurance: “… the crusade by a few columnists and British expatriates to turn the GOP into an anti-immigrant party seems to have failed. Immigrant-bashing has proven to be lousy American politics. When even California conservatives admit this, the debate should be over.”
Gigot was expressing what was by then the bipartisan elite orthodoxy on immigration. Whereas the various elites that make up the establishment had been divided about immigration—and so open to argument and debate—as late as 1995, they had coalesced around strong support for it by the middle of 1997. A number of social trends, some of which are evident in the above list of events—the need of some corporations and Republican donors for cheap labor, the need of Democrats for cheap votes, the need of labor unions for new recruits, the need of churches and charities for new cases, the need of the media for new narratives of American bigotry, and the continued advance of “victimhood” and “diversity” as concepts explaining American history and society—came together and hardened into a new orthodoxy. It remained the bipartisan elite orthodoxy for the next—well, until last month.
But this was an orthodoxy with weak foundations. It represented the political interests of Democrats much more faithfully than those of Republicans, even if the latter were slow to realize the fact. It ran counter to the instincts of the voters, even if they, too, were slow to realize the fact. And it was chock full of discrepancies, contradictions, fallacies, and simple errors. Consider some of its articles of faith:
Immigrants are necessary to service our growing economy and especially to bail out the Social Security system. Japan enjoyed one of the highest economic growth rates in the world for 35 years with no immigration whatsoever. Since the existence of a thing is absolute proof of its possibility (as Bertrand Russell once pointed out), this demonstrates that a growing economy is possible without immigration. The trick is achieved by a combination of investment and innovation. Current immigration policy—with its emphasis on bringing in unskilled workers and relatives of recent immigrants—discourages both. It distorts as much as it feeds the economy. It ensures that America is a more unskilled and less automated economy, and a more stratified society, than would be the case with lower levels and different types of immigration. As for Social Security, that argument is a Ponzi scheme and, like all such schemes, would require an ever-expanding arrival of new contributors. After a few generations, this ingenious fiscal policy would run out of human immigrants and the U.S. would have to import aliens from outer space to continue financing its vast entitlement programs now accommodating most of the world.
It is essential to legalize illegals and to liberalize legal immigration to win over the growing Hispanic vote. This began a series of arguments addressed to nervous Republicans. It was easily demolished. Since Hispanics currently vote Democrat by roughly a two-to-one margin, admitting more Hispanic immigrants to residence and citizenship would add millions more votes overall to the Democrat column. Hispanics already here favor less restrictive immigration only marginally more than other Americans, and those Hispanics who lean Republican tend to favor more restrictive immigration. Republicans, though, were determined to look on the bright side.
Remember how Gov. Pete Wilson destroyed the Californian GOP by opposing immigration. This argument—to which Gigot refers—is a brilliant device to transform a weakness of the orthodoxy into its strongest point. The weakness in question is that the electoral decline of the California GOP can be plainly traced to demographic change driven by immigration. It is therefore a warning of how unchecked immigration could make the national GOP a minority party. What the Gigot argument does is redirect responsibility for the party’s decline to Wilson’s successful 1994 re-election campaign in which he campaigned for better federal control of immigration. Unfortunately for this claim, Wilson came from behind to win a near-landslide victory in part on this issue. (Proposition 187 also passed handsomely.) It was subsequent Republican candidates who lost heavily—but they had quietly disavowed Wilson and avoided immigration as an issue. To blame Wilson for their defeats is to indulge in magical thinking. That many Republicans did just that testifies to the power of orthodoxy in politics.
Despite its difficulties, George W. Bush embraced this orthodoxy both as a candidate and as president. Indeed, he was more open and went further than most Republicans. For instance, he made it clear that he admired the enterprise of most illegal immigrants and would try to help their families join them in the United States. Most Americans paid little attention to these declarations since other issues were more prominent. Democrats agreed with the president, and the media covered them both favorably and on the inside pages, if at all. In other words, the elite orthodoxy had the effect of ensuring that immigration, illegal and legal, never became a political issue from 1997 to about 2006. Bush’s two elections seemed to confirm it.
Why did this apparent national consensus break down so spectacularly in 2006 and 2007? There are three explanations. Not surprisingly, the elite explanation is the least plausible: namely, that our system is broken. If our system had been less partisan, the argument goes, it would have passed a necessary measure that most Americans wanted. This is the opposite of the truth. In reality, a bipartisan elite tried to force a measure that most Americans opposed into law but were defeated by senators who heeded strong and widespread protests. In sum: our system worked.
The second explanation, advanced by Brimelow, is that ordinary Americans—in particular, grassroots Republicans—have been staging more and more rebellions against the elite consensus: the near-defeat of Utah Republican immiphiliac Chris Cannon in a primary; the clear victory of immigration reformer Brian Bilbray over a pro-immigration Democrat in the hard environment of Duke Cunningham’s former district; the astounding defeat of Republican football hero Tom Osborne for the Nebraska governorship solely over his support for in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants; the replacement of the mayor and five councilors in Herndon, Virginia by rebels running against their sponsorship of an official day-laborer site for illegals; the calls by state GOP conventions in Washington and Texas (yes, Texas!) for the removal of automatic citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants; etc., etc.
These rebellions have alerted Republicans in Congress to both the risks of ignoring popular sentiments and the potential rewards of listening to the voters. Hence, in the debates of 2006 and 2007, two-thirds or more of the Republicans in the Senate and a larger percentage of House members rejected the so-called bipartisan bills. Even before Congress showed its hand, the wider conservative intellectual community had been gradually shifting away from elite orthodoxy. In the most recent debate, a list of conservative intellectuals who opposed it on principle included Thomas Sowell, Roger Kimball, and Robert Bork.
They, too, had been liberated—in part by the insurgencies Brimelow lists, in part by the most distinguished intellectual rebellion on these issues in recent years. This was Samuel Huntington’s book, Who Are We? exploring the deconstruction of American identity by bilingualism, multiculturalism, and mass immigration. There was an attempt by various academic and multicultural bully-boys to crush Huntington and his thesis with the usual slurs of racism and nativism. But this failed when a list of undeniably distinguished scholars rode gallantly (since some disagreed with him) to his defense. Following that, the topics raised by Huntington became respectable and common fare for such outlets as City Journal and even The Weekly Standard. [A personal note may be in order here: I do not include National Review in this company since the magazine has been strongly in favor of conservative immigration reform since 1992. Contrary to some mythology on this topic, I remain on the magazine’s masthead, I write regularly for it (on immigration among other topics), and I am perfectly content with how it has handled immigration since 1997. In particular, both the magazine and the website played an indispensable role in the defeat of the 2006 and 2007 immigration bills.]
Brimelow’s thesis of a spreading popular rebellion is accordingly an important part of the truth. But does it account for the scale of the defeat suffered by Bush and the bipartisan establishment? Surely we might still be living under a national consensus for doing nothing about immigration if some third factor had not intervened? So what is the X-factor?
According to Steve Sailer’s explanation, George W. Bush is the X-factor. He brought about the collapse of the elite consensus on immigration because he insisted on repeatedly raising the subject. Suppose he had simply kept quiet. Simply ignoring illegal immigration inter alia would have enabled Republican donors to continue getting cheap labor while denying Democrats the prospect of cheap votes. Most presidents, especially if they were embroiled in a war crisis, would have acted on that cynical logic. But Bush believes that he has both a moral duty and good economic reasons to reform immigration along the “comprehensive” lines of the proposed bill. And by getting together with the Democrats on two occasions to pass such a bill, he maximized the rebellion of Middle America against both it and him.
Most conservative voters were reluctant to believe that a president they liked could possibly support a policy they detested. His expressions of support for legalizing illegals initially confused them. But the more he embraced amnesty, the more he persuaded supporters he was serious, and the more they abandoned him. Bush’s ratings fall in lockstep with his advocacy of liberal immigration reform with almost uncanny timing. Republicans could now look at the actual bill more critically.
That was dangerous. Because the Bush-Kennedy bill was written largely by Democrats and immigration lawyers, it was riddled with items that Republicans disliked. So it was not difficult for researchers, such as Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, to show that granting 12 or more million low-paid people the right to welfare benefits would impose vast costs on U.S. taxpayers. To get such a costly measure through, advocates had to create a sense of crisis about the existing situation of 12 million illegals. But those shouting “crisis” were in charge of immigration control while the number of illegals doubled. They had gone from complacency to panic in a single bound. It did not increase confidence in their advice. At the same time, the sense of crisis they created gave greater credibility to such alternative “enforcement first” measures as protecting border security, employer sanctions, and making deportation easier.
Advocates of the legislation as different as Sen. John McCain and think-tanker Tamar Jacoby were now trapped in a logical dilemma. On the one hand, they had to dismiss these alternatives to the bill as either unrealistic or barbaric; on the other, they had to assure doubters that these same measures in the bill would work fine and acceptably once the bill had been passed. By the end of the debates, the establishment experts were looking as confused and self-contradictory as the Bush-Kennedy bill itself. It was the leaders of the opposition—Senators Sessions and DeMint in particular—who seemed in command of the facts as well as the situation.
The legislation might still have survived if we had been living in the world of 1997. By 2006, however, the alternative media of talk radio and bloggers had been flourishing for several years. These broke stories, analyzed legislative contradictions, corrected erroneous media accounts, aroused opponents nationally, and in general organized opposition to the bill. Taken together, new media as politically different as Rush Limbaugh, Mickey Kaus, and NRO stalled the rapid progress that was essential for the bill’s passage. They revealed its defects. And they established that the bill’s bipartisanship was a fraud since the overwhelming majority of the GOP outside the Senate opposed it.
That peeled off a final layer of the bill’s conservative support. Bill Kristol, representing many neoconservatives disposed to favor the bill, came out against it. He did so in part because it had serious drafting defects but, more importantly, because it was creating a bitter gulf between rank-and-file Republicans and the party leadership. That in turn was imperiling Republican objectives in other areas, notably Iraq.
The bill failed, and it is unlikely to be revived until after the 2008 election. Some brand of immigration reform, however, there will have to be eventually. McCain in defeat gibed that opponents of the bill were purely negative and had no “solution” of their own. No shame attaches, of course, to being negative if the proposal under consideration will make matters worse, as McCain’s policy would have done. Yet as it happens, there are many sensible conservative proposals on the table. My own would be to revive those in the Jordan Commission of 1995. They are not ideal, but they are a sensible improvement on the status quo.
Until the battle recommences, however, if any indignant xenophobe is thinking of writing an exposé of this conspiracy of English immigrants to impose an “un-American” system of immigration law on the American people, Steve Sailer has already come up with the perfect title: “The Protocols of the Elders of Albion.”
http://amconmag.com/2007/2007_07_30/cover.html
<TABLE height=35 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR><TD colSpan=2></TD></TR><TR><TD colSpan=3>
Click here to display images in this message or edit your settings for all messages.
External Images and objects in this message have been blocked. What's this?
</TD></TR><TR><TD colSpan=3>
</TD></TR><TR><TD class=com_font_3 vAlign=top colSpan=3><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=7> </TD><TD></TD></TR><TR><TD width=7> </TD><TD><TABLE><TBODY><TR><TD bgColor=#ffffff leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=650 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>
</TD></TR><TR><TD><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD rowSpan=3> </TD><TD class=t1fromdatetext>From: Dave Gorak </TD></TR><TR><TD class=t1fromdatetext>Date: Aug. 22, 2007 8:30 p.m. </TD></TR><TR><TD class=t1fromdatetext> </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR><TR><TD class=t1redunderbigheader>LETTER SUCCESSES – Week ended Aug. 18 </TD></TR><TR><TD class=t1thinwhitespace> </TD></TR><TR><TD class=t1letterblock vAlign=top align=left>DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL. PLEASE SEND ALL PUBLISHED LETTERS AND QUESTIONS RELATED TO THE LETTER-WRITING PROGRAM TO:
Dave Gorak
Everyone,
--Following is the published letters report for the period Aug. 12-18
--BUT FIRST: When changing your e-mail address, please send it to me with your name. The automatic notifications sent by servers omit names.
Terry Gavin in Illinois says the July Fourth holiday was very special this year in the wake of the Senate amnesty bill’s defeat; Californian Leon Lim praises the feds for getting serious about enforcement; Utah writer Gaylan Stewart says we already have a guest worker program (H-2A visas) available to growers; Virginian Allison Carman Kipp says we must stop offering encouragement and support to illegals; and Hoosier Barry Wiggins puts in a nice plug for Attrition Through Enforcement.
--As always, this memo is intended for participants in this program, plus a few friends, and not for wide distribution. Editors tend not to publish letters they suspect are part of an organized letter-writing campaign. So, please refrain from cc:ing us on your letters-to-the-editor and from talking about the program in public forums.
--And please remember to include the full name of the paper that ran your letter and the date.
-- NumbersUSA forwards these letters to you so you can share in the success of the program and see the published efforts of our writers. As a reminder, however, the letters are personal and do not necessarily represent NumbersUSA positions.
RECOMMENDED WRITING STYLE: We recognize that each of you has the ability to make your own decisions about how to write your letters. NumbersUSA's opinion is that letters are more likely to be published and more likely to help our cause of dramatic immigration reductions if they are written in a temperate, self-controlled way that avoids name-calling and arguments based on race, religion or national origin. A strong use of a few facts, voting records, concise analysis and sometimes humor seems the best way to advance our arguments. We encourage specific criticism of open-border politicians and others, but caution against "in your face" rhetoric. Firm but civil argument tends to get the best results. You, of course, are free to disagree. We applaud all published letters that advocate for our immigration-reduction goals, but we may not disseminate those that move outside the tone that we encourage, a tone that many newspapers include in their own letters to the editor guidelines.
-- Thank you all!
Index:
The Courier News (Ill.) – 8/12
(1) Terry Gavin
Mansfield (Ohio) News-Journal – 8/12
(2) (3) Jacqueline I. Ruhl
Ventura County (Calif.) - 8/13
(4) Leon Lim
The Salt Lake Tribune – 8/13
(5) Gayland Stewart
The Examiner (Washington, D.C.) – 8/14
(6) Al Eisner
Greenville (S.C.) News – 8/14
(7) Ruth Pollard
Rocky Mountain News – 8/14 (Online only)
(8) Scott J. Sedei
Wichita (Kan.) Eagle – 8/15
(9) Mark Aberle
The Times Examiner (S.C.)- 8/15
(10) (11) James Aldridge
Get educated about BOCS resolution
(12) Allison Carman Kipp
News-Sentinel (Ind.) - 8/17
(13) Barry Wiggins
Ashbury Park (N.J.) Press – 8/18
(14) Eugene Cutolo
(1)
The Courier News (Ill.) – 8/12
"Defeat of immigration bill cause for celebration"
As we celebrated the Fourth of July, America's birthday, last month, we also celebrated a great day for America: Amnesty for millions of illegals was defeated in Washington, D.C.!
Vast numbers of our citizens -- nearly 80 percent, according to national polls -- were able to defeat the push for amnesty by the elites who are out of touch with everyday Americans.
Republicans, Democrats and independents joined together to turn back the tide of those in our government who refuse to listen to us, the people. All demographics, including legal immigrants, rejected a bill that would have led to 40 million to 50 million more illegals being allowed into our country over the next 10 years.
It would sure be great if we American citizens could pull together on the other important issues of our time, like Islamic terrorists who wish to kill every American who disagrees with their religious views.
Though there is much to celebrate in this victory for America's future, sadly we here in Illinois are stuck with two senators, Durbin and Obama, who voted with Ted Kennedy for amnesty for illegals. I not only called Senators Durbin and Obama but faxed and e-mailed, with no response at all. Hopefully, others like me here noticed their lack of interest in representing us honestly and they will be replaced by people who want to represent Illinois' people and the best interests of the vast majority of our state.
Terry Gavin
Elgin, Ill.
(2) (3)
Mansfield (Ohio) News-Journal – 8/12
Support Hillary if you want further harm done to America
Americans want straight talk from presidential candidates about domestic issues. Straight talk is Hillary Clinton's forte, but instead of supporting American workers, she promises amnesty for illegal immigrants and all the trimmings on the tree when she is elected. She and Barack Obama recently labeled those who don't support amnesty as racist.
Never mind that her position is in direct opposition to the views of the majority of citizens she aspires to lead: Americans concerned about overpopulation and its effects on our entitlement programs, schools and environment. She is corporate America's doll; bought with corporate funding.
Never mind the consequences of adopting millions of uneducated and unskilled souls who will never rise from their situation to claim the American dream, forever destined to be slaves to greedy businesses who want them for their cheap labor.
Hillary, Bill and the Bushes approve of NAFTA and the job losses it causes American workers. They are members of the so-called Trilateral Commission, a group of elite who have been cooking up the Security and Prosperity Partnership and North American Union since 1973. They will soon claim their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And they don't believe it's any of your business.
On Aug. 20-21, leaders of Canada, Mexico and the U.S. will meet in Montebelle, Canada with corporate interests from all three nations and China to discuss the final stages in erasing our borders, dissolving this nation, building a NAFTA Super Highway and replacing the American dollar with the Amero.
Our infrastructure is crumbling. But $2.5 million in US tax money appropriated the US Department of Transportation for our highways was used instead to plan the NAFTA Highway. China is building a super seaport in Mexico and needs this highway to circumvent our ports manned by unionized stevedores, to transport its tainted food and wares into this nation and Canada. Now Bush says he'll veto any Congressional effort to make China clean up its act. If you approve of Bush's policies and want more, be sure to vote for Hillary.
Jacqueline I. Ruhl
Fredericktown, Ohio
(This letter also published in the weekly Mt. Gilead (Ohio) Sentinel – 8/13-8/17).
(4)
Ventura County (Calif.) - 8/13
Re: Your Aug 6, article, "Tough immigration rules worry growers"
Rob Roy, president of the Ventura County Agricultural Association, said "that the new rules the Bush administration will soon impose to crack down on illegal immigrants will be very difficult for agriculture."
What does this mean? The rest of us also wish we could selectively follow rules and laws we like. For example, paying taxes is very difficult for most of us and will act — using his words — as a "noose around our family's neck." What does he propose we do?
The Social Security Administration has sent "no-match Social Security number" letters to employees and their employers since 2002 to verify employees' legal status. Employers obviously are prohibited from hiring illegal workers. Since it is difficult for employers to enforce this law, they choose to ignore them for 15 years. What does Roy think will happen to us if we do not pay taxes for 15 years?
Kudos to Russ Knocke, Homeland Security Department spokesman, who said: "The department is going to be tough and aggressive in the enforcement of the law. You are going to see more work-site cases, and no more excuses." Knocke is doing his job. Can we count on the agricultural industry to do the same?
Leon Lim
Camarillo, Calif.
(5)
The Salt Lake Tribune – 8/13
Spin for cheap labor
"The sky is falling, the sky is falling!" cry the cheap labor employers and other enablers of illegal aliens.
"Who will harvest U.S. crops?" asks The Tribune (Our View, Aug. 10). I wonder how those crops were harvested decades ago, before there were 12-20 million illegal immigrants in the United States? This is even more questionable since there is less land in agricultural production along with significant mechanization, making fewer laborers needed today.
There is already an agricultural visa program in place. Could it be that agricultural work is even beneath the dignity of most illegal aliens who prefer to work as domestics, in construction and at processing plants, depressing wages for working poor U.S. citizens?
It is likely that cheap labor supporters don't really need to worry. This sounds like just more spin from Homeland Security. We will have to wait and see if there is long-term action.
Gaylan Stewart
Spanish Fork, Utah
(6)
The Examiner (Washington, D.C.) – 8/14
No public services for illegal immigrants
I am extremely disappointed that Montgomery County leadership decided not to follow Loudoun and Prince William counties in their lead to deny public services to illegal immigrants. I resent the fact that tax payers’ money — taxes I and my family pay to Montgomery County — is now being used to provide public services to law breakers, criminals or Illegal immigrants who broke into our country for their own economic gains and greed.
Illegal immigrants do not contribute to the county in any way and continue to be a burden and nuisance on law abiding citizens in this county. So far, these illegal immigrants have caused overcrowding in residential neighborhoods and become a public and general nuisance. They have over taxed the school system and medical care system, as well as the public service law enforcement system. They have a day labor center that should never have been approved to operate here.
I urge the leadership and council to put this issue on the ballot for the citizens of Montgomery County to decide whether these illegal immigrants should get any public services at all. I sa no public services should be provided ever to any illegal immigrants, as they do not deserve it and have not earned it.
Al Eisner
Wheaton, Md.
(7)
Greenville (S.C.) News – 8/14
Local police should tackle immigration
Illegal immigration is a growing problem in our state. Over the past few weeks we have been hearing stories of the increase in gang activity in our area -- and certainly a part of that comes from illegal immigration.
Since our federal government has shown that they have no interest in securing our borders and enforcing our immigration laws, it has become more important that our local law enforcement agencies take a more active role. This is especially important in light of the fact that illegal aliens outnumber federal immigration agents by approximately 5,000 to one.
More than 600,000 state and local law enforcement officers already come into contact with illegal aliens every day across our country. I believe the vast majority of these officers believe deeply in the rule of law and want to help protect the security of our country. However, many are unsure of their authority or have been told not to do anything by their leadership. This must be changed.
It is the responsibility of every law enforcement officer in this country to uphold the laws of our land. One way that their authority to do so can be clarified is through a program called 287(g). This program provides training by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for local law enforcement personnel who then can act with the immigration authorities to identify and deport criminal aliens. Every law enforcement office in this country should be taking advantage of this program.
The Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Department in Charlotte is using this program with success, there is a push in Georgia to get their law enforcement into the program, and we in South Carolina should be contacting our local mayors, sheriffs and police to encourage them to participate. Our question should be, if you are not participating, why not?
Ruth Pollard
Greenville, S.C.
(8)
Rocky Mountain News – 8/14 (Online only)
Tom Tancredo’s amnesty-free bill
Re: Tancredo outlines his amnesty-free immigration proposal, by Chris
Barge, July 11, 2007.
I applaud Tom Tancredo for introducing an “amnesty-free immigration proposal.” Since the bill drew “immediate fire from the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition”, it must be good! They claim “Congressman Tancredo’s proposal is unjust, unrealistic and completely out of touch with the American people.” Which American people would those be? Certainly not the majority that flooded their Senators’ offices withangry telephone calls, faxes and visits to defeat a bill that would have granted amnesty to the 20 million-plus illegals squatting in the United States. Mr. Tancredo is one of the few politicians who is in touch with the American people. He has consistently put Americans first. Kennedy, McCain and Bush have sold us out to big business interests that bemoan the loss of a cheap labor source. And Ken Salazar consistently votes in favor of the illegals and completely ignores his Colorado constituents.
The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition stated, “It is sad and tragic that Mr. Tancredo continues to play the politics of fear and hate, rejecting the values of family unity, civil liberties and diversity that are the cornerstone of our democracy.” I am one of the thousands of Americans who has been a victim of crimes committed by illegals. Why are our rights as American citizens swept aside, while illegals are judged by a separate set of rules and laws that pander to their “civil liberties and diversity?” Rules and laws that don't hold them accountable for crimes an American citizen would be imprisoned for.
The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition does not support immigrants, they support criminal trespassers. Illegals and the groups that support them blur the immigration issue by leaving out the key word, “illegal.” They use trigger words such as “fear”, “hate” and “racist” to blur the fact illegals entered the United States illegally and continue to break our laws to remain here. The majority of senators who opposed the Kennedy/McCain bill said it “lacked enforcement.” I don't think that will be an issue with Mr. Tancredo’s bill. Thank you Tom!
Scott J. Sedei
Longmont, Colo.
(9)
Wichita (Kan.) Eagle – 8/15
Secure borders
The article "Mexican shelters are filling with southbound migrants" (Aug. 12 Eagle) was a vindication of what I and many have known all along: If the government takes sincere effort to secure the border, requires employers to verify identification and Social Security numbers, effectively punishes both illegal aliens and employers for breaking the law, and extends no entitlement benefits to illegals, then the magnet drawing the illegals will weaken and the flow will end for the most part.
It is obvious that to support segments of the U.S. economy, some mechanism to supply low-cost labor is vital. But it needs to be accomplished through legal pathways that ensure the safety of the U.S. citizen, as well as the migrant worker, and include the additional taxation of funds leaving the United States. To pay voluntary legal foreign workers based on the individual work situation, other than a "one-size-fits-all" minimum wage, is not racist or unfair when they have chosen to come to the United States to work because it is better than what they can do at home.
That may sound unfair to some, but for the continued strength of our economy and security of the United States, this is necessary for our survival. We should not apologize or back away from enforcement of our immigration laws.
Mark Aberle
Wichita, Kan.
(10) (11)
The Times Examiner (S.C.)- 8/15
Our Judges and many of our elected officials are lawyers, 'officers- of-the-court', who often go with 'which-everway' they perceive the- wind to be blowing. And, this is precisely why our country is in near moral collapse and citizens all over America perceive our legal system as broken.
Clemson city Attorney, Kay Barrett who is suffering from the disease of political correctness, recently sided with activist U.S. District judge, James Munley, who ruled that little Hazelton, PA, had no right to protect its citizens from an illegal alien invasion. The city had passed two ordinances barring the hiring or housing of illegal aliens because of increased crime and drain on city services. But, Clinton appointee, judge Munley, ruled that Hazelton's ordinances were unconstitutional even though Article IV, Section 4, of the U.S. Constitution requires the federal government "to protect each of the states from invasion,"and, not just military invasions.
Activist Judge Munley 'leaped-aplenty' in ruling that Hazelton's ordinances violated the U.S. Constitution's supremacy clause,supposedly, because only the Federal government can enforce laws that it is charged with doing.-- even though the Federalgovernment, like its predecessors for decades, has done almost nothing to enforce our immigration laws. Ms. Barrett, not only'leaps-aplenty' also but, expands the Judge's ruling when she tells the Anderson Independent-Mail that Hazelton's ordinances violated 'the contract cause', the First, Fourth, 14th Amendment, and individual rights.-- And, said, "passing such an ordinance was divisive and promoted hatred and strife."
However, Ms. 'political correctness' doesn't seem to realize that divisiveness, hatred, and strife will be promoted only when we lemmings allow 'activist' judges to create 'rights' for lawbreakers and allow 'officers-of-the-court,' such as herself, to remain in office who are supposed to be enforcing our laws, but are aiding and abetting criminals. And, we citizens sure as hell better keep our guns because we're going to need them to protect ourselves from the political correct ethnic panders that we elect and appoint to office who only pretend to enforce our laws and represent us.
James Aldridge
Anderson, S.C.
(A modified version of this letter published Aug. 18 in the Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail.)
(12)
Get educated about BOCS resolution
Potomac News (Va.) – 8/16
I am writing in response to Pamela Harms Letter to the Editor entitled "Intolerance is leading the county astray." Pamela Harms and all other pro-illegal supporters, please visit www.drake.house.gov, where you will learn that on July 25, Congress passed an amendment "aim<ING> to eliminate what are commonly referred to as "sanctuary policies" in local municipalities, whereby law enforcement officials are barred from asking suspects about their immigration status or reporting them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The amendment will ensure that existing law is enforced uniformly across the country by withholding federal funding for cities that choose to violate section 642(a) of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA)."
Congresswoman Drake also states, "sanctuary cities undermine these partnerships by willfully and selectively choosing to disregard federal laws that are already on the books."
The resolution passed ensures enforcement of existing federal laws,
which is what Congress wants (our federal officials).
I am tired of hearing that the board, Help Save Manassas, and citizens who support the board's resolution are racist, xenophobic, nativist, violators of civil rights, etc... There are no legal arguments to support illegal immigrants being in our country. What part of illegal don't you understand?
To PRLDEF, MALDEF, the ACLU, the NAACP, the Virginia Muslim Action Committee, the Washington Lawyers Conference, the Central American Resource Center, the Virginia Council on Human Rights, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Virginia Human Rights Commission, the Muslim Association of Virginia, the Woodbridge Workers Committee, and all other pro-illegal supporters, advocacy groups, and religious groups, I invite you to spend your time and resources more wisely by doing two things:
1. Help the illegal immigrants to return to their homelands and immigrate to the U.S. in accordance with our immigration laws, and ...
2. Travel to their countries of origin and help them repatriate, and assist the local citizens in effecting positive changes in their own countries.
By encouraging illegals to remain here illegally, you are supporting their lawlessness.
Allison Carman Kipp
Manassas, Va.
(13)
News-Sentinel (Ind.) - 8/17
Column ignored illegal alien's victims
Kevin Leininger's Aug. 3, column about Juan, an illegal alien living in Fort Wayne, completely ignores Juan's victims.
First, Juan victimized the property owners along the border on whose land he trespassed. Property owners on our border with Mexico are being terrorized by illegal aliens and coyotes, like the one employed by Juan who, every day, trespass, steal from homes, kill livestock, litter, relieve themselves and trample fragile ecosystems.
Second, illegal aliens like Juan endanger the lives of the men and women who serve in our Border Patrol by leading them on dangerous chases and, in some cases, targeting them with deadly weapons.
Third, Juan and illegal aliens like him drive down wages and take jobs from just those Americans who are most vulnerable and closest to poverty. When the supply of labor is increased, wages are reduced and jobs are more scarce. How many American factory and restaurant employees make less money because they have to compete with Juan and illegal aliens like him who are willing to work “off the books”? How many Americans aren't working because of unfair competition from Juan and other illegal aliens like him?
Fourth, Juan and illegal aliens like him steal money out of the pockets of every tax-paying American. Far from, as Leininger claimed, “paying taxes for services they cannot always receive,” illegal aliens like Juan impose a net burden on American taxpayers, in effect stealing money from every taxpayer. A June 26 report by the Heritage Foundation found that low-skill illegal aliens like Juan “receive, on average, three dollars in government benefits and services for each dollar of taxes they pay. This imbalance imposes a net cost of $89 billion per year on U.S. taxpayers.” $89 billion a year would pay for the maintenance of a lot of bridges and roads!
Finally, Leininger either didn't do much research or chose to suppress some of his findings, because he wrongly states that the only alternative to granting amnesty to criminals like Juan is mass deportation. The humane solution to our illegal alien problem is simple: secure the border with Mexico and start to enforce our employment and immigration laws. As Juan and illegal aliens like him are unable to find jobs and unable to access the American welfare system, most will voluntarily return to their home countries. The few who remain will be in numbers low enough for orderly deportation. For more information on the “Attrition through Enforcement” plan, please see www.numbersusa.com/interests/attrition.html.
Barry Wiggins
New Haven, Ind.
(14)
Ashbury Park (N.J.) Press – 8/18
Slayings show leaders' failures
The murder of three students from Newark is a tragedy that was preventable. One of the suspects, an illegal immigrant from Peru, had been indicted on numerous charges including the rape of a 5-year-old girl.
President Bush's failure to secure our borders make it possible for an endless stream of illegals to cross our borders. He must bear the blame for the loss of these young lives.
Gov. Corzine is no less blameworthy. His nonenforcement policy has allowed criminal immigrants to roam our streets. New Jersey is one of only nine states that hasn't taken extra steps to combat illegal immigration. The state's attorney general has asked immigration officials not to make agreements with New Jersey law enforcement agencies that would give them the authority to identify, detain and process immigration offenders.
The plan to assist illegal aliens and to prepare them for a path to legalization are a violation of federal law. We are all poorly served by Corzine's failure to uphold immigration law, and most horribly three innocent young men are gone and their families grieve.
Thankfully, Bush's term in office soon will end. Let's make Corzine's stay equally brief.
Eugene Cutolo
Colt’s Neck, N.J.
================
The letters program - as all the projects of NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you, along with grants from private foundations to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America. Would you consider making a donation? Click on: https://www.numbersusa.com/donate or send your donation to NumbersUSA, 1601 N. Kent St., Suite 1100, Arlington, VA 22209-2105; 1-877-885-7733.
</TD></TR><TR><TD class=t1redoversmallheader vAlign=top align=left></TD></TR><TR><TD class=t1redundersmallfooter vAlign=top align=left colSpan=2>This may be a good time for you to make sure that you've let us know all of the areas you are interested in. In order to further customize the type of alerts you receive click here http://www.numbersusa.com/survey?action=longlist
As a NumbersUSA subscriber, you will receive occasional emails about immigration-related opportunities. If you want to increase or reduce the frequency of these emails, click here and choose from Total Activism, Moderate Activism, or Limited Activism at the bottom of your registration form: http://www.numbersusa.com/user
NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America.
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Click here to display images in this message or edit your settings for all messages.
External Images and objects in this message have been blocked. What's this?
</TD></TR><TR><TD colSpan=3>
Dave Gorak
Everyone,
--Following is the published letters report for the period Aug. 12-18
--BUT FIRST: When changing your e-mail address, please send it to me with your name. The automatic notifications sent by servers omit names.
Terry Gavin in Illinois says the July Fourth holiday was very special this year in the wake of the Senate amnesty bill’s defeat; Californian Leon Lim praises the feds for getting serious about enforcement; Utah writer Gaylan Stewart says we already have a guest worker program (H-2A visas) available to growers; Virginian Allison Carman Kipp says we must stop offering encouragement and support to illegals; and Hoosier Barry Wiggins puts in a nice plug for Attrition Through Enforcement.
--As always, this memo is intended for participants in this program, plus a few friends, and not for wide distribution. Editors tend not to publish letters they suspect are part of an organized letter-writing campaign. So, please refrain from cc:ing us on your letters-to-the-editor and from talking about the program in public forums.
--And please remember to include the full name of the paper that ran your letter and the date.
-- NumbersUSA forwards these letters to you so you can share in the success of the program and see the published efforts of our writers. As a reminder, however, the letters are personal and do not necessarily represent NumbersUSA positions.
RECOMMENDED WRITING STYLE: We recognize that each of you has the ability to make your own decisions about how to write your letters. NumbersUSA's opinion is that letters are more likely to be published and more likely to help our cause of dramatic immigration reductions if they are written in a temperate, self-controlled way that avoids name-calling and arguments based on race, religion or national origin. A strong use of a few facts, voting records, concise analysis and sometimes humor seems the best way to advance our arguments. We encourage specific criticism of open-border politicians and others, but caution against "in your face" rhetoric. Firm but civil argument tends to get the best results. You, of course, are free to disagree. We applaud all published letters that advocate for our immigration-reduction goals, but we may not disseminate those that move outside the tone that we encourage, a tone that many newspapers include in their own letters to the editor guidelines.
-- Thank you all!
Index:
The Courier News (Ill.) – 8/12
(1) Terry Gavin
Mansfield (Ohio) News-Journal – 8/12
(2) (3) Jacqueline I. Ruhl
Ventura County (Calif.) - 8/13
(4) Leon Lim
The Salt Lake Tribune – 8/13
(5) Gayland Stewart
The Examiner (Washington, D.C.) – 8/14
(6) Al Eisner
Greenville (S.C.) News – 8/14
(7) Ruth Pollard
Rocky Mountain News – 8/14 (Online only)
(8) Scott J. Sedei
Wichita (Kan.) Eagle – 8/15
(9) Mark Aberle
The Times Examiner (S.C.)- 8/15
(10) (11) James Aldridge
Get educated about BOCS resolution
(12) Allison Carman Kipp
News-Sentinel (Ind.) - 8/17
(13) Barry Wiggins
Ashbury Park (N.J.) Press – 8/18
(14) Eugene Cutolo
(1)
The Courier News (Ill.) – 8/12
"Defeat of immigration bill cause for celebration"
As we celebrated the Fourth of July, America's birthday, last month, we also celebrated a great day for America: Amnesty for millions of illegals was defeated in Washington, D.C.!
Vast numbers of our citizens -- nearly 80 percent, according to national polls -- were able to defeat the push for amnesty by the elites who are out of touch with everyday Americans.
Republicans, Democrats and independents joined together to turn back the tide of those in our government who refuse to listen to us, the people. All demographics, including legal immigrants, rejected a bill that would have led to 40 million to 50 million more illegals being allowed into our country over the next 10 years.
It would sure be great if we American citizens could pull together on the other important issues of our time, like Islamic terrorists who wish to kill every American who disagrees with their religious views.
Though there is much to celebrate in this victory for America's future, sadly we here in Illinois are stuck with two senators, Durbin and Obama, who voted with Ted Kennedy for amnesty for illegals. I not only called Senators Durbin and Obama but faxed and e-mailed, with no response at all. Hopefully, others like me here noticed their lack of interest in representing us honestly and they will be replaced by people who want to represent Illinois' people and the best interests of the vast majority of our state.
Terry Gavin
Elgin, Ill.
(2) (3)
Mansfield (Ohio) News-Journal – 8/12
Support Hillary if you want further harm done to America
Americans want straight talk from presidential candidates about domestic issues. Straight talk is Hillary Clinton's forte, but instead of supporting American workers, she promises amnesty for illegal immigrants and all the trimmings on the tree when she is elected. She and Barack Obama recently labeled those who don't support amnesty as racist.
Never mind that her position is in direct opposition to the views of the majority of citizens she aspires to lead: Americans concerned about overpopulation and its effects on our entitlement programs, schools and environment. She is corporate America's doll; bought with corporate funding.
Never mind the consequences of adopting millions of uneducated and unskilled souls who will never rise from their situation to claim the American dream, forever destined to be slaves to greedy businesses who want them for their cheap labor.
Hillary, Bill and the Bushes approve of NAFTA and the job losses it causes American workers. They are members of the so-called Trilateral Commission, a group of elite who have been cooking up the Security and Prosperity Partnership and North American Union since 1973. They will soon claim their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And they don't believe it's any of your business.
On Aug. 20-21, leaders of Canada, Mexico and the U.S. will meet in Montebelle, Canada with corporate interests from all three nations and China to discuss the final stages in erasing our borders, dissolving this nation, building a NAFTA Super Highway and replacing the American dollar with the Amero.
Our infrastructure is crumbling. But $2.5 million in US tax money appropriated the US Department of Transportation for our highways was used instead to plan the NAFTA Highway. China is building a super seaport in Mexico and needs this highway to circumvent our ports manned by unionized stevedores, to transport its tainted food and wares into this nation and Canada. Now Bush says he'll veto any Congressional effort to make China clean up its act. If you approve of Bush's policies and want more, be sure to vote for Hillary.
Jacqueline I. Ruhl
Fredericktown, Ohio
(This letter also published in the weekly Mt. Gilead (Ohio) Sentinel – 8/13-8/17).
(4)
Ventura County (Calif.) - 8/13
Re: Your Aug 6, article, "Tough immigration rules worry growers"
Rob Roy, president of the Ventura County Agricultural Association, said "that the new rules the Bush administration will soon impose to crack down on illegal immigrants will be very difficult for agriculture."
What does this mean? The rest of us also wish we could selectively follow rules and laws we like. For example, paying taxes is very difficult for most of us and will act — using his words — as a "noose around our family's neck." What does he propose we do?
The Social Security Administration has sent "no-match Social Security number" letters to employees and their employers since 2002 to verify employees' legal status. Employers obviously are prohibited from hiring illegal workers. Since it is difficult for employers to enforce this law, they choose to ignore them for 15 years. What does Roy think will happen to us if we do not pay taxes for 15 years?
Kudos to Russ Knocke, Homeland Security Department spokesman, who said: "The department is going to be tough and aggressive in the enforcement of the law. You are going to see more work-site cases, and no more excuses." Knocke is doing his job. Can we count on the agricultural industry to do the same?
Leon Lim
Camarillo, Calif.
(5)
The Salt Lake Tribune – 8/13
Spin for cheap labor
"The sky is falling, the sky is falling!" cry the cheap labor employers and other enablers of illegal aliens.
"Who will harvest U.S. crops?" asks The Tribune (Our View, Aug. 10). I wonder how those crops were harvested decades ago, before there were 12-20 million illegal immigrants in the United States? This is even more questionable since there is less land in agricultural production along with significant mechanization, making fewer laborers needed today.
There is already an agricultural visa program in place. Could it be that agricultural work is even beneath the dignity of most illegal aliens who prefer to work as domestics, in construction and at processing plants, depressing wages for working poor U.S. citizens?
It is likely that cheap labor supporters don't really need to worry. This sounds like just more spin from Homeland Security. We will have to wait and see if there is long-term action.
Gaylan Stewart
Spanish Fork, Utah
(6)
The Examiner (Washington, D.C.) – 8/14
No public services for illegal immigrants
I am extremely disappointed that Montgomery County leadership decided not to follow Loudoun and Prince William counties in their lead to deny public services to illegal immigrants. I resent the fact that tax payers’ money — taxes I and my family pay to Montgomery County — is now being used to provide public services to law breakers, criminals or Illegal immigrants who broke into our country for their own economic gains and greed.
Illegal immigrants do not contribute to the county in any way and continue to be a burden and nuisance on law abiding citizens in this county. So far, these illegal immigrants have caused overcrowding in residential neighborhoods and become a public and general nuisance. They have over taxed the school system and medical care system, as well as the public service law enforcement system. They have a day labor center that should never have been approved to operate here.
I urge the leadership and council to put this issue on the ballot for the citizens of Montgomery County to decide whether these illegal immigrants should get any public services at all. I sa no public services should be provided ever to any illegal immigrants, as they do not deserve it and have not earned it.
Al Eisner
Wheaton, Md.
(7)
Greenville (S.C.) News – 8/14
Local police should tackle immigration
Illegal immigration is a growing problem in our state. Over the past few weeks we have been hearing stories of the increase in gang activity in our area -- and certainly a part of that comes from illegal immigration.
Since our federal government has shown that they have no interest in securing our borders and enforcing our immigration laws, it has become more important that our local law enforcement agencies take a more active role. This is especially important in light of the fact that illegal aliens outnumber federal immigration agents by approximately 5,000 to one.
More than 600,000 state and local law enforcement officers already come into contact with illegal aliens every day across our country. I believe the vast majority of these officers believe deeply in the rule of law and want to help protect the security of our country. However, many are unsure of their authority or have been told not to do anything by their leadership. This must be changed.
It is the responsibility of every law enforcement officer in this country to uphold the laws of our land. One way that their authority to do so can be clarified is through a program called 287(g). This program provides training by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for local law enforcement personnel who then can act with the immigration authorities to identify and deport criminal aliens. Every law enforcement office in this country should be taking advantage of this program.
The Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Department in Charlotte is using this program with success, there is a push in Georgia to get their law enforcement into the program, and we in South Carolina should be contacting our local mayors, sheriffs and police to encourage them to participate. Our question should be, if you are not participating, why not?
Ruth Pollard
Greenville, S.C.
(8)
Rocky Mountain News – 8/14 (Online only)
Tom Tancredo’s amnesty-free bill
Re: Tancredo outlines his amnesty-free immigration proposal, by Chris
Barge, July 11, 2007.
I applaud Tom Tancredo for introducing an “amnesty-free immigration proposal.” Since the bill drew “immediate fire from the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition”, it must be good! They claim “Congressman Tancredo’s proposal is unjust, unrealistic and completely out of touch with the American people.” Which American people would those be? Certainly not the majority that flooded their Senators’ offices withangry telephone calls, faxes and visits to defeat a bill that would have granted amnesty to the 20 million-plus illegals squatting in the United States. Mr. Tancredo is one of the few politicians who is in touch with the American people. He has consistently put Americans first. Kennedy, McCain and Bush have sold us out to big business interests that bemoan the loss of a cheap labor source. And Ken Salazar consistently votes in favor of the illegals and completely ignores his Colorado constituents.
The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition stated, “It is sad and tragic that Mr. Tancredo continues to play the politics of fear and hate, rejecting the values of family unity, civil liberties and diversity that are the cornerstone of our democracy.” I am one of the thousands of Americans who has been a victim of crimes committed by illegals. Why are our rights as American citizens swept aside, while illegals are judged by a separate set of rules and laws that pander to their “civil liberties and diversity?” Rules and laws that don't hold them accountable for crimes an American citizen would be imprisoned for.
The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition does not support immigrants, they support criminal trespassers. Illegals and the groups that support them blur the immigration issue by leaving out the key word, “illegal.” They use trigger words such as “fear”, “hate” and “racist” to blur the fact illegals entered the United States illegally and continue to break our laws to remain here. The majority of senators who opposed the Kennedy/McCain bill said it “lacked enforcement.” I don't think that will be an issue with Mr. Tancredo’s bill. Thank you Tom!
Scott J. Sedei
Longmont, Colo.
(9)
Wichita (Kan.) Eagle – 8/15
Secure borders
The article "Mexican shelters are filling with southbound migrants" (Aug. 12 Eagle) was a vindication of what I and many have known all along: If the government takes sincere effort to secure the border, requires employers to verify identification and Social Security numbers, effectively punishes both illegal aliens and employers for breaking the law, and extends no entitlement benefits to illegals, then the magnet drawing the illegals will weaken and the flow will end for the most part.
It is obvious that to support segments of the U.S. economy, some mechanism to supply low-cost labor is vital. But it needs to be accomplished through legal pathways that ensure the safety of the U.S. citizen, as well as the migrant worker, and include the additional taxation of funds leaving the United States. To pay voluntary legal foreign workers based on the individual work situation, other than a "one-size-fits-all" minimum wage, is not racist or unfair when they have chosen to come to the United States to work because it is better than what they can do at home.
That may sound unfair to some, but for the continued strength of our economy and security of the United States, this is necessary for our survival. We should not apologize or back away from enforcement of our immigration laws.
Mark Aberle
Wichita, Kan.
(10) (11)
The Times Examiner (S.C.)- 8/15
Our Judges and many of our elected officials are lawyers, 'officers- of-the-court', who often go with 'which-everway' they perceive the- wind to be blowing. And, this is precisely why our country is in near moral collapse and citizens all over America perceive our legal system as broken.
Clemson city Attorney, Kay Barrett who is suffering from the disease of political correctness, recently sided with activist U.S. District judge, James Munley, who ruled that little Hazelton, PA, had no right to protect its citizens from an illegal alien invasion. The city had passed two ordinances barring the hiring or housing of illegal aliens because of increased crime and drain on city services. But, Clinton appointee, judge Munley, ruled that Hazelton's ordinances were unconstitutional even though Article IV, Section 4, of the U.S. Constitution requires the federal government "to protect each of the states from invasion,"and, not just military invasions.
Activist Judge Munley 'leaped-aplenty' in ruling that Hazelton's ordinances violated the U.S. Constitution's supremacy clause,supposedly, because only the Federal government can enforce laws that it is charged with doing.-- even though the Federalgovernment, like its predecessors for decades, has done almost nothing to enforce our immigration laws. Ms. Barrett, not only'leaps-aplenty' also but, expands the Judge's ruling when she tells the Anderson Independent-Mail that Hazelton's ordinances violated 'the contract cause', the First, Fourth, 14th Amendment, and individual rights.-- And, said, "passing such an ordinance was divisive and promoted hatred and strife."
However, Ms. 'political correctness' doesn't seem to realize that divisiveness, hatred, and strife will be promoted only when we lemmings allow 'activist' judges to create 'rights' for lawbreakers and allow 'officers-of-the-court,' such as herself, to remain in office who are supposed to be enforcing our laws, but are aiding and abetting criminals. And, we citizens sure as hell better keep our guns because we're going to need them to protect ourselves from the political correct ethnic panders that we elect and appoint to office who only pretend to enforce our laws and represent us.
James Aldridge
Anderson, S.C.
(A modified version of this letter published Aug. 18 in the Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail.)
(12)
Get educated about BOCS resolution
Potomac News (Va.) – 8/16
I am writing in response to Pamela Harms Letter to the Editor entitled "Intolerance is leading the county astray." Pamela Harms and all other pro-illegal supporters, please visit www.drake.house.gov, where you will learn that on July 25, Congress passed an amendment "aim<ING> to eliminate what are commonly referred to as "sanctuary policies" in local municipalities, whereby law enforcement officials are barred from asking suspects about their immigration status or reporting them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The amendment will ensure that existing law is enforced uniformly across the country by withholding federal funding for cities that choose to violate section 642(a) of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA)."
Congresswoman Drake also states, "sanctuary cities undermine these partnerships by willfully and selectively choosing to disregard federal laws that are already on the books."
The resolution passed ensures enforcement of existing federal laws,
which is what Congress wants (our federal officials).
I am tired of hearing that the board, Help Save Manassas, and citizens who support the board's resolution are racist, xenophobic, nativist, violators of civil rights, etc... There are no legal arguments to support illegal immigrants being in our country. What part of illegal don't you understand?
To PRLDEF, MALDEF, the ACLU, the NAACP, the Virginia Muslim Action Committee, the Washington Lawyers Conference, the Central American Resource Center, the Virginia Council on Human Rights, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Virginia Human Rights Commission, the Muslim Association of Virginia, the Woodbridge Workers Committee, and all other pro-illegal supporters, advocacy groups, and religious groups, I invite you to spend your time and resources more wisely by doing two things:
1. Help the illegal immigrants to return to their homelands and immigrate to the U.S. in accordance with our immigration laws, and ...
2. Travel to their countries of origin and help them repatriate, and assist the local citizens in effecting positive changes in their own countries.
By encouraging illegals to remain here illegally, you are supporting their lawlessness.
Allison Carman Kipp
Manassas, Va.
(13)
News-Sentinel (Ind.) - 8/17
Column ignored illegal alien's victims
Kevin Leininger's Aug. 3, column about Juan, an illegal alien living in Fort Wayne, completely ignores Juan's victims.
First, Juan victimized the property owners along the border on whose land he trespassed. Property owners on our border with Mexico are being terrorized by illegal aliens and coyotes, like the one employed by Juan who, every day, trespass, steal from homes, kill livestock, litter, relieve themselves and trample fragile ecosystems.
Second, illegal aliens like Juan endanger the lives of the men and women who serve in our Border Patrol by leading them on dangerous chases and, in some cases, targeting them with deadly weapons.
Third, Juan and illegal aliens like him drive down wages and take jobs from just those Americans who are most vulnerable and closest to poverty. When the supply of labor is increased, wages are reduced and jobs are more scarce. How many American factory and restaurant employees make less money because they have to compete with Juan and illegal aliens like him who are willing to work “off the books”? How many Americans aren't working because of unfair competition from Juan and other illegal aliens like him?
Fourth, Juan and illegal aliens like him steal money out of the pockets of every tax-paying American. Far from, as Leininger claimed, “paying taxes for services they cannot always receive,” illegal aliens like Juan impose a net burden on American taxpayers, in effect stealing money from every taxpayer. A June 26 report by the Heritage Foundation found that low-skill illegal aliens like Juan “receive, on average, three dollars in government benefits and services for each dollar of taxes they pay. This imbalance imposes a net cost of $89 billion per year on U.S. taxpayers.” $89 billion a year would pay for the maintenance of a lot of bridges and roads!
Finally, Leininger either didn't do much research or chose to suppress some of his findings, because he wrongly states that the only alternative to granting amnesty to criminals like Juan is mass deportation. The humane solution to our illegal alien problem is simple: secure the border with Mexico and start to enforce our employment and immigration laws. As Juan and illegal aliens like him are unable to find jobs and unable to access the American welfare system, most will voluntarily return to their home countries. The few who remain will be in numbers low enough for orderly deportation. For more information on the “Attrition through Enforcement” plan, please see www.numbersusa.com/interests/attrition.html.
Barry Wiggins
New Haven, Ind.
(14)
Ashbury Park (N.J.) Press – 8/18
Slayings show leaders' failures
The murder of three students from Newark is a tragedy that was preventable. One of the suspects, an illegal immigrant from Peru, had been indicted on numerous charges including the rape of a 5-year-old girl.
President Bush's failure to secure our borders make it possible for an endless stream of illegals to cross our borders. He must bear the blame for the loss of these young lives.
Gov. Corzine is no less blameworthy. His nonenforcement policy has allowed criminal immigrants to roam our streets. New Jersey is one of only nine states that hasn't taken extra steps to combat illegal immigration. The state's attorney general has asked immigration officials not to make agreements with New Jersey law enforcement agencies that would give them the authority to identify, detain and process immigration offenders.
The plan to assist illegal aliens and to prepare them for a path to legalization are a violation of federal law. We are all poorly served by Corzine's failure to uphold immigration law, and most horribly three innocent young men are gone and their families grieve.
Thankfully, Bush's term in office soon will end. Let's make Corzine's stay equally brief.
Eugene Cutolo
Colt’s Neck, N.J.
================
The letters program - as all the projects of NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you, along with grants from private foundations to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America. Would you consider making a donation? Click on: https://www.numbersusa.com/donate or send your donation to NumbersUSA, 1601 N. Kent St., Suite 1100, Arlington, VA 22209-2105; 1-877-885-7733.
</TD></TR><TR><TD class=t1redoversmallheader vAlign=top align=left></TD></TR><TR><TD class=t1redundersmallfooter vAlign=top align=left colSpan=2>This may be a good time for you to make sure that you've let us know all of the areas you are interested in. In order to further customize the type of alerts you receive click here http://www.numbersusa.com/survey?action=longlist
As a NumbersUSA subscriber, you will receive occasional emails about immigration-related opportunities. If you want to increase or reduce the frequency of these emails, click here and choose from Total Activism, Moderate Activism, or Limited Activism at the bottom of your registration form: http://www.numbersusa.com/user
NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America.
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
The three amigos, erasing borders?
The Washington Times : August 21 , 2007 -- by Wesley Pruden
Click here to learn more about national sovereignty issues. Some of the folks who gave President Bush a country lickin' on his immigration "reform" are spoiling for another round with him. The reason why is on display at the "Three Amigos" summit in Canada.
Mr. Bush and President Felipe Calderon of Mexico are guests of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper for another workout of a vaguely described scheme called the Security and Prosperity Partnership, which the White House says is nothing more than three amigos getting together to swap yarns, pull a cork and talk about NAFTA writ large. But a remarkably diverse group of skeptics, including congressmen of both parties, critics of unrestrained global trade, conservative activists and left-wing academics and trade unionists, say it's free trade run amok.
The mysterious partnership is known only to the few by the acronym SPP. Most of the reporters at the Canadian summit can barely hide their languor, treating SPP as just another boring economic story White House reporters can't be expected to understand. The Associated Press describes SPP merely as "a way for the nations to team up on health, security and commerce."
Twenty-one Republicans and one Democrat have written to President Bush to tell him of "serious and growing concerns" in Congress about the "so-called" Security and Prosperity Partnership, and the House has adopted legislation barring U.S. transportation officials from even participating in meetings of the partnership.
The congressmen mostly seem miffed that the White House is undertaking far-reaching agreements with Canada and Mexico without telling them about it. The conservative skeptics say these agreements chip away national sovereignty -- that the aim is to establish a North American Union, like the European Union, with unelected bureaucrats empowered to form a super-government to dispossess everyone but the elites. The liberal skeptics argue that "the super-government" would be a tool of the multinational corporations, eager to drive down wages and make wetbacks of everyone without a corporation big enough to plunder cheap labor.
The Mexican government, eager to export penniless Mexicans, is the most enthusiastic about the partnership and the billions of expected yankee dollars. Just two days after his election in 2000, Vicente Fox talked of his vision of a North American common market, a customs union, a common tariff, joint monetary policy and the "free flow of labor" across borders. It's difficult to imagine what Mr. Fox calls a "free flow" of labor if what we've had for decades hasn't satisfied him.
A few months later, Mr. Fox showed up in Washington with an even bigger begging bowl, challenging Mr. Bush to develop a plan to legalize "all Mexicans in the United States" by the end of the year. George W. certainly tried. He's still nursing the bruises.
The White House felt it necessary to dispatch an unnamed senior official as the Canadian summit opened to describe as "silly" the notion of a North American Union, or a common currency. But there's always somebody, senior official or not, who doesn't get the word. Promoters of the Security and Prosperity Partnership, chief among them Robert Pastor, a professor who worked in the Carter administration and has advised Democratic presidential candidates since, have already named the currency -- the "amero" -- they expect to one day find in the well-picked pockets of Americans.
When George W. entertained the leaders of Mexico and Canada in Texas two years ago to introduce the Partnership, three amigos sat before a large stylized map of North America with the borders of the three countries curiously made indistinct. In testimony to Congress in 2005, Prof. Pastor said he envisioned a "new" North America: "Instead of stopping North Americans on the borders, we ought to provide them with a secure biometric Border Pass that would ease transit across the border like an E-Z pass permits our cars to speed through tollbooths." But selling this one won't be E-Z.
The Washington Times : August 21 , 2007 -- by Wesley Pruden
Click here to learn more about national sovereignty issues. Some of the folks who gave President Bush a country lickin' on his immigration "reform" are spoiling for another round with him. The reason why is on display at the "Three Amigos" summit in Canada.
Mr. Bush and President Felipe Calderon of Mexico are guests of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper for another workout of a vaguely described scheme called the Security and Prosperity Partnership, which the White House says is nothing more than three amigos getting together to swap yarns, pull a cork and talk about NAFTA writ large. But a remarkably diverse group of skeptics, including congressmen of both parties, critics of unrestrained global trade, conservative activists and left-wing academics and trade unionists, say it's free trade run amok.
The mysterious partnership is known only to the few by the acronym SPP. Most of the reporters at the Canadian summit can barely hide their languor, treating SPP as just another boring economic story White House reporters can't be expected to understand. The Associated Press describes SPP merely as "a way for the nations to team up on health, security and commerce."
Twenty-one Republicans and one Democrat have written to President Bush to tell him of "serious and growing concerns" in Congress about the "so-called" Security and Prosperity Partnership, and the House has adopted legislation barring U.S. transportation officials from even participating in meetings of the partnership.
The congressmen mostly seem miffed that the White House is undertaking far-reaching agreements with Canada and Mexico without telling them about it. The conservative skeptics say these agreements chip away national sovereignty -- that the aim is to establish a North American Union, like the European Union, with unelected bureaucrats empowered to form a super-government to dispossess everyone but the elites. The liberal skeptics argue that "the super-government" would be a tool of the multinational corporations, eager to drive down wages and make wetbacks of everyone without a corporation big enough to plunder cheap labor.
The Mexican government, eager to export penniless Mexicans, is the most enthusiastic about the partnership and the billions of expected yankee dollars. Just two days after his election in 2000, Vicente Fox talked of his vision of a North American common market, a customs union, a common tariff, joint monetary policy and the "free flow of labor" across borders. It's difficult to imagine what Mr. Fox calls a "free flow" of labor if what we've had for decades hasn't satisfied him.
A few months later, Mr. Fox showed up in Washington with an even bigger begging bowl, challenging Mr. Bush to develop a plan to legalize "all Mexicans in the United States" by the end of the year. George W. certainly tried. He's still nursing the bruises.
The White House felt it necessary to dispatch an unnamed senior official as the Canadian summit opened to describe as "silly" the notion of a North American Union, or a common currency. But there's always somebody, senior official or not, who doesn't get the word. Promoters of the Security and Prosperity Partnership, chief among them Robert Pastor, a professor who worked in the Carter administration and has advised Democratic presidential candidates since, have already named the currency -- the "amero" -- they expect to one day find in the well-picked pockets of Americans.
When George W. entertained the leaders of Mexico and Canada in Texas two years ago to introduce the Partnership, three amigos sat before a large stylized map of North America with the borders of the three countries curiously made indistinct. In testimony to Congress in 2005, Prof. Pastor said he envisioned a "new" North America: "Instead of stopping North Americans on the borders, we ought to provide them with a secure biometric Border Pass that would ease transit across the border like an E-Z pass permits our cars to speed through tollbooths." But selling this one won't be E-Z.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.usillegalaliens.com/impac...structure.html
http://www.usillegalaliens.com/impac...structure.html
She's right on the money...again.
1 Down, 31,999,999 to Go
by Ann Coulter
Posted: 08/22/2007
Mickey Kaus has raised the intriguing possibility that, since Bush's amnesty plan went down to humiliating defeat once Americans got wind of what the elites had planned for us, the Bush administration might respond by intentionally targeting highly sympathetic illegal aliens for deportation "in as clumsy, heartless and lawsuit-inspiring a fashion as possible, in order to create the maximum number of negative headlines."
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff described anti-amnesty Americans as being satisfied with nothing less than "the death penalty" for illegal aliens and recently warned of "some unhappy consequences" unless illegal aliens were granted amnesty. Yes, that Michael Chertoff -- the guy in charge of keeping us safe from foreign invasions.
So it was curious when we were treated this week to a weeping Mexican woman on TV, claiming the U.S. government was tearing her from her infant son and saying she knew the American people would be outraged if she were deported. (I note that her message might have been more effective in English.)
Admittedly, I'd just as soon have Homeland Security focusing on illegal immigrants like the one who shot four promising college kids execution style in Newark, killing three of them, possibly after sexually molesting two of them. Heck, I wouldn't have minded if they had deported Jose Carranza even before his girlfriend accused him of raping her 5-year-old daughter.
Or Ruben Hernandez-Juarez, an illegal alien charged with sexually molesting a 6-year-old boy in Martin County, Fla.
Or Alejandro Bautista, an illegal alien in Cook County, Ill., who was convicted for sexually molesting two teenaged boys.
Or Alejandro Xuya-Sian, the illegal alien who hit a pedestrian with his car in New York and dragged him for nearly a mile before dislodging the victim from his car, throwing him aside and driving off again. (Even more disturbing: Xuya-Sian may not have been wearing his seat belt at the time.)
Or illegal alien Alberto Barajas-Enriquez, who is charged with beating his Michigan neighbor to death with a golf club because the neighbor complained about the constant barking of Enriquez's dog. Asked by police how many times he struck his victim with the golf club, Enriquez said, "Let's see ... five, six ... uh, put me down for a seven."
Or Lucio Sanchez-Martinez, the illegal alien in Ohio charged with sexually molesting a sleeping 8-year-old girl.
For simplicity, I have limited my enumeration of illegal aliens I would like deported to those who were charged or convicted of heinous crimes last week. For illegal aliens charged with child molestation, I had to limit it to two days last week.
Still, if Elvira Arellano is the best they've got to change public opinion on deporting illegal aliens, don't expect public opinion to change anytime soon.
Arellano has already snuck into the country illegally twice (that we know of). After being deported in 1999 -- under an administration that, astonishingly, was more serious about enforcing immigration law than the current one -- she illegally ran across the border again a few days later.
Only after 9/11 was she arrested again and convicted for using a stolen Social Security number to get a job as a cleaning woman at an airport. In lieu of jail time, Arellano was to be deported. Instead she took refuge in a left-wing "church" and began to bellyache about being thrown out again.
Despite living in this country illegally for a decade, Arellano hasn't mastered the most rudimentary English. She doesn't want to assimilate and become a "Mexican-American." She wants to be a Mexican-Mexican living in and off America.
So far, the only thing Arellano has contributed to America is one illegitimate child.
Arellano is part of the advance wave of left-wing, Third World colonization of America. Democrats claim there are "two Americas." If they have their way, there will be two Latin Americas.
Liberals know they're losing the demographic war. Christians have lots of children and adopt lots of children; liberals abort children and encourage the gay lifestyle in anyone with a flair for color.
They can't keep up.
Population expert Nick Eberstadt recently speculated in The Washington Post that a principal reason for America's high fertility rate compared to Europe's is its religiosity. Well, that leaves liberals out.
The Democratic Party is in the fight of its life against a conservative demographic trend. Its only hope is to gerrymander America to make the poorest half of Mexico a state. Only a massive influx of criminals, wards of the state and rioters can save them.
This is why Democrats are obsessed with giving two groups the right to vote: illegal aliens and felons. With Arellano, they get two for the price of one. To liberals, building a wall across the Mexican border is a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Democrats are counting on illegal immigrants to be the future of their party, their border guards for the new socialist state. At least liberals have a clear mission and know what they're fighting for. Their plan is to destroy America.
Karl Rove's only response is: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."
Arellano can go, and take her kid with her.
1 Down, 31,999,999 to Go
by Ann Coulter
Posted: 08/22/2007
Mickey Kaus has raised the intriguing possibility that, since Bush's amnesty plan went down to humiliating defeat once Americans got wind of what the elites had planned for us, the Bush administration might respond by intentionally targeting highly sympathetic illegal aliens for deportation "in as clumsy, heartless and lawsuit-inspiring a fashion as possible, in order to create the maximum number of negative headlines."
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff described anti-amnesty Americans as being satisfied with nothing less than "the death penalty" for illegal aliens and recently warned of "some unhappy consequences" unless illegal aliens were granted amnesty. Yes, that Michael Chertoff -- the guy in charge of keeping us safe from foreign invasions.
So it was curious when we were treated this week to a weeping Mexican woman on TV, claiming the U.S. government was tearing her from her infant son and saying she knew the American people would be outraged if she were deported. (I note that her message might have been more effective in English.)
Admittedly, I'd just as soon have Homeland Security focusing on illegal immigrants like the one who shot four promising college kids execution style in Newark, killing three of them, possibly after sexually molesting two of them. Heck, I wouldn't have minded if they had deported Jose Carranza even before his girlfriend accused him of raping her 5-year-old daughter.
Or Ruben Hernandez-Juarez, an illegal alien charged with sexually molesting a 6-year-old boy in Martin County, Fla.
Or Alejandro Bautista, an illegal alien in Cook County, Ill., who was convicted for sexually molesting two teenaged boys.
Or Alejandro Xuya-Sian, the illegal alien who hit a pedestrian with his car in New York and dragged him for nearly a mile before dislodging the victim from his car, throwing him aside and driving off again. (Even more disturbing: Xuya-Sian may not have been wearing his seat belt at the time.)
Or illegal alien Alberto Barajas-Enriquez, who is charged with beating his Michigan neighbor to death with a golf club because the neighbor complained about the constant barking of Enriquez's dog. Asked by police how many times he struck his victim with the golf club, Enriquez said, "Let's see ... five, six ... uh, put me down for a seven."
Or Lucio Sanchez-Martinez, the illegal alien in Ohio charged with sexually molesting a sleeping 8-year-old girl.
For simplicity, I have limited my enumeration of illegal aliens I would like deported to those who were charged or convicted of heinous crimes last week. For illegal aliens charged with child molestation, I had to limit it to two days last week.
Still, if Elvira Arellano is the best they've got to change public opinion on deporting illegal aliens, don't expect public opinion to change anytime soon.
Arellano has already snuck into the country illegally twice (that we know of). After being deported in 1999 -- under an administration that, astonishingly, was more serious about enforcing immigration law than the current one -- she illegally ran across the border again a few days later.
Only after 9/11 was she arrested again and convicted for using a stolen Social Security number to get a job as a cleaning woman at an airport. In lieu of jail time, Arellano was to be deported. Instead she took refuge in a left-wing "church" and began to bellyache about being thrown out again.
Despite living in this country illegally for a decade, Arellano hasn't mastered the most rudimentary English. She doesn't want to assimilate and become a "Mexican-American." She wants to be a Mexican-Mexican living in and off America.
So far, the only thing Arellano has contributed to America is one illegitimate child.
Arellano is part of the advance wave of left-wing, Third World colonization of America. Democrats claim there are "two Americas." If they have their way, there will be two Latin Americas.
Liberals know they're losing the demographic war. Christians have lots of children and adopt lots of children; liberals abort children and encourage the gay lifestyle in anyone with a flair for color.
They can't keep up.
Population expert Nick Eberstadt recently speculated in The Washington Post that a principal reason for America's high fertility rate compared to Europe's is its religiosity. Well, that leaves liberals out.
The Democratic Party is in the fight of its life against a conservative demographic trend. Its only hope is to gerrymander America to make the poorest half of Mexico a state. Only a massive influx of criminals, wards of the state and rioters can save them.
This is why Democrats are obsessed with giving two groups the right to vote: illegal aliens and felons. With Arellano, they get two for the price of one. To liberals, building a wall across the Mexican border is a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Democrats are counting on illegal immigrants to be the future of their party, their border guards for the new socialist state. At least liberals have a clear mission and know what they're fighting for. Their plan is to destroy America.
Karl Rove's only response is: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."
Arellano can go, and take her kid with her.
50 illegal immigrants found in trailer
FALFURRIAS, Texas (AP) — Federal agents at an inland immigration checkpoint found 50 illegal immigrants locked inside a tractor trailer, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Wednesday.
None of the immigrants required medical attention after they were found Tuesday, though agents said the trailer was not air-conditioned and many were sweating. All were being processed for deportation.
The driver and passenger in the truck's cab were arrested and charged with alien smuggling. Their identities were withheld pending further investigation.
More NAFTA info: http://ooida.com & http://landlinemag.com
FALFURRIAS, Texas (AP) — Federal agents at an inland immigration checkpoint found 50 illegal immigrants locked inside a tractor trailer, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Wednesday.
None of the immigrants required medical attention after they were found Tuesday, though agents said the trailer was not air-conditioned and many were sweating. All were being processed for deportation.
The driver and passenger in the truck's cab were arrested and charged with alien smuggling. Their identities were withheld pending further investigation.
More NAFTA info: http://ooida.com & http://landlinemag.com
BUSH'S AMERICA: ROACH MOTEL
by Ann Coulter
June 6, 2007
Republicans' defense of President Bush's immigration bill is more enraging than their defense of Harriet Miers. Back then, Bush's conservative base was accused of being sexist for opposing an unqualified woman's nomination to the highest court in the land. Now we're racists for not wanting to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.
I don't know why conservatives like Linda Chavez have to argue like liberals by smearing their opponents as racists. Oh wait, now I remember! Their arguments are as strong as liberals' arguments usually are.
Apart from abortion, no subject produces so much disingenuousness as America's immigration policy, both legal and illegal. For nearly 50 years, Americans have been intentionally lied to about our immigration laws.
In 1965, Teddy Kennedy overhauled immigration law with the specific purpose of effecting a dramatic change in the nation's demographics. Bobby Kennedy had civil rights, so Teddy needed something big: He would preside over a civil rights bill for the entire Third World! My word, but that man could drink in those days.
With his 1965 immigration act, Kennedy embarked on entirely transforming American culture for no good reason. (You know how people always say the same arguments against illegal immigrants today were once made about the Irish to show how silly those arguments are? If only the U.S. Senate had had an "Irish Need Not Apply" sign!)
Until that point, immigration law basically took a laissez-faire approach, with country quotas attempting to replicate the traditional immigration patterns. Most immigrants to America had historically come from Great Britain, Germany and Scandinavian countries. Consequently, immigration quotas roughly reflected that balance, with smaller numbers of immigrants admitted from other countries.
But in an angry, long-awaited payback to WASPs, Kennedy decided he was going to radically transform the racial composition of the country. Instead of taking 15 immigrants from England and three from China, America would henceforth take three from England and 15 from China. Payback's a bitch, Daughters of the American Revolution!
Some of those hardworking immigrants who just want a chance to succeed were arrested in a plot to blow up JFK Airport last week.
Most immigrants still come from a handful of countries; Kennedy simply changed which countries those would be. In 2005, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the overwhelming majority of immigrants came from only 10 countries, none of which had sent a lot of immigrants to America for the country's first 200 years: Mexico (161,445), India (84,681), China (69,967), the Philippines (60,748), Cuba (36,261), Vietnam (32,784), the Dominican Republic (27,504), Korea (26,562), Colombia (25,571) and Ukraine (22,761).
In 1960, whites were 90 percent of the country. The Census Bureau recently estimated that whites already account for less than two-thirds of the population and will be a minority by 2050. Other estimates put that day much sooner.
One may assume the new majority will not be such compassionate overlords as the white majority has been. If this sort of drastic change were legally imposed on any group other than white Americans, it would be called genocide. Yet whites are called racists merely for mentioning the fact that current immigration law is intentionally designed to reduce their percentage in the population.
We needed to have "more discussion" about Iraq for nearly two years before finally invading. When will we be allowed to begin discussion of a government policy enacted by stealth 40 years ago specifically intended to decimate one particular ethnic group in our own country?
If liberals think Iraqis are genetically incapable of pulling off even the most rudimentary form of democracy, why do they believe 50 million Mexicans will magically become good Americans, imbued in the nation's history and culture, upon crossing the Rio Grande? Maybe we should dunk Iraqis in the Rio and see what happens.
And as long as we're adopting an open borders policy for immigration, how about opening the borders for emigration? As it stands, anyone can come in and start plotting terrorist attacks or collecting government services right away. But the rest of us can never escape having to pay for it.
You can leave the country, you can renounce your citizenship — but you still owe taxes for 10 years. The government does not allow us to stop supporting welfare recipients in America, millions more of whom it plans to import under Bush's bill. That's not a free market — it's a roach motel.
If these free-marketeers at The Wall Street Journal want the free movement of people, how about letting us freely leave after they've wrecked the country?
In Samuel P. Huntington's book "Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity," he asks: "Would America be the America it is today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico or Brazil."
I don't want to live in Mexico, Quebec or Brazil. But now I guess I have no choice, since "open borders" means I can never leave.
by Ann Coulter
June 6, 2007
Republicans' defense of President Bush's immigration bill is more enraging than their defense of Harriet Miers. Back then, Bush's conservative base was accused of being sexist for opposing an unqualified woman's nomination to the highest court in the land. Now we're racists for not wanting to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.
I don't know why conservatives like Linda Chavez have to argue like liberals by smearing their opponents as racists. Oh wait, now I remember! Their arguments are as strong as liberals' arguments usually are.
Apart from abortion, no subject produces so much disingenuousness as America's immigration policy, both legal and illegal. For nearly 50 years, Americans have been intentionally lied to about our immigration laws.
In 1965, Teddy Kennedy overhauled immigration law with the specific purpose of effecting a dramatic change in the nation's demographics. Bobby Kennedy had civil rights, so Teddy needed something big: He would preside over a civil rights bill for the entire Third World! My word, but that man could drink in those days.
With his 1965 immigration act, Kennedy embarked on entirely transforming American culture for no good reason. (You know how people always say the same arguments against illegal immigrants today were once made about the Irish to show how silly those arguments are? If only the U.S. Senate had had an "Irish Need Not Apply" sign!)
Until that point, immigration law basically took a laissez-faire approach, with country quotas attempting to replicate the traditional immigration patterns. Most immigrants to America had historically come from Great Britain, Germany and Scandinavian countries. Consequently, immigration quotas roughly reflected that balance, with smaller numbers of immigrants admitted from other countries.
But in an angry, long-awaited payback to WASPs, Kennedy decided he was going to radically transform the racial composition of the country. Instead of taking 15 immigrants from England and three from China, America would henceforth take three from England and 15 from China. Payback's a bitch, Daughters of the American Revolution!
Some of those hardworking immigrants who just want a chance to succeed were arrested in a plot to blow up JFK Airport last week.
Most immigrants still come from a handful of countries; Kennedy simply changed which countries those would be. In 2005, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the overwhelming majority of immigrants came from only 10 countries, none of which had sent a lot of immigrants to America for the country's first 200 years: Mexico (161,445), India (84,681), China (69,967), the Philippines (60,748), Cuba (36,261), Vietnam (32,784), the Dominican Republic (27,504), Korea (26,562), Colombia (25,571) and Ukraine (22,761).
In 1960, whites were 90 percent of the country. The Census Bureau recently estimated that whites already account for less than two-thirds of the population and will be a minority by 2050. Other estimates put that day much sooner.
One may assume the new majority will not be such compassionate overlords as the white majority has been. If this sort of drastic change were legally imposed on any group other than white Americans, it would be called genocide. Yet whites are called racists merely for mentioning the fact that current immigration law is intentionally designed to reduce their percentage in the population.
We needed to have "more discussion" about Iraq for nearly two years before finally invading. When will we be allowed to begin discussion of a government policy enacted by stealth 40 years ago specifically intended to decimate one particular ethnic group in our own country?
If liberals think Iraqis are genetically incapable of pulling off even the most rudimentary form of democracy, why do they believe 50 million Mexicans will magically become good Americans, imbued in the nation's history and culture, upon crossing the Rio Grande? Maybe we should dunk Iraqis in the Rio and see what happens.
And as long as we're adopting an open borders policy for immigration, how about opening the borders for emigration? As it stands, anyone can come in and start plotting terrorist attacks or collecting government services right away. But the rest of us can never escape having to pay for it.
You can leave the country, you can renounce your citizenship — but you still owe taxes for 10 years. The government does not allow us to stop supporting welfare recipients in America, millions more of whom it plans to import under Bush's bill. That's not a free market — it's a roach motel.
If these free-marketeers at The Wall Street Journal want the free movement of people, how about letting us freely leave after they've wrecked the country?
In Samuel P. Huntington's book "Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity," he asks: "Would America be the America it is today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico or Brazil."
I don't want to live in Mexico, Quebec or Brazil. But now I guess I have no choice, since "open borders" means I can never leave.
More proof
Sprawl exceeds reach of hydrants http://usatoday.com
By Joseph Gidjunis, USA TODAY
SALISBURY, Md. — When Robert and Tammy Weber bought their dream home in 2004, they didn't give a thought to the fact that the nearest fire hydrant was more than a mile away.
"Having the entire house burn down is one of those things you don't ever think is going to happen to you," Robert Weber says.
On July 17, that's exactly what happened. Three tankers of water couldn't put the fire out in their late 1990s subdivision house.
Six out of 10 homeowners in Wicomico County, Md., a growing area between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, do not have hydrants within the recommended 1,000 feet, says Jack Lenox, county planning and zoning director.
Nearly a fourth of U.S. families face the same protection inadequacies as the Webers because they live in extended suburban or rural locations with no hydrants, says Lori Moore-Merrell, an operations analyst with the International Association of Fire Fighters. The lack of fire hydrants is a growing problem as more homes are built outside urban and suburban infrastructure, she says.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Daily | Md | Robert | SALISBURY | International Association of Fire Fighters | Wicomico County | Joseph Gidjunis
States create their own standards, and localities may or may not enact stricter rules, says Chris Jelenewicz, an engineer with the Society of Fire Protection Engineers.
"Municipalities and county governments are finding with this far-flung development it costs a lot to extend the basic infrastructure," says Anthony Flint, public affairs director of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
In Wicomico County, it costs about $15,000 per house to run water and sewer service into a new development, Salisbury, Md., City Manager John Pick says.
Hydrants, which are recommended every 1,000 feet, cost about $1,200 apiece, according to Jim Smalley of the National Fire Protection Association.
Proximity to hydrants and fire stations has always been important to homeowners because it influences insurance rates.
In Lexington, Ky., for example, the owner of a $100,000 home in the city limits pays about $400 a year, but the rate is $1,200-$1,500 a year on the outskirts of the county, says Donna Pile, president of the National Association of Professional Insurance Agents.
Gidjunis reports for The Daily Times in Salisbury, Md.
Comments: (72)Showing: Newest first Oldest first
Jim8 wrote: 16m ago
http://www.usillegalaliens.com/impacts_of_illegal_immigration_american_infrastructure.html
Jim8 wrote: 18m ago
Umama U just don't get it... Join numbersusa.com & maybe U will understand...Ill post another artiicle in a minute that you can read also.
Yomama wrote: 37m ago
AO - what the h*ll does immigration have to do with fire protection. I swear! This has to do with localities having the fire protection they need. Zoning board and builders approve and build homes outside of fire hydrant lines and they are the ones to blame. Immigrants generally can't afford the kind of houses we are talking about. LET'S STAY ON TASK!!
RBrooksC wrote: 40m ago
I love listening to the Liberals on this board. When one decides to make the correct decsion to get out of the city and move to where one has land, quiet and less crime and build a nice large house, they have actually built "McMansions" and made the "wrong decision." To people like that and the MOM of Maryland, the only "good" and "correct" thing to do is move back into the city and take the bus everywhere.
The word "Sprawl" is used, especially in The People's Republic of Maryland, to denigrate those people who want to have several acres of land and a larger house. If one doesn't choose to live in the crime infested city of Baltimore, they are "evil" people who are contributing to "sprawl" which will be the death of us all.
AO wrote: 1h 7m ago
Over population of this country is in part caused by illegal immigration. More people - more sprawl - more cars -more pollution. It is reality. I don't see any benefit for legal US citizens having them here breaking the law! http://numbersusa.com
Sprawl exceeds reach of hydrants http://usatoday.com
By Joseph Gidjunis, USA TODAY
SALISBURY, Md. — When Robert and Tammy Weber bought their dream home in 2004, they didn't give a thought to the fact that the nearest fire hydrant was more than a mile away.
"Having the entire house burn down is one of those things you don't ever think is going to happen to you," Robert Weber says.
On July 17, that's exactly what happened. Three tankers of water couldn't put the fire out in their late 1990s subdivision house.
Six out of 10 homeowners in Wicomico County, Md., a growing area between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, do not have hydrants within the recommended 1,000 feet, says Jack Lenox, county planning and zoning director.
Nearly a fourth of U.S. families face the same protection inadequacies as the Webers because they live in extended suburban or rural locations with no hydrants, says Lori Moore-Merrell, an operations analyst with the International Association of Fire Fighters. The lack of fire hydrants is a growing problem as more homes are built outside urban and suburban infrastructure, she says.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Daily | Md | Robert | SALISBURY | International Association of Fire Fighters | Wicomico County | Joseph Gidjunis
States create their own standards, and localities may or may not enact stricter rules, says Chris Jelenewicz, an engineer with the Society of Fire Protection Engineers.
"Municipalities and county governments are finding with this far-flung development it costs a lot to extend the basic infrastructure," says Anthony Flint, public affairs director of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
In Wicomico County, it costs about $15,000 per house to run water and sewer service into a new development, Salisbury, Md., City Manager John Pick says.
Hydrants, which are recommended every 1,000 feet, cost about $1,200 apiece, according to Jim Smalley of the National Fire Protection Association.
Proximity to hydrants and fire stations has always been important to homeowners because it influences insurance rates.
In Lexington, Ky., for example, the owner of a $100,000 home in the city limits pays about $400 a year, but the rate is $1,200-$1,500 a year on the outskirts of the county, says Donna Pile, president of the National Association of Professional Insurance Agents.
Gidjunis reports for The Daily Times in Salisbury, Md.
Comments: (72)Showing: Newest first Oldest first
Jim8 wrote: 16m ago
http://www.usillegalaliens.com/impacts_of_illegal_immigration_american_infrastructure.html
Jim8 wrote: 18m ago
Umama U just don't get it... Join numbersusa.com & maybe U will understand...Ill post another artiicle in a minute that you can read also.
Yomama wrote: 37m ago
AO - what the h*ll does immigration have to do with fire protection. I swear! This has to do with localities having the fire protection they need. Zoning board and builders approve and build homes outside of fire hydrant lines and they are the ones to blame. Immigrants generally can't afford the kind of houses we are talking about. LET'S STAY ON TASK!!
RBrooksC wrote: 40m ago
I love listening to the Liberals on this board. When one decides to make the correct decsion to get out of the city and move to where one has land, quiet and less crime and build a nice large house, they have actually built "McMansions" and made the "wrong decision." To people like that and the MOM of Maryland, the only "good" and "correct" thing to do is move back into the city and take the bus everywhere.
The word "Sprawl" is used, especially in The People's Republic of Maryland, to denigrate those people who want to have several acres of land and a larger house. If one doesn't choose to live in the crime infested city of Baltimore, they are "evil" people who are contributing to "sprawl" which will be the death of us all.
AO wrote: 1h 7m ago
Over population of this country is in part caused by illegal immigration. More people - more sprawl - more cars -more pollution. It is reality. I don't see any benefit for legal US citizens having them here breaking the law! http://numbersusa.com
Arizona Senate wants cross-border program suspended Members of the Arizona Senate have a laundry list of reasons why they want the proposed cross-border program with Mexico suspended and this summer they passed a measure outlining them.
Senate Memorial 1007 unanimously passed the Arizona Senate on June 19. The legislation requests U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters to suspend the cross-border program.
Topping the concerns of the Arizona senators is that Mexico-based trucks entering the U.S. today are not held to the same strict federal standards in terms of safety and air quality as their U.S. counterparts.
The measure states: “… those substandard trucks and low paid, possibly ineligible drivers represent a danger to users of United States highways and our environment and threatened American jobs and our national security.”
The Arizona Secretary of State forwarded the legislation to Secretary Peters in mid-June. Source: http://landlinemag.com
Senate Memorial 1007 unanimously passed the Arizona Senate on June 19. The legislation requests U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters to suspend the cross-border program.
Topping the concerns of the Arizona senators is that Mexico-based trucks entering the U.S. today are not held to the same strict federal standards in terms of safety and air quality as their U.S. counterparts.
The measure states: “… those substandard trucks and low paid, possibly ineligible drivers represent a danger to users of United States highways and our environment and threatened American jobs and our national security.”
The Arizona Secretary of State forwarded the legislation to Secretary Peters in mid-June. Source: http://landlinemag.com
From: Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA
Date: Sunday 25AUG07 11:55 p.m. EDT
Monday begins TV ad campaign to expose human face of victims of extreme immigration
DEAR FRIENDS,
The ad is something else!
It reminds viewers that there are real victims to the federal government's policy of importing or allowing more than a million foreign workers (both legal and illegal) into this country each year.
If you are reading this Monday mid-morning, you should also have in your in-box an email from us asking you to sign a petition and to watch the new TV immigration ad that begins running Monday in every region of the country.
You will see across the top of that email that we are asking you to spread that email far and wide.
I am sending this email to you to say how very important it is that you expose as many people as possible to the pre-Labor Day ad and petition campaign. So, please forward that email and/or fill in as many email addresses as possible on the 'refer' list that you'll see after you sign the petition.
I think you will be excited to see that this calm but explosive TV ad will finally be raising the issue of discrimination against American workers in a highly public way.
Already, more than 27 million U.S. jobs are being filled by foreign workers, even though 54 million working-age Americans don't have a job.
This is an extended ad campaign by the Coalition for the Future American Worker. It is starting out in Boston, South Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Austin and San Jose/San Francisco. Those of you in those areas will hear from us about specific actions you can take in your local area that will augment the power of this ad campaign.
If you don't find the petition/ad email, you can look at both the petition and the ad at:
www.ReformUS.org
I hope you are as excited as we are and will open that petition/ad email right now.
THANKS,
P.S. As we close in on the end of August, donations from activists have not yet met the monthly goal for maintaining our minimum level of operations.
Date: Sunday 25AUG07 11:55 p.m. EDT
Monday begins TV ad campaign to expose human face of victims of extreme immigration
DEAR FRIENDS,
The ad is something else!
It reminds viewers that there are real victims to the federal government's policy of importing or allowing more than a million foreign workers (both legal and illegal) into this country each year.
If you are reading this Monday mid-morning, you should also have in your in-box an email from us asking you to sign a petition and to watch the new TV immigration ad that begins running Monday in every region of the country.
You will see across the top of that email that we are asking you to spread that email far and wide.
I am sending this email to you to say how very important it is that you expose as many people as possible to the pre-Labor Day ad and petition campaign. So, please forward that email and/or fill in as many email addresses as possible on the 'refer' list that you'll see after you sign the petition.
I think you will be excited to see that this calm but explosive TV ad will finally be raising the issue of discrimination against American workers in a highly public way.
Already, more than 27 million U.S. jobs are being filled by foreign workers, even though 54 million working-age Americans don't have a job.
This is an extended ad campaign by the Coalition for the Future American Worker. It is starting out in Boston, South Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Austin and San Jose/San Francisco. Those of you in those areas will hear from us about specific actions you can take in your local area that will augment the power of this ad campaign.
If you don't find the petition/ad email, you can look at both the petition and the ad at:
www.ReformUS.org
I hope you are as excited as we are and will open that petition/ad email right now.
THANKS,
P.S. As we close in on the end of August, donations from activists have not yet met the monthly goal for maintaining our minimum level of operations.
Click here to display images in this message or edit your settings for all messages.
External Images and objects in this message have been blocked. What's this?
From: Dave Gorak
Date: Aug. 27, 2007 4:35 p.m.
LETTER SUCCESSES – Week ended Aug. 25
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL. PLEASE SEND ALL PUBLISHED LETTERS AND QUESTIONS RELATED TO THE LETTER-WRITING PROGRAM TO:
Dave Gorak
DO NOT FORWARD THIS E-MAIL OR MAKE COPIES
Everyone,
--Following is the published letters report for the period Aug. 19-25
--BUT FIRST: Californian Haydee Pavia says the recently deported Elvira Arellano is a “slap in the face” to all legal immigrants; Anthony Bulver in Missouri notes that columnist Ruben Navarrette can’t seem to discuss the illegal alien problem without injecting race into his columns; Colorado writer Scott Sedei asks why the Denver Post doesn’t publish stories about the millions of unskilled Americans who are looking for jobs; and Kathleen Pacifico in New Jersey says “name-calling” has no place in the immigration debate.
--As always, this memo is intended for participants in this program,plus a few friends, and not for wide distribution. Editors tend not to publish letters they suspect are part of an organized letter-writing campaign. So, please refrain from cc:ing us on your letters-to-the-editor and from talking about the program in public forums.
--And please remember to include the full name of the paper that ran your letter and the date.
-- NumbersUSA forwards these letters to you so you can share in the success of the program and see the published efforts of our writers. As a reminder, however, the letters are personal and do not necessarily represent NumbersUSA positions.
RECOMMENDED WRITING STYLE: We recognize that each of you has the ability to make your own decisions about how to write your letters. NumbersUSA's opinion is that letters are more likely to be published and more likely to help our cause of dramatic immigration reductions if they are written in a temperate, self-controlled way that avoids name-calling and arguments based on race, religion or national origin. A strong use of a few facts, voting records, concise analysis and sometimes humor seems the best way to advance our arguments. We encourage specific criticism of open-border politicians and others, but caution against "in your face" rhetoric. Firm but civil argument tends to get the best results. You, of course, are free to disagree. We applaud all published letters that advocate for our immigration-reduction goals, but we may not disseminate those that move outside the tone that we encourage, a tone that many newspapers include in their own letters to the editor guidelines.
--Thanks so much for your hard work and persistence.
Index:
Daily Herald (1)
(1) Dave Gorak
Chicago Tribune – 8/20
(2) Haydee Pavia
News-Leader (Mo.) - 8/22
(3) Anthony E. Bulver
The Denver Post – 8/23
(4) Scott J. Sedei
Odessa (Texas) American – 8/23
(5) Stacy Wright
The Monitor (Texas) – 8/24
(6) Mike Hochstein
The Press Enterprise (Calif.) – 8/24
(7) Janice Reed
Los Angeles Daily News – 8/25
(8) Tim Aaronson
San Francisco Chronicle – 8/25
(9) Kevin McDonald
Northwest Herald (Ill.) – 8/25
(10) James R. Thompson
LETTERS WE’VE JUST RECEIVED
Gettysburg (Pa.) Times – 8/17
(11) Kathleen M. Pacifico
(1)
Daily Herald (Ill.) – 8/19
What was the point of Arellano story?
Your Aug. 12 story about convicted felon Elvira Arellano, “A day in the life of a woman living sanctuary,” serves no useful purpose except to portray this illegal alien as someone to be looked up to by others who share her contempt for the rule of law.
This story, of course, was aimed at “celebrating” the one-year anniversary of a woman ordered deported for using someone else’s identity to gain employment but who instead took refuge with her young son inside a Methodist church.
Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate to write a story asking why Chicago Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who should have sent her packing shortly after the church door closed behind her, have stood around for a year looking like deer caught in car headlights?
Better still, why not a story about a day in the life of the millions of our native-born working poor who must compete with Arellano and her ilk for jobs that rightfully belong to them, jobs these citizens once did but for decent wages that allowed them to support their families as they searched for a better life?
Dave Gorak
Executive Director
Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration
LaValle, Wis.
(2)
Chicago Tribune (online only) – 8/20
Arellano ‘a slap in the face’
I'm Hispanic. I came to the U.S. as a legal immigrant and I'm a proud U.S. citizen. I came to this country with the permission of the American people who, by the way, are the most generous and welcoming people in the world.
Elvira Arellano, like millions of illegal aliens, is a slap in the face to legal immigrants and an insult to law-abiding American citizens of Hispanic descent. Arellano has broken our laws, not only by thumbing her nose at our immigration laws, but also by stealing a Social Security number. That makes her a criminal illegal alien and in case anybody is wondering why her driver was also handcuffed and arrested, it's because it's a federal offense to transport an illegal alien. In fact, Rev. Coleman and many others who have been aiding and abetting Arellano should also be charged.
As for her child, Arellano chose to break the law in this country. She has to explain that to him.
Haydee Pavia
Laguna Woods, Calif.
(3)
News-Leader (Mo.) - 8/22
'Guests' aren't permanent
Re: "Businessman seeks to close gap," Aug. 14.
Once again, Ruben Navarrette Jr. tries to throw the "race card" into discussions on illegal immigration. In his article about Lionel Sosa, a Mexican-American businessman "bringing together two countries that, while neighbors, sometimes appear worlds apart," Navarrette offers his time worn and overused statement about the immigration debate in Congress, "In fact, it became virtually impossible once 'anti-Mexican' sentiment sidetracked the discussion."
The article is also interesting in that Sosa is interested in "offering illegal immigrants a path to 'legal status' and liking the concept of importing guest workers." One should note that there is a vast difference between "legal status" and citizenship. Most illegal aliens in this country have no interest in becoming American citizens. They just want "legal status" so they can continue to take jobs from Americans and send all of their income back to their home countries. That "legal status" would also open the doors to all of our social services, welfare, food stamps, educational aid, health care and other benefits that many of them obtain anyway, through use of false documentation already. It would just make it "legal" for them to get those benefits.
The article goes on to state that Sosa doesn't like the fact that "guest workers" have to return to their home countries on a regular basis. Well, what does the term "guest worker" connote? If you look up the word "guest" in the dictionary, it describes a guest as "a person who spends [some> time at another's home (in this case, country) for a visit." It does not mean the "guest" stays "permanently."
What Navarrette and Sosa also don't reveal in their commentaries is that this country already has at least eight guest worker programs that currently allow over 1 million foreign nationals to work in this country on a temporary basis. The problem is that so many gluttonous businesses, both large and small, have become so accustomed to exploiting the illegal alien labor market, that they now think they're entitled to employ illegal aliens just so they can further gorge themselves on large profit margins; while forcing the American taxpayers to pick up the bill for their illegal employees' health care, welfare, food stamps, and other taxpayer subsidized benefits. In the meantime, their competitors, who comply with employment laws and hire only American citizens and pay a living wage, go bankrupt because they can't compete.
There are almost 20 million American citizens who are currently unemployed in this country who would be more than happy to do some of those "jobs American's won't/can't do" as is often stated by our president, Sen. [Ted> Kennedy and other pro-illegal alien advocates. As of yet, I have not heard Navarrette describe how the term "illegal alien" has any "racial connotations." There are illegal aliens in this country of all races, creeds, colors, religions, genders and they all should be forced to return to their respective home countries.
Anthony E. Bulver
Ava, Mo.
(4)
The Denver Post – 8/23
Immigration issues: tuition rates and labor
Re: "Enforcement alone won't solve immigration issues," Aug. 14 editorial.
Why does The Post consistently bemoan the plight of illegal workers when millions of unskilled Americans are currently looking for jobs? When will we see their stories?
Agriculture officials report crops are rotting in fields because there aren't enough illegals to pick them. Yet the H-2A visa program gives growers access to unlimited numbers of temporary workers to complete their harvests. Greedy growers would rather let crops rot than use the H-2A visa program because it would require them to pay higher wages.
The tone of your article suggests that due to this new legislation, we should feel pity for illegals and the companies that hire them. Why? These businesses have created the most obscene form of corporate welfare this nation has ever witnessed. Lack of border enforcement has cost American taxpayers billions in handouts to subsidize their "cheap" labor force. I'd rather pay more for a product and employ an American worker. And contrary to what the propaganda would have us believe, it isn't going to bankrupt the consumer. On the other hand, the illegals just might bankrupt America.
Scott J. Sedei
Longmont, Colo.
(5)
Odessa (Texas) American – 8/23
Unholy alliance
Re: Immigration policy needs more thought by Bill Hammond in an Aug. 10 guest column.
How is checking to ensure an employee has a legal status to work in the United States in any way, as Hammond suggests, illegal racial discrimination?
Many businesses have chosen to ignore current immigration laws just for the fact that our leaders have bowed to corporate America. For far too long, nothing has been done to enforce this nation’s laws when it concerns illegal immigration. Businesses have taken advantage of that fact to cut Americans from work or cut their wages and benefits.
All businesses, for years, have had access to E-Verify, an Internet-based system operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in partnership with the Social Security Administration. The fact that most businesses have not used this free, tax payer-funded service speaks volumes. It gives unscrupulous businesses the option of “plausible deniability.” In other words, if the feds ever ask businesses if they hire illegal aliens, they can say “not to my knowledge” and continue hiring illegal aliens at cheaper wages and fewer benefits.
If employers receive no-match letters, they are told not to act on the letter alone. In fact, it states an employer who takes action against an employee based on nothing more substantial than a mismatch letter may, in fact, violate the law. The DHS regulations and the ICE letter describe with specificity what steps employers should take upon receipt of a no-match letter, in addition a website and 800 number are provided to help employers comply with immigration laws.
Hammond goes on to state, “The new rule presents employers with a dilemma of threatened prosecution by ICE vs. potential violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which protects all workers regardless of immigration status from discrimination in employment.”
I have read through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and could find nothing that states it is discrimination not hire illegal aliens.
Hammond suggests there is a “no-match mess” for Congress to act on, while in fact a “no-match mess” does not exist. The true mess is that businesses have refused to comply with immigration laws and our government has condoned and supported their actions.
This alliance between businesses and elected officials threatens the very existence of our country — all in the name of greed.
Stacy Wright
Odessa, Texas
(6)
The Monitor (Texas) – 8/24
Illegal immigrants are criminals
To the editor:
The letter by Miguel Cahue “Police violated human rights” on 20 Aug. 2007 made me wonder what human rights were violated and where the harassment and intimidation was. No one should have felt harassed or intimidated when asked for ID unless they had something to hide. I’m glad the local police “wasting our tax dollars while doing someone else’s job” were not in a sanctuary city like Houston where illegal aliens are “protected” by the city government and police, contrary to federal law.
A suspect’s immigration status should be determined by the police and if illegal, held for ICE or the Border Patrol. A criminal is a criminal. I’ve been asked to show ID by the police and had no problem because I’ve nothing to hide. The federal government has apparently heard the voice of the majority of American citizens and is finally enforcing immigration law, including work place enforcement. The capture and deportation of illegal aliens has increased. Raids on businesses have increased with large numbers of illegals caught and deported. The most recent is the capture and expeditious deportation of Elvira Arellano, the illegal alien who had taken sanctuary in a church in Chicago. Bravo for ICE and immigration enforcement.
Now we must build the border wall, get English legislated as the official language of the United States, stop birthright citizenship to children of illegal aliens and anyone other than U.S. citizens, stop the visa lottery, require passports to enter the United States, require a good working knowledge of English to become a U.S. citizen, all government processes like voting or driver’s exams to only be in English, and anyone harboring illegal aliens will go to jail and any religious group harboring illegal aliens will lose their tax exempt status.
Mike Hochstein
McAllen, Texas
(7)
The Press Enterprise (Calif.) – 8/24
Richest, Poorest Growing Farther Apart
The article, "Richest, Poorest Growing Farther Apart, Thurs. Aug.23, 2007, stating that the income gap in California is growing farther apart and that middle class jobs are slowing, is no surprise.
As the California Legislature taxes and spends, making it incredibly difficult to maintain a business in California and while the U.S. government allows thousands of illegals to enter our Southern borders, California will be the benchmark for the disappearing middle class.
The middle class, once the backbone of this capitalist economy, must now cover itself as well as health and social services for the undocumented. Those of us so-called middle class workers have not had raises in 5 or more years while our jobs have slowly eroded. Many of these jobs left the country, were downsized or replaced by lower-paid new arrivals. The middle class will disappear and be replaced by a socialist economy. Expect to see this happen throughout the U.S.
Janice Reed
Beaumont, Calif.
(8)
Los Angeles Daily News – 8/25
Foreign teachers
Re "Foreign teachers fill a need at LAUSD" (Aug. 19):
As a former Peace Corps volunteer who spent two years working in the Philippines to improve science education there, I was intrigued with the report of Filipino science teachers being hired for L.A. Unified. Consider: American PCVs go to the Philippines to improve science education in the Philippines. Because of emigration from Mexico and places like the Philippines, Los Angeles has too many kids to teach and so looks to Filipino teachers to teach science to foreigners in Los Angeles. So ... Americans train foreigners abroad who emigrate to teach foreigners here at home.
This strikes me as inefficient. Instead of moving everyone around the world, wouldn't it make more sense to have Filipino teachers go directly to Mexico - or remain in the Philippines - and teach kids there?
Tim Aaronson
El Cerrito, Calif.
(9)
San Francisco Chronicle – 8/25
Illegal workers must go
Editor - I keep hoping for some balance from the media, but it just isn't happening. Once again, The Chronicle has glorified breaking the law and distorted the truth in the process (Editorial, "A war on state's economy," Aug. 19).
Reality check No. 1: Only 2 percent of illegal immigrants work in agriculture. The future of agriculture in California is in mechanization, not an endless stream of illegal workers who get free health care, free education for their kids, welfare and even subsidized mortgages.
Reality check No. 2: Poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans want immigration laws enforced and oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants. When given the choice between amnesty and attrition through enforcement, an overwhelming number of citizens support attrition through enforcement. In this scenario, the jobs and benefits magnets are removed and illegal immigrants return home on their own.
I have another question for the pollsters quoted in the "Voice of the West." Did you survey illegal immigrants or just California citizens? What a surprise it would be if illegal immigrants didn't want immigration laws enforced.
Kevin McDonald
Novato, Calif.
(10)
Northwest Herald (Ill.) – 8/25
Straw poll significance
To the Editor:
The traditional Iowa GOP presidential straw poll was held Aug. 11. The winner was the well-financed Mitt Romney. Of note was the overall vote breakdown. Although Romney had 4,400 votes, Huckabee received almost 2,60;, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback received almost 2,200, and Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado received almost 2,000.
Of crucial significance, however, is the way I learned about Tancredo’s close showing. The story that was printed in the Northwest Herald does not mention Tancredo’s showing.
Tancredo has opposed the Bush White House, which wanted to give amnesty to illegal immigrants. His leadership role in the House has helped turn the tide on the issue. His persistence has resulted in the recent White House reversal on open orders and the recent crackdowns.
Neither the liberal news media nor the White House want to acknowledge Tancredo’s leadership role. Romney seems to have adopted Tancredo’s position and, with his money and news media attention, has gone to the front.
The best way to learn what is going on with effective handling of illegal immigrants is to contact www.numbersusa.com for details. This gives a detailed listing of the views of all presidential candidates, not just the well-financed ones.
James R. Thompson
Crystal Lake, Ill.
LETTERS WE’VE JUST RECEIVED
(11)
Gettysburg (Pa.) Times – 8/17
Ethnic stereotyping inexcusable
I feel compelled to challenge Arthur E. House’s August 2 letter, which demonizes the anti-illegal immigration movement as hysterical, racist, and nonsensical. First of all, he confuses legal with illegal immigration. Those who oppose illegal immigration are not “anti-immigrant” as his letter states. I am against illegal immigration only. I do not direct my ire at Hispanics (legal or illegal) or any other race. For national security reasons, we need secure borders and internal enforcement of our laws.
We need strong enforcement directed at illegal employers so that the job magnet is eliminated. Illegal employers give themselves a competitive advantage over the honest business person by exploiting illegal workers. They enrich themselves, while American citizens subsidize tax evasion, low pay, and lack of benefits. In addition, Americans are faced with an oversupply of labor, which creates a poor job market and stagnant wages. Local communities are faced with overburdened health care facilities, school systems, housing markets, law enforcement, infrastructure, and government services.
I am in favor of the Mandatory Basic Pilot Program, which requires that employers check the validity of their employees’ Social Security numbers. So, yes, that would include Irish illegal aliens and their employers, as well as all other employers and illegal aliens, whatever their race or ethnicity.
As an Irish American, I found Mr. House’s remark about Colleen and Brigid working in the pub to be extremely offensive. Evidently Irish people are to be found only around pubs. If they aren’t boozy pub crawlers, they must be pub workers. Such ethnic stereotyping is inexcusable.
Americans’ concern with illegal immigration has been around much longer than three years. There is more activism as the illegal population increases and citizens see the increasing problems caused by illegal immigration. One big concern is overpopulation. In 1970, there were 200 million in the U.S., with the native-born population growth stabilized. Today there are 301 million. By 2050 there will be over 400 million people living in our country. That is an unsustainable population and a legitimate cause for concern that has nothing to do with race.
Regarding our country’s policies on Cubans’ refugee status and special work visas for baseball players; since refugees and visa holders are entering our country legally, this is not part of the illegal immigration issue.
In conclusion, the illegal immigration debate deserves thoughtful examination of facts rather than mindless name-calling.
Kathleen M. Pacifico
Mount Arlington, N.J.
================
The letters program - as all the projects of NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you, along with grants from private foundations to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America. Would you consider making a donation? Click on: https://www.numbersusa.com/donate or send your donation to NumbersUSA, 1601 N. Kent St., Suite 1100, Arlington, VA 22209-2105; 1-877-885-7733.
This may be a good time for you to make sure that you've let us know all of the areas you are interested in. In order to further customize the type of alerts you receive click here http://www.numbersusa.com/survey?action=longlist
As a NumbersUSA subscriber, you will receive occasional emails about immigration-related opportunities. If you want to increase or reduce the frequency of these emails, click here and choose from Total Activism, Moderate Activism, or Limited Activism at the bottom of your registration form: http://www.numbersusa.com/user
NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America.
External Images and objects in this message have been blocked. What's this?
From: Dave Gorak
Date: Aug. 27, 2007 4:35 p.m.
LETTER SUCCESSES – Week ended Aug. 25
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL. PLEASE SEND ALL PUBLISHED LETTERS AND QUESTIONS RELATED TO THE LETTER-WRITING PROGRAM TO:
Dave Gorak
DO NOT FORWARD THIS E-MAIL OR MAKE COPIES
Everyone,
--Following is the published letters report for the period Aug. 19-25
--BUT FIRST: Californian Haydee Pavia says the recently deported Elvira Arellano is a “slap in the face” to all legal immigrants; Anthony Bulver in Missouri notes that columnist Ruben Navarrette can’t seem to discuss the illegal alien problem without injecting race into his columns; Colorado writer Scott Sedei asks why the Denver Post doesn’t publish stories about the millions of unskilled Americans who are looking for jobs; and Kathleen Pacifico in New Jersey says “name-calling” has no place in the immigration debate.
--As always, this memo is intended for participants in this program,plus a few friends, and not for wide distribution. Editors tend not to publish letters they suspect are part of an organized letter-writing campaign. So, please refrain from cc:ing us on your letters-to-the-editor and from talking about the program in public forums.
--And please remember to include the full name of the paper that ran your letter and the date.
-- NumbersUSA forwards these letters to you so you can share in the success of the program and see the published efforts of our writers. As a reminder, however, the letters are personal and do not necessarily represent NumbersUSA positions.
RECOMMENDED WRITING STYLE: We recognize that each of you has the ability to make your own decisions about how to write your letters. NumbersUSA's opinion is that letters are more likely to be published and more likely to help our cause of dramatic immigration reductions if they are written in a temperate, self-controlled way that avoids name-calling and arguments based on race, religion or national origin. A strong use of a few facts, voting records, concise analysis and sometimes humor seems the best way to advance our arguments. We encourage specific criticism of open-border politicians and others, but caution against "in your face" rhetoric. Firm but civil argument tends to get the best results. You, of course, are free to disagree. We applaud all published letters that advocate for our immigration-reduction goals, but we may not disseminate those that move outside the tone that we encourage, a tone that many newspapers include in their own letters to the editor guidelines.
--Thanks so much for your hard work and persistence.
Index:
Daily Herald (1)
(1) Dave Gorak
Chicago Tribune – 8/20
(2) Haydee Pavia
News-Leader (Mo.) - 8/22
(3) Anthony E. Bulver
The Denver Post – 8/23
(4) Scott J. Sedei
Odessa (Texas) American – 8/23
(5) Stacy Wright
The Monitor (Texas) – 8/24
(6) Mike Hochstein
The Press Enterprise (Calif.) – 8/24
(7) Janice Reed
Los Angeles Daily News – 8/25
(8) Tim Aaronson
San Francisco Chronicle – 8/25
(9) Kevin McDonald
Northwest Herald (Ill.) – 8/25
(10) James R. Thompson
LETTERS WE’VE JUST RECEIVED
Gettysburg (Pa.) Times – 8/17
(11) Kathleen M. Pacifico
(1)
Daily Herald (Ill.) – 8/19
What was the point of Arellano story?
Your Aug. 12 story about convicted felon Elvira Arellano, “A day in the life of a woman living sanctuary,” serves no useful purpose except to portray this illegal alien as someone to be looked up to by others who share her contempt for the rule of law.
This story, of course, was aimed at “celebrating” the one-year anniversary of a woman ordered deported for using someone else’s identity to gain employment but who instead took refuge with her young son inside a Methodist church.
Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate to write a story asking why Chicago Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who should have sent her packing shortly after the church door closed behind her, have stood around for a year looking like deer caught in car headlights?
Better still, why not a story about a day in the life of the millions of our native-born working poor who must compete with Arellano and her ilk for jobs that rightfully belong to them, jobs these citizens once did but for decent wages that allowed them to support their families as they searched for a better life?
Dave Gorak
Executive Director
Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration
LaValle, Wis.
(2)
Chicago Tribune (online only) – 8/20
Arellano ‘a slap in the face’
I'm Hispanic. I came to the U.S. as a legal immigrant and I'm a proud U.S. citizen. I came to this country with the permission of the American people who, by the way, are the most generous and welcoming people in the world.
Elvira Arellano, like millions of illegal aliens, is a slap in the face to legal immigrants and an insult to law-abiding American citizens of Hispanic descent. Arellano has broken our laws, not only by thumbing her nose at our immigration laws, but also by stealing a Social Security number. That makes her a criminal illegal alien and in case anybody is wondering why her driver was also handcuffed and arrested, it's because it's a federal offense to transport an illegal alien. In fact, Rev. Coleman and many others who have been aiding and abetting Arellano should also be charged.
As for her child, Arellano chose to break the law in this country. She has to explain that to him.
Haydee Pavia
Laguna Woods, Calif.
(3)
News-Leader (Mo.) - 8/22
'Guests' aren't permanent
Re: "Businessman seeks to close gap," Aug. 14.
Once again, Ruben Navarrette Jr. tries to throw the "race card" into discussions on illegal immigration. In his article about Lionel Sosa, a Mexican-American businessman "bringing together two countries that, while neighbors, sometimes appear worlds apart," Navarrette offers his time worn and overused statement about the immigration debate in Congress, "In fact, it became virtually impossible once 'anti-Mexican' sentiment sidetracked the discussion."
The article is also interesting in that Sosa is interested in "offering illegal immigrants a path to 'legal status' and liking the concept of importing guest workers." One should note that there is a vast difference between "legal status" and citizenship. Most illegal aliens in this country have no interest in becoming American citizens. They just want "legal status" so they can continue to take jobs from Americans and send all of their income back to their home countries. That "legal status" would also open the doors to all of our social services, welfare, food stamps, educational aid, health care and other benefits that many of them obtain anyway, through use of false documentation already. It would just make it "legal" for them to get those benefits.
The article goes on to state that Sosa doesn't like the fact that "guest workers" have to return to their home countries on a regular basis. Well, what does the term "guest worker" connote? If you look up the word "guest" in the dictionary, it describes a guest as "a person who spends [some> time at another's home (in this case, country) for a visit." It does not mean the "guest" stays "permanently."
What Navarrette and Sosa also don't reveal in their commentaries is that this country already has at least eight guest worker programs that currently allow over 1 million foreign nationals to work in this country on a temporary basis. The problem is that so many gluttonous businesses, both large and small, have become so accustomed to exploiting the illegal alien labor market, that they now think they're entitled to employ illegal aliens just so they can further gorge themselves on large profit margins; while forcing the American taxpayers to pick up the bill for their illegal employees' health care, welfare, food stamps, and other taxpayer subsidized benefits. In the meantime, their competitors, who comply with employment laws and hire only American citizens and pay a living wage, go bankrupt because they can't compete.
There are almost 20 million American citizens who are currently unemployed in this country who would be more than happy to do some of those "jobs American's won't/can't do" as is often stated by our president, Sen. [Ted> Kennedy and other pro-illegal alien advocates. As of yet, I have not heard Navarrette describe how the term "illegal alien" has any "racial connotations." There are illegal aliens in this country of all races, creeds, colors, religions, genders and they all should be forced to return to their respective home countries.
Anthony E. Bulver
Ava, Mo.
(4)
The Denver Post – 8/23
Immigration issues: tuition rates and labor
Re: "Enforcement alone won't solve immigration issues," Aug. 14 editorial.
Why does The Post consistently bemoan the plight of illegal workers when millions of unskilled Americans are currently looking for jobs? When will we see their stories?
Agriculture officials report crops are rotting in fields because there aren't enough illegals to pick them. Yet the H-2A visa program gives growers access to unlimited numbers of temporary workers to complete their harvests. Greedy growers would rather let crops rot than use the H-2A visa program because it would require them to pay higher wages.
The tone of your article suggests that due to this new legislation, we should feel pity for illegals and the companies that hire them. Why? These businesses have created the most obscene form of corporate welfare this nation has ever witnessed. Lack of border enforcement has cost American taxpayers billions in handouts to subsidize their "cheap" labor force. I'd rather pay more for a product and employ an American worker. And contrary to what the propaganda would have us believe, it isn't going to bankrupt the consumer. On the other hand, the illegals just might bankrupt America.
Scott J. Sedei
Longmont, Colo.
(5)
Odessa (Texas) American – 8/23
Unholy alliance
Re: Immigration policy needs more thought by Bill Hammond in an Aug. 10 guest column.
How is checking to ensure an employee has a legal status to work in the United States in any way, as Hammond suggests, illegal racial discrimination?
Many businesses have chosen to ignore current immigration laws just for the fact that our leaders have bowed to corporate America. For far too long, nothing has been done to enforce this nation’s laws when it concerns illegal immigration. Businesses have taken advantage of that fact to cut Americans from work or cut their wages and benefits.
All businesses, for years, have had access to E-Verify, an Internet-based system operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in partnership with the Social Security Administration. The fact that most businesses have not used this free, tax payer-funded service speaks volumes. It gives unscrupulous businesses the option of “plausible deniability.” In other words, if the feds ever ask businesses if they hire illegal aliens, they can say “not to my knowledge” and continue hiring illegal aliens at cheaper wages and fewer benefits.
If employers receive no-match letters, they are told not to act on the letter alone. In fact, it states an employer who takes action against an employee based on nothing more substantial than a mismatch letter may, in fact, violate the law. The DHS regulations and the ICE letter describe with specificity what steps employers should take upon receipt of a no-match letter, in addition a website and 800 number are provided to help employers comply with immigration laws.
Hammond goes on to state, “The new rule presents employers with a dilemma of threatened prosecution by ICE vs. potential violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which protects all workers regardless of immigration status from discrimination in employment.”
I have read through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and could find nothing that states it is discrimination not hire illegal aliens.
Hammond suggests there is a “no-match mess” for Congress to act on, while in fact a “no-match mess” does not exist. The true mess is that businesses have refused to comply with immigration laws and our government has condoned and supported their actions.
This alliance between businesses and elected officials threatens the very existence of our country — all in the name of greed.
Stacy Wright
Odessa, Texas
(6)
The Monitor (Texas) – 8/24
Illegal immigrants are criminals
To the editor:
The letter by Miguel Cahue “Police violated human rights” on 20 Aug. 2007 made me wonder what human rights were violated and where the harassment and intimidation was. No one should have felt harassed or intimidated when asked for ID unless they had something to hide. I’m glad the local police “wasting our tax dollars while doing someone else’s job” were not in a sanctuary city like Houston where illegal aliens are “protected” by the city government and police, contrary to federal law.
A suspect’s immigration status should be determined by the police and if illegal, held for ICE or the Border Patrol. A criminal is a criminal. I’ve been asked to show ID by the police and had no problem because I’ve nothing to hide. The federal government has apparently heard the voice of the majority of American citizens and is finally enforcing immigration law, including work place enforcement. The capture and deportation of illegal aliens has increased. Raids on businesses have increased with large numbers of illegals caught and deported. The most recent is the capture and expeditious deportation of Elvira Arellano, the illegal alien who had taken sanctuary in a church in Chicago. Bravo for ICE and immigration enforcement.
Now we must build the border wall, get English legislated as the official language of the United States, stop birthright citizenship to children of illegal aliens and anyone other than U.S. citizens, stop the visa lottery, require passports to enter the United States, require a good working knowledge of English to become a U.S. citizen, all government processes like voting or driver’s exams to only be in English, and anyone harboring illegal aliens will go to jail and any religious group harboring illegal aliens will lose their tax exempt status.
Mike Hochstein
McAllen, Texas
(7)
The Press Enterprise (Calif.) – 8/24
Richest, Poorest Growing Farther Apart
The article, "Richest, Poorest Growing Farther Apart, Thurs. Aug.23, 2007, stating that the income gap in California is growing farther apart and that middle class jobs are slowing, is no surprise.
As the California Legislature taxes and spends, making it incredibly difficult to maintain a business in California and while the U.S. government allows thousands of illegals to enter our Southern borders, California will be the benchmark for the disappearing middle class.
The middle class, once the backbone of this capitalist economy, must now cover itself as well as health and social services for the undocumented. Those of us so-called middle class workers have not had raises in 5 or more years while our jobs have slowly eroded. Many of these jobs left the country, were downsized or replaced by lower-paid new arrivals. The middle class will disappear and be replaced by a socialist economy. Expect to see this happen throughout the U.S.
Janice Reed
Beaumont, Calif.
(8)
Los Angeles Daily News – 8/25
Foreign teachers
Re "Foreign teachers fill a need at LAUSD" (Aug. 19):
As a former Peace Corps volunteer who spent two years working in the Philippines to improve science education there, I was intrigued with the report of Filipino science teachers being hired for L.A. Unified. Consider: American PCVs go to the Philippines to improve science education in the Philippines. Because of emigration from Mexico and places like the Philippines, Los Angeles has too many kids to teach and so looks to Filipino teachers to teach science to foreigners in Los Angeles. So ... Americans train foreigners abroad who emigrate to teach foreigners here at home.
This strikes me as inefficient. Instead of moving everyone around the world, wouldn't it make more sense to have Filipino teachers go directly to Mexico - or remain in the Philippines - and teach kids there?
Tim Aaronson
El Cerrito, Calif.
(9)
San Francisco Chronicle – 8/25
Illegal workers must go
Editor - I keep hoping for some balance from the media, but it just isn't happening. Once again, The Chronicle has glorified breaking the law and distorted the truth in the process (Editorial, "A war on state's economy," Aug. 19).
Reality check No. 1: Only 2 percent of illegal immigrants work in agriculture. The future of agriculture in California is in mechanization, not an endless stream of illegal workers who get free health care, free education for their kids, welfare and even subsidized mortgages.
Reality check No. 2: Poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans want immigration laws enforced and oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants. When given the choice between amnesty and attrition through enforcement, an overwhelming number of citizens support attrition through enforcement. In this scenario, the jobs and benefits magnets are removed and illegal immigrants return home on their own.
I have another question for the pollsters quoted in the "Voice of the West." Did you survey illegal immigrants or just California citizens? What a surprise it would be if illegal immigrants didn't want immigration laws enforced.
Kevin McDonald
Novato, Calif.
(10)
Northwest Herald (Ill.) – 8/25
Straw poll significance
To the Editor:
The traditional Iowa GOP presidential straw poll was held Aug. 11. The winner was the well-financed Mitt Romney. Of note was the overall vote breakdown. Although Romney had 4,400 votes, Huckabee received almost 2,60;, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback received almost 2,200, and Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado received almost 2,000.
Of crucial significance, however, is the way I learned about Tancredo’s close showing. The story that was printed in the Northwest Herald does not mention Tancredo’s showing.
Tancredo has opposed the Bush White House, which wanted to give amnesty to illegal immigrants. His leadership role in the House has helped turn the tide on the issue. His persistence has resulted in the recent White House reversal on open orders and the recent crackdowns.
Neither the liberal news media nor the White House want to acknowledge Tancredo’s leadership role. Romney seems to have adopted Tancredo’s position and, with his money and news media attention, has gone to the front.
The best way to learn what is going on with effective handling of illegal immigrants is to contact www.numbersusa.com for details. This gives a detailed listing of the views of all presidential candidates, not just the well-financed ones.
James R. Thompson
Crystal Lake, Ill.
LETTERS WE’VE JUST RECEIVED
(11)
Gettysburg (Pa.) Times – 8/17
Ethnic stereotyping inexcusable
I feel compelled to challenge Arthur E. House’s August 2 letter, which demonizes the anti-illegal immigration movement as hysterical, racist, and nonsensical. First of all, he confuses legal with illegal immigration. Those who oppose illegal immigration are not “anti-immigrant” as his letter states. I am against illegal immigration only. I do not direct my ire at Hispanics (legal or illegal) or any other race. For national security reasons, we need secure borders and internal enforcement of our laws.
We need strong enforcement directed at illegal employers so that the job magnet is eliminated. Illegal employers give themselves a competitive advantage over the honest business person by exploiting illegal workers. They enrich themselves, while American citizens subsidize tax evasion, low pay, and lack of benefits. In addition, Americans are faced with an oversupply of labor, which creates a poor job market and stagnant wages. Local communities are faced with overburdened health care facilities, school systems, housing markets, law enforcement, infrastructure, and government services.
I am in favor of the Mandatory Basic Pilot Program, which requires that employers check the validity of their employees’ Social Security numbers. So, yes, that would include Irish illegal aliens and their employers, as well as all other employers and illegal aliens, whatever their race or ethnicity.
As an Irish American, I found Mr. House’s remark about Colleen and Brigid working in the pub to be extremely offensive. Evidently Irish people are to be found only around pubs. If they aren’t boozy pub crawlers, they must be pub workers. Such ethnic stereotyping is inexcusable.
Americans’ concern with illegal immigration has been around much longer than three years. There is more activism as the illegal population increases and citizens see the increasing problems caused by illegal immigration. One big concern is overpopulation. In 1970, there were 200 million in the U.S., with the native-born population growth stabilized. Today there are 301 million. By 2050 there will be over 400 million people living in our country. That is an unsustainable population and a legitimate cause for concern that has nothing to do with race.
Regarding our country’s policies on Cubans’ refugee status and special work visas for baseball players; since refugees and visa holders are entering our country legally, this is not part of the illegal immigration issue.
In conclusion, the illegal immigration debate deserves thoughtful examination of facts rather than mindless name-calling.
Kathleen M. Pacifico
Mount Arlington, N.J.
================
The letters program - as all the projects of NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you, along with grants from private foundations to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America. Would you consider making a donation? Click on: https://www.numbersusa.com/donate or send your donation to NumbersUSA, 1601 N. Kent St., Suite 1100, Arlington, VA 22209-2105; 1-877-885-7733.
This may be a good time for you to make sure that you've let us know all of the areas you are interested in. In order to further customize the type of alerts you receive click here http://www.numbersusa.com/survey?action=longlist
As a NumbersUSA subscriber, you will receive occasional emails about immigration-related opportunities. If you want to increase or reduce the frequency of these emails, click here and choose from Total Activism, Moderate Activism, or Limited Activism at the bottom of your registration form: http://www.numbersusa.com/user
NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America.
