The shamrock amnesty contingent is not doing any jigs since their beloved bill flopped. No, the 50,000 estimated illegal Irish are dejected and angry.

Over at the whiner blog Irish Voices, they think we should return the Statue of Liberty, showing a severe misunderstanding about the meaning of the icon. (The historically literate know the inspiring statue was NOT an immigrant welcome mat, but instead honored republican government.)

An Irish newspaper attempted a sob story about a graphic designer downcast about her unlawful status, but didn’t have any expertise with utilizing sniffly details that would properly tug at heartstrings. It instead emphasized how easy life has been for the new New Yorker:

Foy said her illegal status had little impact on her daily life. She has a bank account, a retirement plan, a social security number and a driver’s licence. She has never had any difficulty finding work in the design industry.
[Immigration bill failure leaves Irish eyes unsmiling, Sunday Business Post - Ireland 7/1/07]

The recent setback demands a change in strategy. When the illegal Irish thought the comprehensive scam was their ticket to a free ride, they generously professed “a sense of commonality” with their Mexican compadres. But as the Business Post also noted, “Campaigners on behalf of undocumented Irish immigrants in the United States will now press for a special immigration deal for Ireland.”

In fact, the Irish believe they are too special to have to follow the law like other people. We can expect Ted Kennedy to agree.

Muslim Terrorists in Britain put in a couple of lame attempts at terrorism recently.

Via Tim Blair in Australia, I see this NYT story 4 Held in Scottish Attack as British See Broader Plot [By Alan Cowell And Raymond Bonner, Sunday, July 1, 2007]

In July 2005, four suicide bombers killed 52 people on London’s transit system, and another set of attacks failed two weeks later, bringing home to Britain fears of homegrown terrorist attacks among its disenfranchised South Asian population. Witnesses said the two men in the Glasgow attack were South Asian.

Homegrown terrorism is second-generation immigrant terrorism, and it’s an interesting paradox for immigration enthusiasts when something like this happens–either the terrorist are immigrants, and that’s a consequence of immigration, or they were born in Britain, in which case it’s a case of the total failure of assimilation.

The “South Asians,” usually Muslims from Pakistan, are not disenfranchised in any sense. They rule whole districts of Great Britain, they have members not only in the commons, but in the House of Lords, and they voted George Galloway into Parliament not in spite of his support for Britain’s enemies, but because of it.

Enoch Powell’s point in warning about the British Race Relations laws in his famous speech in 1968 was that Great Britain had never had anything like Jim Crow laws

The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knows no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.

Britain had never had the kind of legally mandated discrimination seen in the American South, so it didn’t need a Race Relations law that could only “disenfranchise” one group–actual Britons.

And it was really the phenomenon of anti-racist legislation that was responsible for a famous quote:

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided.

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.

And he was right, of course.

Just the other day, Tony Blair had a message for Islamists in Britain, saying that they need to be told

“It’s not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn’t justified.”’ [Blair launches stinging attack on 'absurd' British Islamists, By Nicholas Watt, Sunday July 1, 2007 The Observer ]

It’s important to remember what’s going on here–there are colonies of Muslims in Great Britain who hate England, and show it by rioting, committing terrorism, demonstrating in favor of beheading anyone who speaks up about Islam, and committing large amounts of crime and violence. The problem here is that they aren’t disenfranchised enough.

They are “homegrown” terrorists, rioters, or criminals because they were transplanted to Britain in spite of warnings from people like Enoch Powell.

And a major part of the difficulty in dealing with this situation is the political correctness observed in the story in the New York Times, and enforced by British law.

Americans should take this as a warning about the dangers of any massive changes in either demography, or freedom of speech.

This is from the blog Tinkerty Tonk,

Ace looks at the highly effective wall the Israelis put up and asks: “Are the Amnestias against the wall because it won’t be effective — or against it because it will be effective?”

Both.

Opponents of the wall genuinely think that sealing the border is impossible–at least those in the mainstream do. Furthermore, if they refuse to even entertain the notion that sealing the border is possible a) they will never be proven wrong; and b) their adversaries will never be proven right. And it doesn’t hurt that their stance will make them the favored choice at the polls for the very vocal hardcore believers who think that any attempt to close the borders is a betrayal of their ideals.

The woman who wrote the post compares border control to the former impossibility of controlling crime in New York. Lots of New York liberals seemed to think that crime was legitimate response to poverty and racism.

BTW, the title of the post is Something there is that does love a wall a line I’ve used myself.

George Borjas notes that the New York Times reported this quote by Senator Kennedy without any comment:

Referring to opponents of the bill, Mr. Kennedy said: “We know what they don’t like. What are they for? What are they going to do with the 12 million who are undocumented here? Send them back to countries around the world? Develop a type of Gestapo here to seek out these people that are in the shadows? What’s their alternative?”[Immigration Bill Fails to Survive Senate Vote, By ROBERT PEAR and CARL HULSE, New York Times, June 28, 2007]

Nothing offensive about a Senator comparing American law enforcement to the Gestapo, is there?

But they were able to find some “heated rhetoric” from Republican Senator Jeff Sessions

“The bill would provide amnesty and a path to citizenship for people who broke into our country by running past the National Guard.”[After Bill’s Fall, G.O.P. May Pay in Latino Votes, By JENNIFER STEINHAUER New York Times, July 1, 2007]

The idea that it’s a “heated rhetoric” to criticize illegal aliens is strange, and as for border control costing the GOP the votes of Hispanics who don’t vote Republican anyway, that’s just the MSM’s way of saying that Hispanics are disloyal.

Recently the Des Moines Register wrote about :
“600 GOP stalwarts at the forum put on by Iowans for Tax Relief and the Iowa Christian Alliance.”. This forum included several major GOP candidates except for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Arizona Sen. John McCain–and Congressman Ron Paul. Ron Paul didn’t get invited to the forum despite having the strongest record on tax relief. It didn’t really matter because Paul staged his own forum and got more folks there than the other GOP candidates did combined.

Congressman Tom Tancredo and Congressman Ron Paul are emerging as the leading candidates supporting immigration restriction. What I think is interesting here is that while Tom Tancredo’s lifetime record on immigration restriction is stronger, Ron Paul’s recent record on H-1b restriction is actually stronger.

H-1b expansion is different than many other forms of immigration policy in that its effects have been felt by a specific, well educated group. That is important in the Iowa race because the process in Iowa is heavily weighted towards ability to mobilize activists-and being displaced by H-1b expansion is something that can transform people into activists. The next major GOP Iowa event is the Ames Straw poll. No candidate in the last 30 years has won the Iowa caucuses without winning the Ames Straw poll(which is a poll taken at a large, GOP fund raising event). Candidates can buy large blocks of tickets and bus folks to the straw poll, but ultimately the straw poll and the caucuses are measures of each candidates ability to mobilize committed voters in Iowa.

I happen to disagree with Paul on several issues. I’m concerned his economic policies would result in a high degree of concentration of wealth. However, because of his consistent stand against the Iraq war, his lifetime of Libertarian activism-and his ability to reach out to folks directly impacted by H-1b expansion, I suspect Paul will make a much stronger show in Iowa than is widely anticipated.

Tancredo has made immigration restriction a more central issue in his campaign-and has drawn a lot of negative attention from Latino advocates as a result of how he has approached this issue. Paul has put himself in a better position to appear a true moderate on immigration(and paint the other GOP candidates as open borders radicals) and to appeal to the people most likely to become effective activists as a result of being directly impacted by immigration expansion policy.