The headline I read yesterday in the Los Angeles Times said:

O.C. Sweep Nets 23 Suspected Members of Racist Street Gang by H.G. Reza, Times Staff Writer March 17, 2006

Now then, I have learned to mistrust the use of the word “racist” (especially if it is written in the LA Times) ever since the term was comandeered by the Liberal Entitlement Movement as some sort of weapon of mass destruction in the War on Logic. As such, I simply had to find out the real story.

I didn’t have to look far…the first sentence in Mr. Reza’s column was:

“Dozens of law-enforcement officials fanned out across Orange County on Thursday to arrest 23 suspected members of a white racist street gang that includes nonwhites…”

Among those arrested were Vietnamese and Latina women.

Ok…I have a question:

If a Vietnamese woman is a white supremacist, isn’t she taking self-loathing a bit too far? Seriously, does she go to gang meetings (or heists, drive-by’s…you know…social events) and say things like:

Hey! I know what we should do tonight! Let’s burn down a few Vietnamese shops! We’ll show them what they get for coming into our neighborhood! In fact, my mom has two nail salons downtown–we can start with those. Hey, if you aint White, you aint right!

(Unfortunately, it is only then that she discovers as a Vientamese woman she is not allowed to submit agenda items or really even speak…oh, and she has to drink from a different water fountain.)

Hmm…so who labeled them a “white racist” gang? According to this LA Times article:

“Public Enemy Number One, which the Anti-Defamation League calls the county’s largest white racist gang, all had criminal records but no convictions for violent crimes. “

Nope, no violent crimes or “hate” crimes for that matter. You see, this gang is best known for crimes such as identity theft and credit card fraud which everybody knows are inherently racist crimes, right?

Then again, the LA Times may just be…I don’t know…full of it!

The editor of the Los Angeles Times may be reached by email here.

Yesterday’s Vdare.com letter inspired me to read further about the story of contractor David Shafer, a home-builder in the Atlanta area whose life was battered by the influx of illegal alien workers [Illegal Immigration: One man's ruin ... and recovery, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 12, 2006].

Mr. Shafer had gone from a comfortable middle-class living to the brink of financial disaster in a few short years because of illegal immigrants taking over his livelihood. But the AJC was disturbed at Shafer’s “anger” and unpleasant “bitter” attitude at how his life has been sabotaged.

Now, at a time when all levels of government are grappling with illegal immigration, Shafer embodies the sentiments of many Georgians. He’s certain the immigrants are damaging him but doubtful that elected officials will solve the problem. [...]

By that December day in Suwanee, Shafer had grown as bitter as the wind signaling the end of another construction season without a paycheck. He had just started taking the antidepressant Zoloft. Gone was the happy-go-lucky Cub Scout leader whose previous activism was limited to raising money for the neighborhood swim club and the Collins Hill High wrestling squad.

But never fear — this story has a kumbaya ending, as suggested in the “recovery” part of the title. After a breakdown triggered by getting off his meds, Shafer got back on Zoloft and embraced diversity by learning Spanish. Problem solved, according to the AJC.

Is that the media’s prescription for coping with invasion? Drugs and politically correct attitude adjustment?

It was a good thing for Britain that antidepressants didn’t exist during Winston Churchill’s time. (For appeasement relief, listen to a sound clip of Churchill’s call to arms, “Their Finest Hour”).

It has been rumored that a majority of the 18 voting members of the Senate Judiciary Committee favor some form of guest worker plan that would essentially extend amnesty to the 12 to 20 million illegal aliens living in the United States.

Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennesse [send him mail] informed the Judiciary Committee that he would introduce his own immigration reform bill should the committee fail to agree on a version before next week’s Congressinal recess.

True to form, the committee had not come to an agreement by yesterday’s deadline and Senator Frist introduced his bill (PDF here):

1. Require all employers to verify the identity and immigration status of their employees through an electronic system.
2. Assess civil penalties of between $500 and $20,000 against employers for each illegal immigrant they hire and criminal penalties of up to $20,000 per illegal immigrant hired and up to six months in jail for engaging in a pattern of employing illegal workers.
3. Add 4,400 Border Patrol agents over six years to the 10,000 Congress provided for in the intelligence reform law passed in 2004, and 1,000 more immigrant smuggling investigators over the next five years.
4. More than double the number of employment-based green cards, from 140,000 to 290,000, and make more employment based visas available to unskilled workers. It also would free up other visas by exempting immediate relatives of U.S. citizens from being counted in the annual pool of 480,000 visas, and increase country-by-country ceilings on family sponsored and employment-based immigrants.

Yeah…I’m not really okay with the increase in green cards but every cloud has a silver lining:

NO GUEST WORKER PLAN…NO AMNESTY!!!

Senator Frist is one of the strongest Republican candidates for President in 2008 and recently won the straw poll at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.

This is what I think we can safely derive from the Frist legislation:

Senator Frist has sifted through all the garbage the Raza lobby has sold to the MSM and instead–wait for it–listened to the American voters.

What a novel approach…

Come election time the voters will want to see some real reform and a guest worker plan/amnesty deal won’t cut it…it will succeed only in enraging the American public and I think Frist may have figured that out.

Now if only some of his buddies (Specter, McCain and the Gang) would come on board…

Hungarian-Canadian journalist George Jonas, writes in Canada’s National Post [A question of loyalty, March 10, 2006] that

Until recent times, the West has been spoiled by the loyalty of immigrants, even from hostile regions or cultures.

I think that part of the reason for this is that before the First World War in some countries, and during the Cold War in others, immigrants had no nation-states to be loyal to. Ireland, for example, didn’t become “A Nation Once Again” until 1921, and thus Irish patriotic feelings, kept alive by many an Emerald Society, couldn’t express themselves as dual loyalty, because Ireland was (unwillingly)part of the United Kingdom, and they weren’t going to be loyal to that.

In the same way, Russian Jews fleeing pogroms had no reason to feel loyalty to Czarist Russia, and many Central-European homelands were part of either the Russian Empire, or of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Italy is a special case, it didn’t exist as a unified nation until 1861, and in the traditionally impoverished South of Italy, people are more likely to think of themselves as Calabrian or Neapolitan than Italian.

More recently, Cold War immigrants, like Jonas himself, who left Hungary in 1956, one step ahead of the Russian invaders, have frequently been extravagantly loyal. (At one time, a large number of US Special Forces operators were from Captive Nations, because the Army needed their language skills. )

Jonas writes

The pattern continued during the Cold War, when former nationals of hostile communist countries often found refuge in North America. These newcomers of various ethnicity and religion, from Eastern Europe to Vietnam, were as supportive of the values and interests of their adopted countries as native-born citizens of Western descent. Few Americans opposed the anti-American antics of Fidel Castro more resolutely than Florida’s ex-Cuban community.

But, once again, I’d argue that this comes from the historical accident of them having no homes to go back to. In a world with many fewer occupied countries, immigrants will be less likely to become “100 percent Americans,” and more likely to loyal to their native countries.

That has obvious implications for immigration policy. Obvious to me, that is, but not, unfortunately, to Congress, or to the President.