Good news for immigration patriots: The current (3/30 issue) of The Jewish Week reports that the Bush-Kennedy-McCain amnesty drive is stalling (“Presidential Politics Could Scuttle Border Reform: Jewish leaders fear immigration bill, a top communal priority, now longshot”, by James D. Besser). Reason: fierce opposition from patriots in the GOP presidential primary states.

This time around, the biggest hurdles are in the Senate because of rules that allow a single lawmaker to hold up legislation. On the hot-button issue of legal immigration, it will be hard for immigration advocates to win the 60-vote majority needed to overcome filibusters.

And there’s the presidential election.

“You already have one [presidential] campaign based mostly on opposition to illegal immigration,” said an official with one group, referring to Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.). “And the right-wing press continuing to call this a dire emergency. It’s 2008’s gay marriage issue.”

In lib-speak, that’s serious. The gay marriage issue was on the ballot in several states in 2004 and is widely credited with turning out the troops who then put W back in the White House.

The bad news for immigration patriots: what appears to be the continued knee-jerk committment of Jewish organizations to facilitating the immivasion:

A Jewish community divided on a range of other issues is mostly united behind the need for comprehensive immigration reform and regards the House bill as a good first step.

“Once you get past the Israel issue, it’s near the top of the list of priorities for a lot of groups,” said Haddar Susskind, Washington representative for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA).

“It’s one issue where there’s mostly agreement between progressive grass-roots groups and the big national organizations,” said Mik Moore, director of policy for the Jewish Funds for Justice. “There is a real sense of common cause.”

In a previous article I pointed out that a high percentage of Mexican emigrants to the U.S. previously had jobs in Mexico. Well, according to a recent survey conducted by the Banco de Mexico, 6 of 10 Mexican emigrants had jobs in Mexico before emigrating to the U.S. [Seis de cada 10 migrantes dejan trabajo en México Jose Manuel Arteaga, Feb. 13th, 2007, Universal]

The Banco also revealed that 3/4 of Mexican emigrants surveyed had lower than a high school education, and only 5.6% had any college.

The most lucrative jobs for Mexicans in the U.S., according to the survey, are found working in construction, as chauffeurs or auto mechanics .

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“The United States plans to issue 20 percent more visas to Indian students in 2007 than in 2006, a State Department official said during a visit to India this week, according to domain-b.com, an online Indian business magazine.

During a weeklong tour of India to promote American higher education, Karen P. Hughes, under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, said that the United States wanted to assure “every Indian student admitted to a legitimate institution of higher education in the U.S. that he or she will be granted a visa on time.”

Some 24,600 visas were issued to Indian students in 2006, up 32 percent over the previous year, a senior U.S. official said. According to the latest figures from an annual report on international students and scholars in the United States, about 76,500 students from India studied at American institutions in 2005. That number was down about 5 percent from the previous year.”

(U.S. Plans Increase in Number of Visas for Students From India, by Beth McMurtrie. Chronicle of Higher Education 3-29-07)

Writing last year on the massive influx of Eastern Europeans to Britain following the 2004 European Union enlargements, I observed:

Open borders enthusiasts have been quick to point out the story’s bright side. The vast majority of the new arrivals are young, few bring children or elderly relatives with them, and a remarkable 97 percent are employed full-time. The Slavic invasion of Britain, they conclude, has been a smashing success.

Increasingly, however, it appears that the newcomers have come to stay, with “a massive rise in pregnancies and abortion requests” [Immigrant Pregnancies Stretch NHS, March 26, 2007] an unintended consequence in some areas.

UK Commentators’ Laban Tall has more on the story. One reader of his blog had this to say about immigration-driven anomie in contemporary Britain:

“… underneath many people are unhappy with what’s developing. Without any seeming alternative they just quietly leave. I know many people of Afro-Caribbean descent, many of whom I like a lot, but sadly, on balance, I’ve come to the conclusion I’d rather live in a more English setting. It’s not just British culture that’s affected. The days of the blues parties and sound system clashes are pretty much over. It’s just too dangerous. I’m not overly taken by Indian culture either. I have 4, living in a tiny one bedroom flat above me, and I appear to have absolutely zero in common with them. They talk in their own language amongst themselves and mostly listen to Indian music and radio. My culture is slowly falling away in so many subtle ways. It is’t only immigration Labour has got wrong. For me, in some ways quite worse, is the state of Education. That seemed to be the tipping point for most of my friends with families who’ve left.”

According to his parents, college student Andrew Stear was excited about spring break in Florida with about 20 friends who caravanned from Missouri. He was studying business at St. Charles County Community College.

But the fun ended when Andrew was struck down crossing the street by an illegal alien driving a stolen van. The driver, Hugo Rodriguez Colindrez, tried to escape the crime scene but was forced off the road by another motorist who witnessed the incident.

Colindrez reportedly worked in construction on a condo project on Panama City Beach. Police believe he was driving drunk, but the blood tests are not yet available.

Andrew was only 21, but had made a big impression on those who knew him.

Co-workers remembered him as energetic, fun-loving and a good friend.

“He’s the type of person who would do anything for anyone without being asked,” said Dave Hinman, who manages an O’Fallon QuikTrip and owns a sporting goods store where Stear worked.

Hinman said Stear’s caring personality extended outside the workplace too. He volunteered at No Hunger Holiday, an annual program to provide food to needy residents at Thanksgiving.
[Student on vacation killed in hit-and-run, St. Louis Post Dispatch 3/30/07]

One tiny bit of hope to bring this unnecessary road carnage to an end is the Scott Gardner Act, which has been reintroduced as HR 1355. The bill would require rapid deportation of any illegal immigrant convicted of drunk driving.

Here’s report from the Duke University school paper on the Peter Brimelow Vs. Peter Laufer debate:

Immigration authors debate border issues

By Cosette Wong,Duke Chronicle March 28 2007

Are we a nation of immigrants? When Peter Laufer grabbed a bite to eat at Duke’s McDonald’s Tuesday, the woman who took his order in Spanish answered the question for him.

“The sweet woman behind the counter didn’t bat an eye,” said Laufer, an author whose belief that the United States should open the border to immigration placed him at one end of a debate sponsored by the Duke Conservative Union Tuesday evening. “The pat, easy answer, of course, is ‘Yeah.’”

Boy, that is the pat, easy, answer, isn’t it? I have a question for that woman–is where you come from a nation of immigrants? Can the US send people it doesn’t want there to take jobs from the local citizens? Or are is there some kind of Army standing in the way?

Later Laufer discussed the economic problems that America would suffer if illegals were all gone:

“What does it do to our country in terms of our pocketbooks?” he asked. “We don’t know, [but] we know the truth of the film ‘A Day Without a Mexican.‘”

Well, no, we don’t. A Day Without A Mexican is a science fiction film made with the explicit purpose of spreading pro-immigration propaganda. That’s like saying “We all know the truth of The Day The Earth Stood Still.“

Thursday, March 22, 2007 was a banner day for immigration coverage in the mainstream press. There were two [count them: two!] prominent op-eds that frankly discussed how mass immigration is bludgeoning actual American citizens.

In “Immigration: When doing the right thing hurts,” published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, Mark Cromer, a senior writing fellow with Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), describes the awakening and subsequent career crisis of Kirsten Stewart, a landscape designer in Santa Monica, CA.

To my mind, the article is one long highlight, so I’ll semi-arbitrarily pick a couple of passages to quote:

When she first moved to Santa Monica in 2002, Stewart says she was oblivious to the problem [of mass illegal immigration] and consequently hired illegal immigrants as well.

Yet it wasn’t long before she began to feel that there was something inherently wrong with her hiring illegal immigrants. She says it became clear that it hurt her community more than it helped her bottom line.

“I realized that my foreman, who has been in the country a long time, doesn’t have any desire to be a citizen. He has such a strong allegiance to Mexico,” she says.

But it was Stewart’s pregnant nanny from Brazil, also without papers, that pushed her to make a dramatic change.

“She told me that she was so happy that she was having her baby here because (her child) would get a real Social Security number. She told me how surprised she was at all the ‘free’ neonatal care she was getting and all the other ‘free’ health services,” Stewart says. “That’s when the light bulb went off.”

Stewart fired her nanny, stopped hiring her foreman and vowed she would only use workers legally in the country.

Almost immediately, she started losing bids.

Further down in the article:

The experience of trying to do the right thing has left her feeling helpless and embittered.

“I can’t compete by playing honestly in an industry where most everyone else is breaking the rules,” Stewart says. “And they aren’t breaking the rules because Americans won’t do these jobs. They are breaking the rules because they don’t want to pay a decent wage.”

This is an article to savor and then thrust in front of your skeptical and/or oblivious friends and colleagues, insisting that they take two minutes out of their busy lives to read it.

Simultaneously, Providence Journal (Providence, RI) writer Froma Harrop had a notable column “Anger over immigration mess is not just a Republican thing,” in the Seattle Times.

Harrop starts out by noting that immigration is a heavy-duty topic among grassroots Iowans these days:

Iowa Republicans are peppering their presidential hopefuls with pointed questions about illegal immigration. Media reports tend to characterize these discussions as a Republican-base thing, but the reality is otherwise — as careful positioning by Democratic candidates would suggest. The immigration free-for-all is driving nearly everyone crazy.

But then she turns to some consequences from the recent immigration raid at the Michael Bianco, Inc. factory in New Bedford, MA. Most interesting is her account of another possible awakening, this time of intransigently left-wing Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA):

Frank blasted the Defense Department for awarding more than $100 million in contracts to Michael Bianco Inc., which, it appears, was flagrantly employing illegal workers to sew military backpacks and other gear. Frank also quoted a Michael Bianco competitor who called him after the raid, saying, “Now I understand how they kept outbidding me.”

Not only are these memorable articles, they’re tools for our side. I was able to make good use of the Cromer article the very next day, quoting its highlight paragraph in testimony I presented to the Judiciary Committee of Montana’s House of Representatives in support of a bill that would crack down on contractors who hire illegal aliens for public (i.e. taxpayer-funded) projects. My closing paragraphs:

I’d like to finish on a larger theme. There was an article in yesterday’s San Diego paper titled “Immigration: When doing the right thing hurts.” It’s about a political liberal living in the very liberal town of Santa Monica who can no longer earn a living as a landscape designer because she’s stopped hiring illegal aliens, so she’s routinely underbid on contracts by competitors who don’t share her scruples.

What scruples? Well, through some personal experiences and reflection, she realized that her former hiring of illegal aliens “hurt her community more than it helped her bottom line.” She was thinking of the enormous public costs associated with illegal immigration. But her clients, many of them liberals who strongly support ideas like a “living wage,” would rather save a buck than live up to their professed ideals, so she no longer gets their business.

That’s what’s happened across the country, and it’s by no means a sin of just liberals. People go for the short-term, private pecuniary advantage of hiring illegal aliens, forgetting that the rule of law is what made this country the place it is.

A California congressman has said, “The more we become a nation of illegal immigrants, the deeper we fall into anarchy.” Right on. [For quote, see book cover here.]

Mickey Kaus has been holding National Review’s feet to the fire over immigration, asking recently if NR had gone wobbly on immigration. Now he says

“Am I Wobbly? Over at The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry attempt to answer the question of whether National Review has gone wobbly on immigration. It’s pretty clear the answer is yes. Ponnuru says he’s being “consistent” with NR’s position when he defends–as the “framework for a compromise”–Sen. Johnny Isakson’s plan, which would delay “an amnesty or guest worker program” until border and workplace enforcement measures were shown to be working.”[Am I Wobbly?What National Review will do to save McCain. By Mickey Kaus Updated Friday, March 30, 2007, at 8:35 AM ET]

It’s pretty obvious that NR has been wobbly for some time, since, for example, Peter Brimelow was purged for lack of wobbliness. Ramesh Ponnuru is dealt with here: National Review, April 2, 2001 “Minding the ‘Golden Door’: Toward a [Wobbly] Restrictionism that can Succeed” with Peter Brimelow’s responses and mine. See here and here for Lowry.

Kaus says that

National Review has been one of the voices of sanity in the immigration debate.

which is true only if you compare it to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Senator McCain’s press secretary, and adds

If even NR concedes that there’s an official amnesty in our near future, the debate hasn’t “moved to the right,” as Lowry argues. The debate is over.

Well, we’re here, and so are a large number of Congressmen, plus 70 percent of actual voters. Maybe it’s not the debate that’s over–maybe it’s National Review.

It’s called “My Sweet Lord” and it’s a sculpture six feet tall of the crucified Christ, completely naked. A press release advertising the sculpture displayed at the Lab Gallery in the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City describes it as “Jesus, the 485,460 calorie Messiah.”

As if its display during Holy Week weren’t enough, viewers are invited to lick and bite off pieces of the sculpture before it is taken down on Easter Sunday.

The coverage I saw of the outrage included mostly non-Christians on the street who were sympathetic to the many who have voiced outrage so far. (Artist’s Chocolate Jesus Statue in New York Sparks Anger, by Larry McShane on www.myfoxny.com)

This Washington Post blog was pointed out as an instance of media bias by Newsbusters:WashPost: Republican Spoke ‘In Anger,’ Democrat Had ‘Fervor of a Preacher’.

They give this as an example of the implicit bias:

The comments infuriated many Democrats, who rose to speak for the bill. The most eloquent was Del. Melvin L. Stukes (D-Baltimore), who spoke with the fervor of a preacher. He compared opposition to undocumented students with the 1700s view of slaves as less than human.

"Do I need anyone to remind me of the mind-set that existed then and still exists today, that some people were considered three-fifths of a human being?" Stukes asked, his voice rising. "Are we still saying that some people are less than whole? I don’t think so."[House Heats Up Over Bill to Give Illegal Immigrants In-State Tuition]

The three-fifths thing has always annoyed me. It was the slaveowners who wanted slaves counted, for purposes of electoral apportionment, as equal to free men. It was the free states that objected. Slaves would have been better off being counted as zero for electoral purposes, since it was their owners who had the vote, and who would benefit by having extra pro-slavery congressmen.

But as of 2007, an illegal alien is not counted as three-fifths of citizen, for purposes of electoral apportionment. Nor as zero, which is what you might expect the Census to do. For purposes of electoral apportionment, he’s counted exactly the same as if he were a citizen. See the first thing I ever wrote for VDARE.com, more than six years ago:Immigration’s Rotten Borough dynamic…