When in early June I first commented on Senator Rick Santorum’s sudden adoption of the immigration issue in his desperate re-election battle I concluded

Some might find this distasteful opportunism. But to succeed immigration reform needs a coalition. When the rats start boarding your ship, you can be more confident it will float.

Santorum is a welcome sign.

Apparently Senator Santorum is feeling more confident about re election these days (or maybe he has been promised a big dollop of RNC campaign funds). In Sunday night’s Meet The Press debate between Santorum and his Democratic opponent Bob Casey not one word was said about immigration. Instead, apparently by agreement (Casey got to open) half the debate consisted of the ludicrous spectacle of these middle-aged Pennsylvanians competing to be the more bellicose over the Middle East. Casey wants to send more Special Forces to Iraq, Santorum to confront Iran.

The rest was some tax wonkery, abortion-baiting, and some personal trivia.

In essence, the program was an effective curtain raiser for the White House’s effort to militarise the November elections. Clearly, it was planned that way.

With a remarkable lack of professionalism, host Tim Russert allowed the debate to conclude without any consideration of an aspect of the race which has received a lot of MSM attention.

Or maybe it was professional. His paymasters in the Big Media absolutely do not want the subject discussed. It is more important to them who rules Iran than what life is like in small town Pennsylvania.

As for Casey, he neglected a subject where at least he has a constituency and where he could have forced Santorum into contradicting either himself or the White House. Instead he allowed himself to be manouvered into abject me-tooism on the Middle East. He is out of his league.

Today, September 5th, 2006, at 12:06 p.m. ( Central Standard Time) , the Mexican electoral court declared Felipe Calderon the winner of the Mexican election, in a narrow squeaker of a triumph over Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The Mexican electoral court, of which I have written elsewhere
was specifically designed to adjudicate electoral disputes.

Congratulations to President-elect Calderon.

The Dallas Morning News ran a realistic piece on the destructive quality of immigration on September 3. In it, a Texas native describes the heartbreaking result of on immigration take-over in Carrollton, TX, a suburb of Dallas:

For some reason Farmers Branch and southern Carrollton seem a favorite stopping off point for these lawbreakers. Our government declines to do anything about people breaking these laws, and people who complain are branded as racist. Of course being called a racist these days on the immigration issue doesn’t really mean much. It just means that you disagree with blame-America-first liberals on the left and open-borders, cheap-labor businesspeople on the right.

…

I could see the years of equity we put into our house slipping down the drain as our once-pleasant mixed neighborhood turned into a dump. I could also see that neither the federal government, nor the state government, nor the city government was going to do anything to help people like me. And I know how the game is played in the media: People like me are routinely depicted as ignorant racist rednecks. We can’t win.

…

Think about what it means to see your neighborhood and your home investment go to hell because of unregulated Third World immigration. And you expect us to be happy about it?(”My home became a ghetto“, by Phillip J. Hubbell, The Dallas Morning News, Sunday, September 3, 2006)

After I posted this blog about illegal immigration in Russia, a reader sent me a link with video footage of a recent riot in Russia that centered about the presence of illegal immigrants in that country.

There is a huge displeasure across native dwellers of Russian cities for the behavior of Southern migrants, especially from Chechnya.

Now, the simple fact is that under the old Soviet regime–or even most of the Czarist era- there wasn’t a lot of illegal immigration. This displeasure is not just with the immigrants themselves-but with the economic elite that as emerged since the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, the last time there was “huge displeasure” in Russia around the behavior of their economic elites, we saw events set in place that eventually resulted in over 60 Million people getting killed. I hope this history isn’t lost on those making decisions in Russia.

Alan K. Simpson of Simpson-Mazzoli fame (or infamy) is back in the news. The House Judiciary Committee’s field hearing Friday, 9/1, in Dubuque, Iowa was on the subject “Is the Reid-Kennedy bill a repeat of the failed amnesty of 1986?,” and former-Senator Simpson (R-WY) submitted written testimony, according to an article (”Simpson offers his thoughts on immigration“) in the Billings [Montana] Gazette.

For me, the highlight of the Gazette article is Simpson’s take on how things went awry after the 1986 bill’s passage:

Simpson says the bill never worked properly because Congress, driven by the House, stripped out language for a “secure identifier” that would be issued to all Americans and used by employers to verify that workers had legal status.

Simpson said it could have taken the form of a “slide card, like when you go into the grocery,” or like a Social Security card that could have perhaps used the maiden name of the person’s mother. But he emphasized that it would never have been used as a national ID and would only be used at the time of a new hire or when applying for government benefits.

“We said right in that bill in essence that whatever it was that was developed would not be carried on the person, would not be used for law enforcement, but would be somewhere in your possession and it would be used twice in your life,” Simpson said. “You never carried it, the cops didn’t ask you for it.”

But critics objected to the measure, fearing it would infringe on civil rights and privacy rights. The idea brought out the “cuckoos” on both sides of the aisle, Simpson said. “The far right was saying it was the mark of Cain. … The left was saying this was the slippery slope to Nazi Germany,” he said.

“It would have been possessed by not just people who looked foreign, but by bald emaciated guys like me, too,” Simpson said. “That was totally distorted, totally not even comprehended. That was the saddest thing of all for me, to watch the House rip it out.”

Without the identifier provision, a whole industry sprang up to make forged passports and forged green cards, Simpson said, and employers continued to hire illegal aliens in great numbers.

Although Simpson speaks frankly from his experience …

– “Anyone who has learned the issue and is really speaking honestly on it will be accused of being a bigot, a racist, a xenophobe and all sorts of other marvelous things. And that’s how you keep defeating it.”

– “It’s an issue filled with emotion, guilt, fear and racism. And then toss the Statue of Liberty in there with it, and the golden door and the huddled masses, and it all overpowers common sense.”

… he apparently hasn’t fully assimilated the 1986 catastrophe: “The basic core of the American people would be much more pleased rather than see nothing done, see the border enforcement, the fences and that sort of thing. I understand that, but I still think you leave an undigestible 11 million without dealing with them.”

According to the article, Simpson favors “triggered amnesty” for the undigestibles. (Another name for that would be “the Pence bill.”)

Regarding the actual House hearing in Dubuque, it’s clear that Iowa’s Republican U.S. Senator Grassley, who testified, is solidly in our corner and fully learned the lessons of 1986: “We have to learn from our mistakes, and that was one that I made in supporting amnesty last time. That action alone is a major reason why we have up to 14 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. today.”

The hearing coverage in the Des Moines Register also contains an interesting quote from a Chicago environmentalist (or, anyway, “environmental consultant”):

“I thought this was going to be a public hearing, and we could have something to say,” said Nina Shinn, an environmental consultant from Chicago and adamant opponent of providing legal status to illegal immigrants. “Our laws are strong enough, but we just need to enforce them. I don’t need a politician to tell me that. In fact, they should know that themselves.”

Sounds like another renegade from Sierra Club political correctness!