Since the title of the Congressional Testimony referred to below was Born in the U.S.A.? Rethinking Birthright Citizenship in the Wake of 9/11 , I was looking for an online soundfile of Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA for you to listen to online. I was amused to find that one of the search results on HypeMachine was not Springsteen, but a cover by Jose Gonzalez, with an intro in Spanish.

I thought, “Well, he probably was born in the USA. Maybe even in New Jersey, like the Boss.A lot of people are these days.“ Turns out Jose was born in Sweden, to Argentinian parents.

This is almost a year old, but I saw it on Hugh Hewitt today. Vdare.com was on this before 9/11:Weigh Anchor! Enforce The Citizenship Clause, August 31, 2001, by Howard Sutherland, who right next to Ground Zero 11 days later. Peter Brimelow was on it even earlier, see here for his personal involvement.

JOHN C. EASTMAN
Chapman University School of Law; The Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence September 29, 2005

Abstract:
Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives, Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims (Sept. 29, 2005) contends that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment has been misconstrued as mandating birthright citizenship. Rather, the clause was a codification of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which quite clearly exempted from the automatic citizenship provisions children of parents who owed allegiance to a foreign power - i.e., those who were in the U.S. only temporarily (and particularly those who were in the U.S. illegally). This was the understanding of those who drafted and those who ratified the 14th Amendment, and was confirmed by the Supreme Court in the first two cases to address the clause. In 1898, the Court reversed course, though, holding that the Clause mandated birthright citizenship, resulting in a repudiation of the principle of bilateral consent as the foundation for citizenship.SSRN-Born in the U.S.A.? Rethinking Birthright Citizenship in the Wake of 9/11 by John Eastman

A PDF of the whole testimony is here.

There’s more news to file in the “Mexico: Failed State” folder. The country is now so violent and lawless that financiers are rethinking investment there [Mexico's power vacuum lets drug terror spread , Dallas Morning News, 8/27/06].

The historic level of drug violence not only threatens Mexican judges and politicians, who once were immune, but also American tourists and U.S. investors, as the cartels move into vacation corridors such as Acapulco-Zihuatanejo on the Pacific Coast, and Morelia-Uruapan in the central state of Michoacan.

A Dallas businessman recently pulled out of a $40 million project near the Zihuatanejo resort.

“We didn’t think this was the right moment,” said Carol Davenport, a real estate agent from Arlington, Texas, now working in Mexico, who represented the businessman. “The dire situation didn’t exactly inspire investor confidence,” she added, referring to a rash of killings in the area.

The scale of the lawlessness, its geographical reach, and the apparent inability of the government to keep it in check threaten Mexico’s political stability, some analysts warn.

Inability to enforce the law and preserve order over territory is the definition of a failed state. A major negative milestone occurred in June 2005 when el Presidente Fox sent the Army into Nuevo Laredo to quell the drug cartel war, and the violence only got worse. After a few weeks, the Mexican Army simply gave up and left.

Since then, the once active border city has declined precipitously, with at least 40 and perhaps over 100 businesses closing.

Yet there is little if any response from Washington to the danger from Mexico’s worsening drug cartel anarchy spreading north. If anything, Mexican thugs recently got a full speed ahead message from the Bush Justice Department by the shocking prosecution of two Border Patrol agents, in which a drug smuggler got immunity and is suing us taxpayers for $5 million.

Another disturbing symptom is that Mexican drug cartels have further extended their reach into American national forest lands. Forget about safe hiking.

But Washington remains brain dead about encroaching anarchy. Do our elected representatives believe America is immune from becoming a failed state? They shouldn’t.

Kathy Shaidle points to this story from England,

This is how far we have come in the past year or so. When an ICM poll of Britain’s Muslims in February this year revealed that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality[!] responded by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor Phillips’s exact words were these: “If you want to have laws decided in another way, you have to live somewhere else.”

My guess is this: if such a statement had been made by a member of the Tory party’s Monday Club in 1984 — or, for that matter, 1994 — he would have been excoriated and quite probably would have been kicked out of the party. “If you don’t like it here then go somewhere else” was once considered the apogee of “racism”. People who did not like it here were exhorted to exert their political muscle and change the status quo.

How right wing the left sounds after its moment of racial truth By Rod Liddle, Sunday Times, August 27, 2006

OK, that’s the head of the Commission For Racial Equality that just said go back where you came from. Under a Labour Government. Wow!

Anyhow, the same article also refers to the Ray Honeyford case, which you can read about here in the Daily Telegraph: | Headteacher who never taught again after daring to criticise multiculturalism.

The point of Telegraph story is that Honeyford has been vindicated.

Kathy Shaidle writes

No conservative in England will now be awarded the You Were Right All Along Award, and get to make an unforgettable “Oscar” type speech to an audience of millions, not to mention a knighthood.

I wrote in 2004 that Honeyford was

[U]nlikely to get any apologies from the “anti-racist” crowd.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, conservative historian Robert Conquest was asked to do a second edition of his book on Communist mass murder, The Great Terror.

All its evidence had been sneered at by left-wing historians. But naturally, with the collapse of Communism, the truth had come out, and Conquest had been totally vindicated.

When his publisher asked if he had a suggestion for a new title, he said “How about “I Told You So, You —king Fools.”

This would make a great title for a Honeyford autobiography.