Well…I lost the bet.

I didn’t think the President would even utter the word “immigration” tonight during the State of the Union address.

I almost won but when you sift through roughly 45 minutes of war, war and more war, it turns out the President did manage to slip in a couple of words about immigration:

“Keeping America competitive requires an immigration system that upholds our laws, reflects our values and serves the interests of our economy.”

“Our nation needs orderly and secure borders.”

“To meet this goal, we must have stronger immigration enforcement and border protection.”

“And we must have a rational, humane guest worker program that rejects amnesty, allows temporary jobs for people who seek them legally, and reduces smuggling and crime at the border.”

[full text here]

(In fairness, it was just the same ol’ yarn…nothing about reform per se...I think the bet should be a draw, Peter.)

So far, I have yet to hear anyone speak against to President’s call for a guest worker program. Of course, all the usual sheep were at-the-ready with their boot-licking applause.

David Dreier (R-Ca) Chairman of the House Committee on Rules had this response to the President’s comments on immigration:

“I also applaud the President’s acknowledgment of the need for stronger immigration enforcement and border protection, while ensuring the needs of our strong economy are met. “ [Reuters Reaction to State of the Union 2/1/06]

In other words, “thanks for the guest worker program.”

Gag.

The latest Time magazine poll shows that a majority of Americans think illegal immigration is a “serious” problem.

Very good.

But three-fourths of the respondents also say the solution to the problem may be to give citizenship to illegals if they have a steady job, pay taxes AND learn English.

Very stupid.

Memo to those who responded in this fashion, and I’m being generous here because this is a “family” blog:

What the hell is wrong with you? Do you really believe that this is how you discourage people from crossing our borders illegally? C’mon, people. You don’t solve the problem of illegal immigration by allowing those here in violation of laws to become citizens. We tried that in 1986, remember?

If allowed to remain here, these illegals (and their families that would soon follow) would only add millions to the Census Bureau’s projection of 420 million people living here in 2050 and the 571 million people by 2100.

What about the effect of their presence on the environment? Standard of living? Wages for our own working poor? Classroom size? Healthcare insurance? Crime? Traffic congestion?

Trust me: You’re not learning anything about this issue by reading your daily newspapers or watching the 10 o’clock news. Grow up. Start thinking for yourselves.

Considering how revelatory of Hmong culture this story is in the opening two paragraphs, it’s hard to believe that it’s a pro-Hmong story, but it is.

That’s because the underlying assumption of the Boston Globe is that Third World Immigration is inevitable, and good, and nothing can be done to stop it.

BROCKTON — When there is trouble in a Hmong marriage, it is Ter Yang’s job to tell a husband that here in America, paying $10,000 for a wife does not mean he owns her, as he might a car.

When a Hmong family arrives fresh from a refugee camp in Thailand, Yang will call on them bearing lemongrass, health insurance applications, and the news that they must send the girls to school along with the boys.[Helper at the gateway | An immigrant guides his people on America's ways Hmong immigrant bridges two cultures, By Yvonne Abraham, Boston Globe, January 30, 2006]

I came across this old story by the late Michael Kelly on the New York Times coverage of the Black Panthers in the 1970’s.

Back when the New Left was new, not long before Elmer Pratt was indicted for the murder of Caroline Olsen, The New York Times ran two stories reporting, as an uncontroverted fact, that the police had to date killed twenty-eight members of the Black Panther Party. Reporter John Kifner, echoing Panther claims, suggested that anti-Panther rhetoric by the Nixon administration had encouraged “a climate of opinion among local police…that a virtual open season has been declared on the Panthers.” Edward J. Epstein investigated the matter for The New Yorker. Epstein examined every one of the twenty-eight deaths. He reported, in February 1971, that only ten of the Panthers had been killed by police (most of the rest had met their violent ends as a result of various forms of internecine warfare), and, as he wrote, “six of the ten Panthers were killed by seriously wounded policemen who clearly had reason to believe that their own lives were in jeopardy.” Nearly three decades later, the myth of the Panthers has not been exposed by the Times.

It reminded me of an item I did on the Cincinnati riots, in which I pointed out that of the black men killed by the Cincinatti police, most had been very dangerous, and had done a lot of damage before they were killed.

1. Harvey Price killed 15-year-old Tesha Beasley with an axe and kept police at bay for four hours before he was shot by a SWAT team officer on Feb. 1, 1995.
2. Daniel Williams flagged down Kathleen Conway’s police cruiser on Feb. 2, 1998. When she stopped, he hit her in the face and fired four shots from a .357 Magnum into her legs and abdomen before seizing the steering wheel and shoving her into the passenger seat. [Conway fired back, killing him. Officer Conway, now retired due to her injuries, is a heroine, but Williams’s death was nevertheless one of the 15 that rioters were protesting in 2001.]

The point here is that we can find these things out on the internet, and we can present them to you. It took Epstein a lot of work in the 1970’s to find out the truth about the Panthers and the police, but today we can do it in minutes or hours.

That’s what Vdare.com is here for.

Further evidence that pro-immigration stories are mandatory in the MSM at present, as suggested Brenda Walker last night, comes from the Sundance FilmFestival:

Immigrant films win at Sundance : Two films about immigrants living in the US have won the top four awards at the Sundance Film Festival. BBC News Sunday 29 January

Just how desperate the pro-immigration forces are right now can be measured by their willingness to tolerate an award to a Cynthia McKinney puff piece, which (curiously) was, however, little publicized. “American Blackout” is a simplistic attempt to blame the heroine’s electoral misfortunes on Republican machinations. The downplaying of the award indicates other considerations are in play. At any other time, this woman’s views would have brought down anathema on the Sundance Film Festival.

Is it just me, or are illegal alien sob stories increasing in frequency and emotional insistence the last little while?

We wouldn’t expect the MSM to slack off in its open-borders propaganda with the House-Senate showdown coming up. After all, editors apparently like cheap household help as much as Wall Streeters. So the recent output of two-hanky “immigrant” tragedies has been prolific.

Here are a few recent morsels, designed to soften up us hard-hearted Americans.

•  The 300,000 foreigners living here under Temporary Protected Status because of natural disasters at home don’t want to leave now that “temporary” is over. It would be “unfair” to make them leave now that they are all comfy and have cable TV, according to the usual hired mouthpieces.

•  An HIV-positive Colombian wants asylum because the military will kill him in his home country for his homosexuality, or so he says. (Hmmm, aren’t those military fellows already pretty busy with protecting cocaine production and such?)

•  “Friends, legislator fight to keep Merced man in U.S.” because he is so well-liked and has such a nice smile! This is the high-school approach to immigration admissions, in which being popular is the most important quality.

•  “Fears, hopes fill immigrant’s life” is a standard-issue sobster about an illegal with three jackpot babies who’s just gotta stay, for his expensive bone-cancer treatment, if nothing else.

“It used to be you had to kill somebody or do drugs to be deported,” Igbanugo said. “Now if you shoplift twice, you’re gone.”

Oh, the humanity!

Mickey Kaus points to a post by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Why So Many Blacks Fear Illegal Immigrants, Pt.1

Kaus calls it a

a forceful and admirably BS-free post on a dirty little un-PC secret of the Democratic coalition: Anti-illegal immigrant sentiment among blacks. … Is this the real, little-noted reason why President Bush made only miminal gains among African-American voters while he was wooing Latinos with his guest worker and quasi-amnesty proposals?

After explaining the economic facts of life, (thoroughly familiar to VDARE.com readers) Kaus goes on to say

P.S.: I’m not saying economics is the only reason for anti-illegal fervor among blacks. Cultural resentments may be a big part of it. I’m just saying the economic argument is rational. …

Both Kaus and Hutchinson feel that this feeling of displacement African-Americans get is not racism:“African-Americans (as Hutchinson concedes) aren’t racist just because they reach that conclusion.”

Really? It’s not racism? I thought it was when whites complained about “Chinese cheap labor” in the ninteenth century, and when Jesse Helms made his “white hands” commercial decrying affirmative action.

The economic displacement of black Americans is a legitimate problem, and we here at VDARE.com have been pointing it out out for years. (And Peter Brimelow pointed it out in 1995, and Booker T. Washington pointed it out in 1895.)

But actual black racism is a real problem, with a real potential for violence.

The SPLC’s Hatewatch has, for a change, highlighted an incident of genuine anti-immigrant violence.

At William T. Tilden Middle school, a 13-year old boy was beaten by black schoolchildren because he was an immigrant. From Liberia. The details are here in an AP story. (By the way, I guesed who had committed the crime as soon as I saw the Hatewatch headline–if it had been white kids, they would have said so.) One man is quoted in the story as saying “A lot of regular kid stuff ends up getting labeled as ethnic conflicts”

Are savage beatings of young boys accused of cooperating with the law enforcement authorities “regular kid stuff” at inner city schools? They may be, William T. Tilden is on a list of unsafe schools compiled in 2003.

Boy’s vicious beating raises fears in Philly’s Liberian community
KATHY MATHESON
Associated Press, Jan. 22, 2006

PHILADELPHIA - The boy’s beating was brutal: He was punched in the mouth and then stomped on by a group of youths until his jaw was broken and he had bleeding on the brain.

Jacob Gray, the 13-year-old victim of the Oct. 31 attack, had only been in the country six weeks. A Liberian, his family had just moved here from a refugee camp in Ghana.

The city was appalled - not only that it had happened to a boy on his way home from middle school, but that the reported motive for the attack was simply that Gray was an immigrant.

Members of the Liberian community, who number about 15,000 in this city of 1.5 million, said the beating was evidence of long-standing if rarely documented tensions between the city’s black immigrants and American-born blacks.

Though authorities said it appeared Gray was attacked because he was mistakenly labeled a snitch in a drug arrest, the schools and city have taken steps to ease the fear and anger the beating stirred in the city’s Liberian enclave, one of the country’s largest.

Update: Two readers pointed out that I had written that Strom Thurmond was the fellow pilloried for the “White Hands” commercial. Actually, it was Jesse Helms. I’ve changed it, above.

When Ozzie Guillen, manager of the world champion Chicago White Sox, recently became a U.S. citizen he said some pretty nice things that you’d expect to hear from somebody just given the opportunity to live in this country legally, including:

“Winning the World Series was not my dream, it was my goal. This [citizenship] is my dream.”

Glad to see that Ozzie has his priorities straight.

But then he went and ruined everything:

“A lot of people fight and die to be American citizens. [What??] A lot of Latin people are dying to be where I am right now . . . Do you know how many people die every week just to live in this country? Hundreds,” Guillen said. “That’s a dream. A lot of people want to be Americans. It’s not an easy thing to do.”

That’s what the ChicagoTribune posted in its early online edition, but look how the three-time All-Star shortstop was quoted in my print edition:

“Do you know how many people die every week trying to be an American? It’s not an easy thing to do.”

Hmmmmmmmmmm. Somebody in the Tribune Tower apparently woke up and wisely suspected that Ozzie’s death count was high and away.

(Assuming that Ozzie is talking about only those illegals who die attempting to cross the desert, the number for all of fiscal 2005 reached a record 464.)

As a life-long White Sox fan (I became infatuated as a teen-ager with the “Go-Go” lineup of the 1950s), there is no question that Guillen knows how the game should be played and how to get the most out of his players. He doesn’t take crap from anyone, and he enjoys telling sportwriters what they can do with their often boneheaded questions.

(Psssssst! Ozzie: Speaking of the media, now that you’re an official American, it doesn’t mean you have to act like so many of our citizens, i.e., taking as gospel everything spewed out about immigration by the MSM, “immigrant rights” groups and the many disloyal, vote-pandering politicians in Washington.)

Ozzie’s commentary, which made as much sense as a pitcher deliberately drilling a batter with the bases loaded, was no doubt gobbled up by certain groups among us as being further proof that our immigration policy is “broken” and can only be fixed with an amnesty. The majority of those who foolishly ignored the warnings against making the trip to El Norte were far more interested in U.S. dollars than they were in becoming “Americans.”

When Ozzie boasts he now knows more about America than “50 percent of Americans,” then I hope he also accepts the idea that those who genuinely want to be Americans begin the process by entering this country in accordance with our immigration laws and then refrain from asking the rest of us to surrender our culture in order to accommodate theirs.

Anything other than this is, well, you know, strictly bush league.

From England, this article by a man living in a formerly English neighborhood:

Well, no, actually. As the old saying goes, the definition of a racist is anybody who’s winning an argument with a liberal…one who is, after all, used to setting all the guidelines for what passes for national debate, is insulated from the effects of his opinions, and doesn’t much care for being challenged.[How my neighbourhood was lost to the multiculture, By Peter Whittle, Sunday Times, January 22]

In fact, this saying is only eleven years old, it’s from Alien Nation, 1995. And here’s the full quote, from page 10:

“Because the term “racist” is now so debased, I usually shrug such smears off by pointing to its new definition: anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal.Or, too often, a libertarian. And, on the immigration issue, even some confused conservatives.”

In the aftermath of the subjectively crushing defeat at the Republican National Committee meeting last Friday of Randy Pullen’s Immigration restriction resolution, one can only salute Rep. James Sensenbrenner’s courage in giving a powerful and articulate interview to the Washington Times on Wednesday on Immigration restriction.

House Republican cites guest worker “amnesty” By Stephen Dinan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES January 25, 2006

Sensenbrenner says a number of correct things. But what he fails to say, and what is absolutely essential, is that birthright citizenship must be abolished. Without reform of this biziarre and fallacious misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, any immigration policy which permits the entry of young and virile aliens will result in America becoming an “Alien Nation”

Valuable Sensenbrenner observations (full reported text here):

Simpson-Mazzoli was based on the flawed premise that we would solve the illegal-alien problem by granting those presently in the country amnesty and not having an employer-sanctions program that would turn off the magnet for new illegals to come across the border. And it didn’t work because employer sanctions were not enforced.

I am very disturbed that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce invited Mexican Foreign Minister [Luis Ernesto] Derbez to Chicago to attack my legislation and to attack me by name…They should be ashamed of themselves

The following is really impressive because it suggests the Congressman actually understands economics:

…if you look at the percentage increase in the presence of illegal aliens from 2003 to 2004, the two top states are Iowa and Wisconsin, about as far away from the southern border as you can find…they concentrate in certain types of jobs that are low-skilled jobs and are labor-intensive jobs, which means, as I repeat, the people that are doing it the wrong way and getting such a terrific economic advantage in lowering their labor costs, that they either put out of business the people who are doing it the legal way or they drag down the wages of the U.S. citizens and green-card holders who are employed by the they drag down the wages of the U.S. citizens and green-card holders who are employed by them…

In other words, he blames the employers of illegals. Hot stuff, for a Republican.

And the conclusion:

Amnesty is not negotiable. The American public will not stand for amnesty, and amnesty didn’t work in Simpson-Mazzoli, and it’s not going to work here.

Sensenbrenner deserves to be encouraged.