There was a sensation last summer — at least among us old-timers on this subject — over a man-bites-dog article on illegal aliens in the Los Angeles Times. The astonishing aspect of the article (”6 + 4 = 1 Tenuous Existence,” by Sam Quinones, July 28, 2006; recently moved to the Times’s pay archive but freely available, with some annotations and highlightings, here, ) was its depiction — in a human-interest story — of mass illegal immigration’s baleful burdens on American society.

Steve Sailer promptly and enthusiastically quoted the Times article’s juiciest passages here, adding plenty of background material and commentary. I won’t duplicate his effort.

But I will bring back for VDARE readers five paragraphs from the Times article’s secondary story (Read it to see what I mean!) that I’ve been using in talking with audiences of immigration naifs, including Congressional staff people.

“My” part of the Times article (The quoted paragraphs are from about 2/3 of the way to the end.) describes the experience of a woman who came to California illegally from Mexico but then somehow attained legal status later, probably from the 1986 IRCA law.

“[S]ister Alejandra was the first to leave. In Los Angeles, she and her husband were barely able to make ends meet. As in Mexico, ‘there was little work and it’s poorly paid,’ she said.

“Eight years ago, she and her family moved to Kentucky, where a friend said there was more work and were fewer Mexican immigrants bidding down the wages for unskilled jobs.

[snip, omitting one paragraph]

“Today, the Magdalenos in Lexington earn more than they did in Los Angeles, in a city where the cost of living is lower. Kentucky is now their promised land, and they talk about California the way they used to talk about Mexico.

“‘What we weren’t able to do in many years in California,’ Alejandra said, ‘we’ve done quickly here.

“‘We’re in a state where there’s nothing but Americans. The police control the streets. It’s clean, no gangs. California now resembles Mexico — everyone thinks like in Mexico. California’s broken.’”

I read aloud that final, juicy paragraph with loving deliberateness, sometimes rubbing it in a bit with my listeners: “And you want this coming to Ohio (or Tennessee, or North Dakota, etc.)??”It’s a tool for our side, folks! Please use it.

John Leo has been giving Sheldon Awards to spineless college presidents for some years; according to him, the difference between a Sheldon Award and an Oscar is that Oscar features a man with no face looking straight ahead, whereas the Sheldon shows a man with no spine looking the other way.

While there’s a lot of competition, (Lee Bollinger is perpetual favorite) this year the award goes to the President of Duke University, for supporting the Duke Rape Hoax, and for failing to protect his students from threats of violence.

The last of our three finalists is president of Duke, Richard Brodhead. [Send him mail.]Because Michael Nifong made himself such a spectacular villain in the lacrosse case, Mr. Brodhead escaped without much criticism. But here is what Mr. Brodhead did: On hearing the first reports, he abruptly canceled the lacrosse season, suspended the two players named in the case, and fired the lacrosse coach of 16 years, giving him less than a day to get out.

This helped create the impression that the players were guilty. His long letter to the campus on April 20 did the same thing. He didn’t say the boys were guilty, but he talked passionately about the coercion and assault of women, the legacy of racism, and privilege and inequality — all of which fed the anger aimed at the lacrosse team.

Mr. Brodhead did nothing to deter the tsunami whipped up against the players by some students and the Group of 88, an alliance of mostly radical race and gender professors. One of the looniest of the 88, Houston Baker, answered a polite and worried letter from one of the lacrosse moms by calling her “the mother of a farm animal.”

Without any comment from Mr. Brodhead, the protesters issued death threats, carried banners that said “castrate,” featured photos of lacrosse players on “Wanted” fliers, and banged pots outside the boys’ residences in the early morning hours to disturb their sleep. A word from the president about leaving the boys alone and guaranteeing them a fair trial would have been nice.

Like Mr. Brodhead, the Group of 88 did not quite call the players guilty, but praised the campus protestors for “shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman.” No comment about that from Mr. Brodhead and no comment from him on Mr. Nifong for nine months. An engineering professor at Duke said, “There never was a clear sense that the students were innocent until proven guilty.”

Congratulations Richard Brodhead, Sheldon laureate 2007. And you should resign.

This is from a recent Steve Sailer column.

As Dr. Frankenstein used to say:

"It’s alive!"

Just as I warned last week, the Kennedy-Bush-McCain Axis of Amnesty reanimated their patched-together monster in the Senate … although it’s definitely not back by popular demand.

If this bill were a horror movie, it would be House of Wax II … and not a sequel to the Vincent Price original, either, but a remake of the recent Paris Hilton remake.

Or maybe:

Aliens 4

In Washington, no one can hear you scream.

And this is what the same concept looks like on YouTube:

This week VDARE.com readers may be intensely engaged in the political fray. Their intensity might be spurred by reminders of enemy designs on our country.

One stark reminder is this sign advertising the May 1, 2006 mass march:

Though the image is a bit blurry, you can certainly make out the four demands in yellow lettering immediately below the “WE WANT!” Demand #1 is for “Immediate Legalization without Conditions,” i.e. amnesty for everyone, presumably even if they slunk across the border five minutes ago.

More interesting, though, in revealing the enemy’s mentality is Demand #2: “No Border Walls.” Think about that for a moment: They don’t “merely” want amnesty for those here illegally now. They want there to be no impediment to further illegal inflow!

Amnesty without end, amen!

That sign image reproduced here is still available at the website of the Mexican-American Political Association, MAPA. (Both English and Spanish versions of the sign are at this page. Note that they give particulars for the May 1, 2006 festivities in Santa Ana, CA.)

An early mover in MAPA was Bert Corona, the fierce-looking character at the top and (fittingly) extreme left of those MAPA pages. K. Lloyd Billingsley of the Pacific Research Institute has provided valuable reporting on various scandals in California’s governance over the years, including the ever-growing overlap with ethnicity-driven politics. In this article, he covers Corona’s (among others’) rabble-rousing history, which included the demand that illegal aliens get the vote.

Current head of MAPA is ethnic grievance-merchant Larry (Nativo) Lopez, and I’ve heard Lopez himself beat the tom-toms about “no border walls.”

This allergy to barriers on the border with Mexico isn’t just lunatic-fringe stuff, either. (It’s lunatic, alright, but not fringe.) Here are the words of Gerardo Sandoval, member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in an op-ed (”Democrats must push immigration reform,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 17, 2006) shortly following the elections:

“Democrats need to be clear that the $6 billion border fence now under construction is not just a wasteful boondoggle, but an affront to all Latinos.”

So, VDARE readers, if your ardor for the fight wanes, remind yourself what’s at stake by recalling those three inspiring words: “No Border Walls.”

It’s a sweet victory that the American soccer team smacked down Mexico, after being behind by a point in the Chicago match-up.

The United States came from a goal down to win the Gold Cup for the fourth time with a 2-1 victory over Mexico in an entertaining final on Sunday.

Mexico took the lead a minute before the break through Andres Guardado but the U.S. drew level with a Landon Donovan penalty in the 62nd minute and 10 minutes later Benny Feilhaber grabbed the winner with a superb volley.
[U.S. fight back to beat Mexico 2-1 in final, Reuters 6/24/07]

The rivalry between the teams goes beyond normal sports competition. The state of near-warfare that exists on the border and in places of intense Mexican invasion is mirrored on the field. American star Landon Donovan (shown after the win) has had to put up with a lot of crap. But he gives back as good as he gets and wins when it counts.

The soccer situation reveals that Presidente Bush is full of frijoles when he characterizes Mexicans as our friendly neighbors. In fact, they hate us, as shown in polling and behavior.

Another measure of Mexicans’ obsession with beating the U.S. at soccer was the low turnout at an invader rights rally in Hollywood, attributed to their staying home to watch the match. The local commies of ANSWER-LA planned to have 15,000 Marxicans but fewer than 1,000 showed up. Oops, the Mexican proletariet is not behaving!

As a result of American disinterest in soccer and open borders, the U.S. team usually faces a majority Mexican crowd. “Against Mexico, it’s always an away game,” according to midfielder DaMarcus Beasley.

Beasley also reports that “Landon is the most hated U.S. guy in Mexico.”

More than Tom Tancredo? Excellent!

Of the several Immigration discussions on the weekend talk shows, the most violent (and hence the most realistic) was at Meet the Press, where Pat Buchanan faced Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill). The Politico website says

Food Fight!: The usually-staid “Meet the Press” on NBC turned into a smackdown Sunday…And it wasn’t pretty. There were interruptions, sighs and tense body language…none of the [other] exchanges got as heated as the one between Buchanan and Gutierrez.

(Immigration debate- turned-TV smackdown By Carrie Budoff June 24 2007)

Gutierrez (whose handsome F- ranking from Americans for Better Immigration is definitive) spent the program emitting a high pitched ethnocentric screech of rage. Of course these aging and decrepit Anglos should move over and give his strong and virile people everything they want! Any other idea was impermissible!

the tone and the texture of the debate that Pat has brought here to MEET THE PRESS is really what is wrong with this debate.

Pat Buchanan, of course, is eminently capable of defending himself - and actually knows the issue. (Old Atlantic Lighthouse, which headlined Pat Buchanan KOs Luis Gutierrez provides a useful statistical brief supporting the points Pat made.)

But the Guttierrez performance was illuminating. Clearly emboldened when his tantrum was not answered by Buchanan with another, he began to threaten:

Republicans are going to become a party of the past and irrelevant in national elections… and in the Congress of the United States…if we don’t change the texture and the tone of this debate and stop blaming immigrants… …and specifically Latinos for every ill that exists in this society.

And not satisfied with bullying the GOP, he went on to try intimidating American workers

We have the largest—the largest guest worker program in the history of the United States. It’s called 12 million undocumented workers. I want them to stop reducing wages of American workers…You know what they do because of their undocumented status? They actually do compete in the work space unfairly, damaging American workers. So if we’re not going to deport them…then we need to legalize them

(Of course, since Guttierrez opposes effective border controls, this simply makes room for more illegals.)

There was a time when immigration enthusiasts were more discreet. As Old Atlantic Lighthouse sourly notes:

Buchanan had the facts on what immigration is doing to Americans. Gutierrez made it clear, it was intentional.

Immigration has killed wage progress.

Americans need to consider Guttierrez. This is the ethnic particularist in full flight, viscerally incapable of considering any point of view but that of his clientele. Thanks, Ted Kennedy.

Tim Russert’s performance as Moderator was contemptible. In this section, he helped Gutierrez mount his attack. In the second, he allowed the assembled correspondents to skip off the issue and quickly get into Belt Way trivia. In an impressive example of Inside-the Beltway insularity, one, Roger Simon, actually denied there was an immigration crisis at all. (Email Roger Simon.)

Even the National Review has abandoned that strategem!