Today’s reminder that illegal immigration is not a victimless crime is the trial opening for the illegal alien accused of killing 20-year-old Natalie Housand. The young woman, a resident of Tabor City, North Carolina, was a nursing student who worked as a nursing assistant.

She was killed Dec. 19, 2004, by Jose Jesus Garcia Lopez, when an SUV driven by him struck her car as he swerved into her lane. Lopez will testify he was too drunk to remember the head-on collision that killed Natalie Housand, according to his lawyer.

A witness said that Lopez’ vehicle was traveling at 100 mph and that the SUV’s brake lights never went on.

Natalie’s family and friends put together a remembrance website to celebrate her all-too-brief life, filled with photos and loving tributes.

While the big guns of the MSM contines to peddle their fare of boilerplate sob stories of poor Juan struggling across the cruel desert, the American victims of open borders get little attention and are found almost exclusively in local media. Even the horrific rape and murder of Mary Nagle in New City, New York, only rated a few brief articles in the Times, one of which was how local folks were afraid to bring total strangers into their homes as laborers.

Allan Wall was on Terry Lowry’s “What’s Up” program. You can listen here. [MP3 1, MP3 2 ]

Yesterday on the Senate floor, Senator Feinstein (D-CA) described the current immigration bill which is designed to legalize the 12-20 million illegal aliens in the U.S. as “one-hundred percent calculated to fail.”

She offered an alternative solution: an Orange Card for which anybody residing illegally in the U.S. before January 1, 2006 is eligible.

The plan would require that applicants pay a fine of $2000 immediately (the current plan also has a $2000 fine but it can be paid at a much later date) pay back taxes and undergo criminal background checks.

The Feinstein amendment was an unmitigated disaster and did not pass.

So here’s my question: The Senate will supposedly vote on this bill as early as tomorrow and Senator Feinstein has described the existing bill as “one hundred percent calculated to fail.”

How will she vote?

Most likely, she’ll stay in line with her party and vote in favor of the bill in spite of her own admission that it is a bad bill–hopefully somebody is keeping notes and will ask her about that later.

The Washington Post runs a telling headline:

“Bush Is Losing Hispanics’ Support, Polls Show;
Surveys Find the Immigration Debate Is Also Alienating White Conservatives” by Thomas B. Edsall and Zachary A. Goldfarb, May 21, 2006

The priority given Hispanics in this headline is another example of a consistent pattern of media bias. Hispanics cast only 6.0 percent of the vote in the last election, according to the Census Bureau. White conservatives, whom the Post admits are also alienated, account for roughly four to six times more votes than all Hispanics put together.

If you just went by what you read in the newspapers you’d have to assume that the Constitution had been amended to make minority votes count more heavily than white votes.

Still, Edsall and Goldfarb confirm what we’ve been saying for over a half decade: the Bush-Rove immigration strategy makes no political sense. They write:

“Cumulatively, the data underscore the perils for Bush and his party in the immigration debate churning on Capitol Hill, one that threatens to bleed away support simultaneously from the Republican base and from Hispanic swing voters, whom Bush strategists had hoped to make an important new part of the GOP coalition.”

Edsall and Goldfarb report:

“A survey of 800 registered Hispanic voters conducted May 11-15 by the nonpartisan Latino Coalition showed that Democrats were viewed as better able to handle immigration issues than Republicans, by nearly 3 to 1: 50 percent to 17 percent. Pitting the Democrats against Bush on immigration issues produced a 2 to 1 Democratic advantage, 45 percent to 22 percent.”

Well, gosh, now why would the Democratic Party be more enthusiastic about importing more Latinos than, on the whole, the Republican Party?

Could it be because…Latinos vote Democratic?

In response, Bush and his GOP allies like Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) have been attempting to appeal to Hispanics by denouncing the GOP’s conservative base as “the political lowest common denominator” (in Hagel’s words last Thursday).

Not surprisingly, the spectacle of leading Republicans condemning the salt of the Republican Party isn’t making Hispanics trust Republicans more.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post has finally caught up to concept first put forward in the 1997 Brimelow-Rubenstein article “Electing a New People” that immigration is bad for the GOP. Edsall and Goldfarb write:

“Even if the GOP does maintain Bush’s margins among Latinos in 2008, another study found that Democrats are likely to achieve a net gain in future elections, simply because Hispanics are growing as a share of the electorate.”

Y-e-s! That is how simple arithmetic works!
They continue:

Ken Strasma, a Democratic strategist who specializes in using demographic data to target potential voters, and the Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University conducted a study concluding that, if past voting patterns hold, the growing Hispanic population means that Democrats will increase their 2004 vote totals by nearly half a million votes in 2008.

That sounds a little exaggerated to me, probably due to Strasma assuming that the tidal wave of Hispanic electoral might will finally roll in in 2008, but clearly the direction is correct.

“The impact is even stronger farther out in the future, as Hispanic vote growth would move two Southwestern battleground states — Nevada and New Mexico — into the Democratic column by 2016, and add Iowa and Ohio by 2020,” the study said. If the 2004 election had been held in an electorate based on the one forecast for 2020, with all other factors held constant, the higher Hispanic vote would have given Democrat John F. Kerry a slight victory in both the electoral college and the popular vote, the study added.

It only took the Post nine years to catch up with VDARE.COM’s authors, but better late than never.

Of course, the Senate’s Amnesty/ Immigration Acceleration bill, which would increase the number of legal immigrants by 47 million over the next two decades. would hasten this process radically.

Jacob Weisberg has a Bushism of the Day column in Slate, which deals with the President’s supposed verbal slips. (Weisberg would not agree with Vdare.com that the President’s entire immigration policy is wrong–see his vicious review of Alien Nation)

The problem, as Eugene Volokh has frequently noted, is that Weisberg commits two major sins in trying to find enough Bushisms to fill a daily column, which has been made into a book.

1. He leaves out the context.
2. He doesn’t link to the original, in spite of the fact that Slate is an online only magazine, and the only way he could get much of his material is by reading it off the internet.

“Finally, the desk, where we’ll have our picture taken in front of–is nine other presidents used it. This was given to us by Queen Victoria in the 1870s, I think it was. President Roosevelt put the door in so people would not know he was in a wheelchair. John Kennedy put his head out the door.”–Showing German newspaper reporter Kai Diekmann the Oval Office, Washington, D.C., May 5, 2006 [Bushism of the Day. By Jacob Weisberg]

Bush is talking about a door in the front of the desk, and you’d have no way of knowing that from Weisberg’s excerpt.

“John Kennedy put his head out the door ” may sound strange, but the German journalist interviewing Bush immediately knew what he was talking about, and immediately said “Yes, the very famous picture –”[Interview of the President by Kai Diekmann of BILD The Oval Office May 5, 2006 ]

This is the picture he was talking about.

And of course, all the facts that he mentions concerning the desk given by Queen Victoria, (made from the timbers of H.M.S Resolute) are correct, except that it was 1880 that the desk arrived in Washington. Why shouldn’t he be right about that? It’s not rocket science. It’s not immigration policy, either.

What’s the point? The point is that this is what we at VDare.com are trying not to do. When we quote something, we link to it, or tell you where you can look it up.

Weisberg [send him mail]isn’t like that, apparently. Peter Brimelow ’s theory, based on a couple of experiences with Weisberg’s journalism is that

Weisberg is one of those people whose verbal slickness exceeds his intellectual powers. Faced with an argument that disturbs him emotionally, he cannot confine himself to the truth, let alone logic.

You could look it up.

UPDATE: Volokh has a post, and a comment thread on this item. Some of the comments have a weird, not getting it feeling, based presumably on their not clicking on links to the picture, or seeking the original transcript.

Nathan Glazer’s review of Alien Nation was quite positive, even though it was titled What He Should Have Said but it includes this passage, which shows a surprising amount of faith in assimilation from the man who wrote Beyond The Melting Pot

Yet it is too late for this country to consist of a single race bound to a common culture. I think the new immigrants in the end will be as American as the Indians and West Indians of England will be English, as the Algerians of France will be French, as the Turks of Germany will be German. Alien Nation Review: NR, May 1995 By Nathan Glazer

If you’ve been reading the news, you know that all those groups are now more and more “Unmeltable.” At the same time, the growth of a large, unassimilable Mexican population is happening in America.