VDARE.COM readers seem especially enraged about Sebastian Mallaby’s April 30 Washington Post op-ed Lazy, Job-Stealing Immigrants? Nativist Nonsense Distorts a Critical Issue. And no wonder: it’s full of the silly, sneering snobbery I left England to escape.

But Mallaby later followed me to the U.S.—argh!—although, curiously, he doesn’t admit that he’s an immigrant in this piece. He’s a former writer of the London Economist, now director of something called the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Sounds ominous. (Equaly ominously, Mallaby’s article is already available on the CFR website for free).

But I was delighted with Mallaby’s article. Of course, it’s distasteful in a democracy to see Mallaby’s elitist unconcern for the fact that, even on his absurd estimate, curtailing immigration now could retrieve a quarter or more of the wage loss that even he admits immigration has inflicted on American high school dropouts. And of course Mallaby repeats various factoids about low immigrant crime rates and the high cost of border security etc. long ago exploded on VDARE.COM

However, all of this is a smokescreen for Mallaby’s self-defeating concession, in his very last paragraph, that “the total economic effect of immigration on U.S. households is a wash”. This is his perverse way of stating the consensus among labor economists, which I reported at length in Alien Nation in 1995, and which was confirmed by the National Research Council’s The New Americans in 1997: that post-1965 immigrant inflow has been of essentially of no net aggregate economic benefit to native-born Americans.

In fact, The New Americans reported a net loss after transfer payments like education. But, hey, Mallaby’s doing better than Tamar Jacoby. She just lies about it.

What this means, of course, is that America is being transformed for nothing. The question for Mallaby is: why? Why does he (and his employers at CFR) want to transform America?

Ask him. Ask the Washington Post’s discussion thread. Ask CFR.

It would have been better, for Luis Martinez, had he been named Horace, Sven or Ngogodo instead. But, as with so many of the arrivals from Latin America, he’s got a first and last name that appear and reappear with tiresome regularity, and apparently more often than in the Anglo world (and as a David Wilson, I should know). See They put wrong Luis in prison | [Bronx] man’s 9-day ordeal as he’s mistaken for robber[ By Chrisena Coleman And Leo Standora Daily News April 24th 2007. }This sort of thing has happened before in New York, and likely will again.

In saner cultural settings, it might have been resolved more quickly: smoother communication, keener senses of difference by police and bureaucrats, etc. But in outsize, polyglot, grind ‘em-up- and-spit-’em out New York, no dice.

And if anyone’s tempted to think that the foreign names flooding us really add “diversity,” check out the civil and criminal files in New York for subjects named “Amadou Diallo” – and see just how often, besides the famous one, a fellow with this particular name shows up.

Bigger question: is all this (non)diversity really making America a better place to live?

Back on March 25, I explained in VDARE.com in “Winter Kills” why the hype that Presidential candidate Barack Obama “transcends race” was slowly eroding:

To flee [winter], numerous big city reporters have convinced their editors to send them on expense-account junkets to Obama’s old tropical haunts in Hawaii and Indonesia. The articles they wrote to justify their trips have begun to undermine Obama’s carefully crafted façade.

The next credibility problem for Obama’s persona: Chicago is a great place to visit once the snow stops falling. As spring arrives, more investigative reporters will head to the Windy City to find out more about Obama’s spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah T. Wright Jr., who was one of the organizers of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s 1994 Million Man March.

Well, it’s supposed to be 73 degrees in Chicago today, April 30, 2007, so right on schedule appears a New York Times article:

A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for Faith

By JODI KANTOR
CHICAGO - Members of Trinity United Church of Christ squeezed into a downtown hotel ballroom in early March to celebrate the long service of their pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. One congregant stood out amid the flowers and finery: Senator Barack Obama, there to honor the man who led him from skeptic to self-described Christian.
Twenty years ago at Trinity, Mr. Obama, then a community organizer in poor Chicago neighborhoods, found the African-American community he had sought all his life, along with professional credibility as a community organizer and an education in how to inspire followers. He had sampled various faiths but adopted none until he met Mr. Wright, a dynamic pastor who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons. …

It is hard to imagine, though, how Mr. Obama can truly distance himself from Mr. Wright. The Christianity that Mr. Obama adopted at Trinity has infused not only his life, but also his campaign. …
Still, Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy. Mr. Obama had never met a minister who made pilgrimages to Africa, welcomed women leaders and gay members and crooned Teddy Pendergrass rhythm and blues from the pulpit. Mr. Wright was making Trinity a social force, initiating day care, drug counseling, legal aid and tutoring. He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Wright said his visits implied no endorsement of their views. …
Mr. Wright preached black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, whom by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less. That message can sound different to white audiences, said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at University of Chicago Divinity School and a Trinity member. “Some white people hear it as racism in reverse,” Dr. Hopkins said, while blacks hear, “Yes, we are somebody, we’re also made in God’s image.” …
Mr. Obama was baptized that year, and joining Trinity helped him “embrace the African-American community in a way that was whole and profound,” said Ms. Soetoro, his half sister. …
In the 16 years since Mr. Obama returned to Chicago from Harvard, Mr. Wright has presided over his wedding ceremony, baptized his two daughters and dedicated his house, while Mr. Obama has often spoken at Trinity’s panels and debates. Though the Obamas drop in on other congregations, they treat Trinity as their spiritual home, attending services frequently. The church’s Afrocentric focus makes Mr. Obama a figure of particular authenticity there, because he has the African connections so many members have searched for. …
Generally, Mr. Obama emphasizes the communal aspects of religion over the supernatural ones. …

In other words, Sen. Obama’s much celebrated “faith” is essentially a religion of race, an exercise in black solidarity through antipathy toward white America that is only nominally linked to Christianity. That would be his own business, if he wasn’t trying to get elected President by misleading the public about it.

And by the Associated Press, at that!

Target employee Caffie Bradshaw, 19, said she was in a break room with two other people when they heard shots. She said co-workers saw a white man with a rifle [emphasis added]who was “spraying bullets.”3 shot dead at Kansas City shopping center | Dallas Morning News | Associated Press April 30, 2007

But he knows one thing for sure: I can’t possibly be right about it!

The Washington Monthly’s blogger Kevin Drum loyally tries to stand up for his employer’s much-snickered over story by young Alexander Konetski about his brief tenure as a copy editor at The American Conservative and how he heroically resigned because the editors wouldn’t spike my Obama story, Obama’s Identity Crisis, on his say-so.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that Drum is subtly sticking it to his employer by quoting a particularly amusing part of the self-important Konetski’s screed:

Even before I read the piece I knew I wouldn’t like it. TAC’s editor, who was pleased with Sailer’s work, had told me as much. But I found the piece so offensive when I first read it that I jumped out of my chair and rushed into the managing editor’s office to try to kill it on the spot. She and the editor promptly dismissed my objections. The piece is provocative, they said — it’s edgy. It’s racist, I said — and the magazine will be regarded as such for publishing it. ….The weekend after Kara and Scott dismissed my objections to Sailer’s essay, I read Dreams From My Father.

In other words, Konetski jumped to a conclusion with no idea what he was talking about, then scrambled to find evidence for it.

Ironically, the Washington Monthly did an abysmal job of fact-checking an article accusing The American Conservative of poor fact-checking. Konetski, who had been hired in November, tries to give the impression that he was a Major Player at the magazine while implying that I was some obscure figure who had “submitted” an article on Obama (instead, it was commissioned) that for some inexplicable but no doubt vile reason the editors chose to believe me over a Big Wheel like him.

In reality, the editors trusted me rather than him because I had a track record of approximately 100 pieces published in TAC going back to its first issue in 2002. As they well know, I’ve frequently been smeared by more formidable figures than Alexander Konetski, but have always ended up with the facts on my side.

Drum’s item is most interesting for his somewhat philistine but reasonable characterization of Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance:

None of which is to say that Obama wasn’t confused and uncomfortable with his racial identity for much of his first three decades. In fact, that’s the whole point of the book. What’s more — and this is the part of Dreams I found most peculiar — it’s never really clear why. In language that’s often florid and overwrought, but also oddly artificial, he tells us how he feels, but the circumstances of his life are never drawn starkly enough to make it clear why he feels the way he does.

In other words, Drum implies that Obama’s emotions about race weren’t objectively justified by the rather pleasant life he has lived. Which is certainly true.

But after that brief foray into honesty, Drum goes back to beating the, uh, drum over my sins. Unfortunately, all he can come up with is naked assertion:

… Sailer wants us to believe that this act of black identification automatically suggests a rejection of Obama’s white heritage. Unfortunately, this says more about Sailer’s state of mind than Obama’s. There’s simply nothing in the book to seriously back it up.”

Well, no, it’s not true that black identification “automatically” suggests a rejection of Obama’s white heritage. For example, Obama’s half-white half-brother Mark, a Stanford physics student who had grown up in Kenya, refused to reject his white heritage, which caused Obama break off contact with him.

But it is true in Obama’s specific case, as voluminously documented in his long autobiography, that identification with the black race involved emotional rejection of the white race. (At least, if his book is to be believed, which is a big if — he didn’t actually reject the many privileges granted to him by such white-founded institutions as Punahou Prep, Occidental College, Columbia University, and the Harvard Law School.

At this point, all I can say is, “Please read the book.” It’s better-written than Drum claims, and not so puzzling as Drum found it … if you don’t make the a priori assumption that I just have to be wrong about it.

Crossposted at Isteve.com

Yesterday I expressed skepticism about Mike Huckabee’s credentials as an Immigration reform patriot. As it happens Huckabee addressed the issue on Friday in Iowa. ( Huckabee discusses immigration during Iowa visit By JOSH NELSON WCFCourier.com Saturday, April 28 2007)

To an experienced eye, it is clear Huckabee’s commitment to repairing America’s immigration disaster is thin and cosmetic. (VDARE.com italics)

Huckabee tried to shore up his credibility on the issue, which ranks at the top of Republican voters’ concerns, while speaking to a crowd at an Iowa Christian Alliance fundraiser. He… said there needed to be a “common sense approach” to the issue.

That approach includes a physical fence in areas where it is needed and electronic monitoring in other areas, he said.

(This of course is the minimalist position usually adopted by those against the idea. Why not a full fence?)

While he said he is opposed to any plans for amnesty, he would like to see a path toward citizenship for people in the country.

(In other words, he wants the effect of Amnesty.)

“I just don’t think it’s realistic to say this weekend we’re going to round up 12 to 20 million young people and their children…”

(This is the central tenet of pro immigration defeatist line. Those who know the history on immigration know that voluntary repatriation often reached 40% of any given immigration flow – but that was before the magnetism of America’s social programs took effect.)

Tellingly, Huckabee did not apparently mention the crucial issues of birthright citizenship, or the status of English.

Any inclination to give Huckabee the benefit of the doubt was completely eradicated by three devastating articles helpfully supplied by a reader (thanks, T.S.)

Huckabee promotes ‘open door’ policy at LULAC convention Thursday, June 30, 2005 By Wesley Brown Arkansas News Bureau

In a impassioned speech before hundreds of influential Hispanic civil rights leaders from across the nation, Gov. Mike Huckabee told a captive audience Wednesday that America is great because it has always opened it doors up to people seeking a better way of life…
“Pretty soon, Southern white guys like me may be in the minority,” Huckabee said jokingly as the crowd roared in laughter…He said Arkansas needs to make the transition from a traditional Southern state to one that recognizes and cherishes diversity “in culture, in language and in population.”

Immigration bill un-Christian, anti-life, governor says Friday, Jan 28, 2005 By Doug Thompson
Arkansas News Bureau

Gov. Mike Huckabee Thursday denounced a bill by Sen. Jim Holt that would deny state benefits to illegal immigrants as un-Christian, un-American, irresponsible and anti-life…Huckabee said he took exception to characterization of immigrants in the bill and by its supporters as exploiters of social programs….Something that’s not worth sharing is not worth celebrating,” Huckabee said. “This is the kind of country that opens its doors. This bill expresses an un-American attitude.”

Governor Huckabee risks political fortunes to denounce immigration raid By Melissa Nelson Associated Press August 5 2005

Huckabee, a Baptist minister, said his support for the state’s growing Hispanic population has to do with compassion, not politics…Hugo Juarez, deputy consul general for the Mexican Consulate in Dallas, called Huckabee a good friend of Mexicans and the Mexican government.

The governor’s pro-immigrant stance was also praised by LULAC president Hector Flores, who called Huckabee’s efforts for the children a testament to progress in racial attitudes.

“I marvel at the changes in a Southern state like Arkansas where the governor actually called out the troops to keep the schools from being integrated in 1957. What a turnaround and especially for it to come from a Republican,” he said.

“What a turnaround” is right. But is Huckabee a “good friend” of the American people? Not on this evidence.

At times when the nefarious, post-national forces arrayed against immigration sanity seem overwhelming, it’s cheering to realize that ordinary American citizens from sea to shining sea are, in large numbers, rising to the challenge.

For example, some time in the last couple of weeks, the immigration-reduction organization NumbersUSA signed up its 300,000th faxer for our cause. That’s one out of every thousand Americans! If distributed uniformly across the 435 congressional districts, this would be 690 faxers per district, which is certainly a formidable number of educated constituents for hammering a congressional office on a single subject. (And for a state with more than about 20 congressional districts — California, New York, Texas, Illinois, Florida … — a U.S. senator’s office really takes it on the chin!)

But how uniform is the distribution of NumbersUSA faxers? Congressman (and former House Speaker) Dennis Hastert (R-IL) said last summer that “Every state is a border state,” and certainly we’re hearing news about illegal aliens’ impacts from every corner of the map. Still, are Americans from every corner alarmed enough to be digging into their wallets?

Yes. A recently added feature at NumbersUSA’s site is their frequently-updated national map of current-month-to-date donations by grassroots members/faxers. The map is self-explanatory, but I’ll point out that it’s organized by congressional district and that the color code giving number of donors per district is at the map’s bottom. (The map doesn’t provide total donation amounts per district.) Those living in large metro areas will likely be interested in the regional maps on the right margin. You can also scroll down to see the final map for the preceding month.

If you’re registered with NumbersUSA and currently logged in, the map displays a headline giving the number of donations from your district so far this month. If you’re not registered, or not logged in, you’ll see “Put Your Congressional District On The Map In Fight Against Amnesty & Extreme Immigration” across the top of the map.

At 1:30 a.m. Mountain Time on Sunday, April 28, 2007, the map and the donations gage just below it on the left show that patriotic citizens from across the country have stepped up in sufficient numbers to keep the fight for the country’s survival humming this month. Though the distribution of donors per district is far from uniform, it’s clear that there are districts glowing green or “hotter” in every state except Hawaii, North Dakota, and Rhode Island.

A glance at the detailed metro maps shows many “cold” central cities abutting suburbs that are hot to red hot. (Surprise!)

Interestingly, northern Virginia, DC, and Maryland is a pretty hot area, donations-wise, suggesting that the area’s increasingly in-your-face diversity and metastasizing traffic gridlock are winning us converts among citizens well-located to shriek at Congress in person, if suitably mobilized.

I look at the map at least daily. I find it fascinating and, towards the end of the month (when there’s lots of green through red), heartening.

Of course I’m interested in how Montana is doing, since I live in Bozeman. This month it’s on the verge of red hot, the best yet. Since I’m actually logged in to the NumbersUSA site, I can also see that we’re at 14 donations.

You might ask, “So all the congressional districts across Montana are about equally hot?” Well … all of Montana is a single district! It had two districts until after the 1990 census, when the (largely-immigration-driven) population growth in other states cost Montana its second congressional seat.

(Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Alaska are also single-district states. Because of this, their — and Montana’s — U.S. senators probably aren’t being pounded by enough faxers.)

What would impel citizens in remote Montana to be as concerned about mass immigration as they are, judging by their robust financial support for NumbersUSA? I’m not sure. Maybe the donors up here are primarily refugees from California, such as myself. On the other hand, news articles on immigration in Montana’s papers that permit online comments from readers typically attract swarms of such comments, heavily weighted toward getting tough on illegal aliens, their enablers, and their employers. For example, see a recent Billings Gazette article (”Immigration bills fail in legislature,” scroll down for readers’ comments) about the disappointing demise of state-level immigration bills in our legislature this year. It’s clear that a lot of these comments are from genuine Montana residents, as distinguished from kibitzers who live in other states.

The other state that especially interests me is Oregon, which consists of five congressional districts. The eastern 2/3 of Oregon (which may be one geographically-large district; I don’t know) has been red hot for at least these last three months. What’s going on there? Questions such as that may sometime become grist for master’s and PhD theses in history — if we save the republic — with these donation maps as a primary source.

So there are lots of us contributing money to the cause, all across the country. Many of us are carrying the burden.

However, these donations are just a means to our end, not a suitable arena for competition or boasting rights. I’ve had people tell me that they were reluctant to use NumbersUSA’s tools because they couldn’t afford to donate. But those of us who can afford to donate want as many patriots as possible using these tools, with no guilty feelings allowed!

As Tom Tancredo said at a November 2003 rally in LaCanada, California,

But we have no other choice, do we? No matter what it looks like, no matter how overwhelming. [Long-time newsman-broadcaster] George Putnam must have thought a million times in the years he’s been [talking about this crisis], that this is overwhelming. But he doesn’t stop, and you know why? He can’t stop. There is no alternative to doing everything we can do. I don’t care what your lot in life is. I don’t care what you’re doing or what your job is. You have a role to play with your neighbors, with your friends, with letters to the editor, with ways you can influence your constituency. I have the same role to play. We all have to do it, no matter what it takes and no matter how challenging.

[See Chapter Nine of Daniel Sheehy's Fighting Immigration Anarchy: American Patriots Battle to Save the Nation.]

p.s. If you’re not yet active via NumbersUSA, you might be interested in an intro I’ve written that I can email to you. Please contact me if so.

p.p.s. Although this note may seem to be a puff-piece for NumbersUSA, that’s not my intent. I was spurred by their donations map and what it tells us about participation in our cause across the country. I encourage donations to all the national (CIS, Pro-English, CAPS, 911/FSA, FAIR … ) and local groups (CCIR, IFIRE, CAIR, Dustin Inman Society… ). And, of course, VDARE!

Bush spoke today at the Kendall Campus of Miami-Dade College. Why did he pick this college? Diversity:

Bush spokesman Blair Jones said Miami Dade was chosen partly because it had made repeated requests and that it’s a “first-rate and diverse institution of higher learning.”[Bush to speak at Miami Dade College graduation Saturday By Scott Travis South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 27 2007]

How diverse is Miami- Dade these days? These are the demographics of Miami-Dade College, all campuses:

Fall 2001 Credit Student Profile:
Ethnic mix: 12 percent, white non-Hispanic; 22 percent, black non-Hispanic; 65 percent, Hispanic; 2 percent, other. 61 percent of Miami-Dade students are female, 39 percent are male.

That may be diverse in some existential sense, but I don’t call it an institution that “looks like America”–yet.

Kendall Campus is in Kendall, Florida and here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Some of [Kendall's] most famous residents include long-term resident Janet Reno, former U.S. Attorney General, whose parents built her home by hand; in addition, O.J. Simpson made his home in Kendall after his murder acquittal.

Kendall is also home to one of the largest Colombian American populations in the State of Florida. Over 11,000 Colombians live in the area, mostly concentrated in the western fringes (West of the Florida Turnpike), where they make up over 60 percent of the population in certain neighborhoods (West Kendall, Royal Palms on 134th Ave. and the Hammocks). Interestingly enough, several White non-Hispanic enclaves do exist West of the Turnpike. The Devon Aire neighborhood is over 70 percent non-Hispanic White and its elementary school, Devon Aire Elementary, is heralded as the highest-scoring elementary school (on the statewide FCAT exam) in Miami-Dade county.

The demographics on Kendall show that whites are already a minority, outside the enclaves mentioned above:

The racial makeup of the CDP was 41.6% White, 4.45% African American, 0.14% Native American, 2.99% Asian, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 2.81% from other races, and 3.10% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 49.9% of the population.

Miami-Dade’s demographics show that not only are whites a minority in the county, but so are native-born Americans:

The racial makeup of the county was 18.6% White (not Hispanic), 20.5% Black (not Hispanic) (with a large part being of Caribbean descent) and African American, 0.19% Native American, 1.3% Asian, 4.58% from other races, and 3.79% from two or more races. 60.6% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. 51.4% of the county residents were born outside the United States, while 67% of the population speaks a language other than English at home.

The speech Bush gave, while officially an education speech, or so it says on the label, was focused on immigration, and contained a lot of pro-immigration rhetoric:

The opportunities of America make our land a beacon of hope for people from every corner of the world. It says something about this college that more than half of the students were raised speaking a language other than English. Some of you are the children and grandchildren of immigrants — who risked everything to give you opportunities they never had. Others of you are immigrants yourself, who came to this country with the hope of a better life and the determination to work for it. Over the years, this school has helped open the door for opportunity for hundreds of thousands of immigrants — and that is why Miami Dade proudly calls itself Democracy’s College. (Applause.)

This college has had a significant impact on thousands of our citizens. Take, for example, Gwen Belfon, who graduates today. As a single mother in Trinidad and Tobago, Gwen dreamed of attending college. But she put her own dreams on hold to raise her four children. A few years ago, Gwen came to the United States and enrolled at Miami Dade. Today this proud mother fulfills a lifelong dream. When Gwen crosses the stage this afternoon, she will receive her associate’s degree in education. And she’s not done yet. Next January, she will return to Miami Dade to start on her bachelor’s degree. (Applause.)President Bush Delivers Commencement Address at Miami Dade College

Good for her. But, er, who is paying for all that, and why? If President Bush had been speaking to the Americans for Tax Reform, I doubt if they’d have cheered right at that point.

Really, Miami seems like the apothesis of the Invite-The-World policies of the Bush Administration. When Tom Tancredo called Miami a Third World country at the Renaissance Weekend, he got a lot of grief for saying it–and then when a speech he was supposed to give in Miami was cancelled after bomb threats, threats of mob violence, and a revolt by the staff of the restaurant where he was to speak, we wrote that “We presume this settles once and for all the question of whether Miami is part of the Third World.”

But it’s not just us–this story below is from Time Magazine, written in 2001.

Even believers like Joaquin Blaya are worried that Miami will become another banana republic, bedeviled by huge divisions between the rich and the very poor. There is no doubt that waves of immigrants have put an enormous strain on Miami, both financially and socially. Roughly 140,000 Anglo residents have fled in the past decade, largely in response to the city’s growing Hispanic character. Some areas of the city today resemble the Third World, with the homeless and immigrants living under highways or in matchstick houses along canals.

Three times in the past decade, Miami has erupted in racial disturbances — caused in part by blacks frustrated as each new immigrant wave passes them by economically. The black Cuban-American neighborhood of Allapattah now serves as an uneasy buffer between the blacks of Liberty City and the white Cubans and Nicaraguans living in Little Havana. But Dade County board chairman Art Teele, a black who won his job with the backing of the commission’s new Latino members, doesn’t see race as the problem. “There is some lingering resentment by the blacks,” he admits, “but today they are just as resentful of the Haitians arriving.”

Miami: the Capital of Latin America, Time Magazine, Sunday, Jun. 24, 2001 By Cathy Booth

This is what Bush describes in his speech as “one of the most vibrant and diverse communities in our nation. .” And it seems to be his plan for the rest of the United States, as well.

Following up on Patrick Cleburne’s post regarding the recent remarkable change in tone on immigration voiced by Senator Sam Brownback–from wild-eyed enthusiast to questioning moderate–candidate Rudy Giuliani has also, in response to the criticism he has received as he campaigns across the country, toned down his open-borders position.

According to the New York Times [Giuliani Shifts His Tone on Immigration, By Marc Santora and Sam Roberts, April 22, 2007] Giuliani who has “a record on immigration with the potential to complicate his bid for the nomination” is now hedging his remarks.

While Giuliani talks in terms of “no amnesty” and secure borders it is important to note that he has dropped his long-standing, unqualified endorsement of illegal immigration.

The apparent changes of heart of Brownback, Giuliani and McCain before them should be seen as a significant–but not quite yet complete–victory for the immigration reform movement.

I have noted before that much of the most incisive writing on the American immigration disaster in the MSM tends to appear in discussion threads and letters to the editor, rather than the professional journalism itself

A case in point is Tom Shuford’s letter to the Raleigh News & Observer today:

“People are here without papers,” says Duke anthropology professor Charles D. Thompson Jr. in his April 18 Point of View piece “Lessons learned on immigration,” because “massive historical and economic forces push people around.”

Humbug. “Massive historical and economic forces” didn’t:
* Push through the 1965 Immigration Act with its chain migration provisions that made Latin America and, secondarily, Asia the near-exclusive sources of legal and illegal immigration.
* Grant citizenship to children born to foreign nationals illegally in the U.S.
* Hand down the 1982 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision (Plyler v. Doe) ordering taxpayers to educate children brought illegally to the U.S….

The actors in this farce are not mysterious “historical forces.” They are familiar characters: short-sighted politicians, corporate and ethnic lobbyists, overreaching judges.

Immigration reform: private citizens doing the work the elite won’t do.