At 9:30 a.m. on April 24, the Center for Immigration Studies holds a press conference to publicize its excellent new report, “Illegitimate Nation: An Examination of Out of Wedlock Births Among Immigrants and Natives” . We must all hope no MSM hack points out that Linda Thom reported this data on VDARE.COM some three years ago and that CIS therefore has what smear-by-association artists sometimes call a “tainted source” That would mean CIS’ failure to acknowledge its debt to Linda in its footnotes and its constant triangulation against us is not merely ungentlemanly, but pointless.

French voters yesterday turned out in record numbers to cast their ballots in the first-round of the 2007 presidential elections, choosing the leading center party candidates, Nicolas Sarkozy (UMP) and Ségolène Royal (Socialists), to face one another in the May 6th run-off election. Randall Burns earlier commented on the election here. This is how I saw things from Paris…

Like all observers, I was astonished by the extent of voter mobilization. In the run-up to the election, 3.3 million new voters were added to the rolls. More impressive yet, fully 84% of registered voters made it to their polling stations (the highest figure since 1965) compared with roughly 71% five years ago. As an American, it’s hard not to envy such numbers.

The traumatic memory of the 2002 presidential elections did much to generate this surge in voter participation. On April 21st, 2002, Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen beat out Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin for a slot in the second round of voting. Five years later, many voters seem to have decided that it would be too dangerous to stay home.

Which leads to my second observation: if yesterday’s election was a referendum on Jean-Marie Le Pen, it was one which Le Pen massively lost. Heading into the election on a wave of confidence, the Front National suffered what one supporter referred to as a “cruel and major defeat”, down 6 points and a million votes from its 2002 performance.

Le Pen’s loss was Sarkozy’s gain. As I noted in an earlier post, containing the FN has been central to Sarkozy’s electoral strategy from the outset. This strategy seems to have paid off, with a number of FN strongholds (Marseille, Alsace) going over to the UMP candidate.

What does all this mean from a restrictionist perspective? At the center of Sarkozy’s platform are a number of sensible and long overdue measures aiming to stabilize and reduce immigration to the country, including annual ceilings by category, “selective” recruitment of immigrants and a requirement that candidates know French before being granted residency permits. And yet while Sarkozy looks good on paper, his actual record, including two years as Minister of the Interior, has led many on the right to question whether his supposedly get-tough stance on immigration is anything more than an electoral ploy.

Yesterday’s results have left the French far right in disarray, even as some of its signature positions have gone mainstream in the person of Nicolas Sarkozy. But it would be too early to claim even discursive victory. Having eliminated the threat to his right, the next two weeks may reveal a very different Sarkozy as he competes for control of the center with Ségolène Royal.

Athena Kerry’s blog this afternoon about an arrogant and weakly reasoned article by a Latina member of the Treason Lobby demanding that English cease to be the American language is available free (with registration). (E Pluribus Unum by Cristina Rodriguez Democracy Issue #4 Spring 2007)

This woman was a Rhodes Scholar, which means she is a hand-selected recruit to the Liberal Establishment. Coming soon to a country near you!

As I noted on Saturday, Lou Dobbs is desperately wrong to neglect this issue.

Bilingualism in the US “not only ensures that immigrants participate more fully in society and integrate more quickly, it also makes the nation and its democracy stronger.” At least that’s according to New York University law professor Cristina Rodriguez in the recent article published in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rodriguez goes on to say:

There is a beneficial trade-off for society… when the focus does not fall exclusively on having immigrants learn English, but also on having them retain their native language. “Indeed,” she writes, “bilingual capacity helps companies access foreign markets, and those with language skills are in demand.” Meanwhile, when public services are available in other languages, non-English-speakers can develop more confidence in the government. That can help promote “democratic habits” among immigrants, she says.”

Rodriguez recommends we face “the differences in the population directly, rather than [trying] to suppress them with rules that posit a uniformity that does not exist.”

(A glance at the current issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas: The benefits of bilingualism, The Chronicle of Higher Education 04-11-07)

Rodriguez admits that the rise in demand for bilinguals is actually the result of huge numbers of immigrants. But, needless to say, she does not mention the problem VDARE.COM keeps stressing: institutional bilingualism in effect skews hiring toward the linguistic minority, which as a practical matter is more likely to acquire the majority’s language, thus materially disadvantaging English-only native-born Americans.

And there’s this: By encouraging immigrants to be bilingual, we would be requiring Americans and American government to be quadra- deca-, even ventalingual. And who, Ms. Rodriguez [email her], is willing to pay for the price that?

In the New York Times article “Before Deadly Rage, A Life Consumed By A Troubling Silence,” [By N. R. Kleinfeld, April 22, 2007] which is of course All The News Fit To Print, they write the following about the inscription on Cho’s arm:

“On one arm was inscribed Ax Ismael, a name whose significance has not been determined but might be a Biblical allusion.”

A “BIBLICAL ALLUSION”? The biblical spelling, as we all know, is “Ishmael” and not the Q’URANIC form of the name that they quoted. Even allowing the possibility that the killer couldn’t spell, sweeping this fact under the rug as a biblical reference is surely a noteworthy and unfortunate omission.

Given all of this mentally-ill killer’s ramblings about “martyrs” and so forth, it’s very likely that he identified to some extent with Islamist terrorists and killers. But given his Korean Christian background and well-documented lack of pretty much any social activity, it’s extremely unlikely that he had anything at all to do with Muslims, the Q’uran, or Islam. The name could be an oblique reference to something Islamic, but it also sounds a lot like a username online or in a video game, and we know Cho spent a lot of time on his computer. “Ismail Ax” sounds threatening in and of itself.

Why not mention a few more likely explanations for “Ismael Ax” on his arm? It’s possible that the New York Times is reluctant to have not one but two of its much-touted minorities in their diversity agenda, Koreans and Muslims, associated with this horrific crime. Maybe they were trying to forestall, in this age of mostly-Islamic terrorism, any chance that someone somewhere might link this case to Muslims or Islam, with which it is basically not connected. It may be a noble goal, but a newspaper should not choose its facts based on what some hypothetical idiot somewhere might misinterpret–they’re supposed to be working for the rest of us! They should print the facts, regardless of their palatability or (slight) potential to be misinterpreted.

Tom Hundley writes in the Chicago Tribune about the recent French Presidential front runner:

During the 2005 riots, Sarkozy, who was then interior minister, described the young immigrant rioters as “scum” and promised a harsh crackdown. His admirers praise him as a tough proponent of law-and-order while foes see him as a dangerous authoritarian figure who panders to anti-immigrant sentiments.

Now, Sarkozy is the son of a Hungarian immigrant(and has a Jewish grandfather). What that means in concrete terms is it will be hard to call this guy a “Nazi” in politically correct France–even if he actually started mass deportations to solve France’s immigration issues. Right now, the market at Intrade.com gives Sarkozy about a 72% chance of victory in the run off election.

I suspect that the immigration issue will continue to become even important in France. This was the last election in which Le Pen will likely be running. Immigration was alway the signal major issue for Le Pen. However, Le Pen managed to acquire a rather unsavory reputation with much of the electorate–which meant that when he did manage to get into the run-off election he did barely any better than when he was in the multi-candidate election.

Sarkozy’s candidacy is arguably an attempt by the French mainstream to grab some of Le Pen’s support–and that will even a bigger factor the next French presidential election.

The question now becomes what range of policies immigration restriction in France is likely to be bundled with. We haven’t yet seen the French counterpart of Pim Fortuyn–but I suspect France may soon be ready for something similar.