The United States First Amendment protections on freedom of speech are unique in the world. Canada, Australia, and Great Britain all have “Race Relations” laws criminalizing some forms of speech. (Something Enoch Powell warned about in his famous speech, which didn’t get him arrested.)

• In Great Britain, Dr. Frank Ellis has been suspended from his job as a lecturer, and is under investigation by the West Yorkshire Police for views that in the US can be printed in the Wall Street Journal.

• A Canadian conservative magazine, (possibly the Canadian conservative magazine) is facing a lawsuit in “human right court” for printing the Cartoons of Mohammed.

• And Andrew Fraser, who has been covered here at length, has been told by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, that his letter to the editor of a local paper was ” an unlawful breach of s 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.”

I’ve reproduced Fraser’s press release below, with links. John Jay Ray, in one of his many blogs, has reproduced his detailed defense here.

Media Release
31 March 2006

Human Rights Commission Declares Associate Professor Andrew Fraser’s Letter to the Parramatta Sun Unlawful

In a stunning blow to freedom of expression in Australia, the President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Mr John von Doussa, QC, today declared that a letter to the editor written by Associate Professor Andrew Fraser and published in the Parramatta Sun on 6 July 2005 was an unlawful breach of s 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
(more…)

The immigration issue has risen in importance not because of real-world conditions but because of a relentless campaign to place it at the center of the national consciousness - a campaign waged primarily by intellectuals (many of them, ironically, immigrants themselves). WHY THE IMMIGRATION ANGST?,By John Podhoretz, New York Post, March 31, 25006]

Now, who exactly does he mean by that? I can guess. But here’s one example: John O’ Sullivan, who was born in England, who when hearing that the White House planned to “marginalize” critics of the guestworker plan, asked

“How do you marginalize 70 percent of the American people?”

And it’s not Peter Brimelow, John O’ Sullivan, George Borjas, or any other”immigrant himself” including the late Ernest van den Haag, writing before the 1965 act, who made that 70 percent of Americans skeptical of immigration.

In fact, it may be another set of immigrants who made them feel that way; the immigrant taking their job, the immigrant robbing a bank, the immigrant on welfare.

Just as the 70 percent of the of the American people who poll negative on immigration are far more numerous than the various immigration skeptics, with their personal experience of the immigration process, so are immigrant, (for example,) criminals more numerous than the Anglospheric contingent at Washington meetings of FAIR.

Diana West, in a powerful Washington Times column this morning (“Mexico North“, March 31 2006), sketches the utter and amazing transformation that has come over Los Angeles since she was a litle girl there, just in the 1960s. I am naturally disposed to approve of this column because of her kind reference to Alien Nation. But what really impresses me is that this reference is in the context of the decisive and disastrous role of the 1965 Immigration Act, the point at which the U.S. government began to abolish the American people and elect another. Needless to say, this insight is wholly absent from the typically disingenuous propaganda piece appearing in the allegedly anti-statist Wall Street Journal, also today.

The very real illegal immigration crisis is what has gotten the immigration debate moving again. But it’s good to remember that legal immigration policy is the ultimate problem.