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.