The Restoration Weekend run by David Horowitz happened in February, so it’s not news, but there are a bunch of audio files of speeches available.

However, there’s something wrong with the audio links page, so here’s an MP3 link to Tamar Jacoby and Doug McIntyre, (Transcript here.) And three samples, if you want to listen. The argument made by Tamar Jacoby that border guards should stop trying to catch busboys and gardeners, so they can concentrate on Arab terrorists ignores the fact that more people are killed in the US by busboys, gardeners, and day laborers than by terrorists.

• Moderator:In 2005, Opinion Dynamics did a survey and found that over 91% of the American public felt that illegal immigration was a serious problem. So this is a problem that really resonates with the American public at this particular point in time.
• Tamar:�ll never forget the border guard who said to me, it was here in Arizona, �If another 9/11 happens here in Arizona on my watch and it happened because I was so busy chasing your busboy or my gardener that I didn�t find the terrorists, I�ll never forgive myself.� Let�s take those workers off the table so the border guards can get back to really focusing on the bad guys.
• While nearly every other major city in America has seen a steep decline in violent crime, in Los Angeles County, the murder rate is up. The L.A. Unified School District�which is many things, but �unified� isn�t one of them�is a disaster. Seventy-eight percent of the student body speaks Spanish and you�re as like to see bien venutos over the door as you are to see �welcome.�

D.A. on radio 1-2 AM Friday EST, which is tonight 10-11 Pacific.

He’s on now:

Wake Up America Radio - with Mark Edwards from Las Vegas. Listen online here.Call-in Number: 702.383.825

The topic is illegal immigration.[Click here to launch the audio.]

Previously on the David Allen Show, Jacksonville, Florida, 5:15 PM [ish] Eastern

The topic will be the Sheriff in Jacksonville.…

Listen online here.

John Derbyshire has an article on the future of robotics, and the dangers of immigration, in the New English Review. I always like this subject, because it was the subject of one the first pieces I wrote for Vdare.com.

Immigration into Japan and South Korea is essentially nil. This is not because nobody wants to go and live in those countries–several hundred million Chinese, Filipinos, and Indonesians would love to–but because the Japanese and Koreans don’t think immigration would be good for their countries. They prefer robots over helots.

We might ask ourselves whether that preference might not, in the long run, prove to be a wise one. Our fathers mowed their own lawns. We hire gangs of helots–illegal immigrants–to mow our lawns. Since the demographic crunch will dry up the supply of helot labor everywhere, our children, in their middle age, will likely have their lawns mowed by some descendant of Robomow.

The East Asians, however, with their aversion to cheap immigrant labor, and their fascination with robotics, will have got there long before us. With the demographic transition behind them, and, one assumes, their economic inefficiencies long since corrected, they will be sailing under clear skies through the mid-21st century, while we are still fighting our way through demographic gales. [Robotics vs. Helotics New English Review July 2006 ]

Probably the best roundup Vdare.com’s robotics reportage, (done by computer-assisted humans) is here:Japanese And American Robots.

Here’s what Sam Francis had to say on the subject of mechanization vs. cheap labor.

• In 1979, President Carter’s Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland ended government financing of research into farming technology because he didn’t want to replace “an adequate and willing work force with machines.” That was just about the time we started hearing about how Americans wouldn’t take those jobs anyway.The “adequate and willing work force” Mr. Bergland was talking about was made up of immigrants.

  [Sam Francis, in an article featuring the mechaniezed canopy shakers which may replace immigrant workers in Florida. They’re big, scary machines. But the workers are kind of scary, too.]

Update: Picture of Fujitsu’s service robot added, below.

Sometimes reader mail can be used to make a point or illustrate a problem.

Today’s mail brings a short letter from David in San Jose, California - U.S.A.

There is nothing I need to add or say here that David hasn’t.

Please don’t give up, David.

D.A.-

I have written enough letters, all to no avail. A couple of months ago, I contacted the local San Jose FBI office to let them know that Social Security cards were being sold openly at a local daily flea market. Most of the visitors to this huge flea market are Hispanic and the booth that sold Social Security cards also sold other forms of ID. They also were openly advertised.

Obviously this is illegal - and a source of documentation for illegal immigrants. I sent the FBI digital photos of the booth with its large signs advertising the illegal IDs.

Nothing has been done even though the FBI has been notified and the grounds are patrolled daily many local San Jose police. This is a travesty. I am fed up with the government’s refusal to protect our borders and enforce our laws. I did not serve in Viet Nam to see my country overrun by this invasion.

David, California.

With immigration topics on front pages nationwide, victory on illegal immigration may be within our grasp. (Caution: I have neither insider information nor shrewd political instincts.)

I live in fear that we’ll ultimately win on illegal immigration, and then most people will lose interest, thinking “problem solved.” (Our society has a short attention span.)

However, mass legal immigration provides the seedbed for mass illegal immigration. (See, for example, Mark Krikorian’s “Sheboygan” argument here.) So if we permit legal immigration at its current astronomical levels and return to our sloppy ways, illegal immigration may metastasize again.

Plus, mass legal immigration creates most of the same problems as mass illegal immigration.

Thus, when I encounter someone who is with us on illegal immigration, I usually try to push them further, to get them to also recognize the larger subject.

For example, a columnist for a suburban newspaper in a major metro area recently published a good op-ed about illegal immigration, but he made the usual, glib distinction between the illegal and legal varieties. (For several reasons, I’ll leave him anonymous and won’t link his column.) So I wrote him a private email outlining my view of things:

Dear XXXX,

You wrote:

Immigration is not the issue in America, ……. The issue is illegal immigration and how to deal with it in an enlightened and compassionate way.

But legal immigration carries with it almost all the ills of illegal immigration, the significant exception, of course, being the large-scale breakdown of the rule of law that goes with the latter. (Note that the nominally-legal immigration pathways of refugee and asylum are used fraudulently about 95% of the time.)

Having lived in Redondo Beach, California 1996 - 2005, I provide you with this distillation of my observations on what mass immigration, legal and illegal both, is doing to our country:

1. The flood of immigrants drives wages and living conditions in our central cities toward those of the Third World.

2. The influx imposes both sprawl and gridlock on our metropolitan areas.

3. Immigrant families needing services overwhelm our schools, taxpayer-funded healthcare facilities, and other public agencies.

4. Those requiring services don�t assimilate and, instead, expect to be served in their native languages.

5. American civic culture frays as each ethnic group establishes its own grievance lobby and pushes for preferences.

6. Illegal aliens bring us fearsome diseases such as tuberculosis (new, drug-resistant strains) and Chagas.

7. Shortages of water and other resources loom, especially in immigration-blitzed California.

You can flesh out your understanding of these points quickly by reading the 20 micro-essays here …

… about a 15-minute claim on your time. I suggest starting with essay number 8, “Mass immigration and basic freedoms“:

Then, to productively orient your future thinking about immigration, ponder these two questions:

What is the purpose of the United States?

What is the purpose of our immigration laws?

My answer to both: To benefit the citizens of the United States.

Is your answer different?

If, for example, you think that immigration here is a civil right for the rest of the world, and we have a duty to let them in, please recognize that there are 5 billion people in the world poorer than the average Mexican. So where would you draw your line?

Columnist XXXX wrote me a brief response: “Many thanks for this. You make compelling points.”

That was especially rewarding, as I often get no response. But whether rewarding or not, I think it’s always worth trying with journalists — if we can get them to broaden their thinking, there’s real leverage for us in advancing the public conversation about mass immigration.

(I think it’s worth making the same points in “retail” situations, too, such as when we hear a friend say “I have a problem with illegal immigration, but I like legal immigration.”)

We must keep pushing, pushing, pushing …

Here’s a good question from the Christian Science Monitor: How well are American Muslims fitting in? [August 2, 2006]

It comes with some disturbing answers.

At least the article is free of the American exceptionalism that is common in many pieces about Muslims living in the US, that somehow our tradition of assimilation has overcome the Islamic tradition of jihad. When the number of Muslim immigrants living in America hit a critical mass, there will be the same conflict here as in France and Britain.

WASHINGTON - It’s called the “Virginia Jihad” case: Iraqi-American medical researcher Ali al-Yimimi, who preached in northern Virginia mosques and disseminated his radical thinking on the Web, was sentenced to life imprisonment last week. His crime: inciting followers, many of them young American-born Muslims, to a violent defense of Islam and war against the United States and its intervention in Islamic countries. [...]

In the US, the attacks and events like the Virginia Jihad case are raising anxieties about immigrants and their allegiances in the midst of a rapidly expanding immigrant population. With a new report finding that births to foreign-born women in the US are at their highest level ever - nearly 1 in 4 - some experts are warning that the traditional rapid assimilation of immigrants risks breaking down - with potentially worrisome consequences.

“Traditionally you had in the US an immigrant child learning to swim in a sea of native children, but increasingly it is the children of natives lost in a sea of children of immigrants,” says Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington. His research of US Census figures shows that in 2002, 23 percent of US births were to immigrant mothers - up from 15 percent in 1990.

The figure is closer to 25 percent today, Mr. Camarota adds, and could approach 30 percent by 2010. [...]

In Western countries with sizable Muslim minorities, the survey shows, concerns about unassimilating populations run parallelel to worries about extremist violence. In the US, where 70 percent said they worried about Islamic extremism in their country, half said they sensed an increasing interest in Islamic identity, and generally saw that as a bad thing. “The US is on the lower end [when compared to European countries],” says Ms. Funk, “but the same trend is there.”

The intelligent thing for America to do, given the calamity, which Islamic immigration has brought to Europe (and the likelihood of Eurabia becoming a reality due to the relentless demographics of immigration and high birth rate), would be to at least stop Muslim immigration from, say, terror-supporting nations. But Washington can’t even do that, as illustrated by the fact that diversity visas are still dispensed to citizens of North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

As Parapundit (Randall Parker) recently remarked, “Muslims are nature’s way of telling us that multiculturalism is a really bad idea.”